In Defense of Elitism, Part I

Another election cycle over, another fevered couple of weeks listening to claims of elitism and arguments against it. William F. Buckley, Jr. once famously quipped that he'd rather be ruled by 100 names randomly picked from the phone book than by the staff of Harvard University. When separated from the political context of the time, this seems incredibly imprudent, particularly when you know 100 people from the Greater Boston White Pages. Indeed, I'd like to argue that the entire anti-elitist sentiment in American political life is not only misguided, but indeed, anti-American.

As someone who spent the greater part of their youth shilling newspapers for what counts as "the Left" in modern day America, I am intimately acquainted with your typical four year radical. Straight out of a suburban, middle-class home, they are shocked (SHOCKED!) to find out that injustice still exists in the world after having it brought to their attention by a college professor. You can smell the stink of the middle class on them as they whinge about things they're never seen in action, let alone been victimized by. Often times their heart aches for a laundry list of "unfair" phenomenon in the world ranging from systemic urban poverty to coffee being an abundant crop. They typically radicalize and de-radicalize quickly, leaving their affilitations behind with beer bongs.

This is an excellent example of bad elitism. The type of elitism that most intelligent people, Americans in particular, recoil from. It's ill-informed, classist, big city chauvinist, anti-worker, anti-farmer, and anti-poor. It's rhetorical method is often billed as "consciousness raising," the watered-down, milquetoast liberal version of Lenin's revolutionary vanguard. The basic belief is that the problem with these fucking working class people is that they don't know what's good for them. That's why they're generally in favor of abortion restrictions and gun rights. If only they would listen to the faculty at Harvard / revolutionary socialists they would know what their best interests are.

On the other end of the socio-economic spectrum there is the populism of the working classes themselves. While raised in a blue collar household, my family never engaged in much of this and so I'm able to view the phenomenon with the lens of a fly on the wall observer. There are those who are immediately distrustful of experts of any kind, or any opinion which comes from alien class forces. Who are these economists / sociologists / evolutionary biologists to tell us what's true? We know our own interests and can form reality without their telling us, thank you very much. This is what passes for anti-elitism in America, and a number of my friends who are otherwise operational elitists fall prey to the snares laid by this type of rhetoric.

What it essentially comes down to is that not only is common sense not very common, but it also leads you to believe that the Earth is flat and that the sun literally "rises" in the east and "sets" in the west, turning a convenient verbal metaphor into a scientific truism. The fact is that an economist with a Ph.D. from Harvard whose dissertation was written on the steel industry in western Pennsylvania not only knows things about how the industry operates that a welder in Pittsburgh doesn't know, he probably knows more about it, regardless of the fact that he's never laid a single bead of weld. You wouldn't go to the welder to craft a corporate culture in the best interests of workers (though you might want to ask him what he needs) any more than you would sit the economist on the line to assemble I-beams. Such class drag is popular among up-and-coming bureaucrats in the People's Republic of China, but it's just that- class drag, adopted for expediency and dropped when inconvenient.

I don't want to make this more simplistic than it is. There is nothing about going to Yale that automatically makes one an expert. Nor is attending a top-notch university a necessary pre-requisite for being an intellectual elite. But it's not a bad start. And one would be hard-pressed to make a case that several years of close study don't give one an intellectual advantage that cannot be gained intuitively from quotidian work in a field. Succinctly stated, being an iron worker for 30 years may give you a firm grasp on the grosser and finer points of structural engineering and design, but it will teach you next to nothing about urban planning and a city's needs.

It's not just that you go to a doctor when you want to be healed. You also go to a hairdresser when you want to look nice, and you know where the extra $20 you spend at Bishop's over Supercuts goes when you look in the mirror. In a sense, all but the most ploddingly stupid of human beings are not operational elitists in the same way that nearly everyone is an operational materialist- they walk through doors without even attempting to "will" a hole in the wall to appear. But for some reason nearly everyone bristles at the idea of letting experts make decisions that effect them. I'm not talking Soviet-style micromanagement here. Talk to some of your coworkers and ask them what they think of Ivy League educated economists deciding how the latest government bailout gets spent. For the sake of argument, disregard cynicism and assume that they will spend the money in the most utilitarian fashion possible. Methinks there will be very little support for letting the experts make decisions about things that many of them have literally studied for decades. Are the experts sometimes wrong? Of course. But letting the masses make decisions about subjects they know little to nothing about is tantamount to throwing an AM radio steered dart a board and letting the chips fall where they may.

The ultimate irony, of course, is that the word "elitism" gets thrown around as a political epithet around every election. It gets lobbed like a fresh cow turd from one side of the political spectrum to the other, as if a first-class education and millions of dollars in corporate financing aren't prerequisites to obtaining office in the first place. Setting aside the issue of corporate financing of elections (something I'm opposed to) why is it imprudent to expect that the political leaders of the nation would come from a class of men who are (as were the royalty of old Europe) quite literally groomed for leadership from the time that they are born. Much as I would like to see education opportunities expanded such that the hereditary nature of such a class wanes over time, that does not provide an excuse for intellectual slack any more than the availability of cheap media manipulation tools provides an excuse for lax aesthetic standards. Everyone is more than welcome at the party, but that doesn't guarantee that everyone gets laid.

Reverse the question. Would you stick economists on an assembly line? Would you trust them to hand toss your pizza, cut your hair, deliver your food in a timely manner, take well frame photographs, or even pour a pint of Guinness properly? One of the most basic achievements of human civilization is the division of labor, letting people who know how to do something do it, freeing up the masses from having to make their own rugs or what have you. A society as complex as ours requires not just the production of goods and delivery of services, but also a massive bureaucracy which ensures that trains run on time, buildings are set up to code standard, and yes, that bailout billions are distributed properly.

But really, there's a bigger question here. Both sides of the political aisle have, probably since the days of Jackson, made a lot of political hay extolling the virtues of a mythical "common man." While I certainly appreciate the contribution made to society by people putting up buildings, cooking my food, and driving buses around in such a way that no one gets killed, I don't put a great deal of stock in their ability to make decisions about things. The common man seems fair to good at making decisions that affect themselves and their family, and dismal at making decisions in the greater interest of society.

Still, though, all of this misses the point. America's- and humanity's- greatness has never been in the unwashed masses who toil and toil keeping the ball rolling so that we can all eat and have roofs over our heads. Our greatness lies in... well, greatness. There will always be Joe Blows to make sure that the coffee gets made on time. What makes life interesting and what gives our greatest contributions are the Nikolai Teslas, the Paul Laffoleys, the J.G. Ballards. We should be striving towards that kind of achievement rather than engaging in idiotic platitudes about how great the average is.