In Defense of Elitism. - book review
A recent and welcome addition to the burgeoning anti-”political correctness” canon is In Defense of Elitism,(*) by Time magazine culture critic William Henry, III, who died this past June. Henry has written an intelligent, persuasive book, in places perhaps unnecessarily vitriolic but, by and large, a thoughtful critique. Moreover, he does not limit himself to PC but challenges us to reevaluate some of the basic ideas that pervade American society.
In Defense of Elitism begins with the simple premise that all the major public-policy debates of the last half-century have been fought between the forces of elitism and egalitarianism, and that the latter have been winning far too often. This arises from a few basic notions, which most people unthinkingly and uncritically adopt: that all people are basically the same; that the common man is unerring and needs no intermediaries; that self-expression and self-esteem are more important than objective achievement; and that a good and just society ought to spend more of its time and energy propping up the “losers” than in encouraging the “winners.”
Henry believes that in our fear of elitism, we have lost sight of its benefits. In doing so, we have blinded ourselves to a few simple facts about human beings and their essential nature:
that some people are better than others - smarter, harder working, more learned, more productive, harder to replace. Some ideas are better than others, some values more enduring, some works of art more universal. Some cultures, though we dare not say it, are more accomplished than others and therefore more worthy of study. Every corner of the human race may have something to contribute. That does not mean that all contributions are equal.
Statements like this might easily be dismissed as the rantings of a conservative malcontent (the opinion of Brent Staples of the New York Times, among others), but, as Henry himself notes, he was no conservative. In fact, he had the very finest liberal credentials - he was a lifelong Democrat, a self-proclaimed card-carrying member of the ACLU, and the recipient of a number of awards from civil-rights groups.
Henry, it seems, like a small but growing number of other liberals, has noticed that good intentions do not always lead to good ends. As most people know from their everyday experiences, the noxious egalitarianism that Henry describes is not some obscure ideological notion that is only of interest to intellectuals and academics. Henry does not restrict himself to general criticisms, spending entire chapters discussing what egalitarianism has wrought throughout society, in the schools and in the workplace, in our entertainment and leisure, in our language. Some of the stories he tells will be familiar to readers of the PC literature, though Henry, armed with prodigious polemical skills, gleans fresh insight into the ramifications of these issues.
He traces a good part of this change in attitude, in social, political, and cultural terms, back to the sixties, beginning on college campuses, generally in protest against authority and, more specifically, the Vietnam War. Obviously, this is hardly fair, or very nuanced. Many other forces also were at work here, including the overall decline in the American system of education, and the more general cultural shift, as described by James Q. Wilson, underway for the better part of the last two centuries, that features “the emancipation of the individual from the restraints of tradition, community, and governments.” With this in mind, it is difficult to blame all of our cultural pathologies on the youthful experiments of hippies and baby boomers.
Following World War II, the doors to the universities were thrown open, essentially for anyone who wanted to go and who could fulfill a few basic requirements. In Henry’s mind, there have been few social forces that were more willfully egalitarian. The effect has been to blur the distinction between the commonplace and the distinguished. It has also provided fertile ground for pseudo-scholarship based on dubious ideas about gender and ethnicity. The worst legacies of these changes are the evolving nature of what is taught, from what professors want to teach to what students think they want to learn. Henry comments that President Clinton refers to spending on education as an investment in human capital. If this is so, “it seems reasonable to ask whether the investment pays a worthwhile rate of return.” If it does not, do we devalue everyone’s education, with the result that it becomes “a credential without being a qualification, required without being requisite”?
To counter this devaluation, Henry proposes a radical solution: reduce the number of kids who go to college from 60 percent to 33 percent, perhaps over a span of five years; and eliminate tenure, which promotes the self-interest of professors over the well-being of students, to be replaced by set-length contracts, to be renewed (or not) based upon professionalism and performance. Before the reader can conclude that Henry is either hopelessly naive or completely deranged, he sadly admits that he doesn’t really believe that his proposal might actually be adopted.