David Brooks Gets One Right

...and in the process, of course, he comes in for ruthless mockery from those who want to defend the barriers he is trying to break down.

Taken out of context, his remarks about the discomfort of a high-school-educated friend with European sandwiches sound pretentious. But in context, it should be obvious that he's trying to solve the problem represented by this kind of pretentiousness. He's trying to open a road for ordinary Americans to cross those social barriers. I quote at length to give that context.
I was braced by Reeves’s book, but after speaking with him a few times about it, I’ve come to think the structural barriers he emphasizes are less important than the informal social barriers that segregate the lower 80 percent.

Recently I took a friend with only a high school degree to lunch. Insensitively, I led her into a gourmet sandwich shop. Suddenly I saw her face freeze up as she was confronted with sandwiches named “Padrino” and “Pomodoro” and ingredients like soppressata, capicollo and a striata baguette. I quickly asked her if she wanted to go somewhere else and she anxiously nodded yes and we ate Mexican.

American upper-middle-class culture (where the opportunities are) is now laced with cultural signifiers that are completely illegible unless you happen to have grown up in this class. They play on the normal human fear of humiliation and exclusion. Their chief message is, “You are not welcome here.” ...

To feel at home in opportunity-rich areas, you’ve got to understand the right barre techniques, sport the right baby carrier, have the right podcast, food truck, tea, wine and Pilates tastes, not to mention possess the right attitudes about David Foster Wallace, child-rearing, gender norms and intersectionality....

Status rules are partly about collusion, about attracting educated people to your circle, tightening the bonds between you and erecting shields against everybody else. We in the educated class have created barriers to mobility that are more devastating for being invisible.
That's all correct. This comes after the earlier parts of the column on breaking down regulatory burdens in zoning laws (to make it easier for poorer Americans to live in better school districts), and on breaking down barriers in higher education that make it harder for poorer Americans to attain success there. Normally, when a left-leaning guy like Brooks calls attention to a problem, it's to propose a government program. Here, he's gone as far as suggesting the heresy of stripping layers of government away.

He's also right that many Americans -- I think of my father, who was college educated in East Tennessee -- would be totally uncomfortable in that restaurant, and would find the offer to go for Mexican a huge relief. And yet Mexican food is just as loaded with foreign terminology as French or Italian food. The word "capicollo" is no more impenetrable than the word "chimichanga." The point isn't that folks are xenophobic or incapable of appreciating foreign foods.

The point is about raising barriers designed to keep ordinary people out. Once the ordinary guy learns to order a "croque-monsieur" instead of a "grilled ham and cheese sandwich," they'll change the game and start offering only something else. And you'll learn about this code change if you listen to all the right radio programs on NPR, or the right podcasts, or have the right social groups to walk you through them. The barrier stays up, and the unwelcome remain not welcome.

36 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's not the foreign language, it's the nasty attitude of those who think they are entitled to run the rest of us around.

I remember being corrected about my pronunciation of "espresso," "gyros"-- several different ways, and "Hannukkah" after some wag changed it to the guttural Germanic form of "Channukka." I've been told that anybody who has any variety of a Southern accent -- including that beautiful one that sounds like Elizabethan english -- cannot ever sound educated, and that pronouncing it "nucular" means that the policy must be bad.

I have also lived and work among people in high public office, and been mistaken for a "date" instead of the office holder that I was.

When I worked with some of the best and brightest, I also noticed that those people had no more basic intellect than the ones I left behind, very much including the tradesmen and union workers.

I have listened to union workers discuss interest rates, gold, collectibles and ARMs. The discussions about the ARMs were especially interesting, because these people knew all about the numbers and the potential risks well before the whole thing fell apart.

I have thrown a party at a famous yacht club, and visited a famous private country club. I have walked on threadbare rugs in both places, and also in a building on 5th Avenue.

I have visited John F. Kennedy's yacht after it was fully restored, and seen the cotton cafe curtains, as well as the mattress that seemed identical to one that I have slept on in what my parents called "the shack."

I have seen the Presidential dinnerware, and I like my own better.

I've seen my own cousin and her daughter, on a day when they chose to, look and photograph like British royalty.

I suppose David Brooks is trying to make the medicine go down gently for his readers, but in my assessment, the whole point of the social barriers is to help people of modest ability and accomplishment be pretentious. He is not going to change that, because they want it that way.

Valerie

Grim said...

I remember being corrected about my pronunciation... "gyros"-- several different ways...

At one point I worked by a restaurant run by some Turks who hit upon an excellent way of educating their customers on how they wanted "gyro" pronounced: they put up a large sign offering a 15% discount if you pronounced it "YEE-roh." Others may prefer it otherwise, but I still pronounce it that way because they were willing to pay for the privilege of having me adopt their preference. :)

I've been told that anybody who has any variety of a Southern accent -- including that beautiful one that sounds like Elizabethan english -- cannot ever sound educated...

I was specifically educated out of my accent. We had classes designed to teach us to speak without a Southern accent. Even all these years later, I can only return to a mild version of it when I'm with family from back home. Otherwise, I sound "educated," meaning not Southern.

That's a pretty high barrier to have to cross.

...but in my assessment, the whole point of the social barriers is to help people of modest ability and accomplishment be pretentious. He is not going to change that, because they want it that way.

Exactly. The huge amount of mockery he's receiving today is really about trying to shut him up, because they've got it just the way they want it. As in the old story, he's stopped preaching and started meddling.

Cassandra said...

The best revenge against such twits is to refuse to notice (or care) about this kind of trivial nonsense. I really have to wonder about people who feel bad that they don't know the difference between sopressata and capicollo (especially when the Common Folk can buy ginormous packages of both at Costco, dirt cheap).

This stuff isn't exactly hard to find, anymore, and if Brooks got out more, he might know that :p

In all fairness, snobbery and attempts to make people feel like they don't belong occur across social classes because insecure people can be really awful to each other. There's plenty of reverse snobbery around - it's just that for some reason people generally care more about being excluded from the upper classes than the lower ones. But I've noticed that if you're in the minority, reverse snobbery hurts every bit as much.

One of my takeaways from spending my freshman year at an Ivy was that I really didn't feel I had much in common with many of my fellow students (and that didn't really bother me all that much, as I much preferred being around people I felt a connection to - regardless of their background).

Sadly, there are folks in our neighborhood who really have an inflated sense of their own importance. We try to avoid them, and seek out the nice ones.

Anonymous said...

If you say Brooks gets one right it must mean he gets most every thing else dead wrong.

I can agree with that.

I think David Brooks is a humongous bedwetter.

How so? Go to the link and count the ways.

http://dad29.blogspot.com/search?q=David+Brooks&max-results=20&by-date=true

Grim said...

Do the Common Folk shop at Costco? You have to buy a membership to get admitted. It's only in the last year that I've set foot inside of one, and it looked to me like a place that sold some things cheaply, but also bottles of wife costing hundreds of dollars each (some of them), USDA Prime beef, and numerous luxury goods (some of these in large quantities that are cheap only when thought of by the unit price).

I have a feeling that most Costco shoppers may already be members of at least the lower orders of Brooks' 'upper middle class.'

Cassandra said...

Grim's correct - Brooks does get some things right, though.

Years ago, David Brooks wrote (IMO) one of the funniest op-eds I of all time. It was about John Foregainst Kerry, and the title was "The Boston Fog Machine".

Excerpt:

Kerry established himself early as the senator most likely to pierce through the superficial clarity and embrace the miasma. The gulf war had just ended. It was time to look back for lessons learned. ''There are those trying to say somehow that Democrats should be admitting they were wrong'' in opposing the gulf war resolution, Kerry noted in one Senate floor speech. But he added, ''There is not a right or wrong here. There was a correctness in the president's judgment about timing. But that does not mean there was an incorrectness in the judgment other people made about timing.''

For you see, Kerry continued, ''Again and again and again in the debate, it was made clear that the vote of the U.S. Senate and the House on the authorization of immediate use of force on Jan. 12 was not a vote as to whether or not force should be used.''

In laying out the Kerry Doctrine -- that in voting on a use-of-force resolution that is not a use-of-force resolution, the opposite of the correct answer is also the correct answer -- Kerry was venturing off into the realm of Post-Cartesian Multivariate Co-Directionality that would mark so many of his major foreign policy statements.

Sheer genius, and he nailed Kerry's pompous brand of incoherence:

The Iraq problem returned in 1998, and Kerry proved again that there is no world crisis so grave it can't be addressed with a fusillade of subordinate clauses. Teams of highly trained spelunkers have descended into the darkness of the floor speech he gave on Oct. 10, 1998, searching for meaning, though none have returned alive.

In a characteristic sentence, which admittedly sounds better in the original French, Kerry exclaimed: ''We know from our largely unsuccessful attempts to enlist the cooperation of other nations, especially industrialized trading nations, in efforts to impose and enforce somewhat more ambitious standards on nations such as Iran, China, Burma and Syria, that the willingness of most other nations -- including a number who are joined in the sanctions to isolate Iraq -- is neither wide nor deep to join in imposing sanctions on a sovereign nation to spur it to 'clean up its act' and comport its actions with accepted international norms.''

Enjoy:

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/13/opinion/the-boston-fog-machine.html?_r=0

Cassandra said...

I have a feeling that most Costco shoppers may already be members of at least the lower orders of Brooks' 'upper middle class.'

Your Costco must be really different from the ones up here :p I've only been in the Sam's Club in Athens, GA, and no one there looked upper class to me.

The vast majority of folks in our Costco appear to be what I'd call working class to lower middle class. Plus, we don't have wine in Maryland -
just food, home goods, and fresh produce that's easily 1/2 the price you pay at the grocery stores. Membership costs only 30 bucks for a year, and if you shop for a family you earn more than that back in refunds and rebates. I rarely shop there anymore b/c I don't have a large family to feed (so buying in bulk makes no sense). But the place is full of small business owners and a ton of Asian shoppers (remarkable in this area).

I shopped there all the time when The Spousal Unit was still on active duty. Groups of military wives used to go together and split up some of the bulk purchases - it was even cheaper than the Commissary, and the selection was better. It's more similar to Walmart than anything else.

Cassandra said...

You may be getting the Trader Joe's crowd in your Costco :p Watching all the well to do UGA students stocking up on delicacies there has caused quite a bit of eye rolling on the occasions when we've gone with the kids.

We don't have a Trader Joe's out here - they said there 'wasn't enough money to support their target demographic'.

Heh :)

Grim said...

There isn't a Costco in Athens. The one I was in was over in my old stomping grounds of Forsyth County, GA, which is now the most upscale county in Georgia after thirty years of heavy immigration from Atlanta. I don't know if they have a Trader Joes, though, which Athens does!

So maybe they scale it to markets, and they look quite different from one Costco to the next. Still, I see on Wikipedia that they're apparently the world's largest retailer of a number of luxury goods: "choice and prime beef, organic foods, rotisserie chicken, and wine." Rotisserie chicken isn't that much of a luxury, although it saves you the cooking. Choice beef isn't either. But the others are.

The article goes on to say that Costco's membership "comprises a large, loyal and affluent constituency, with an average annual household income of $156,000 a year." That's not 'the 1%,' but it is fully three times the average American household income.

Cassandra said...

I think they do scale to the local markets. And I didn't think y'all had a Costco in Athens, but OTOH I wouldn't have been surprised to find out I was wrong :) I'm wrong a lot, not that I like admitting that, being of the female persuasion and all....

I remember the Costco in California was upscale and mostly luxury goods. But the last Costco I actually shopped at was in DC (or maybe Arlington) and that one was anything but - you could tell (because I worked in retail for years) that shoplifting was a major concern and there wasn't much there I wanted to buy. We shopped there when the Spousal One was at a training class and I drove down on Friday night to stay in his hotel because we were paying for it anyway. We walked to Costco and bought fresh bread and wine and (I think) chicken and pasta salad for dinner and brought it back to the hotel. MUCH cheaper than dining out, and more relaxing. And the food was pretty darn good!

You can see my penny pinching Scots blood (and his) coming through :p

We buy mostly bulk items there, like toilet paper, paper towels, etc. Last Christmas we had a Festivus party for the Marines in the Unit's office and their families, and I did a lot of shopping at Costco. We wanted to have nice food and drink for the holiday, and my dollars went a LOT farther there than they would have at any of the local grocery stores. But, as I say, I don't shop there much unless we're entertaining (hardly ever, and always work related or large family gatherings at Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, etc.).

It's funny - I see Costco so differently. To me, they put some luxury goods within reach of people who wouldn't otherwise be able to afford them. I'm somewhat in awe of Walmart for the same reasons.

I walked in there in May and bought a pair of shorts - exactly what I'd been looking for - for $6! I wear them all the time! And reading glasses (that I get compliments on every time I go out) -- 3 pairs for the price of a single pair anywhere else! It's ridiculous - people think they were expensive and I absolutely LOVE saying, "No - Wally World!"

I hate crowds and don't much care for Walmart OR Costco overall, but I have great respect for their ability to amp up the purchasing power of people who don't have a ton of money. They also sell diamond jewelry that I would never think of buying, but being able to buy a huge bag of strawberries or apples or green beans for far less than they cost at any local grocery store seems like a big deal to me if you have a big family.

raven said...

I am too old to put up with pretentious bullshit. In food, in Art, in anything. Clear concise accurate speech trumps any BS no matter how it is stacked. And leave the waitress a real good tip and you will have made points where it counts.
See ya'all later- I am off to the Aleutians.

Grim said...

Wow, that sounds great. Wish I could come!

Eric Blair said...

So Brooks wrote:

Recently I took a friend with only a high school degree to lunch. Insensitively, I led her into a gourmet sandwich shop. Suddenly I saw her face freeze up as she was confronted with sandwiches named “Padrino” and “Pomodoro” and ingredients like soppressata, capicollo and a striata baguette. I quickly asked her if she wanted to go somewhere else and she anxiously nodded yes and we ate Mexican.

American upper-middle-class culture (where the opportunities are) is now laced with cultural signifiers that are completely illegible unless you happen to have grown up in this class. They play on the normal human fear of humiliation and exclusion. Their chief message is, “You are not welcome here.”


This is absolute bullshit. I refuse to believe that there is a person in New York who dosen't know what that stuff is, even if they're an immigrant right off the boat. The sandwiches are basically hoagies or submarine sandwiches or hero sandwiches. The "sandwich shop" is basically a delicatessen, or deli, from the German "delicatesse" "delicacy".

YOU CAN BUY IT ALL IN ANY SUPERMARKET INCLUDING THE DISCOUNT ONES FROM BOSTON TO WASHINGTON, AND NO DOUBT ELSEWHERE. I COULD GET THAT STUFF IN A WEGMANS IN UPSTATE NEW YORK IN 1985.

I think he made the whole goddam story up.

As to "cultural signifiers that are completely illegible unless you happen to have grown up in this class" statement, that is also complete bullshit.

That is only true if one is incurious or oblivious to the world, and yeah, there are plenty of people like that around, but think on this Grim, do you think Brooks ever read Plotinus? or Averroes?

That people tend to marry those like them is nothing new. It's what poeple do.

The only barrier to anything in this country is lack of money.

Assistant Village Idiot said...

Brooks is correct, and the requirements for entry into that class are even a bit worse than he writes. Not only is there an argot that must be learned to prove that you really care about being in this class and have put the time into it (Cf. the postmodernist vocabulary of academics, which has the same purpose), but there is an implied promise to submit to the opinions and values of the group.

There is some intelligence there. It is not entirely random who is accepted, though "clever" might be a better description. But intelligence is not sufficient, there must be payments of part of your soul as well. Not all of your soul, certainly.

Not yet.

Grim said...

Grim, do you think Brooks ever read Plotinus? or Averroes?

Damn few do. I know he read Augustine, because it was important to his book on character. Plotinus would be a natural next step, but I'm not sure he got there.

Plotinus is hard, though. You have to really want to know what he has to say.

Averroes is easy by comparison, but that's a whole different era. Most people figure if they've read Aquinas, they know what Averroes thought because Aquinas cites him constantly. But Averroes wrote more than commentaries, which I doubt Brooks (or almost anyone) has read. His works on Islamic law are very interesting, especially the parts where he tries to align it with Plato.

E Hines said...

Not only is there an argot that must be learned to prove that you really care about being in this class and have put the time into it...but there is an implied promise to submit to the opinions and values of the group.
There is some intelligence there. It is not entirely random who is accepted....


And yet this is the same crowd that demands explicitly that randomness of who will be allowed into the group that is the nation, and the entrants need not at all put any effort into proving they belong or make the implied promise. Because this group intends to raise the new entrants up right.

Eric Hines

jaed said...

Costcos definitely vary. In the metro area where I live, there are three, and while most of their stock is shared among all three stores, one of them has noticeably more upscale stuff in the big area in the middle where the products rotate often. The ones in richer areas will have somewhat more upscale stuff.

Also, they tend to be near cities, which might help account for the average-income figure (cost of living and income in large cities is higher). Plus a lot of small business operators shop there. The one closest to me has a lot of convenience-store-owner customers—people whose stores aren't big enough to go wholesale for a lot of stuff buy things like blocks of 4-packs of toilet paper there.

douglas said...

Yes, it's the business owners that really drive that income number of members. Lots of people shop there for bulk family items (diapers, paper products, household cleaners, non-perishable food) and most folks can afford a few of the 'luxury' food items now and then. If you need a computer or tires, that's a not-upper class large cost item that you can save on. Gas is cheaper there too if you have that at your local Costco and don't mind waiting in line for five minutes.

I think her facial expression likely had a lot more to do with the prices than knowledge of the ingredients of the sandwiches. The hipster kids do make really nice food, but good God is it expensive. I'd love to eat at those places all the time (and there's lots of them around here), but I couldn't possibly afford it, especially if I wanted to take the whole family out to eat.

His reaction to her response though- now that reeks of the smugness and class self-elevation that he speaks of.

Tom said...

Just for the record, although I lived on the east coast for a while, I'd never heard or seen the words "sopressata and capicollo" before. I have no idea what they are.

I think Brooks has this one right, though. His claims are modest: rich snobs tailor their social interactions, including their language, to exclude the kinds of people they don't want to hang out with. Actually, this happens at all levels of society, but here it has an economic impact and relevance to the last election, so we're going to talk about it.

We've known for a long time that language is used to build social groups, and that includes excluding the "wrong" kinds of people.

Anonymous said...

So why not introduce his guest to the people there, and politely (yes, I know, NYC, but still) ask them what's what and what they recommended?

I realize Brooks's larger point is that we've developed a social class that has raised barriers to keep out anyone not from the "right sort," much as occurred during the Gilded Era. But Brooks failed a test of hospitality, in my opinion, by not doing a little background work to make his guest comfortable in his first choice of eateries. Thus making himself come across as a snob or at worst a mean-spirited jerk.

LittleRed1

MikeD said...

I have never heard of sopressata before today, and I've only ever seen capicola spelled capicola, not capicollo.

Personally, I don't believe Brooks had a friend who was intimidated by his deli. I think he wrote this article to virtue signal what a "good person" he is by "associating and being considerate of the lower class" and to (in effect) humblebrag about how very upper class he is.

David Foster said...

"I realize Brooks's larger point is that we've developed a social class that has raised barriers to keep out anyone not from the "right sort," much as occurred during the Gilded Era."

I think it's more like the traditional British class system, in which things like *accents* really mattered. During the American Gilded Era, my impression at least is that *money* would get you entree.

David Foster said...

Something Peter Drucker wrote back in 1969:

"Individually he (the knowledge worker) is an “employee”…but the knowledge worker sees himself as just another “professional,” no different from the lawyer, the teacher, the preacher, the doctor, the government servant of yesterday. He has the same education. He has more income. He has probably greater opportunities as well…This hidden conflict between the knowledge worker’s view of himself as a “professional” and the social reality in which he is the upgraded and well-paid successor to the skilled worker of yesterday underlies the disenchantment of so many highly educated young people with the jobs available to them."

It seems likely that the Proletarianization of Knowledge Work has led to a desire on the part of at least some knowledge workers to differentiate themselves via class markers of various kinds.

See my post "Technoproletarians?"

http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/52410.html

Grim said...

Heh. The major effect of adopting these class markers is not to differentiate themselves, but to make them indistinguishable from one another. That makes them more like a proletariat: if they all think alike, talk alike, look alike, and eat alike, they can be substituted one for the other with no difference in outcomes to their employer. Thus, they become economically subject to the same substitution pressures as unskilled labor.

You could better differentiate yourself by distinguishing yourself. Then no one could replace you without suffering some loss of function. And that will lead to rewards, even in the workplace, that will better secure your social position than class markers.

Cassandra said...

Class seems to be less of an issue in the US than most European countries, and less of an issue to some people than to others.

When the Unit was on active duty, I saw officers' wives who were definitely lower class (one was a former stripper who met her husband in her place of employment) and enlisted/staff NCO wives who were from upper class families.

And I knew officers' wives who were very down to earth and unconcerned with appearances/social status, and enlisted wives who were ferociously competitive and quite literally eyed every other wife and judged other wives on where they shopped and how much they spent on things like haircuts, facials, salons (meanwhile, I never had a professional manicure until my mid 50s, and that only b/c I was treating my Mom), etc.

People make all kinds of choices about what impresses them, who they associate with, how they spend their money. In the Marines, we generally made friends with prior enlisted couples. We had very similar mindsets, life experiences, etc. But I never noticed that class made all that much difference in who I liked and who I didn't. It was really more character and shared experiences.

I agree with Mike and Douglas about a lot of the BS factor. We haven't recently "erected" anything - upper class people were snobby when I was a kid (sometimes) and lower class people were reverse-snobby when I was a kid (sometimes) because people are groupish and such distinctions help people feel like they "belong". But they're not equally important to everyone and they're not new.

They're just human nature. FWIW, any officers' wife (including my oldest friend, whose husband was a PFC when she married him and retired as a Colonel) can tell you stories about wives being mean to them/excluding them simply because their husbands were officers. My friend said that she experienced the same thing as both a staff NCO wife and junior enlisted wife.

There are always people who feel the need to distinguish the "in group" from "out groups" and preserve some imaginary pecking order. That so-called pundits are just rediscovering/explaining basic human nature seems kind of amusing to me :p

douglas said...

Cass, I think there's some important distinctions there between what you have done in your life vs. what Brooks is talking about and oddly enough, practicing simultaneously. You make distinctions, are attracted more to certain people, and have been excluded by others. He's talking about a lot of people and their tendency to exclude others (he makes it sound accidental, but it's not so accidental). They don't want to mix with the hoi polloi- we're dirty and evil, they're 'special', enlightened souls.

We've got this thing going on in our elementary school community right now (which I've mentioned previously in comments) where some folks are all worked up about a supposed 'culture of racism' which is purely imaginary on their part (they see pattern where most of us see isolated incidents). Ironically enough, one of the people who's pushing that agenda is a colored woman (you'd be hard pressed to tell looking at her, as until she said it we had no clue) who at one public community watch meeting about local crime made a comment about something 'not supposed to happen up here', as we live on a hill just above the barrios. She slipped- but it's how it is for a lot of them- it's explicit classism. They avoid people based solely on class or political identification- people like you and I (I hope) don't do that. We happily associate with people of different classes (my wife and I also have a somewhat distant friend who was a stripper once, oddly enough), political views (not that I have a choice unless I want very few friends around here), and so forth. They don't (knowingly). And by 'they' I just mean those who fit that mold- certainly not all hipsters or lefties or upper middle class urban what-evers are that.

You're certainly right that it sometimes seems to matter more to some who are are trying to ascend to a perceived higher class. It's almost a kind of guilt or self-loathing thing.

douglas said...

Another anecdote that illustrates this perfectly- Recently at a school community meeting about the supposed race issue, a couple of people had commented something about being progressive, or "...at least we're all progressives up here (on our hill)." I got up to make some comments after that, and my first comment was that I was a bit surprised that if we value diversity, we should value all diversity including ideological, and that I was in fact not a progressive and I was certain I was not the only one. I literally saw one man's jaw drop. A lot of the people that moved to this neighborhood did so precisely because they figured they'd be surrounded with fellow travelers. A number of people though, who I know to consider themselves progressive, thanked me later for my comments, including that one, because they're regular folks who aren't ideologically driven- and they tended to be the sorts we're drawn to for friends. Anyway, point being it's not just a couple anecdotes, it's a long perceived and verified pattern that I've seen and experienced.

Cassandra said...

You make good points, Douglas, and I'm not discounting them In fact, that's kind of what I meant by "some people just aren't nice - avoid them". But I also think sometimes people assume what - to them - is the 'most obvious cause' (racism, sexism, class tension) when a lot of times, that's just the mechanism for normal human aggression/nastiness.

Case in point: my younger boy married a woman from a wealthy family. They're not pretentious at all, and very nice/decent folk. In her neighborhood, the other wives/mothers (mostly married to professors) are mean to her and exclude her. If there were a class difference, maybe she'd attribute that to classism. Maybe if she were weird about this stuff, she'd attribute it to anti-Semitism or professional snobbery (their husbands are full profs at Wash U, she's an adjunct prof at UMissouri).

Personally, I think those other women are just nasty people who don't deserve to be my DIL's friend. In my mind, she's well shot of them. But it still hurts her, terribly.

Point being, there's what other people really think, why they really do what they do, and how we interpret it (often based on our own filters and biases). I'm not saying classism doesn't exist - I've seen it in my own neighborhood. We now have very nice townhomes across the neighborhood, and my book club basically broke up over that -- snotty women making crass remarks about the townhomes 'bringing down the neighborhood'. I "sympathy-quit" in solidarity :p

Who needs these nitwits? :) Anyway, great discussion and a lot of food for thought from Grim and the rest of the Hall.

douglas said...

Yes, agreed.

"But I also think sometimes people assume what - to them - is the 'most obvious cause' (racism, sexism, class tension) when a lot of times, that's just the mechanism for normal human aggression/nastiness."

Ah, this is so true- with the stuff that's been going on with the school, we've tried to tell these people that when a kid uses a racial slur in anger, it's likely (and in one case we know) the kid isn't racist- he just grabbed the most convenient, heaviest verbal club he could find in the moment. You said it so much better though.

Eric Blair said...

Cass--I think there is a class difference between your daughter in law and the professor's wives--you said she was 'wealthy' which I infer means she came from a wealthy family. I'm willing to bet most if not all of the professor's wives came from 'middle middle' class backgrounds where hating on the "rich" is still a sport.

But all that has been around forever, even in this country. And I still don't think that what Brooks was talking about is a problem, or at least a new problem.

When was it ever not like that?

I don't think the point I was trying to make to Grim came across--what is this 'upper middle class' that Brooks is talking about? People that go to certain schools? Is it supposed to be some sort of shared cultural stuff, like the way knowledge of Latin or Shakespeare or used to be? And that can't be it, because the our culture is so fragmented--Brooks might think he's part of something special, but in reality he is not, and what he thinks is a 'class' is nothing more than his group of aquaintances.

Tom said...

I don't think Brooks is saying this kind of thing is new. I think he's just pointing it out to a crowd that is likely guilty of the behavior he describes but which also claims to care about inequality. NYT's readers are exactly the type who need to hear this.

As for the meaning of "class" in America, it isn't a clear demographic so much as a combination of a certain income level plus a certain set of attitudes and behaviors. In fact, I ran into the attitudes and behaviors in grad school a lot, so the income level might even just be anticipated. "Upper middle" is inexact, but I think he describes the kind of people he's talking about fairly well. I knew some of these people when I lived on the east coast, and I know some of them here in Oklahoma. I don't know if "class" is the right word, but I know who he's talking about well enough, whatever you call them.

I think Brooks is saying the right things to the people who need to hear it. No doubt he must be pilloried for that.

Gringo said...

Cassandraa:
Case in point: my younger boy married a woman from a wealthy family. They're not pretentious at all, and very nice/decent folk. In her neighborhood, the other wives/mothers (mostly married to professors) are mean to her and exclude her. If there were a class difference, maybe she'd attribute that to classism. Maybe if she were weird about this stuff, she'd attribute it to anti-Semitism or professional snobbery(their husbands are full profs at Wash U, she's an adjunct prof at UMissouri).

It's professional snobbery. Tenured versus adjunct: manor versus peasants/proles. Consider what tenured get paid compared to adjunct- not to mention job security.

In addition, there is elite private school versus state u: that matters very much to profs and by extension, to their spouses. Just ask how they would feel about their offspring attending state u.Though the elite private school versus state u distinction is less important than tenured versus adjunct.

I don't know how true this is today, but in the past, a lot of elite private schools offered tuition breaks for faculty brat children from other elite schools- call it the Elite School League- which would mean the sky-high private school tuition can often be offset. And that matters very much to elite school profs: sorta like a trade union member getting their kid into the union. Perhaps better said: to pay for the kid's union card.

Cass said...

It's funny - I only went to the Ivy I attended b/c my Dad went there as an NROTC student before entering the Navy. I didn't apply to any others - but I grew up visiting this campus b/c we had a cabin nearby in the woods and my Dad had such fond memories of camping in that area.

Once there, I really didn't care for the whole elitist shtick. I didn't ever feel the least bit excluded even though my middle class military background was different. I just didn't share the same world view or goals. My brother eventually attended, and his friends were mostly people like him (middle class, many went into the military after graduation).

When my youngest boy's friends all got into Ivies, he wanted to go too. I encouraged him to steer clear of them, and don't regret that choice. I don't have as strong feelings as Grim on this - my objections were really more that unless your child is very competitive/outgoing, he or she will usually be happier at a quality small college or university.

I don't recall ever feeling at all excluded on the basis of class, but that may well have been my choice of friends. Selection goes both ways :)

Cass said...

... that can't be it, because the our culture is so fragmented--Brooks might think he's part of something special, but in reality he is not, and what he thinks is a 'class' is nothing more than his group of aquaintances.

This is how I see things, fwiw.

Cass said...

It's professional snobbery. Tenured versus adjunct: manor versus peasants/proles. Consider what tenured get paid compared to adjunct- not to mention job security.

This makes sense to me, Gringo. May also be insecurity (women aren't profs, but my DIL is). I think the two can co-exist!

...we've tried to tell these people that when a kid uses a racial slur in anger, it's likely (and in one case we know) the kid isn't racist- he just grabbed the most convenient, heaviest verbal club he could find in the moment.

Yes - I think this is so true, Douglas! Insecure people are very good at ferreting out other people's vulnerabilities. I see a lot of behavior in my office that I could be tempted to attribute to sexism. But I really think it's just more a matter of "use the tool at hand". In those rare occasions when I've had a man act like a sexist towards me, I've always thought, "I'll bet he's a bully to other men, too." And that usually turns out to be the case - the guy's not so much a sexist as an all-around aggressive, insecure jerk.

So it behooves me not to let people like that intimidate me.

Ymar Sakar said...

From Alinsky, came Hussein.

Killing or neutralizing ALinsky or Soros, would have done more good in the long term.

David B is merely a student of his mentor and mentors. Get rid of the previous generation of teachers, and the later generation won't be nearly as powerful or influential.