15 years ago, I spent a day as a guest writer at St. Paul's. It was fun. The students were extremely smart and remarkably polite. My most vivid memory is of my in-class conversation with a young woman who'd always gone to boarding schools. From her earliest years, she'd spent more than 2/3rds of her life living away from her parents. And I'm the reservation Indian kid who grew up with appx 95% of his living blood relatives and 99% of his dead ancestors' graves on the same 160,000 square acres of land.
The thought that just passed through my mind: "I'm extremely polite to service workers because I was a service worker in my teens and twenties. The St. Paul's politeness is not like that."
At best the politeness is self-aware noblesse oblige, at worst it’s “these people will figure out we rigged the game if we act overtly hostile to them”.
In UK over the last 20 years,a pop musician (not a rock star) or an actor of talent will be feted and made a big thing of . Then The Sun will do an expose. He's not a Working Class Hero despite the guttural estuary accent and playing oppressed bin men or striking coal miners. He went to Eton.
In the 18th century novel Tom Jones by Fielding (lived not that far from me,his house is now part of Bath University) anyone who is polite and well mannered is immediately marked down as "poor" ie impecunious,and treated with contempt. Not saying this was right but it's how it was. And still is really. Just more hidden
I think they're good people. Are they good elites? Not sure. Then again, who has been? Does such a thing even exist, or only good-by-comparison-to-other-much-more-atrocious-elites?
Reading these comments, I start thinking about elites who made it out, pushed themselves to see beyond what their upbringing and genetics infused within them, and I think of Siddhartha and St. Francis of Assisi. It can be done, but you must be radical.
There are many people who live a good life and do good things. Some are elite. More are not. I think we need to put the word away when it comes to these individuals who get a massive leg up in society. Being an elite athlete is one thing. Elite media, elite schools, those social constructs - the term serves only those who create and inhabit the hierarchies. Anachronistic and unhelpful in terms of broader society. Be good. Do the next right thing. Live a good life. Those are the the real elites in the game of life. You'll know them when you meet them. The rest is luxury branding
At the base line the important thing about being elite is staying elite especially if it's a family thing to pass on. So when danger threatens...well what else are the common people for than to man the barricades. They'll get a lovely remembrance service in the Abbey.
If you meet them they are actually really nice,charming and engaging (to your face anyway!) to get on in life and jobs it's actually more important to be amiable and funny than clever, especially as everyone can Google information now,so the office miseriguts is redundant!
Yes - many of these kids would know more about Drake than about their own grandfather. The price many of these kids pay for this kind of education - lack of love, lack of connection, lack of purpose other than scrambling up the ladder of individual achievement. Also - meritocracy is a bit of a red herring. These kids are every bit as privileged as the privileged kids who went before them - the codes are different. The problem now is that they think they earned and deserve every bit of their privilege. They give only lip service to the country or people around them who got them there. There is no sense of civic obligation of the old sort (ie divorced from politics). Plenty of activists, sure, but fewer humble servants who will do the quiet work in their community year after year. More materialistic and individualistic now.
You should read the book. It's really fascinating, and will probably leave you less judgmental of the kids. They're actually quite appealing, and not nearly as disconnected as you're suggesting. The problem (as Khan sees it, I think, and certainly I do) isn't that they have bad character. In fact by and large they seem to have quite good character, and are not at all dismissive of the people around them who have supported them. The problem is that they're too blind to the class aspects of their success, and to the ways that meritocracy as a framework or ideology is missing some important elements of how things actually shake out in America.
They’re ‘appealing’ like any narcissist can be appealing for the sake of expediency.
Ultimately, the personality of the majority of these students is vanilla as heck on the outside, while quite nasty and cutting on the inside. “Ease” goes only so deep.
That's now how I read his depiction of them, or in fact my experience of them (having gone to these kinds of places, and arguably being one of these people). They just seem like regular people, but with immense advantages that they're often somewhat in denial of.
Oh, no. They know their advantages, and continually develop inwardly and outwardly to protect them. I don’t believe their dissembling is as much maleficent as it is adaptive in a self-preserving sense.
But why would you care? I'm in UK. We have social inequality here. I know some "poor" people (both better off than me,secret income sources,bloody typical) but they don't care how I live and would think me a fool if I cared how they live. If you're doing alright why care,it's weaponised Compassion to destroy you as Nietsche describes accurately
You're mixing up two classes. The people we no longer have are the lower middle class clerks and office managers who were prepared to put in a lifetime,often with lonely sadness,of low paid work with complete honesty,never fiddling the books,never expropriating the petty cash. These men,and women were painfully honest and now no one wants that life. Not when you.can be a contemporary D.H Lawrence and do the digital nomad thing from Greece or Italy. As it said on the bus "God doesn't exist so now you can stop worrying and go and live your life".
As someone who has hired extensively among university graduates, I would say that SAT scores are a better gage than the university, but if you want a bunch of people with high test scores, the easiest place to recruit are the Ivies, Chicago, MIT and Stanford, and maybe Georgetown. Yes, a kid with high scores who studied engineering at University of Illinois is just as good, but I will need to sift through thousands of resumes to get to his, whereas, if I go to University of Chicago, they are ALL going to have high test scores.
I can tell you that I have suffered with slow kids whose parents pulled strings to get them hired, and it was unbearable. For many kinds of work, someone must be able to solve problems, and have at least a working knowledge of calculus, and ideally linear algebra. I have worked with not so bright young people with engineering degrees, and I would rather have an English major from Yale who get a high SAT math score. They learn faster and work harder.
The best part of these "elite" graduates is that no matter what you ask of them, they will get it done. They will work though the night, call classmates to figure things out, and they often will just randomly do extra work to impress you. The graduates from those schools worked hard to get there, and it shows. I personally think it is worth recruiting from those elite schools. I have never suffered an analyst from such schools who is unable to learn, or unwilling to work.
Now, let me tell you what I see all the time from nepotism hires: refusal to complete a tasks, inability to learn, unwillingness to work, incessant complaining, and overall a lack of maturity. If I had a perfect candidate, it would be a veteran graduate of an elite university, followed by Asian immigrants. The former has the poise , confidence and maturity while the latter are the smartest people on earth. What I never will hire are the middle class nothings who went to the local school because "the city is cool." Those perpetual children are unbearable. I would never interview anyone with less than a 700 on the SAT math, unless some big shot is forcing me to hire his idiot child who could not find a job anywhere on her own.
Al-Gharbi has a great passage on this in his Compact essay: "the truth is that elite institutions like Columbia primarily select for highly conscientious and capable conformists. If you are sufficiently talented and prolific, the conformity expectations can be slackened slightly (a win-win that helps other conformists understand themselves and the institution as more “edgy” than they really are); and if you are sufficiently wealthy, deficits in capability or conscientiousness can be overlooked or worked around. But the modal student is not an idiosyncratic genius or a billionaire kid who failed his way to the top."
These elite degrees are so immensely valuable as signaling mechanisms precisely for this reason. If you hire a kid who did well at one of these schools, you pretty much know that they're bright, able to learn, and not just willing but eager to work their asses off for your approval. At every level they're selecting for ideal employees. Not necessarily genius innovators or outside the box thinkers, but that's not what most employers need most of the time anyway, and there probably isn't a great way to reliably select for those kinds of people anyway.
The coda to this, in my case, is that I went to Yale with the assist of legacy admissions, and for many years was a terribly inconsistent but intermittently quite creative employee. You would have hated me as an employee. It's taken me about 20 years of rather painful struggle to get even close to the level of performance that most of my classmates had from the get-go. I'm decent now, and fortunately still pretty creative -- I'm now in the talented and prolific but non-conformist bucket that Al-Gharbi mentions -- but it's been a long road, and I have long been acutely aware of the ways in which I've tended to underperform relative to my cohort.
I once,for some research,read through letters of I.K Brunel the engineer. In one letter he wrote to a friend how he was looking for a new PA. He said in this letter he didn't want an engineering genius (like himself),he didn't want a moody,but with flashes of brilliance young man,he wanted an average but amiable and pleasant young man who would be nice to have around and would make him cups of tea,stick the stamps on his letters,and keep the windowsill geraniums watered. Interesting. We are all conditioned to think it's about knowing stuff when really it's about BEING.
Just a thought but would a VERY SMART kid pretend to be suitably conformist to get the place. Saving their individuality for later when in a more secure place.
A degree from an "elite" university in the United States doesn't do much for you in an academic sense, or even a "signaling" one. You're much better off if you study intensely under instructors at Amherst/Williams/Swarthmore and then proceed to Harvard/Yale/Princeton. This was once the almost-always-taken path to respect, if not the complete cultural legitimacy (postwar, for example, McCloy, Wilbur, even Reuben Brower, master of Adams House for some time).
Sure. Or any other university that has the faculty, course list (and let's be realistic here), the imprimatur you want. What I'm saying is that the quality of your education depends on the people you choose to learn from and how willing you are to apply what they try to teach you to your particular circumstances in life.
I know that nowadays small liberal arts colleges are, at best, considered sets for Donna Tartt novels and not the powerhouses they should be regarded as for generating leaders and important artists. This is backwards thought set on its ass and tilted sideways. Those institutions continue to exist because they let kids in, smack them into some semblance of intellectual shape, and release them into a world that needs them more than ever.
What they are great at is as preparatory schools. My own college (Amherst) isn't regarded as significant because someone specifically because particular people went there and immediately made a world-changing mark. The particular significance of colleges like Amherst is that they instill reverence for service, most of all, and of course intellectual curiosity.
That makes a lot of sense to me. I had a good undergraduate education, but friends of mine who went to small liberal arts education often describe a more intensive intellectual experience than what I had.
Also, fwiw, I think the data is pretty clear that elite schooling doesn't matter than much in terms of career outcomes, with the exception of a small number of professions that place an extra high emphasis on pedigree. So that kind of super elite pedigree, if it means anything, is maybe more about a kind of intangible status that you can lord over your neighbors than anything else.
Reminds me of Orwell's description of the upper classes in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War. At first they remained showy and extravagant with their wealth. As the war progressed, they began to dress differently, act differently, blend in with the locals. And then when the war was over it was back to being flashy again.
Take a walk around Knightsbridge London. You wont see many in designer clothes or maybe,but Grunge style. Real formidable actual wealth hides discreetly.
What Khan describes is only a more-rarefied version of my experience at Williams College 50-odd years ago. A redoubt of the upper class was then already opening to students from suburban public schools, and even to a sliver of exceptional Black, Asian, and working-class kids. Ever since I've had an equivocal allegiance to an institution that has built a society more meritocratic but no less stratified in terms of power.
I once got into a debate with a young and idealistic teacher-to-be about "making a difference." This person felt strongly, vehemently, that they should go out and work in the inner city schools, to give their entire being over to this "making a difference" force that had taken over their mind like a drone pilot.
I said to this person (after my fourth or fifth beer) that "if you want to make such a damn difference, then you should go teach at an elite private school. A deeply elite one. The real deal. Those little fuckers will be manning the spigot rather than trying to find it. Change them and you change the world."
This person was goggle eyed, like I had just sprouted a wormhole in the middle of my forehead. But I still think I was on to something that night, inspired even, or at least on to a small part of something. Your piece touches nicely on this idea.
But this sort of thinking seems wistful, too dulled at the knife's edge: “We might dream of a better elite, one possessed not just of a democratic ethos but the historical, cultural, and political wisdom to anchor it in practices that spread wealth and power more widely.” I don't buy it. I don't buy any of it. Not any more. I suspect you don't either.
There will always be what we call an elite, a revolving democratic elite. And frankly I hope so. If not, something terrible will have occurred. This vague, collectivist idea of “spread[ing] wealth and power more widely” worries me. It worries me because it seeks the death of something important, of the spirit, of the fight and the flame and the chase. And don't think it doesn't.
The kids of the elite have to get schooled somewhere. This is inevitable. And let's hope it's somewhere that understands the aforementioned spigot, and how to teach those little fuckers some proper responsibility. Many of them will go nowhere and do very little anyway. Privilege has fierce limitations.
The human world is already changing. But lord save us from those who think they know how it should end up.
Apologies for quoting myself, but I just responded to another comment that made a similar argument. What I said basically was this:
You're almost certainly right that there will always be an elite, and we should definitely care about the its quality, and not nurture utopian dreams of a purely egalitarian society. But at the same time I don't think there's some fixed quotient of power they hold vis a vis the rest of society. Surely it waxes and wanes over time. I don't have any great hopes, for instance, for the resurrection of labor as a major force in our politics, but they certainly were once such a force, in the not too distance past, which suggests to me that we can realistically hope for a more just distribution of power. That's very different from a naive dream of perfect equality. We don't even have to go into the past. There are other countries that right now have a different distribution of power and wealth.
So I'd like a) less power in the hands of the elite, and b) a better elite to manage the disproportionate power they will have even under the most politically egalitarian circumstances. Or reverse those two in terms of priority. I don't actually have a well considered view of which factor is more important to a flourishing society, but I think it's too fatalistic and also historically inaccurate to posit an elite class that eternally hold the same amount of power. Just as the quality of the elite can vary, its control vis a vis the masses can vary too.
I'm not sure where I end up on your other point, about the dangers of an elite that thinks "they know how it should end up." What's the alternative? An elite that just works in its own interests, without a more idealistic gloss on it? What do you mean by "the spirit, the fight, the flame"? Sounds kind of Ayn Randian to me.
When you say you don't buy any of it anymore, I wonder how deep that goes. How would you understand Ghandi, or Martin Luther King? Was there not a transformation in our society, in the direction of more justice and equality, thanks to the civil rights movement? And if there was, how do you account for that? And if there wasn't, what sense do you make of it?
I might say that we are dancing as best we can in this thread, grappling a bit with limited time and space.
That said, first a confession: I have been battling the forces of critical theory off and on for decades. It gives me a deep distaste for all of the wretched rhetoric around dismantling structures of power, as if it weren't about just replacing it with some other, some worse form of collectivist power. I guess it's a trigger for me, in today's sensitized lingo.
We may not be that far apart, in truth. I think of myself as a pretty old fashioned liberal democrat. I don't have dreams of instilling the proper consciousness in the masses, and I agree that the narrative that a lot of people on the left want to instill (into themselves and their kids, as much or more than the misses) is pretty dispiriting and dysfunction. I'm pretty libertarian in that respect, and pretty optimistic.
My political aspirations, though, include a belief that we'd all be much better off if people had a more secure material base and felt like their voices were somewhat heard and represented in the actions of the state. That's not critical theory. That's Thomas Paine and Whitman and Lincoln and FDR, etc.
Regarding Ayn Rand, I think more like some unholy blend of Marcus Aurelius and Emelia Earhart educated by Emerson. Rand is too "third rail" and cartoonish.
It'd be fun to Compare this to Rob Henderson's "Troubled." This skill that Kahn describes--the ability to discern how to navigate different social settings with ease--is one that Henderson never seemed to grasp. I don't say that as an elitist critique of Henderson as a person, but just that it diminishes the relevance of his social critique if he can't really understand the culture he's writing about.
One example comes to mind: Henderson asks some Stanford entrepreneurs what has been key to their business success and their response: luck. Henderson then rhetorically asks if they are going to tell their kids if they should just focus on luck as the key to their advancing in life, and as he reports, they sheepishly admit that, no, they will tell their kids to work hard. Apparently this illustrates Henderson's point about the double standard of luxury beliefs. But I think a much more likely explanation is provided here by Kahn. It's really about the ease of moving in different worlds by signalling modesty when that's called for (and when hard work and connections is table stakes in the company you keep).
There's a long history of integration efforts in schools like this, with as much focus on supporting kids once they are enrolled as there is on recruitment. Those efforts tend to focus on racial integration, and so the support tends to take an identity focus: there might be a POC success counselor to support those POC students. It makes me wonder how Kahn's idea of the culture of elitism is different from, weaves together, and interplays with race in affecting the success of these integration efforts.
What determines someone's success in internalizing this culture that Kahn describes? Is there earlier cultural priming that would allow a kid from an elite background to absorb it better than someone who didn't come from that background?
Interesting connection (and one we should pursue when I get my act together to do the Henderson episode).
Khan does touch on the racial aspect somewhat in his book, and has examples of some students of color who are and are not able to internalize the culture. He doesn't really theorize about why some can and some can't, but I guess I assume it would be a mix of nature and nurture. Surely some people are just innately better at deciphering, and adapting to, the subtle social norms around them, so that they'll get it, given sufficient exposure, even if they came from a wholly different background. Whereas others will really struggle to assimilate the norms if they weren't raised with them, and some will struggle to fit in even if they were raised with them.
I think implicit in his book is the idea that if you want kids from non-elite backgrounds to maximally benefit from exposure to elite culture, then you would want to be wary of separating them off on their own too much once they're in the elite space. So some degree of support for your racial or ethnic or religious group would be fine, but you wouldn't want, say, separate housing, or totally separate social worlds, or else you run the risk of depriving them of precisely what they need to learn in order to most successfully advance within elite hierarchies.
Back in the 1980s a tv company sponsored a bright black kid,a boy,to go to a big UK public school,can't recall which one. It was for a TV series of course. Idea I think was to show how if a clever kid has the barriers to upward mobility removed they'll do as well as m'lord. But they had to drop the project after 3 of the six. The black kid did really well at first. Soared in academic study ,top of the class,great at sport,made lots of friends,then - this was long term over several months started drinking alcohol and then dealing substances,handy he had lots of friends eh. So he got expelled and the whole thing was expunged. Because there is a lot more to education and careers,and life than factual knowledge. Poor kid
Oh my God yeah this was my critique of that book as well. Idk why no one else has critiqued this about the book, but I do notice he has a tendency to block critics from his social media. To me, it doesn't even seem like an upper class thing, just a being nice thing. Both my husband and I grew up poor though not the circumstances that author had, and we both know when to give people accurate advice vs be nice and supportive while they figure things out. If anything, I had issues with social cues and I'd give people free advice all day until one day someone did that to me and I realized I don't really want that. You might enjoy my thoughts about the book https://lila.substack.com/p/interrogating-luxury-beliefs
When you sound a revolutionary’s cry toward the end, you surprised me. “We are greater in number than those who attend Andover and Exeter.”
Do you want a world without
moneyed prep schools that help rich kids stay high above the masses, or do you want a world in which those schools return to idealizing Teddy Roosevelt and training young, wealthy, able men to travel, claim and conserve land, and stand for anti-corruption measures in politics?
I certainly share the disapproval that these schools send people to Ivy leagues and then to McKinsey or Goldman Sachs or overpaid political consulting jobs.
But there will always be an elite. Can’t we simply demand they are not hypocrites and that they take responsibility for their great influence over the nation?
My initial thought is that you're almost certainly right that there will always be an elite, and we should definitely care about the its quality, but at the same time I don't think there's some fixed quotient of power they hold vis a vis the rest of society. I'm sure it waxes and wanes over time. I don't have any great hopes, for instance, for the resurrection of labor as a major force in our politics, but they certainly were once, which suggests to me that we realistically hope for a countervailing power in a society that isn't accountable primarily to the elite.
So I'd like a) less power in the hands of the elite, and b) a better elite to manage the disproportionate power they will have even under the most politically egalitarian circumstances.
I don't know that TR is quite my ideal. But I will certainly assent to "they take responsibility for their great influence over the nation."
I went to SPS and this is exaggeration for shock effect. "Children with multiple homes who chartered planes for weekend international trips, came from family dynasties, and inherited unimaginable advantages met me on the school’s brick paths.” Of course every now and then or decade or two someone like Tim Mellon comes along who can afford to donate $100 million to Trump. For the most part SPS students are noted for their potent brain power. It's a wealthy school of course and that is why so many students are on scholarship. The perception generated by Kahn is WASP, WASP, WASP but the reality is nearly 1/2 the student body is non-Caucasian.
Well wait have you read what I said about the book, or the book itself? He talks at great length about all the ways in which it isn't WASP, WASP, WASP anymore.
Maybe he was exaggerating the degree to which it was still like that in the mid-90s, when he was there as a student, but the vast majority of the book is precisely about how much it isn't like at all that by the time he goes back in the oughts. That's the whole point, that it has re-oriented itself as an egalitarian cultivator of brain power.
He's arguing that while there are good things about this shift, it also functions to obscure the degree to which a place like St. Paul's is still a perpetuator of the elite, just a different kind of elite that manifests its privilege in a different way. Non-white scholarship students play an essential role in this obscuring of its function. They are the evidence that the school is not what its critics say it is. Khan is saying that it's still an institution whose function is to cultivate an elite, and that this still, as always, leads with its products acting in their class interest.
Sounds like a school for spies. 😂 But seriously, "merit" or the "perception of merit" is semantics of the over-educated. I did very much enjoy the landscape regardless.
A few things: first and most importantly I really enjoyed your piece. These are most definitely not circles in which I travel. I will be reading Privilege. You've sold at least one book for Mr. Khan. (I did keep thinking of that awesome movie "The Left Behinds" while reading.)
Second, I learned a new word: schnoid. (Which macOS spell check tells me should say schnook, but now I know better.)
(Another aside about technology: the top Google result was from Urban Dictionary. The second was from a place called Nerdology in a piece called "A Definitive Guide To Nerdolog" on the site CascadeClimbers.com. The Nerdology definition seemed more plausible but I clicked on the Urban Dictionary link and, lo and behold, the actual definition there for schnoid was much more like one from Nerdology and the words from the Google result summary were nowhere in the Urban Dictionary definition. If anyone reading this doesn't know what schnoid means, don't click on the link embedded in the Urban Dictionary definition. Yes, I'm stupid.)
This is hilarious. So maybe I kind of made up the word? Except that that nerdology definition is basically what I meant. I was just using it as a synonym for nerd or dork.
The term "schnoid" implies computer use. A "Computer Nerd" is a schnoid. Note that this computer use must be nerdy in order to constitute schnoidism. Thus, one who stays up late at night playing Moria is not necessarily a schnoid, while one who tweaks around with the source code and programs Moria is. Someone who has to find eigenvaules on the computer for pChem is not a schnoid, but someone who is not in the class but tries to find those eigenvalues as a way of blowing off time most definitely is a schnoid.
Great new word. I've invented the word "Gregarity" (shorter than 'gregariousnes" ) for how we are compelled from infancy into unwanted GREGARITY ++ probably only because it's more economic. Toddler groups didn't exist when I was tiny but we have to go to school then few jobs are solitary,then tv ads show life as a continual Lidl Xmas food advert,all convivial multi- age multi culture diverse attractive people laughing and shoving food down their gobs,and "no-mates" is a derogatory term of abuse. Two new words for the dictionary "schnoid" and "gregarity". I'll write to Suzi Dent.
Great essay! I didn’t attend a school like this (I was given the opportunity to and denied it out of a sense of juvenile populism) but I had a familial connection to one, (of the many up and down the Connecticut river) and this bunch of contradictions about education, hierarchy and meritocracy is something I’ve thought about a lot in the last few years.
absolutely fascinating exploration of the book; would i be wrong to say its thesis is similar territory to ‘outliers: the story of success by malcolm gladwell… I won’t bore you by drawing out the convergences…
yeah that’s it, but covers similar territory about schooling, wealth, class; et cetera, et cetera, so on and so forth; just read the wiki for a quick & dirty overview: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliers_(book)
so yes, while there may be some thematic overlap in their broader discussions of success and privilege, there are NOT any direct connection or reference between the two works however, parallel tracks I guess
15 years ago, I spent a day as a guest writer at St. Paul's. It was fun. The students were extremely smart and remarkably polite. My most vivid memory is of my in-class conversation with a young woman who'd always gone to boarding schools. From her earliest years, she'd spent more than 2/3rds of her life living away from her parents. And I'm the reservation Indian kid who grew up with appx 95% of his living blood relatives and 99% of his dead ancestors' graves on the same 160,000 square acres of land.
That’s part of what’s confusing about it all. I think most of these people are genuinely appealing, not at all snooty or entitled seeming.
But also maybe quite disconnected from what life is like for various other American demographic and cultural groups.
The thought that just passed through my mind: "I'm extremely polite to service workers because I was a service worker in my teens and twenties. The St. Paul's politeness is not like that."
At best the politeness is self-aware noblesse oblige, at worst it’s “these people will figure out we rigged the game if we act overtly hostile to them”.
In UK over the last 20 years,a pop musician (not a rock star) or an actor of talent will be feted and made a big thing of . Then The Sun will do an expose. He's not a Working Class Hero despite the guttural estuary accent and playing oppressed bin men or striking coal miners. He went to Eton.
In the 18th century novel Tom Jones by Fielding (lived not that far from me,his house is now part of Bath University) anyone who is polite and well mannered is immediately marked down as "poor" ie impecunious,and treated with contempt. Not saying this was right but it's how it was. And still is really. Just more hidden
Who cares! 🥴
They knew how to be good hosts!
I think they're good people. Are they good elites? Not sure. Then again, who has been? Does such a thing even exist, or only good-by-comparison-to-other-much-more-atrocious-elites?
Reading these comments, I start thinking about elites who made it out, pushed themselves to see beyond what their upbringing and genetics infused within them, and I think of Siddhartha and St. Francis of Assisi. It can be done, but you must be radical.
I think good elitism has a short shelf life.
There are many people who live a good life and do good things. Some are elite. More are not. I think we need to put the word away when it comes to these individuals who get a massive leg up in society. Being an elite athlete is one thing. Elite media, elite schools, those social constructs - the term serves only those who create and inhabit the hierarchies. Anachronistic and unhelpful in terms of broader society. Be good. Do the next right thing. Live a good life. Those are the the real elites in the game of life. You'll know them when you meet them. The rest is luxury branding
ps huge fan of your work, Mr Alexie.
At the base line the important thing about being elite is staying elite especially if it's a family thing to pass on. So when danger threatens...well what else are the common people for than to man the barricades. They'll get a lovely remembrance service in the Abbey.
If you meet them they are actually really nice,charming and engaging (to your face anyway!) to get on in life and jobs it's actually more important to be amiable and funny than clever, especially as everyone can Google information now,so the office miseriguts is redundant!
Yes - many of these kids would know more about Drake than about their own grandfather. The price many of these kids pay for this kind of education - lack of love, lack of connection, lack of purpose other than scrambling up the ladder of individual achievement. Also - meritocracy is a bit of a red herring. These kids are every bit as privileged as the privileged kids who went before them - the codes are different. The problem now is that they think they earned and deserve every bit of their privilege. They give only lip service to the country or people around them who got them there. There is no sense of civic obligation of the old sort (ie divorced from politics). Plenty of activists, sure, but fewer humble servants who will do the quiet work in their community year after year. More materialistic and individualistic now.
You should read the book. It's really fascinating, and will probably leave you less judgmental of the kids. They're actually quite appealing, and not nearly as disconnected as you're suggesting. The problem (as Khan sees it, I think, and certainly I do) isn't that they have bad character. In fact by and large they seem to have quite good character, and are not at all dismissive of the people around them who have supported them. The problem is that they're too blind to the class aspects of their success, and to the ways that meritocracy as a framework or ideology is missing some important elements of how things actually shake out in America.
They’re ‘appealing’ like any narcissist can be appealing for the sake of expediency.
Ultimately, the personality of the majority of these students is vanilla as heck on the outside, while quite nasty and cutting on the inside. “Ease” goes only so deep.
That's now how I read his depiction of them, or in fact my experience of them (having gone to these kinds of places, and arguably being one of these people). They just seem like regular people, but with immense advantages that they're often somewhat in denial of.
Oh, no. They know their advantages, and continually develop inwardly and outwardly to protect them. I don’t believe their dissembling is as much maleficent as it is adaptive in a self-preserving sense.
But why would you care? I'm in UK. We have social inequality here. I know some "poor" people (both better off than me,secret income sources,bloody typical) but they don't care how I live and would think me a fool if I cared how they live. If you're doing alright why care,it's weaponised Compassion to destroy you as Nietsche describes accurately
You're mixing up two classes. The people we no longer have are the lower middle class clerks and office managers who were prepared to put in a lifetime,often with lonely sadness,of low paid work with complete honesty,never fiddling the books,never expropriating the petty cash. These men,and women were painfully honest and now no one wants that life. Not when you.can be a contemporary D.H Lawrence and do the digital nomad thing from Greece or Italy. As it said on the bus "God doesn't exist so now you can stop worrying and go and live your life".
Here is demonstrated the big gap between an uninformed opinion and reality...
Wow. Spectacular writing
As someone who has hired extensively among university graduates, I would say that SAT scores are a better gage than the university, but if you want a bunch of people with high test scores, the easiest place to recruit are the Ivies, Chicago, MIT and Stanford, and maybe Georgetown. Yes, a kid with high scores who studied engineering at University of Illinois is just as good, but I will need to sift through thousands of resumes to get to his, whereas, if I go to University of Chicago, they are ALL going to have high test scores.
I can tell you that I have suffered with slow kids whose parents pulled strings to get them hired, and it was unbearable. For many kinds of work, someone must be able to solve problems, and have at least a working knowledge of calculus, and ideally linear algebra. I have worked with not so bright young people with engineering degrees, and I would rather have an English major from Yale who get a high SAT math score. They learn faster and work harder.
The best part of these "elite" graduates is that no matter what you ask of them, they will get it done. They will work though the night, call classmates to figure things out, and they often will just randomly do extra work to impress you. The graduates from those schools worked hard to get there, and it shows. I personally think it is worth recruiting from those elite schools. I have never suffered an analyst from such schools who is unable to learn, or unwilling to work.
Now, let me tell you what I see all the time from nepotism hires: refusal to complete a tasks, inability to learn, unwillingness to work, incessant complaining, and overall a lack of maturity. If I had a perfect candidate, it would be a veteran graduate of an elite university, followed by Asian immigrants. The former has the poise , confidence and maturity while the latter are the smartest people on earth. What I never will hire are the middle class nothings who went to the local school because "the city is cool." Those perpetual children are unbearable. I would never interview anyone with less than a 700 on the SAT math, unless some big shot is forcing me to hire his idiot child who could not find a job anywhere on her own.
Al-Gharbi has a great passage on this in his Compact essay: "the truth is that elite institutions like Columbia primarily select for highly conscientious and capable conformists. If you are sufficiently talented and prolific, the conformity expectations can be slackened slightly (a win-win that helps other conformists understand themselves and the institution as more “edgy” than they really are); and if you are sufficiently wealthy, deficits in capability or conscientiousness can be overlooked or worked around. But the modal student is not an idiosyncratic genius or a billionaire kid who failed his way to the top."
These elite degrees are so immensely valuable as signaling mechanisms precisely for this reason. If you hire a kid who did well at one of these schools, you pretty much know that they're bright, able to learn, and not just willing but eager to work their asses off for your approval. At every level they're selecting for ideal employees. Not necessarily genius innovators or outside the box thinkers, but that's not what most employers need most of the time anyway, and there probably isn't a great way to reliably select for those kinds of people anyway.
The coda to this, in my case, is that I went to Yale with the assist of legacy admissions, and for many years was a terribly inconsistent but intermittently quite creative employee. You would have hated me as an employee. It's taken me about 20 years of rather painful struggle to get even close to the level of performance that most of my classmates had from the get-go. I'm decent now, and fortunately still pretty creative -- I'm now in the talented and prolific but non-conformist bucket that Al-Gharbi mentions -- but it's been a long road, and I have long been acutely aware of the ways in which I've tended to underperform relative to my cohort.
I once,for some research,read through letters of I.K Brunel the engineer. In one letter he wrote to a friend how he was looking for a new PA. He said in this letter he didn't want an engineering genius (like himself),he didn't want a moody,but with flashes of brilliance young man,he wanted an average but amiable and pleasant young man who would be nice to have around and would make him cups of tea,stick the stamps on his letters,and keep the windowsill geraniums watered. Interesting. We are all conditioned to think it's about knowing stuff when really it's about BEING.
Just a thought but would a VERY SMART kid pretend to be suitably conformist to get the place. Saving their individuality for later when in a more secure place.
Would work, but would take an immense amount of not just intelligence but discipline.
💯
A degree from an "elite" university in the United States doesn't do much for you in an academic sense, or even a "signaling" one. You're much better off if you study intensely under instructors at Amherst/Williams/Swarthmore and then proceed to Harvard/Yale/Princeton. This was once the almost-always-taken path to respect, if not the complete cultural legitimacy (postwar, for example, McCloy, Wilbur, even Reuben Brower, master of Adams House for some time).
You mean get the advanced degree from the Ivy?
Sure. Or any other university that has the faculty, course list (and let's be realistic here), the imprimatur you want. What I'm saying is that the quality of your education depends on the people you choose to learn from and how willing you are to apply what they try to teach you to your particular circumstances in life.
I know that nowadays small liberal arts colleges are, at best, considered sets for Donna Tartt novels and not the powerhouses they should be regarded as for generating leaders and important artists. This is backwards thought set on its ass and tilted sideways. Those institutions continue to exist because they let kids in, smack them into some semblance of intellectual shape, and release them into a world that needs them more than ever.
What they are great at is as preparatory schools. My own college (Amherst) isn't regarded as significant because someone specifically because particular people went there and immediately made a world-changing mark. The particular significance of colleges like Amherst is that they instill reverence for service, most of all, and of course intellectual curiosity.
That makes a lot of sense to me. I had a good undergraduate education, but friends of mine who went to small liberal arts education often describe a more intensive intellectual experience than what I had.
Also, fwiw, I think the data is pretty clear that elite schooling doesn't matter than much in terms of career outcomes, with the exception of a small number of professions that place an extra high emphasis on pedigree. So that kind of super elite pedigree, if it means anything, is maybe more about a kind of intangible status that you can lord over your neighbors than anything else.
Reminds me of Orwell's description of the upper classes in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War. At first they remained showy and extravagant with their wealth. As the war progressed, they began to dress differently, act differently, blend in with the locals. And then when the war was over it was back to being flashy again.
Take a walk around Knightsbridge London. You wont see many in designer clothes or maybe,but Grunge style. Real formidable actual wealth hides discreetly.
Gotta do what it takes to survive!
I went to the most elite boarding school in New Zealand as a youth in the late 80s.
We were new money, now I see this was going on around me. I was oblivious to it then.
The article learned me good on what was going down!
What Khan describes is only a more-rarefied version of my experience at Williams College 50-odd years ago. A redoubt of the upper class was then already opening to students from suburban public schools, and even to a sliver of exceptional Black, Asian, and working-class kids. Ever since I've had an equivocal allegiance to an institution that has built a society more meritocratic but no less stratified in terms of power.
I share your equivocal feelings toward these places.
Very nice piece. Bravo.
I once got into a debate with a young and idealistic teacher-to-be about "making a difference." This person felt strongly, vehemently, that they should go out and work in the inner city schools, to give their entire being over to this "making a difference" force that had taken over their mind like a drone pilot.
I said to this person (after my fourth or fifth beer) that "if you want to make such a damn difference, then you should go teach at an elite private school. A deeply elite one. The real deal. Those little fuckers will be manning the spigot rather than trying to find it. Change them and you change the world."
This person was goggle eyed, like I had just sprouted a wormhole in the middle of my forehead. But I still think I was on to something that night, inspired even, or at least on to a small part of something. Your piece touches nicely on this idea.
But this sort of thinking seems wistful, too dulled at the knife's edge: “We might dream of a better elite, one possessed not just of a democratic ethos but the historical, cultural, and political wisdom to anchor it in practices that spread wealth and power more widely.” I don't buy it. I don't buy any of it. Not any more. I suspect you don't either.
There will always be what we call an elite, a revolving democratic elite. And frankly I hope so. If not, something terrible will have occurred. This vague, collectivist idea of “spread[ing] wealth and power more widely” worries me. It worries me because it seeks the death of something important, of the spirit, of the fight and the flame and the chase. And don't think it doesn't.
The kids of the elite have to get schooled somewhere. This is inevitable. And let's hope it's somewhere that understands the aforementioned spigot, and how to teach those little fuckers some proper responsibility. Many of them will go nowhere and do very little anyway. Privilege has fierce limitations.
The human world is already changing. But lord save us from those who think they know how it should end up.
The proletariat are restless enough as it is.
Apologies for quoting myself, but I just responded to another comment that made a similar argument. What I said basically was this:
You're almost certainly right that there will always be an elite, and we should definitely care about the its quality, and not nurture utopian dreams of a purely egalitarian society. But at the same time I don't think there's some fixed quotient of power they hold vis a vis the rest of society. Surely it waxes and wanes over time. I don't have any great hopes, for instance, for the resurrection of labor as a major force in our politics, but they certainly were once such a force, in the not too distance past, which suggests to me that we can realistically hope for a more just distribution of power. That's very different from a naive dream of perfect equality. We don't even have to go into the past. There are other countries that right now have a different distribution of power and wealth.
So I'd like a) less power in the hands of the elite, and b) a better elite to manage the disproportionate power they will have even under the most politically egalitarian circumstances. Or reverse those two in terms of priority. I don't actually have a well considered view of which factor is more important to a flourishing society, but I think it's too fatalistic and also historically inaccurate to posit an elite class that eternally hold the same amount of power. Just as the quality of the elite can vary, its control vis a vis the masses can vary too.
I'm not sure where I end up on your other point, about the dangers of an elite that thinks "they know how it should end up." What's the alternative? An elite that just works in its own interests, without a more idealistic gloss on it? What do you mean by "the spirit, the fight, the flame"? Sounds kind of Ayn Randian to me.
When you say you don't buy any of it anymore, I wonder how deep that goes. How would you understand Ghandi, or Martin Luther King? Was there not a transformation in our society, in the direction of more justice and equality, thanks to the civil rights movement? And if there was, how do you account for that? And if there wasn't, what sense do you make of it?
I might say that we are dancing as best we can in this thread, grappling a bit with limited time and space.
That said, first a confession: I have been battling the forces of critical theory off and on for decades. It gives me a deep distaste for all of the wretched rhetoric around dismantling structures of power, as if it weren't about just replacing it with some other, some worse form of collectivist power. I guess it's a trigger for me, in today's sensitized lingo.
And maybe this (perhaps inspired by your piece): https://substack.com/@demianentrekin/note/c-83506363?r=dw8le
We may not be that far apart, in truth. I think of myself as a pretty old fashioned liberal democrat. I don't have dreams of instilling the proper consciousness in the masses, and I agree that the narrative that a lot of people on the left want to instill (into themselves and their kids, as much or more than the misses) is pretty dispiriting and dysfunction. I'm pretty libertarian in that respect, and pretty optimistic.
My political aspirations, though, include a belief that we'd all be much better off if people had a more secure material base and felt like their voices were somewhat heard and represented in the actions of the state. That's not critical theory. That's Thomas Paine and Whitman and Lincoln and FDR, etc.
Regarding Ayn Rand, I think more like some unholy blend of Marcus Aurelius and Emelia Earhart educated by Emerson. Rand is too "third rail" and cartoonish.
Damn. That goes on forever. Too long for an article about privileged little shits.
https://marlowe1.substack.com/p/the-essences-by-davin-ireland-badass
And they always will be. And their kids. Even if they have to send you to a foreign battlefield to die for them. They'll give you a lovely memorial.
Oh Tim! I know you love it.
It'd be fun to Compare this to Rob Henderson's "Troubled." This skill that Kahn describes--the ability to discern how to navigate different social settings with ease--is one that Henderson never seemed to grasp. I don't say that as an elitist critique of Henderson as a person, but just that it diminishes the relevance of his social critique if he can't really understand the culture he's writing about.
One example comes to mind: Henderson asks some Stanford entrepreneurs what has been key to their business success and their response: luck. Henderson then rhetorically asks if they are going to tell their kids if they should just focus on luck as the key to their advancing in life, and as he reports, they sheepishly admit that, no, they will tell their kids to work hard. Apparently this illustrates Henderson's point about the double standard of luxury beliefs. But I think a much more likely explanation is provided here by Kahn. It's really about the ease of moving in different worlds by signalling modesty when that's called for (and when hard work and connections is table stakes in the company you keep).
There's a long history of integration efforts in schools like this, with as much focus on supporting kids once they are enrolled as there is on recruitment. Those efforts tend to focus on racial integration, and so the support tends to take an identity focus: there might be a POC success counselor to support those POC students. It makes me wonder how Kahn's idea of the culture of elitism is different from, weaves together, and interplays with race in affecting the success of these integration efforts.
What determines someone's success in internalizing this culture that Kahn describes? Is there earlier cultural priming that would allow a kid from an elite background to absorb it better than someone who didn't come from that background?
Interesting connection (and one we should pursue when I get my act together to do the Henderson episode).
Khan does touch on the racial aspect somewhat in his book, and has examples of some students of color who are and are not able to internalize the culture. He doesn't really theorize about why some can and some can't, but I guess I assume it would be a mix of nature and nurture. Surely some people are just innately better at deciphering, and adapting to, the subtle social norms around them, so that they'll get it, given sufficient exposure, even if they came from a wholly different background. Whereas others will really struggle to assimilate the norms if they weren't raised with them, and some will struggle to fit in even if they were raised with them.
I think implicit in his book is the idea that if you want kids from non-elite backgrounds to maximally benefit from exposure to elite culture, then you would want to be wary of separating them off on their own too much once they're in the elite space. So some degree of support for your racial or ethnic or religious group would be fine, but you wouldn't want, say, separate housing, or totally separate social worlds, or else you run the risk of depriving them of precisely what they need to learn in order to most successfully advance within elite hierarchies.
Back in the 1980s a tv company sponsored a bright black kid,a boy,to go to a big UK public school,can't recall which one. It was for a TV series of course. Idea I think was to show how if a clever kid has the barriers to upward mobility removed they'll do as well as m'lord. But they had to drop the project after 3 of the six. The black kid did really well at first. Soared in academic study ,top of the class,great at sport,made lots of friends,then - this was long term over several months started drinking alcohol and then dealing substances,handy he had lots of friends eh. So he got expelled and the whole thing was expunged. Because there is a lot more to education and careers,and life than factual knowledge. Poor kid
Oh my God yeah this was my critique of that book as well. Idk why no one else has critiqued this about the book, but I do notice he has a tendency to block critics from his social media. To me, it doesn't even seem like an upper class thing, just a being nice thing. Both my husband and I grew up poor though not the circumstances that author had, and we both know when to give people accurate advice vs be nice and supportive while they figure things out. If anything, I had issues with social cues and I'd give people free advice all day until one day someone did that to me and I realized I don't really want that. You might enjoy my thoughts about the book https://lila.substack.com/p/interrogating-luxury-beliefs
You get very lucky when you work hard!
Masterpiece indeed. St Paul’s is an exemplar of the best things about an independent school, captured so compellingly in this wonderful study.
When you sound a revolutionary’s cry toward the end, you surprised me. “We are greater in number than those who attend Andover and Exeter.”
Do you want a world without
moneyed prep schools that help rich kids stay high above the masses, or do you want a world in which those schools return to idealizing Teddy Roosevelt and training young, wealthy, able men to travel, claim and conserve land, and stand for anti-corruption measures in politics?
I certainly share the disapproval that these schools send people to Ivy leagues and then to McKinsey or Goldman Sachs or overpaid political consulting jobs.
But there will always be an elite. Can’t we simply demand they are not hypocrites and that they take responsibility for their great influence over the nation?
I don't remember saying that!
My initial thought is that you're almost certainly right that there will always be an elite, and we should definitely care about the its quality, but at the same time I don't think there's some fixed quotient of power they hold vis a vis the rest of society. I'm sure it waxes and wanes over time. I don't have any great hopes, for instance, for the resurrection of labor as a major force in our politics, but they certainly were once, which suggests to me that we realistically hope for a countervailing power in a society that isn't accountable primarily to the elite.
So I'd like a) less power in the hands of the elite, and b) a better elite to manage the disproportionate power they will have even under the most politically egalitarian circumstances.
I don't know that TR is quite my ideal. But I will certainly assent to "they take responsibility for their great influence over the nation."
I went to SPS and this is exaggeration for shock effect. "Children with multiple homes who chartered planes for weekend international trips, came from family dynasties, and inherited unimaginable advantages met me on the school’s brick paths.” Of course every now and then or decade or two someone like Tim Mellon comes along who can afford to donate $100 million to Trump. For the most part SPS students are noted for their potent brain power. It's a wealthy school of course and that is why so many students are on scholarship. The perception generated by Kahn is WASP, WASP, WASP but the reality is nearly 1/2 the student body is non-Caucasian.
Well wait have you read what I said about the book, or the book itself? He talks at great length about all the ways in which it isn't WASP, WASP, WASP anymore.
Maybe he was exaggerating the degree to which it was still like that in the mid-90s, when he was there as a student, but the vast majority of the book is precisely about how much it isn't like at all that by the time he goes back in the oughts. That's the whole point, that it has re-oriented itself as an egalitarian cultivator of brain power.
He's arguing that while there are good things about this shift, it also functions to obscure the degree to which a place like St. Paul's is still a perpetuator of the elite, just a different kind of elite that manifests its privilege in a different way. Non-white scholarship students play an essential role in this obscuring of its function. They are the evidence that the school is not what its critics say it is. Khan is saying that it's still an institution whose function is to cultivate an elite, and that this still, as always, leads with its products acting in their class interest.
Sounds like a school for spies. 😂 But seriously, "merit" or the "perception of merit" is semantics of the over-educated. I did very much enjoy the landscape regardless.
Wait - did you go there?
No, sorry. I meant the landscape painted by the article.
A few things: first and most importantly I really enjoyed your piece. These are most definitely not circles in which I travel. I will be reading Privilege. You've sold at least one book for Mr. Khan. (I did keep thinking of that awesome movie "The Left Behinds" while reading.)
Second, I learned a new word: schnoid. (Which macOS spell check tells me should say schnook, but now I know better.)
(Another aside about technology: the top Google result was from Urban Dictionary. The second was from a place called Nerdology in a piece called "A Definitive Guide To Nerdolog" on the site CascadeClimbers.com. The Nerdology definition seemed more plausible but I clicked on the Urban Dictionary link and, lo and behold, the actual definition there for schnoid was much more like one from Nerdology and the words from the Google result summary were nowhere in the Urban Dictionary definition. If anyone reading this doesn't know what schnoid means, don't click on the link embedded in the Urban Dictionary definition. Yes, I'm stupid.)
This is hilarious. So maybe I kind of made up the word? Except that that nerdology definition is basically what I meant. I was just using it as a synonym for nerd or dork.
The term "schnoid" implies computer use. A "Computer Nerd" is a schnoid. Note that this computer use must be nerdy in order to constitute schnoidism. Thus, one who stays up late at night playing Moria is not necessarily a schnoid, while one who tweaks around with the source code and programs Moria is. Someone who has to find eigenvaules on the computer for pChem is not a schnoid, but someone who is not in the class but tries to find those eigenvalues as a way of blowing off time most definitely is a schnoid.
Great new word. I've invented the word "Gregarity" (shorter than 'gregariousnes" ) for how we are compelled from infancy into unwanted GREGARITY ++ probably only because it's more economic. Toddler groups didn't exist when I was tiny but we have to go to school then few jobs are solitary,then tv ads show life as a continual Lidl Xmas food advert,all convivial multi- age multi culture diverse attractive people laughing and shoving food down their gobs,and "no-mates" is a derogatory term of abuse. Two new words for the dictionary "schnoid" and "gregarity". I'll write to Suzi Dent.
I'm in. Let them spread.
They’re sniglets, sort of.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sniglet
Hah! I haven't thought of sniglets in forever. We had a few of those books around the house. I loved them.
Hah! I love GREGARITY but it sounds a little like a 1970s private eye or cop show, like Manix, Cannon, Longstreet, Beretta, etc.
“Who is that guy, chief? Who does he think he is?”
[The chief removes the tooth pick from his mouth.]
“That is one of toughest cops I ever knew. That’s James Gregarity.”
[The chief puts the tooth pick back in his mouth. Zoom to the admiring face of patrolman Smith, nodding with understanding.]
Great essay! I didn’t attend a school like this (I was given the opportunity to and denied it out of a sense of juvenile populism) but I had a familial connection to one, (of the many up and down the Connecticut river) and this bunch of contradictions about education, hierarchy and meritocracy is something I’ve thought about a lot in the last few years.
The Tyranny of Merit by Michael Sandell,book you might like to read.
absolutely fascinating exploration of the book; would i be wrong to say its thesis is similar territory to ‘outliers: the story of success by malcolm gladwell… I won’t bore you by drawing out the convergences…
Haven't read outliers. Was that the 10,000 hours one?
yeah that’s it, but covers similar territory about schooling, wealth, class; et cetera, et cetera, so on and so forth; just read the wiki for a quick & dirty overview: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliers_(book)
Fascinating read.
I think I read that book. I don't really buy his theory though. From the disadvantage in my life I should be the Queen of England by now!
so yes, while there may be some thematic overlap in their broader discussions of success and privilege, there are NOT any direct connection or reference between the two works however, parallel tracks I guess