Havelock Ellis, the pioneering psychologist and a less than notably funny man, thought that laughter had a religious basis. “Even the momentary expansion of the soul in laughter is, to however slight an extent, a religious exercise,” Ellis wrote. There is something appealing about the notion that laughter is an expansion of the soul, allowing fleeting moments in which all one’s troubles are dismissed and one feels an elevation of spirit. The notion suggests that laughter is a gift, possibly a divine gift. I say “possibly divine” because, when viewing the human comedy, in its full range of preposterousness, its endless ironies and unexpected pratfalls, one is forced to conclude that God Himself must love a joke.
The Fall of the WASPs
(2013)
The United States once had an unofficial but nonetheless genuine ruling class. This class was drawn from what came to be known as the WASP Establishment. Members of this establishment dominated politics, economics, education, but they do so no more. The WASPocracy, as I tend to think of it, lost its confidence, and with it its power and interest in leading. The United States at present is without a ruling class, and it is far from clear whether this is a good thing.
The acronym WASP of course derives from White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, but as acronyms go, this one is more deficient than most. Lots of people, including prominent powerful figures, among them U.S. Presidents, have been white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant, but were far from being WASPS. Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were both white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant, but neither was a WASP.
WASPs were a caste, and as such closed off to all not born within the caste, with the possible exception of those who crashed the barriers by marrying into it. WASP credentials came with lineage, and lineage, that is proper birth, automatically brought connections to the right institutions. Yale, Princeton, Harvard were the great WASP universities, backed up by Choate, Groton, Andover, Exeter, and other prep schools. WASPs tended to live in exclusive neighborhoods: on upper Park and Fifth Avenue in New York, on the Mainline in Philadelphia, Back Bay in Boston, Lake Forest and Winnetka in Chicago, though WASP life was chiefly found on the eastern seaboard. WASPs had their own social clubs, and did business with a small number of select investment and legal firms such as Brown Brothers Harriman and Sullivan & Cromwell. Many were thought to have lived on inherited money soundly invested.
The State Department was dominated by WASPs and so, too, was the Supreme Court, with one seat left unoccupied for a Jew of proper mien. Congress was never preponderantly WASP, though a number of Senators—Henry Cabot Lodge, Leverett A. Saltonstall come to mind—have been WASPs. Looking down on the crudities of quotidian politics, Henry Adams, a WASP to the highest power, called the dealings of Congress, the horse-trading and corruption and the rest of it, “the dance of democracy.” In one of his short stories, Henry James has characters modelled on Henry and Clover Adams, planning a social evening, say, “Let’s be vulgar—let’s invite the President.”
So strong, so dominant was WASP culture that wealthy families who did not qualify by lineage attempted to imitate and live the WASP life. The most notable example was the Kennedys. The Kennedy compound at Hyannis Port, the sailing, the clothes, the touch football played on expansive green lawns—pure WASP-mimicry, all of it. Except that true WASPs were too upstanding to go in for the unscrupulous business dealings of Joe Kennedy or feckless philanderings of him and his sons.
That the Kennedys did their best to imitate WASP life is perhaps not surprising, for in their exclusion the Irish may have felt the sting of envy for WASPocracy more than any others. The main literary chroniclers of WASP culture—F. Scott Fitzgerald, John O’Hara—were Irish. (Both Fitzgerald and O’Hara tried to live their lives on the WASP model.) But not the Irish alone. To this day, the designer Ralph Lauren (né Lifshitz) turns out clothes inspired by his notion of the WASP life lived on the gracious margins of expensive leisure.
The last WASP President was George H. W. Bush, but there is reason to believe he was not entirely proud of being a WASP. At any rate, he certainly wasn’t featuring it. When running for office, he made every attempt to pass himself off as a Texan, declaring a passion for pork rinds and a love for the music of the Oak Ridge Boys. (George W. Bush, even though he had gone to the right schools, and can claim impeccable WASP lineage, seems otherwise to have shed all WASPish coloration and is an authentic Texan, happily married to a perfectly middle-class librarian.)
That George H. W. Bush felt it strategic not to emphasize his WASP background was a strong sign that the decline of the prestige of the WASP in American culture was well on its way. Other signs had arisen much earlier. During the late 1960s, some of the heirs of the Rockefeller clan openly opined that they felt guilty about their wealth and how their ancestors came by it. By the 1970s, exclusive universities and prep schools began dropping their age-old quotas on Catholics and Jews and contorted their requirements to encourage the enrollment of blacks. The social cachet of the Episcopal Church, a major WASP institution, drained away as its clergy turned its major energies to leftish causes.
Elite, which was how WASPs of an earlier era preferred to think themselves, became a buzz, and a bad, word. Being a WASP was no longer a source of happy pride, but distasteful if not slightly disgraceful—the old privileges of membership now seeming unjust and therefore badly tainted. An old joke has one bee asking another bee why he is wearing a yarmulke. “Because,” answers the second bee, “I don’t want anyone to take me for a WASP.”
The late 1960s put the first serious dent into the WASPs as untitled aristocrats and national leaders. The word WASP did not come into play so much for the student protestors as the word Establishment, heretofore chiefly an ecclesiastical term. The Establishment was the enemy and the target of much 1960s protest. The Establishment was thought to have sent the country into Vietnam; it was perfectly content with the status quo, with all its restrictions on freedom, tolerance for unjust social arrangements; it stood for uptightedness, and repressiveness generally.
The Establishment took its place in a long tradition of enemies of American life. On this list of enemies at various times have been Wall Street, Madison Avenue, the military-industrial complex—vague entities all. But there was nothing vague about the Establishment. They were alive and breathing, and they had such names as John Foster and Allen Dulles, Averell Harriman, McGeorge Bundy, Dean Rusk, Townsend Hoopes, Joseph Alsop, C. Douglas Dillon, and Robert McNamara. The WASPs ruled the country, and for those who didn’t much like the country, or the directions in which they saw it tending, the WASPs were the great and easily identifiable enemy.
The last unashamed WASP to live in the White House was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and he, with his penchant for reform of American society, was considered by many a traitor to his social class. He is also likely to be the last to reside there. WASP culture, though it exists in pockets of private life—country clubs, neighborhoods, a few prep schools and law firms—is finished as a phenomenon of public significance.
Much can be—and has been—said about the shortcomings of WASPs. As a class, they were exclusionary, and hence tolerant of social prejudice, if not often downright snobbish. Tradition minded, they tended to be dead to innovation and social change. Imagination was not high on their list of admired qualities. Yet they had dignity and an impressive sense of social responsibility. In a book of 1990 called The Way of the Wasp, Richard Brookhiser held that the chief WASP qualities were “success depending on industry; civic-mindedness placing obligations on success, and anti-sensuality setting limits to the enjoyment of it [sensuality]; conscience watching over everything.” Under WASP hegemony, corruption, scandal, incompetence in high places were not, as now, regular features of public life. Under WASP rule, stability, solidity, gravity, a certain weight and aura of seriousness suffused public life.
For better or worse, we don’t at present have anything like an unofficial ruling class that older generations of WASPs provided. What w
e have instead is a meritocracy, a leadership thought to be based on men and women who have earned their way not through the privileges of birth but by merit.
La carrière ouverte aux les talents, careers open to the talented, is what Napoleon Buonparte promised, and it is what any meritocratic system is supposed to provide. America now fancies itself under a meritocratic system, under which the highest jobs are open to the most talented people, no matter their lineage or social background. And so it might seem, when one considers that our 42nd President, Bill Clinton, came from a broken home in a backwater town in Arkansas, while our 44th President, Barack Obama, was himself also from a broken home, biracial into the bargain, and with a background in radical politics.
Both men arrived at their high posts through political savvy, paid staff expert in arranging their images, and the usual American electoral shenanigans. But none of this would have been possible if they—and their wives—hadn’t had their mettle tested in the fire of the American educational system. Meritocracy in America starts, and for many ends, in colleges and universities, really a small number—perhaps eight or ten—colleges and universities. On the meritocratic climb, one must first succeed in getting into these institutions, then do well within them, to be considered among the talented to whom all careers are open.
Bill Clinton had Georgetown, Oxford (as a Rhodes Scholar), and Yale Law School on his resume; Barack Obama had Columbia and Harvard Law School. Their wives had, respectively, Wellesley and Yale Law School and Princeton and Harvard Law School. They are players all, high rollers in the great American game of meritocracy. Their initial merit resides, presumably, in their having been superior students.
David Brooks once wrote a column in the New York Times on the brilliance of the Obama cabinet and support staff. His only evidence was that so many of them had gone to ostensibly splendid schools. A “valedictory,” he called the collectivity, suggesting so many must have been perennial valedictorians of their various schools on their climb to such powerful jobs.
A meritocracy in America, in this reading, means people who are best in school go right to the top. But is the merit genuine? One is reminded that of the two strongest American presidents since 1950—Harry S. Truman and Ronald Reagan—the first didn’t go to college at all and the second went to Eureka College, a school affiliated with the Disciples of Christ Church in Eureka, Illinois. The notion of Harry Truman as a Princeton man, Ronald Reagan as a Yalie somehow diminishes them both.
Apart from mathematics, which demands a high IQ, and science, which requires a distinct aptitude, the only thing that normal undergraduate schooling prepares a person for is . . . more schooling. Having been a good student, in other words, means nothing more than one was good at school: one had the discipline to do as one was told, one learned the skill of quick response to oral and written questions, one psyched out what one’s professors wanted and gave it to them. Having been a good student, no matter how good the reputation of the school, is no indication of one’s quality or promise as a leader. It might even suggest that one is more than a bit of a follower, a conformist, standing ready to give satisfaction to the powers that be, so that one can proceed on to the next good school or step up the ladder of meritocracy.
What our new meritocrats have failed to evince that the older WASP generation prided itself on is character. Character embodied in honorable action is at the heart of the novels and stories of Louis Auchincloss, America’s last unembarrassedly WASP writer. Doing the right thing, especially in the face of temptations to do otherwise, was the WASP test par excellence.
Trust, honor, character—these are the elements that have departed American public life with the departure from prominence of WASP culture. Rule by meritocrat has not thus far been able to replace them. For all his suavity and cunning, and for all her vast ambition, does anybody really doubt that at bottom Bill and Hillary Clinton are ultimately in business for themselves? However articulate he may sound, and reasonable he may seem, why do Barack Obama’s words lack weight and conviction?
A moral component is absent in the culture of meritocracy. A financier I know, who grew up under the WASP standard, not long ago told me he thought that the subprime real estate collapse and the continuing hedge-fund scandals have been directly brought on by men and women who are little more than greedy pigs without a shred of character or concern for their clients or country. Naturally, he added, they all have MBAs from the putatively best business schools in the nation—meritocrats, in other words.
Meritocrats, those earnest good students, are about little more than getting on, getting ahead, above all getting their own. The WASP leadership, for all that may be said in criticism of it, was better than that.
The WASP day is done. Such leadership as it provided is not likely to be revived. But recalling it at its best is a sad reminder that what has followed from it is far from clear progress. Rather the reverse.
The Virtue of Victims
(2015)
Our virtues lose themselves in selfishness
as rivers are lost in the sea.
—La Rochefoucauld
If Hillary Clinton wins the presidency in 2016, she will not only be the nation’s first woman president but our second affirmative-action president. By affirmative-action president I mean that she, like Barack Obama, will have got into office partly for reasons extraneous to her political philosophy or to her merits, which, though fully tested while holding some of the highest offices in the land, have not been notably distinguished. In his election, Mr. Obama was aided by the far from enticing Republican candidates who opposed him, but a substantial portion of the electorate voted for him because having a bi-racial president seemed a way of redressing old injustices. They hoped his election would put the country’s racial problems on a different footing, which sadly, as we now know, it has failed to do. Many people voted for Mr. Obama, as many women can be expected to vote for Mrs. Clinton, because it made them feel virtuous to do so. The element of self-virtue—of having an elevated feeling about oneself—is perhaps insufficiently appreciated in American politics.
How have we come to the point where we elect presidents of the United States not on their intrinsic qualities but because of the accidents of their birth: because they are black, or women, or, one day doubtless, gay, or disabled—not, in other words, for themselves but for the causes they seem to embody or represent, for their status as members of a victim group? It’s a long but not, I think, a boring story.
In recent decades, vast numbers of people have clamored to establish themselves or the ethnic group or sexual identity or even gender to which they belong as victims of prejudice, oppression, and injustice generally. E. M. Forster wrote of “the aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate, and the plucky.” Owing to the spread of victimhood, we have today a large aristocracy of the suffering, the put-upon, and the unlucky. Blacks, gays, women, American Indians, Hispanics, the obese, Vietnam veterans, illegal immigrants, the handicapped, single parents, fast-food workers, the homeless, poets, and anyone else able to establish underdog bona fides can now claim to be a victim. Many years ago, on television, I watched a show that invited us to consider the plight of unwed fathers. We are, it sometimes seems, a nation of victims.
Victims of an earlier time viewed themselves as supplicants, throwing themselves on the conscience if not mercy of those in power to raise them from their downtrodden condition. The contemporary victim tends to be angry, suspicious, above all progress-denying. He or she is ever on the lookout for that touch of racism, sexism, homophobia, or insensitivity that might show up in a stray opinion, an odd locution, an uninformed misnomer. People who count themselves victims require enemies. Forces high and low block their progress: The economy disfavors them; society is organized against them; the malevolent, who are always in ample supply, conspire to keep them down; the system precludes them. Asked some years ago by an interviewer in Time magazine about violence in schools that
are all-black—that is, violence by blacks against blacks—the novelist Toni Morrison, a connoisseur of victimhood whose novels deal with little else, replied, “None of those things can take place, you know, without the complicity of the people who run the schools and the city.”
Public pronouncements from victims can take on a slightly menacing quality, in which, somehow, the role of victim and supposed antagonist is reversed. Today, it is the victim who is doing the bullying: threatening boycott, riot, career-destroying social media condemnation, and frequently making good on their threats. Victims often seem actively to enjoy their victimhood—enjoy above all the moral advantage it gives them. Fueled by their own high sense of virtue, of feeling themselves absolutely in the right, what they take to be this moral advantage allows them to overstate their case, to absolve themselves from all responsibility for their condition, to ask the impossible, and demand it now, and then to demonstrate virulently, sometimes violently, when it isn’t forthcoming.
Evidence of the taste for victimhood is abundant, and one sometimes discovers it in peculiar places, even among the rich, the famous, and those who have access to publishers. One finds it often in the spate of victim memoirs that have been published in recent decades. These memoirs are at bottom declarations of the victim status of their authors, whose stories are about their having been raised with abusive or alcoholic parents, having been sexually abused, having struggled against a debilitating mental illness. If the only standing higher than victimhood in contemporary America is celebrity, the celebrity victim book—starting years ago with Mommie Dearest by Joan Crawford’s daughter—rings both gongs simultaneously to make the greatest public noise.
A relatively new sub-genre of the victim memoir are books and essays about that ultimate victim status, those who are about to die, but aren’t ready to depart the planet without first announcing it, often at book length. Christopher Hitchens’s last book was about his encounter with esophageal cancer. The historian Tony Judt was able to compose a book about his dying from ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s Disease, while in the grip of that nightmare affliction. The critic and poet Clive James announced his forthcoming death in 2010, and has been publishing several poems and giving interviews about it in the interval between then and now; the neurologist Oliver Sacks took to the New York Times op-ed page to announce his own imminent death by melanoma. All this as if death, that most democratic of institutions, didn’t make victims of us all, and wouldn’t continue to do so as long as the mortality rate remains at an even 100 percent.
The Ideal of Culture Page 12
