Elitism E-Book

Eliane Glaser

• Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Provocations
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 111

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

The populist right have marshalled public anger against the real elites – corporate and financial power – and turned it onto those who represent us in Parliament, uphold our rights, treat us when we're sick, and create and curate the best books, art and ideas. Culture and education have been made into symbolic arenas of 'democratisation' while gross inequality remains intact. This important book argues that the real elites escape scrutiny while everything that makes our lives worth living becomes worthy and diluted. Meanwhile, liberals have lost their nerve, accepting the anti-elitism slur at face value. But social privilege is not the same thing as excellence. For too long conservatives have had a monopoly on upholding standards of beauty and truth. But now that they've become ruthless modernisers, it's time for progressives to take on that task. This book provides the ammunition for a timely rebuttal.

Leseprobe

iiiPROVOCATIONS

ELITISM

A PROGRESSIVE DEFENCE

ELIANE GLASER

SERIES EDITOR: YASMIN ALIBHAI-BROWN

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Contents

Title PageIntroductionOneThe New Anti-ElitismTwoAnti-Elitism Has a HistoryThreeElites and ‘Elites’Four‘Private Opulence and Public Squalor’Five‘Democratisation’ and the Culture WarsSixThe Great CapitulationviSevenHow They Get Away With ItEightExcellence Is Not PrivilegeNineHigh Art for AllTen‘Deference Is Dead’ElevenA New Defence of Good ElitismCopyright

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Introduction

I’ll say it up front: I am a member of the liberal, metropolitan elite. I live in north London, I work in the media, I’m a writer and – God forbid – I teach at a university. I don’t actually feel very elite, riding around on a second-hand bicycle, a member of the journalistic precariat, on a shoestring lectureship. Don’t get me wrong: I live a very comfortable life. But something peculiar has happened over the past few years. Never mind that eight people, all men, now own as much wealth as half the world’s population. Never mind that CEOs earn 300 times the salary of the average worker. From newspaper commentary, intelligent magazines, TV talk shows, radio phone-ins and social media comes the same message, loud and clear: that it is people like me who are now the masters of the universe. viiiExperts, professionals and those who work in the arts, publishing, culture or the media have become public enemy number one.

Those in the firing line know this is happening. They whisper about it in workplace corridors, or in the privacy of their own homes. But they daren’t say it in public. Why? Because compared to the more serious losers in all this, the gig-economy bikers for Deliveroo or Uber, care workers paid less than the minimum wage, or shelf-stackers on zero-hours contracts, they are doing all right. But this is a trap. Playing off those on the lowest incomes against the overstretched intelligentsia has paid off brilliantly for the burgeoning financial and managerial classes.

This book puts its head above the parapet to call this outrage out. It is an alibi book for all those doing their best and slogging away to keep us safe, to fight for our rights, to question assumptions and to create brilliant and beautiful works of art. This book is not only for doctors, lawyers, scientists, thinkers, publishers, journalists and artists of every variety, but for all those who appreciate what they do. Which is an awful lot of people. ixThe coronavirus crisis has shown us how much we rely not only on those who save our lives but also on those who make life worth living.

Anti-elitism is a familiar truism to anyone tuned in to media and public discussion over the past five years. Phrases like ‘liberal elite’ are bandied about in press commentary without us really knowing what they mean – or if they even refer to anything real. They are bogey words that prevent us from diagnosing and therefore strategising an escape from our political and cultural quagmire. The constant reiteration just amplifies rather than analyses the problem.

This book will take a step back and attempt to cut through the endless, self-referential commentary by placing it in vital historical perspective. I’ll show why our embattled elites should be not embarrassed but proud – and angry. The real economic elites have pulled off a grand deceit. They are diverting public anger away from the obscene profiteering of billionaires, banks and global corporations and turning it onto cultural and educational high standards.

As I will argue, the populist right and the powerful xinterests they serve are deploying cultural populism as their primary strategy; but what is less often remarked upon is that this is being enabled by a terrified left, quixotically pursuing the wrong solutions. Progressives are letting the real economic elites get away with it – in fact, they are aiding and abetting them – by accepting the false frames of the culture wars. Cultural and educational organisations, and the agencies that fund them, are prioritising a modish agenda of ‘democratisation’, outreach and user engagement, and the resulting emphasis on symbolic representation functions as a proxy for real structural and economic equality. Liberals no longer have the confidence to advocate for excellence and legitimate critical and political authority: the ‘liberal elite’ slur is just as common in broadsheet commentary and left-of-centre political speeches as it is on far-right social media. It is true that in many cases, wealth and social privilege does correlate with political office, higher education and cultural production and consumption. But as I will show, it doesn’t have to be that way.

This surrender to cultural populism is resulting in the concentration of power and wealth at the top of xithe social hierarchy and a race to the bottom when it comes to artistic and educational quality: a society starkly divided economically with a culture that is increasingly undistinguished and undifferentiated. Culture and expression are being levelled; power and money are not. While the real elites are let off the hook, our arts and education are diminished, becoming bland and apologetic. When we have destroyed all sources of reputable knowledge we will call that equality, while real inequality remains conveniently out of the picture. Vast disparities of wealth and power thus escape scrutiny, while everything that gives life value and meaning has to fight for its very existence.

The anti-elitism that we see everywhere around us is presented as a new development, as ordinary people finally having their say, but it is in fact part of a long anti-intellectual tradition stretching back through Nazi Germany to nineteenth-century America. In the course of this short book I’ll pick apart our society’s kneejerk confounding of education and culture on one hand and social and economic privilege on the other. Only by doing so can we start to defend good elitism. We have xiigiven up attempting to define what constitutes truth and beauty, dismissing both as necessarily posh. Yet from the eighteenth century onwards, a series of thinkers and writers set out to do precisely that.

I will point to another largely forgotten historical tradition, running through the writings of William Morris and nineteenth-century workers’ education initiatives, and on into twentieth-century avant-garde art, media and architecture. This alternative tradition envisaged the most challenging ideas and the highest culture as fully legible to the least prosperous people. By reviving its principles, we can begin to imagine a fairer future in both senses of the word: a future society that values both equality and aesthetics. It’s time for a progressive defence of elitism.

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One

The New Anti-Elitism

As an adjective, the word ‘elite’ still has a positive meaning: as in elite athlete, or elite travel agency. As a noun, it’s now wholly negative. Home Secretary Priti Patel has laid in to the ‘north London metropolitan, liberal elite’. The Mail on Sunday hailed Boris Johnson’s election victory as a triumph over ‘vain, secluded elites of London’, lambasting what it called the ‘Corbyn-supporting, Boris-hating metropolitans’ and the ‘left-liberal upper deck’. Johnson’s triumph meant the arrival of ‘the real Britain’: ‘normal people living in normal places and dealing with all the hard-edged problems of real life’; people who are ‘sick and tired’ of the ‘political class’ and the BBC, ‘the megaphone of the liberal elite’. Dominic 2Cummings advertised his disdain for ‘Oxbridge English graduates who chat about Lacan at dinner parties with TV producers’. ‘Blame Rich, Overeducated Elites as Society Frays’ ran a Bloomberg headline. Australia’s Daily Telegraph bemoaned what it called former Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s ‘elitist attitude’ and the growing gulf between the ‘working class’ and the ‘talking class’.

A lot of this is, of course, bound up with Brexit, which is often now referred to as if it were a prime cause – of public anger, bitter political division and many ills besides. But Brexit is a symptom of a broader political trend, with roots that stretch further back in time. And it has also served as a dredged-out channel through which this growing trend has gushed. For The Sun’s Rod Liddle, it represented ‘a revolt against a ruling liberal political class which has caused untold havoc at home and mayhem and murder abroad’. The Mail’s Quentin Letts saw it as ‘a massive custard pie smack in the face’ for ‘our dominating elite of parliamentarians, lobbyists, bankers, artists, political theorists, clergy, academics and sterile aesthetes’. The Mail denounced judges as 3the ‘enemies of the people’, and Michael Gove declared that ‘Britain has had enough of experts’.

Those who voted Remain, it is routinely assumed, are members of ‘the elite’. Dominic Cummings refers to ‘educated Remainer campaigner types’, the head of JD Wetherspoon, a prominent Brexit supporter, attacked ‘elite Remainers’, and the trope has been repeated by the Telegraph, the Express and Spiked. Brexit has helped to erode rationality and truth in four ways: by disparaging experts as unforgivably pompous, by questioning their worth (they didn’t see this coming), by deprivileging economic facts (this is about national pride, not GDP), and by undermining the principle of reasoned debate through the delegitimising of one side. How can Remainers be powerful when they are not supposed to now exist?

As with Brexit, so with Trump. ‘The experts are terrible!’ he told his fans. Trump has – famously – been employing the chilling phrase ‘enemies of the people’ to describe broadcasters and newspapers he doesn’t like. Even using the phrase ‘the people’ is, of course, a way of implicitly attacking elites. The same 4goes for the oft-repeated policy priority of investing in Britain’s ‘towns’ – it has the ring of long-overdue redistribution, but it also carries a nasty undertone of anti-cosmopolitanism.

In this book, I do not intend to add yet another voice to the worthwhile, yet somewhat tiresome, chorus of demagogue-bashing. In order to redress the gross injustices in our society we need to challenge not just wealth and power but the public licence that legitimates it. Anti-elitism is that licence. Progressives might feel like they’re socking it to Trump, Farage, Johnson and the rest in their verbal campaigns, but as long as they continue to tacitly accept anti-elitism as the new political front line, their opposition will be toothless. The philistine oligopoly would like nothing more than for those who believe in liberal democracy to conclude ruefully that, yes, they are stuck in their bubbles and perhaps they do therefore have it coming. Public anger is thereby successfully deflected away from financial and corporate power and onto those who work to improve society, increase the sum of human knowledge and hold our leaders to account. 5

Not only does the targeting of a relatively vulnerable intelligentsia facilitate unchecked power, therefore; it also contributes to the erosion of knowledge itself. ‘I honestly don’t think this “fact-checking” business … is anything more than … one more out of touch, elitist media-type thing,’ said author and Republican strategist Jeffrey Lord (estimated net worth: $5 million). The tagging of accuracy as inherently upper crust is key to this devaluation of knowledge. Fake news has become a journalistic cliché, the subject of a great deal of columnist hand-wringing. Yet defending truth is now like lifting up a table while standing on it, because as a society we have collectively accepted the pairing of veracity and elites.

Thus climate science, and therefore efforts to combat global heating, are also undermined because they are ‘elite’. ‘How on earth can the elite lecture us about climate change?’ demands the Express. ‘Climate elitists wage war on regular people’ ran a headline in the Toronto Sun. In early 2020, while bushfires raged across Australia, the politician and climate sceptic Craig Kelly denied the link between the fires and the global 6temperature rise. He was interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme by Nick Robinson along with Catherine King, a Labor politician; when she expressed dismay at Kelly’s position, Robinson countered that Kelly’s party had won an election by representing the views of the people. King sighed with frustration at this now dominant line of questioning.

There is a chink in truth’s armour, and it is growing into a great gaping gulf: it is the idea that what the public believes and says must be taken at face value, even if they are wrong, their views are destroying the planet and they are patently being misinformed by vested interests. Top-down manipulation of public opinion – how 1970s! You can’t possibly be dusting off that old Marxist notion of ‘false consciousness’ – that citizens are persuaded to vote against their own economic interests by well-resourced politicians via a compliant media; that would be unconscionably patronising. Such arguments usually prompt the response: ‘People aren’t stupid.’ But as the science journalist David Robson points out in The Intelligence Trap, numerous studies have shown that we are all duped: IQ has nothing to do with it. 7

We may be familiar with the anti-elitism coming from the far right – from Stephen Yaxley-Lennon aka Tommy Robinson, Paul Staines aka Guido Fawkes, and Steve Bannon, who has complained that ‘elites have taken all the upside for themselves and pushed the downside to the working- and middle-class Americans’. Far-right conspiracy theorists on the dark web conjure the spectre of ‘The Illuminati’ – a cabal of powerful intellectuals pulling the strings of both culture and finance.