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August 25, 2008
Intellectual Elites: Embarrassment of Riches
Jefferson, the great democrat, famously argued for the "natural aristocracy," by which he meant a meritocracy. In fact, the very possibility of a society in which the best and brightest would be free to rise to the top was supposed to be one of the chief virtues of democracy.
Be careful about what you wish for.
As many have observed before, one of the more unsettling consequences of a meritocracy may be greater inequality--once assumed to be the antithesis of democracy. As Mickey Kaus told it in his book of the early ninties, The End of Equality, as the smarter among us rise to the top they will increasingly monopolize the means to wealth (i.e., the best jobs), leaving the intellectually challenged to fight for what little is left. William Deresiewicz inverts the point--arguing that there is a certain intellectual impoverishment entailed in educational elitism:
When parents explain why they work so hard to give their children the best possible education, they invariably say it is because of the opportunities it opens up. But what of the opportunities it shuts down? An elite education gives you the chance to be rich—which is, after all, what we’re talking about—but it takes away the chance not to be. Yet the opportunity not to be rich is one of the greatest opportunities with which young Americans have been blessed. We live in a society that is itself so wealthy that it can afford to provide a decent living to whole classes of people who in other countries exist (or in earlier times existed) on the brink of poverty or, at least, of indignity. You can live comfortably in the United States as a schoolteacher, or a community organizer, or a civil rights lawyer, or an artist—that is, by any reasonable definition of comfort. You have to live in an ordinary house instead of an apartment in Manhattan or a mansion in L.A.; you have to drive a Honda instead of a BMW or a Hummer; you have to vacation in Florida instead of Barbados or Paris, but what are such losses when set against the opportunity to do work you believe in, work you’re suited for, work you love, every day of your life?Yet it is precisely that opportunity that an elite education takes away. How can I be a schoolteacher—wouldn’t that be a waste of my expensive education? Wouldn’t I be squandering the opportunities my parents worked so hard to provide? What will my friends think? How will I face my classmates at our 20th reunion, when they’re all rich lawyers or important people in New York? And the question that lies behind all these: Isn’t it beneath me? So a whole universe of possibility closes, and you miss your true calling.
It seems our intellectuals don't quite know what to do with themselves--just as we don't know what to do with them either. This is a point I made (perhaps more seriously) in an essay on
"The 'Decline' of Public Intellectuals."
Posted by stevemack at August 25, 2008 01:37 PM
