Too Elite, or Not Too Elite?, Pt.II

There’s got to be something deeper going on psychologically with anti-elitism and art. There’s something of a fundamentalist mentality to it, in the sense that art is associated with liberalism, which is associated with modernity and threat to traditional values. It is interesting that you brought up historical exclusion. Exclusion has been so much a part of the American mythos – even as we have excluded our own people. To be American is both to be excluded and yet exceptional.

It has been said that there is no dirtier word in America than class. We don’t want to admit to it, yet is stings us. And what is “elitism” but the use of a sort of “class card”. It is real, but at the same time a sort of forgery, and one that can’t be mentioned by name. The working class has been excluded from arugulla, museums, literary criticism, gender politics, etc. But those things aren’t necessarily exclusive – or they don’t have to be.

Yet they happen to be things, ideas that are nurtured and germinate in academia, the ivory tower that is indeed exclusive. The fact that universities are bastions of liberalism is neither an accident nor a fact lost on the many who feel left behind culturally and economically. So in a way, liberalism has been foisted on its own petard – it has allowed itself to be associated with economic privilege, even if that is not generally the case, and liberals are not necessarily more affluent.

Too Elite, or Not Too Elite?

With the latest budget squabbles, we've been hearing a bit about government arts funding.  And again, we hear complaints of arts funding as somehow elitist - presumably because of art's history as a fancy of the upper classes.  I think that's less true than it has been at many times in the past.  More on that in a bit.  But first, let's take on the allegation of "elitism" being deployed with such fervor by the contemporary right.

Let me start with socioeconomics.  I've been lower-middle class all my life, as measured by income.  But both my parents were college educated, and I grew up in a very "rich" cultural environment (arts, philosophy, history, world religions, politics, etc. all discussed regularly).  That puts me in an upper class percentile.  My wife and I now both have graduate degrees, and our daughters are being raised in a similarly culturally rich environment.  Yet we have generally lower-middle class incomes. 

So when my daughter goes to school, she'll no doubt encounter other children whose parents were not college educated, and do not have highly intellectual discussions at home, yet are upper-middle class income-wise.  Thus they are in a lower cultural percentile, yet higher income percentile.  They'll tell her that abstract art is stupid, "as any kid could do that".  They'll tell her that her challenging of dominant social norms is "weird".  She'll tell them their unquestioning embrace of popular art is predictable.  She'll accuse them of being provincial.

Of course, they can all be quite civil about it.  While the town can certainly be snobbish, the gown - at least in my experience - can be just as cruel, expressing an "elitism" of their own.  Just go to any gay ghetto and ask how many people had fled the persecution of small-town norms.  I'm always struck by the tone-deafness of those who would accuse liberals, or the educated, of snobbery, while failing to see how oppressive conservatives, or the uneducated can be.

While the arts have sometimes been used as a cudgel with which to clobber the townies, they have also been used as a sort of cultural escape-hatch, through which those who don't fit in, or just see things a tad differently, might find transcendence.  Furthermore, art appreciation has looked quite differently through the ages.  I'm no art historian, but it seems to me that "the arts" today is wide-ranging and diverse.  There is an irony in those who would disdain the arts as elitist, in many ways actually making the arts more elitist, by dismantling the very supports that have allowed the arts to thrive in ways that a purely privatized field would not have. 

I'm very uncomfortable with the increasingly tired conservative anti-elitist rhetoric.  Especially when coming from millionaires.  Just because George W. Bush, a trust fund baby, legacy education at Yale, talks with a twang, rides horses and likes Toby Keith, he's somehow not an elitist, while the vegan kid behind the coffee counter who goes to a state college, listens to indie rock, and likely has socialist sympathies is an elitist.

Are we not just really talking about the power of knowledge?  I mean, this isn't really about liberal elitists "looking down" on the townies.  It is about the dismissal of their special knowledge, in the sense that they know something about comparative religion, world music, the history of cinema, philosophical discourse, and the subtleties of cuisine. 

And yet, is it even about their knowledge of these things?  Most so-called "elitists" I know are actually quite uniformed in many areas.  Imagine!  So are we then really talking about the knowledge itself - the mere idea that someone, somewhere, thinks your mustache is stupid?  That you can't enjoy a good cheap beer anymore without the idea that there was a "fancy" one on the shelf above it?  Or that you went to see Transformers instead of some foreign documentary about foreign films?  Isn't this why Professor Glenn Beck gave a rave review of Spiderman?

Honestly, it feels like "The Republican War on Science" should more accurately be described as "The Republican war on Knowledge".  You there, with your fancy glasses! 

How much of this sort of cultural self-pity is being hyped up for political if not financial gain?  Everyday.  Millions of listeners tune in to Rush Limbaugh and others who tell them that the "elites" are looking down their noses at them.  Yet are they?  Or is this trumped up paranoia, digging in to people's deep-seated fears about themselves, much in the way hypnotists plant false memories?  The classic demogogic  ploy.

Because yeah - you don't have the most fashionable clothes.  You didn't go to university.  You enjoy cheesy television.  You really like Applebees.  You feel comfortable with traditional cultural roles. You don't "get" modern art.

But so what?  Your clothes are really boring and you didn't put much thought into their meaning.  People are going to sing the praises of university because it is a temple of the human mind.  People are going to rag on television because it is overly commercial and filled with cynicism and cliché.  Traditional cultural roles are often really terrible and we all need to think critically, taking nothing for granted.  Modern art is, well, it's complicated, and it's OK to admit you don't understand it. 

These are objective realities.  It is just as true that "elites" are just as lacking in numerous areas of their lives.  Yet those areas tend to not have the same sort of "status" associations (although ask a redneck if knowing how to change a tire is as important as the difference between modernism and post-modernism and he'll laugh in your face).

In the end, the two forms of knowledge have different uses.  As we move further into an information based world, abstract thought will likely become more important than mechanical thought.  And what is ultimately important is not whether one has a mustache or eats arugulla, but how much human, social and political capital one possesses.  It is in all of our interests to set aside petty bickering and focus on the project of equality and empowerment of humanity as a whole.

Truth and Torture

Matt Yglesias asks:

At any rate, I would be interested to know how far the public—or how torture-loving conservative elites—would be willing to go on this. In a lot of ways terrorism cases strike me as unusually unpromising venues for torture. Something more banal like trying to get a low-level drug dealer to spill the beans on his supplier could really work. My view is that routinized deployment of brutality by government officials isn’t going to produce any systematic gains, so it doesn’t make sense to uncork this kind of treatment on Abdulmuttalab or Generic Drug Dealer X. But for torture enthusiasts is there anything special about terrorism suspects?

I've followed a similar logic with the support of torture. If any form of it is acceptable policy then there are surely plenty of applications. Every single argument I've heard for it could easily be applied to local law enforcement - gangs and drug cartels come to mind, not to mention kidnappers, murderers, etc.

And it could be done quite efficiently, with no lasting physical harm. I'm sure there are all manner of horrifically painful things you could do to a body. And we haven't even begun to study it properly. We could start running sophisticated tests on pain thresholds and procedural classifications.

In a recent New Yorker article on the conservative CEO of Whole Foods, Nick Paumgarten writes of:

a tendency, common among smart people, to presume that everyone in the world either does or should think as he does—to take for granted that people can (or want to) strike his patented balance of enlightenment and self-interest. It sometimes sounds as if he believed that, if every company had him at the helm, there would be no need for unions or health-care reform, and that therefore every company should have someone like him, and that therefore there should be no unions or health-care reform.

I think this beautifully describes the mindset behind pro-torture policy. Under the right circumstances (say, the ticking time-bomb) the right people (say, the patriotic armed forces) will do the right thing. While torture may in perfect circumstances be ethical, the world is not perfect. We will not always (ever?) know for certain whether a ticking time bomb really exists - or whether a suspect has information on an impending drug deal - or where a missing girl might be located.

This sort of black and white, reductionist thinking is, to use a favored word of the right, "evil". It distorts truth by redefining reality and erecting shadows. It makes rational debate impossible by changing the rules to fix broken logic. The rule of law and due process are thrown away because "these people are terrorists", yet how could they be defined as such without due process, unless one invokes a sort of alternate reality where circumstances are always perfect, where Lynddie England and her superiors do not exist.

There are rules of logic to dispatch this absurdity. The most basic is the axiom:

All x are z.
Y is an z.
Therefore, y is z.

And its negative:

All x are z.
Z is x.
This does not mean z is x.

Thus:

All terrorists are suspects.
Mister A. is a suspect.
This does not mean Mister A. is a terrorist.

Now, having already made this error in calculation, the modern conservative returns to reason and makes the following logical determination:

Liberals want to treat suspects as if they are not terrorists.

This is a perfectly reasonable conclusion, ladled as it is upon a heaping pile of defecated sense. It would be as if I truly believed all dogs were vicious predators and accused you of unwise leniency in proposing they be allowed to roam freely in parks. This is a common error on the right. The starting assumption is incorrect, and yet logic is subsequently applied. So if all gays are dangerous & mentally ill, then accepting their lifestyle is surely unwise. If abortion is murder, than doctors who perform them are murderers. If every man makes his own lot in life, then the state should not interfere at the expense of others.

Unfortunately we as a society spend precious little time examining first assumptions. Instead, we argue past one another, infuriating each other in taking positions that seem highly illogical and thus incoherent. Yet what to do when so much of our wisdom is simply inherited and accepted with little understanding of historical context or philosophical underpinning? The degree to which one makes a critical examination of one's beliefs is the degree to which one comes in danger of being labeled an "elitist", defined of course in contrast to the populist, who in turn is defined by what is popular, not necessarily what is true.

The great American irony is that while we loathe authority because of its limiting of our natural freedoms, we find ourselves endlessly caught in a reactionary anti-authoritarianism that results in the limitation we seek to avoid. Our populism, fed by a media-political-complex, becomes itself an authoritarian limit on freedom. Current conservatism - a truest expression of this sort of populism - disdains the very authority that would seek to free us from ourselves. It disdains the government that might guarantee or freedom of opportunity. It disdains the university which might guarantee our freedom of thought. It disdains the media, which might guarantee our freedom of inquiry.

One might forgiven for wondering whether it disdains the very concept of truth itself. Recently, as part of an effort to debunk Darwinism on college campuses, Kurt Cameron (former television star and current evangelical figure) compared Darwinism to Nazism,

If you take Darwin’s theory and extend it to its logical end, it can be used to justify all number of very horrendous things.

What does this have to do with whether it is true or not? You can't decide when and when not to believe in truth. It just is, in all its ugly beauty. It may seem easier to believe that because it says being gay is wrong in the bible, that it actually is. Or that if you believe that a fetus has the right to life it does. Or that if you succeeded despite all odds than everyone can. Or that if a person is a terrorist suspect they are a terrorist.