On Aristocracy

Experience

Dear Friends,

I’m sharing a reflective essay. At the partner site

Inner Life

,

Julianne Werlin

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.