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All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.
—Benedict de Spinoza
We Applaud Ourselves.
—Poster seen in a school entrance hall
Of the many dispiriting statistics cited in William Henry’s brief but important new book, In Defense of Elitism, perhaps the most dispiriting comes from a recent (1992) study by the Department of Education. Based on a survey of more than twenty-six thousand adults, this study estimates that fifteen million American adults are entirely illiterate. It also projects that an additional seventy-five million American adults have only minimal reading and computational skills: a third of this group can just manage to tote up the weekly grocery bill, almost none can compose a simple business letter. Even if this projection overstates the case by 50 percent, it is still a frightening bit of news and a staggering indictment of our culture. How is it, after the long war on illiteracy waged in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries, that we now find ourselves slouching toward illiterate barbarism? No doubt there are many pieces to this distressing puzzle, of which the failure of inner-city schools is perhaps as much a symptom as a cause. Mr. Henry, who had been a Pulitzer Prize-winning cultural commentator for Time magazine before his untimely death shortly before the publication of this book, does not supply a direct answer.
We are all held to be equal before the law; this is distinct from the many, many ways in which we are unequal.
The premise of Mr. Henry’s book is that since World War II—and particularly since the 1960s—“nearly every great domestic policy debate” has been a battle between elitism and egalitarianism, and that “egalitarianism has been winning far too thoroughly.” It should be said at the outset that Mr. Henry acknowledges that the egalitarian impulse has an important and beneficent role to play in a political democracy. For one thing, it nurtures a spirit of generosity and charitableness toward those less fortunate than oneself. More to the point, it underwrites what the political scientist Harvey Mansfield has astutely called “the self-evident half-truth that all men are created equal.” We are all held to be equal before the law; this is distinct from the many, many ways in which we are unequal. The problem today, as Mr. Henry sees, is that the egalitarian imperative threatens to overwhelm that other great social impulse, the impulse to achieve, to excel, to surpass: “always to be best and to rise above others,” as Homer put it in one classic expression of the agonistic spirit. Radical egalitarianism would have us pretend that there are no important distinctions among people; where the pretense is impossible, it would have us enact compensatory programs to minimize, or at least to paper over, the differences. The results are a vast increase in self-deception, cultural degradation, and bureaucratic meddlesomeness.
Mr. Henry’s diagnosis of this pathology is not new. It belongs alongside the many other attacks on “affirmative action” (i.e., what used to be called preferential treatment), political correctness, and multiculturalism that have appeared over the course of the last six or seven years. Mr. Henry’s decision to frame his discussion almost wholly in terms of the idea of elitism adds an element of novelty, it is true; and it should be said that he is an exceptionally able verbal anatomist: he makes mincemeat, delightfully, of his targets; but his conclusions, and many of his examples, will be familiar to anyone conversant with the recent evolution of the so-called “culture wars.” Nevertheless, In Defense of Elitism is required reading for anyone interested in the fate of cultural life in this country. Perhaps its chief claim on our attention, however, is what it reveals about the paralysis of contemporary liberalism. That is to say, the real pathos of the book arises not from its argument—cogently controversial though it is—but from the sense of betrayal that motivated it. In Defense of Elitism is the angry bulletin of a man who woke up one day to find some of his fundamental principles in a state of mutiny. It turns out to be a mutiny that involves us all.
Mr. Henry begins his book by assuring us of his liberal credentials. He was a registered Democrat. He was a card-carrying member of the American Civil Liberties Union. He had collected numerous awards from black, homosexual, and religious organizations for writing about civil-rights issues. He gave money to various left-wing causes. His boyhood heroes were Hubert Humphrey and Martin Luther King, Jr. He once crossed a room to avoid “even being introduced” to Pat Buchanan. He was “not a right-winger.” And yet he also always thought of himself as an elitist.
As this litany suggests, the fundamental tension in this book is between two versions of liberalism. On the one hand, there is what we might call traditional liberalism, which embraces elitism; on the other hand, there is egalitarian liberalism, which rejects it. Mr. Henry saw himself as a partisan of the former. But “somewhere along Bill Clinton’s path to the White House,” he explains, it dawned on Mr. Henry that “elitist” had come to rival “racist” as a pejorative epithet. Suddenly, to call someone an “elitist” was to accuse him of grave moral blindness. One could no longer declare oneself an elitist without risking excommunication from the liberal establishment. With very rare exceptions, politicians shunned the label, knowing it was political poison. (In his last chapter, “Politics by Saxophone,” Mr. Henry writes perceptively about the significance of Bill Clinton’s efforts to appear anti-elitist.) Teachers and even college professors rushed to deny that they were elitists; art museums, orchestras, and other institutions once frankly devoted to the custodianship of high culture made themselves over into the people’s choice.
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The only thing odd about this picture is the timing of Mr. Henry’s revelation. For in truth, the attack on elitism was in place long before Bill and Hillary’s trek to the White House. Mr. Henry was a perspicacious observer of cultural life. What took him so long? He tells us that he grew up in the Fifties and went to college (Yale) “in the Vietnam era.” How could he have missed the spirit of anti-elitism pulsating all around him? Did he perhaps sense new winds, anti-anti-elitist winds, in the air and bestir himself to capitalize on what he suspected might be a new trend? Whatever the answer, he orchestrated his awakening with keen rhetorical skill. He mustered sufficient indignation and at least the appearance of incredulity to make his book a lively polemic. Mr. Henry was a committed liberal who, in speaking up for elitism, put himself on a collision course with the prevailing liberal orthodoxy. In this respect, his book belongs to that newish genre of liberal criticism which seeks to attack liberalism without, exactly repudiating it. Robert Hughes’s The Culture of Complaint and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s The Disuniting of America are other, best-selling examples of the genre.
Mr. Henry’s basic procedure is to appeal to common sense while at the same time introducing a fillip of politically incorrect sentiment. What is an elitist? In his first chapter, “The Vital Lie,” Mr. Henry lists several attributes, including “respect for leadership and position,” “esteem for accomplishment,” “reverence for heritage,” “commitment to rationalism and scientific investigation,” “upholding of objective standards,” and, above all, “the willingness to assert unyieldingly that one idea, contribution or attainment is better than another.”
It is of course the last feature that—however indisputable it is in reality—will be most galling to the politically correct. Mr. Henry is not shy about spelling out the implications of his assertion. What he is talking about, he writes, is
Mr. Henry begins with observations that only a deeply smitten egalitarian could dispute (though the brash use of the word “better” will no doubt set some PC hearts a-flutter). But already by the second sentence he is into contentious territory. Still, although it will pain a cultural relativist to admit it, everything in our experience confirms the truth of Mr. Henry’s observations: some ideas are better than others, some works of art more enduring. Who can deny it? When we come to Mr. Henry’s conclusion, with its audacious comparison of the achievements of advanced Western technology with a barbaric African tribal rite, we can almost hear the indignant shouts. Here again, Mr. Henry is right, but the dictates of liberal orthodoxy require that we avoid saying so.
Mr. Henry rather specializes in articulating shocking, unmentionable truths in this book. There is something to offend nearly everyone—a good if not quite infallible sign of probity. I am uncertain whether Afro-centrists or feminists will be more enraged by this book. On balance, I am inclined to think that feminists will be. Mr. Henry’s comment about the bone is sure to put some noses out of joint, so to speak. But his attack on the excesses of feminism is broad-based and unrelenting. He notes, for example, that, according to one leading figure in textbook publishing, “some of the most outrageous misstatements in textbooks are written in deliberately to placate pressure groups, … most notably ardent feminists, whom this executive describes as ‘the most relentless, overall the worst.’ The person in question is sufficiently fearful of retaliation not to want to be identified by name, age, gender,” etc. Mr. Henry also includes the usual quota of academic feminist nonsense, noting that a sure way for a woman to get published today is to title her book “Feminism and … ” or “Women and … ” filling in the blank with almost anything. “A vast proportion of what passes for female scholarship,’ he notes, “is either overblown hagiography of minor figures proferred for rediscovery or ‘feminist critiques’ meant to reinvent the past to suit the needs of the present.” Not even the most prestigious university presses are immune. For example, Yale University Press recently published a book called Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture, which, judging from Mr. Henry’s quotations, is even worse than it sounds. But my favorite of his discoveries is Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge. It purports to be “a sustained examination of the masculinism of contemporary geographical discourses”; in fact, a more damaging parody of feminist nonsense is hard to imagine. Here is a brief sample:
Such examples of what Mr. Henry rightly calls “whiny bilge” will—or should—make feminists squirm. But what will really set them off are observations such as this: “the unvarnished truth,” Mr. Henry writes, “is this: You could eliminate every woman writer, painter, and composer from the caveman era to the present moment and not significantly deform the course of Western culture.” Sure, we would lose “individual artists of merit,” including such marvelous writers as Jane Austen and George Eliot. Mr. Henry is quick to acknowledge this. But his point holds, and it will hardly matter that he goes on to observe that “this does not mean women are inferior. It simply means they didn’t have the opportunity.”
Here again, Mr. Henry is right, but the dictates of liberal orthodoxy require that we avoid saying so.
Mr. Henry is not gratuitously offensive. The serious point behind his blunt language is that reality cannot be molded to suit our ideology. It would of course be nice for feminism if there were as many important women painters, writers, scientists, statesmen, composers, philosophers, mathematicians, architects, and inventors as there have been men in these vocations. But there haven’t been. Why this should be the case is an open question. Lack of opportunity certainly has had something to do with it.
Whatever the reasons, it helps no one to argue, as many radical feminists do, that “if women cannot be numbered equally with men in the ranks of proven genius, . . . then the concepts of genius and quality must be discarded as politically unacceptable.”
Mr. Henry’s attack on the ethic of egalitarianism ranges from the grammatical to the institutional. He rightly deplores the “odious anti-syntactical evasion, ‘their’ ”—as in the popular solecism “everyone has their own way”—and he searingly criticizes the politically correct effort, to “integrate” retarded children into classrooms for normal students. He criticizes the multicultural agenda in the new, politically correct Heath Anthology of American Literature, and describes as “wicked” (because what is taught to the young will remain with them for the rest of their lives) the decision in New York State to mandate that children be taught that one of the two main sources of the United States Constitution was the organizing pact of the Iroquois Indian Nation. This would, Mr. Henry observes, have been news to the Founding Fathers.
Mr. Henry is refreshingly insensitive to the sensitivity police who demand that one deny reality rather than offend a special interest. “The impulse in current American society,” he notes, “is to ‘empower’ the afflicted, even to the extent of engaging in the charade that they suffer no affliction but are merely somehow different.” Writing in Time, Mr. Henry once described the dancing in a Broadway show as “clubfooted.” Sure enough, an angry letter soon arrived on his desk from an organization representing the clubfooted objecting that his use of the word “implied a deformity.” Which of course it did. Because a club foot is a deformity.
Mr. Henry also recalls the case of a high-school student who was a deaf mute but who demanded to compete in an annual speech contest. The topic: “My Voice in America’s Future.” Contestants were required to submit an audiotape—identified only by number to rule out favoritism—that would be judged by two criteria: the content of the speech as written in English and the oratorical style of the contestant’s delivery. The deaf mute demanded to be allowed to submit a videotape in American Sign Language, thus avoiding both criteria for the contest. In the end, she agreed to submit an audiotape in which her ideas were translated into English by an interpreter. The girl’s mother said, “We don’t want to just drop this. We want to see things change so that people will be able to accept people who are not quite the same.” Of course, as Mr. Henry notes, most Americans routinely accept people who are not quite the same. What this girl and her mother wanted was something else: they wanted her “to do something altogether different and have it be treated as the same thing.”
As Mr. Henry points out, our educational institutions, especially our colleges and universities, are among the most powerful bastions of this sentimentalizing tyranny. Many universities, he notes, have “caved in almost entirely” to the PC lobby with its demand for “special-pleading” studies, speech codes, and preferential treatment for designated minorities (including that majority-minority, women). “The historical role of centers of learning,” he writes, “has been to preserve standards and protect enduring achievements from the wind and fire of momentary political or populist whim. Now the professors are fanning the flames.”
Nor is the problem confined to higher education. Increasingly elementary and secondary schools are “far less concerned with the educational needs of the children they teach than with the political yearnings of the adults who lobby them.” Among other things, this has resulted in a “rewriting of curriculum at every level” in order to bring history into accord with the politically correct version of reality. Thus it is, for example, that one textbook claims that America used the atomic bomb to end the Korean conflict and that Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., were both assassinated during the Republican administration of Richard Nixon rather than the Democratic administration of Lyndon Johnson.
There is also a tendency to transform schools into giant counseling centers whose goal is not the transmission of knowledge but the inculcation of warm feelings about oneself. A professor of early-childhood development whom Mr. Henry quotes recalls visiting a first-grade class in an affluent Middle Western suburb. Each Student had produced a booklet called “All About Me.” The first page of each booklet listed some basic family information. Then came pages devoted to the questions “What I like to eat,” “What I like to watch on TV,” “What I want as a present,” and “Where I want to go on a vacation.” There were no such questions as “What I want to know more about” or “What I want to solve.” “Each page,” this professor noted, “was directed toward the child’s basest inner gratifications.” The prevailing narcissistic ethos was epitomized by a banner she glimpsed in the entrance to a school hall: “We Applaud Ourselves.”
Mr. Henry sets himself firmly against all these trends. “Schools,” he insists, “exist to teach, to test, to rank hierarchically, to promote the idea that knowing and understanding more is better than knowing and understanding less. Education is elitist. Civilization is elitist.” Probably the worst aspect of the whole movement for political correctness, he notes, is “the erosion of the intellectual confidence needed to sort out, and rank, competing values.” It is grimly ironic that a movement meant to “empower” the hitherto disenfranchised winds up dis-empowering them in the most fundamental way.
Part of the problem is the sheer size of the “higher” education establishment. The quotation marks are necessary because for many students college is no longer a significant achievement but “a mere rite of passage, a capstone to adolescent party time”: indeed, so lax have standards become that for many students a college degree is “a credential without being a qualification.” About the rise of mass education since World War II, Mr. Henry writes that “the true effects have been to break down the distinction between the accomplished and the workaday, to promote pseudo-scholarship based on gender anxiety and ethnic tribalism.” Today, the United States spends approximately $150 billion a year on education. Two-thirds of that is public money. Mr. Henry’s modest proposal is to “reduce, over perhaps a five-year span, the number of high school graduates who go on to college from nearly sixty percent to a still generous thirty-three percent. This will mean closing a lot of institutions. Most of them, in my view, should be community colleges, current or former state teachers’ colleges, and the like. These schools serve the academically marginal and would be better replaced by vocational training in high school and on-the-job training at work.” In response to the claim that everyone learns something from his time at college, Mr. Henry replies, Maybe so: “But at what price? One hundred and fifty billion dollars is awfully high for deferring the day when the idle or ungifted take individual responsibility and face up to their fate. And the price is even steeper when the egalitarian urge has turned our universities . . . into soapboxes for hazy and tribalist [ideas].”
It is grimly ironic that a movement meant to “empower” the hitherto disenfranchised winds up dis-empowering them in the most fundamental way.
In a society that has surrendered to radical egalitarianism, education will naturally be a prime locus of anti-elitist sentiment. But, as Mr. Henry shows, the attack on elitism is hardly confined to the shenanigans of PC professors and their equivalents in elementary and secondary schools. The “foolishly embraced” idea that “self-fulfillment is more important than objective achievement” finds a responsive echo throughout American society. One indication of this is to be found in the much abused concept of “entitlement.” Noting that the list of what people feel they are “entitled to” has “exploded exponentially” over the last few decades, Mr. Henry points out that the rise of the rhetoric of entitlement has been accompanied by a corresponding “erosion of personal responsibility.” As late as the mid-1960s,
The change has been a momentous one. For example, “where a generation ago people felt entitled to a chance at education, they now feel entitled to the credential affirming that they have completed a course of study regardless of their actual mastery.” Elsewhere in society there is also a general
This is a long and complex list. But Mr. Henry’s main point is straightforward. The “missing element in every phase of American life,” he argues, “is what used to be called rugged individualism.” Genuine fairness included the freedom to strive, the opportunity to succeed, but also the possibility of failure. “Above all,” Mr. Henry writes, “fairness is not the same thing as equality. . . . It is unfair to men and whites and children of privilege to hold their achievements suspect. It is unfair to women and blacks and the poor to create compensatory programs so pervasive that they can never know the full joy of having achieved something on their own. A fair society is one in which some people fail.” This may sound like a harsh philosophy. In fact, it is infinitely more benevolent than one requiring that reality be systematically distorted in the interests of ideological purity.