The Elite Culture Gerry OShea
Thinking about
the allurements of capitalism, the promise that anyone can make it in America, a
country where every self-made millionaire is widely admired. Rags-to-riches
stories guarantee an attentive audience.
The entrepreneur
is often portrayed as a rugged male who successfully overcomes bureaucratic
regulations and peer opposition — an admirably dogged character. Reminds me of a
tale about a rogue confronting impossible odds.
A condemned
man is begging for clemency from the all-powerful king. He is facing a death
sentence for stealing the king’s donkey. He pleads with the monarch to let him
live for a year, and in recompense, he swears that he will teach the king’s
favorite white horse to talk. The king expresses incredulity about the
proposition, but he reckons he has nothing to lose in the deal, and he agrees
to postpone the execution for twelve months to see if the criminal can get his
special horse to talk.
The prisoner
returned to his cell in an elated mood, but his cellmate could not understand
his mirth, especially when he heard of his plans to spend a year teaching a
horse to converse. The voluble chancer pleaded his case with his jailhouse
friend: “A lot can happen in a year. The king might die. The horse might die. I
might die. And, how do you know, maybe the bloody white nag will talk!” Like
many aspiring capitalists, he gambles that events will work out for him.
How is the
capitalist system working in America? In a recent survey, nearly four-fifths of
the population told pollsters that their children would be less well off than
they are, the worst result for this question since 1990, when only about
two-fifths were that gloomy.
Also, the latest longevity numbers in the
United States reveal a major negative. The average lifespan of citizens lags significantly
behind other Western countries. People, on average, are living a few years
longer in Ireland now than in America.
Most weekly workers put in long hours just to
make ends meet, and yet, unless they carry a union card, they rarely receive a
retirement pension needed to supplement their social security check.
A recent
report on inheritance highlights a telling systemic problem. It contends that a
large global transfer of wealth is set “to make affluent millennials the
richest generation in history.” Such unequal inherited wealth is not consistent
with sensible public policy or basic morality and runs counter to a thriving
democracy.
A core
conservative belief stresses that in an ideal world, every human being should
be responsible for his or her own economic betterment. The idea of handing any
young person an unearned bulging bank account, accumulated by someone who has
passed on, contradicts the core conservative principle that individual
responsibility and diligent work should determine a person’s economic status. When
last did you hear a conservative leader argue that crucial political point in
America or anywhere else?
In the
preface to his 11th book, Quiet Street, Nick McDonnell promises
an interrogation of America’s most entrenched elite, the entitled,
blue-blooded, white upper class of the East Coast. He is well-groomed for this
task because he himself, by birth and upbringing, is an unquestionable, if
ambivalent, member.
As a
journalist, he writes a lot about American foreign policy, but in this book,
whose subtitle reads appropriately as On American Privilege, he
is attempting to shine a light on rampant inequality connected to “another kind
of concentrated American power.”
For
McDonnell, this is part of a spiritual journey where he must shed his elitist
baggage: “It is important for me as a writer and reporter to try to see myself
as clearly as I try to see the people and places I write about.”
He reflects
at length on his school days at Buckley (an all-boys private school in
Manhattan) and Riverdale Country School, followed by Harvard and Oxford – all bastions
of ptivilege. He mentions enjoyable summers at the Devon Yacht Club.
During his education in Buckley, many of the
boys, all from elite families, would snigger about the kitchen workers, viewed,
of course, as less worthy because of their limited means and the fact that some
of them could barely speak English.
In all these
“special institutions,” good manners were preached and expected, but, in
reality, he writes members could get away with almost anything. Money talks and
you know what walks! A sense of entitlement dominates this ethos, which, with
the burgeoning growth of elite families, is sure to become even more prevalent.
This culture
of elitism, bred in classism, is certainly not confined to America. I worked
for ten years in a comprehensive high school in Ballymun, a poor section of
Dublin. In applying for scarce jobs in
those years, our graduates often reported back that the system was rigged
against them because young men from the elite fee-paying high schools – all run
by religious orders - had the inside connections guaranteeing preference in
hiring.
A few years
ago, in a widely discussed study, three Harvard researchers showed how money,
not ability, is the surest indicator of who will get into Ivy League
universities and go on to become CEOs.
In McDonnell’s
book, he writes fondly about many of his experiences in the series of elite
private institutions he attended, but he characterizes their culture as best
described in terms of “superficial meritocracy.”
In writing
his book, he talked to his peers from his prep school years, and they reflected
on the cognitive dissonance that allowed them to reconcile the purported school
values of “kindness, fairness, and generosity” with the reality of moneyed
families justifying passing on their privileges to the next generation.
McDonnell
favors radical changes that would end the pretense that elite educational
institutions are driven by high ideals and not dominated by Mammon’s greasy
hand. He and his school friends decided that the sense of importance that they
enjoyed, the prestige of feeling good about their status and standing with
their peers, far trumped the availability of a big bank account.
Harmless
talk with friends over a few beers late at night, lauding old-time relationships
while diminishing the importance of bank accounts. But elitism falls flat
without the two conjoined. Money and status go hand in hand. The elite brand is
suffused with both.
Gerry O’Shea
blogs at wemustbetalking.com
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