Dear Friends,
I’m sharing a reflective essay. At the partner site Inner Life, writes on a similar theme — social mobility in writing across the centuries.
Best,
Sam
ON ARISTOCRACY
There was an ugly moment my freshman year of college when a particularly toolish prep school guy locked eyes with all the girls he was hitting on and proposed a toast: “Here’s to being at Yale and having it made.”
What was particularly upsetting about that — and, actually, the girls he was hitting on were genuinely mad at him — was that he was articulating what was in the back of everybody’s mind and what everybody took for granted. Not that long ago we had been high school students, maybe with good grades or whatever but part of the general flotsam of teen movies and WB shows. With an admission note from the Yale University portal we seemed to become something else, we weren’t sure exactly what, but that toolish preppie put his finger on it better than anything else I encountered at that time: we had become aristocrats.
Looking back, I think that’s my best understanding of what Yale was. It certainly wasn’t about turning out intellectuals, as I’d at one point naively assumed. And it wasn’t exactly about creating a “professional managerial class” — or at least that’s not the most elegant term for it: that makes it seem like the Ivy League graduates were plugged into leadership positions across the society, which is not exactly what happened. It was a bit more of a sense of a class apart — differentiated by having a highly expensive education poured into us and by having formative ties with one another that would sustain us throughout our careers.
But to assign the label of ‘aristocrat’ to that — which feels intuitively right to me — it’s worth digging into what that word really means. And all an aristocrat is, basically, is an entrenched elite. The basis of aristocracy is to suppose that there will always be inequalities in a society — that seems a self-evident, inarguable point — and that there are some who are well-fitted to occupy an elevated station. Aristocrats come in many different forms. There are those who are socially conscious and look to occupy leadership roles in various institutions. There are those who are preoccupied with power. And there are those who are uncomfortable with it and more or less surrender their own aristocracy. But what aristocracy is, for the most part, is the preservation of that sense of being distinct: at the moment that that otherness is lost then aristocracy collapses.
At the height of aristocracy — in the period leading up to the French Revolution — the chief preoccupation of aristocrats was how to pass their wealth and status on to the next generation, to have a system of inheritance for titles and property that didn’t pass through the public. What the French Revolution did was to annihilate that system of direct transmission. To be an aristocrat in Revolutionary France was, evidently, to be subject to terror; and, throughout the rest of Europe, aristocrats became a shrunken version of themselves across the 19th century. Wealth no longer primarily originated in landed estates, carefully passed down across generations. Wealth came above all from manufacturing, and bourgeois tradesmen turned out to be best equipped for that work.
But the bourgeoisie no longer particularly manufactures, and an elite has emerged out of the bourgeoisie that is mostly interested in preserving itself — in white-collar jobs, in high-status educational credentialing, in all the usual Bourdieuian signalings of cultural cache. It took some time for the shape of the new aristocracy to emerge. It happened probably faster in Europe, in which the upheavals of the Revolutionary Era did not in the end produce the class equality that the radicals longed for. A technocratic hierarchy emerged through the 19th century “bourgeois republics” focused above all on education. I remember a French colleague of mine being shocked to meet the head of California’s state fire department and to discover that he was, actually, a firefighter. “In France there is no way that Ken would be the head of the fire department,” he said. “It would be someone with narrow glasses and an expensive watch who had gone to the right school.”
In America the new aristocracy took somewhat longer to develop. The earlier iterations of it — the Southern gentility of Gone With The Wind, the WASP elite of Henry James — collapsed somewhat spectacularly, the Southern aristocrats getting themselves killed in the Civil War, and the WASPs by all accounts drinking themselves into a stupor and forgetting to have kids. I remember at Yale getting great enjoyment out of class photos laid out side to side. The photos from the dawn of time until about 1964 looked exactly the same — there seemed to be some vampires who were there in every photograph — and then all hell broke loose, shaggy hair, big smiles, a year or two where it might have been difficult to arrange any photos at all, and then order got restored with a co-ed and more demographically diverse class but all with a business school sheen. We told ourselves — there were even campus songs about it — that an old elite had been washed away by a new meritocracy, that we were dedicated to democratic if not revolutionary ideals, but at the same time we all knew that it wasn’t really true.
The sense of a new aristocracy really hit for me when I realized how many of my cohort were marrying each other. It wasn’t necessarily about love — we weren’t a very romantic generation — and more a sense of a best fit. It really was a smart strategy to have two adults earning professional salaries, with one or two high-quality children, and then to outsource the child rearing to nannies and pre-schools. The real trick was about how to pass wealth onto the next generation, which wasn’t so easy with inheritance taxes and without landed estates. But this turned out to be manageable too with a heavy focus on schools. As F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1922 wrote of a childbirth, “He hoped it would be a boy so he could one day be sent to Yale College in Connecticut.” And that’s basically still the paradigm. It’s a number of professions — lawyers, bankers, etc — that are based in a set of skills and cultural markers requiring an advanced education. Rather than passing on their accumulated wealth, let alone titles, parents of this class simply expect their progeny to repeat the process: the same schools, sometimes the same firms, everything in the name of meritocracy even as members of the same families have the same elite careers.
It is an aristocracy but without the vulnerability and without the guilt. It relies on a somewhat delicate dance with the surrounding society: sharing the same values, keeping the gates of admission apparently open, even as the same class always wins.
I'll be writing about this soon, but I think belonging to the aristocracy goes beyond graduating from Yale. There's a whole background network that prepares students for the admission race, and while the degree might open more opportunities, the full range of options requires knowing how to leverage the degree. That's more than who you know, it's the cultural language you speak, the shared set of assumptions, the underlying premise of what constitutes good character or meaningful living.
My colleague William Pannapacker, longtime columnist for the Chronicle, grew up blue collar in Pittsburgh. He graduated from Harvard, but struggled mightily on the academic job market before landing a position at a liberal arts college in Michigan. He left that position around the time that I left mine, and he's been effectively adrift ever since. He worked for a time as a telemarketer in Chicago (there was a better name for it), but made less than 50% what he did as a professor and was eventually laid off after maybe a year on the job. He started a consulting business but is now back on the job hunt. I think really belonging to the aristocracy means that you have a bunch of other people looking out for you when you're in a situation like that. The first-gen student can't use their family network, and they never really belonged to the aristocracy, so they're truly on their own. It's a story about college that should be more widely told.
David has written about this, and it's both troubling and pretty insulting to someone from my background: "The sense of a new aristocracy really hit for me when I realized how many of my cohort were marrying each other." Ironically, this was one reason I initially resisted majoring in English. I was not interested in all the novels about gentry trying to marry well. Thomas Hardy's milkmaids fascinated me more. But on another level, it makes sense -- marrying across classes isn't simple. Money, identity, and a whole range of other assumptions that go into daily life can conspire against love. I have learned some of that the hard way.
I'll add one more wrinkle. While it's true that college graduates dominate the managerial class, there are a LOT of impoverished college grads and perhaps an equal amount of thriving tradespeople. I have more than one cousin with just a high school education who earns in the mid six figures. Just as George Packer says that there are at least four different Americas, I think there might be two or three "middle classes." For my cousin in Alaska, that means earning quite a lot fishing for six months, then living on a sailboat in Florida, then piecemeal building a home on land near Kalispell, Montana. The main goal for that slice of the middle class is staying debt free, a foreign concept to many Americans trying to move up economically.
Thank you for this reflective and nuanced piece on the form that aristocracy has taken today in American society. I also went to an Ivy, thinking that things were now meritocratic and that there would be a broad range of people I'd meet. Instead, I found that, in spite of other types of diversity, most people had similar upbringings and were of a similar socioeconomic background. For most of the people I encountered, everything was about getting a certain kind of well-paying job—having "the same elite careers." I recently read Poison Ivy by Evan Mandery, and it makes several similar points!
"It really was a smart strategy to have two adults earning professional salaries, with one or two high-quality children, and then to outsource the child rearing to nannies and pre-schools." — Until rather recently, I used to believe most people thought of marriage as based on love. Then I realized that the attitude described in your essay was not uncommon, and that for some, marriage is simply "business," something to be considered coldly, objectively, professionally. A little heartbreaking, but one lives and learns!