Right Man's Burden

Do not panic, fellow parasites and meatbags. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary available anywhere you care to look, Mr. Brooks has filed another column from Capitalist Valhalla to assure us that our elite overlords are not Randite killbots who think of us as wee grapes of labor to be stomped for the wine of maximized profit...or a gobbets of harvestable organs...or a parasitic moochers who use the figleaf of democracy to expropriate their hard-earned wealth and piss it away on our stupid roads and bridges and cops and teachers.

Not at all.

You will be reassured to know that your elite overlords are, in fact, better than you in every way.

I’d say today’s meritocratic elites achieve and preserve their status not mainly by being corrupt but mainly by being ambitious and disciplined. They raise their kids in organized families. They spend enormous amounts of money and time on enrichment. They work much longer hours than people down the income scale, driving their kids to piano lessons and then taking part in conference calls from the waiting room.

In fact, the only real problem with out elites is that they are just too damned humble to take up the mantle of their elitehood!

The problem is that today’s meritocratic elites cannot admit to themselves that they are elites.

And after a mere 400 words defending of your betters (delivered from the wallow of his own dread that people will discover what a terrible fraud he is), Mr. Brooks uncovers the "real" problem with our elites, which -- surprise! -- also happens to be the same "real" problem he uncovers at the root of every other problem in every other column: bad morals.

Today’s elite is more talented and open but lacks a self-conscious leadership code. The language of meritocracy (how to succeed) has eclipsed the language of morality (how to be virtuous).

All of our problems would just melt away if only we gave up on modernity as a bad job, rolled back the 20th Century entirely and re-entered the good old days of Victoria Regina and the Gilded Age.

No, I am not kidding:

The best of the WASP elites had a stewardship mentality, that they were temporary caretakers of institutions that would span generations. They cruelly ostracized people who did not live up to their codes of gentlemanly conduct and scrupulosity. They were insular and struggled with intimacy, but they did believe in restraint, reticence and service.

Within the frame of a rebuttal to Chris Hayes' book, "The Twilight of the Elites", Mr. Brooks is arguing for a return to 19th century Conservatism -- a massively whitewashed and Disneyfied 19th century Conservatism -- as a tonic to the rise of the "brats" at the "center of the Libor scandal...[and] so many recent scandals" who demonstrate...

...no sense that they are guardians for an institution the world depends on; they have no consciousness of their larger social role.

As always, Mr. Brooks simply ignores those wide swaths of inconvenient history which make his premise sound silly.

For example, during the 1960s and 1970s (the decades of which Mr. Brooks most virulently disapproves) elite institutions of 1960s and 1970s -- which were run in exactly the way Mr. Brooks' approves -- were not challenged or abandoned lightly: they were challenged because they failed us spectacularly and serially and because they lied about their failures. There is no greater, single example of the iron fist within Mr. Brooks velvet-gloved elitism than Richard Nixon's infamous assertion that, if the President of the United States breaks the law, it is not illegal.

Mr. Brooks infantile reading of history and his infatuation with the charms of a genteel paternalistic Conservatism that never existed in reality in the country has no place for the Civil Rights Movement or Vietnam or Watergate, which is why Mr. Brooks routinely skips over the entire era with an eye-rolling dismissal of the Dirty Hippies, along with most of the less happyfun bits of the last couple of centuries.

From Mr. Charlie Pierce:

...
Actually, Wall Street is working exactly the same as it worked 80 years ago, when the Protestant Establishment ran the country into a Depression, and the way it worked in 1873, when the Protestant Establishment ran the country into a panic in which unemployment hit 14 percent, and the way it worked in 1837, when the Protestant Establishment ran the country into a panic in which bank failures in New York alone cost the country $100 million. There were also panics in 1911, 1907, 1901, 1896, 1893, 1890, 1884, 1873, 1857,1825, 1819, 1796, and 1792. Hidden cabals of Zoroastrians were not involved in any of these. The argument is that injustice might provide better outcomes? Thanks, no.

Christopher Hayes of MSNBC and The Nation believes that the problem is inherent in the nature of meritocracies. In his book, "Twilight of the Elites," he argues that meritocratic elites may rise on the basis of grades, effort and merit, but, to preserve their status, they become corrupt. They create wildly unequal societies, and then they rig things so that few can climb the ladders behind them. Meritocracy leads to oligarchy.

'Twas always thus. For details, please see: XVI, Louis The. Chris Hayes is very smart. Read his book.

It's a challenging argument but wrong. I'd say today's meritocratic elites achieve and preserve their status not mainly by being corrupt but mainly by being ambitious and disciplined. They raise their kids in organized families. They spend enormous amounts of money and time on enrichment. They work much longer hours than people down the income scale, driving their kids to piano lessons and then taking part in conference calls from the waiting room.

Of course, you would. That's your answer to every question. The waitress asks you how you want your eggs in the morning, you say, "I don't care, as long as they come from organized families." And, I might add, if you're taking part in your conference calls from "the waiting room" while little Muffy groans through her ballet lessons, it means you have a cking job. And I'd like an offer of proof on that sentence about how Muffy and Trey's parents "work harder than people down the income scale" for the same reason I'd like an offer of proof that Brooks is not a complete dick, since only a complete dick would describe driving your kids to heir extracurriculars as "work."
...

The other giant stink bug in Mr. Brooks' Victorian pomade is Ayn Rand.

The public intellectual who has been more responsible that anyone for the giddy, amoral rapacity and bone-deep contempt for institutions which Mr. Brooks now decries is not Ed Asner (whom Mr. Brooks despises) of Noam Chomsky (whom Mr. Brooks really despises), but the very, very ,very Conservative Ms. Ayn Rand.

Ayn Rand, who helped put Mr. Brooks' hero, Ronald Reagan, on the "Government is the Problem" path to the White House.

Ayn Rand, who gave Mr. Brooks' hero, Alan Greenspan, the intellectual terrarium within which he built his entire view of economics.

Ayn Rand, who taught an entire generation of Conservatives that "altruism" was contemptible fascist trickery on a par with Nazism, that all religions were lies and all belief in the divine was a sign of mental illness, that all taxes of any kind are slavery, and that the very idea of stewardship which Mr. Brooks longs for -- the notion of owing some sort of moral obligation to one's fellow human beings, present or future -- was Stalinist twaddle of the lowest order.

"The language of meritocracy (how to succeed)" did not eclipse "the language of morality (how to be virtuous)", Mr. Brooks. Instead, Ayn Rand and her heirs have spent half a century insisting that the language of meritocracy was the language of morality -- that rapacity was virtue -- and that anyone who suggested otherwise was a dirty Commie stooge who hated freedom, liberty and America.

Sound familiar?

And speaking of Mr. Brooks, where exactly was he while this parade of moral, fiscal and political catastrophe was rolling along?

Oh right!  Now I remember.  Mr. Brooks spent the last 30 years trotting along behind that parade every inch of the way, dog-loyal and intrepid, obediently lauding its heroes, pushing its crackpot economics, ruinous tax cuts and disastrous wars, and collecting his 30 pieces of silver for services.

Of course, if you prefer Mr. Brooks' Dream World straight-up and without all of his icky plutocrat-fawning, in 1931 a gentleman named Aldous Huxley drew up some very detailed blueprints of what it would look like.

From "Brave New World"):

... 

"What's the lesson this afternoon?" he asked. 

 "We had Elementary Sex for the first forty minutes," she answered. "But now it's switched over to Elementary Class Consciousness."

The Director walked slowly down the long line of cots. Rosy and relaxed with sleep, eighty little boys and girls lay softly breathing. There was a whisper under every pillow. The D.H.C. halted and, bending over one of the little beds, listened attentively.

"Elementary Class Consciousness, did you say? Let's have it repeated a little louder by the trumpet."

At the end of the room a loud speaker projected from the wall. The Director walked up to it and pressed a switch.

"… all wear green," said a soft but very distinct voice, beginning in the middle of a sentence, "and Delta Children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able to read or write. Besides they wear black, which is such a beastly colour. I'm so glad I'm a Beta."

There was a pause; then the voice began again.

"Alpha children wear grey They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm really awfuly glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able …"

The Director pushed back the switch. The voice was silent. Only its thin ghost continued to mutter from beneath the eighty pillows.

"They'll have that repeated forty or fifty times more before they wake; then again on Thursday, and again on Saturday. A hundred and twenty times three times a week for thirty months. After which they go on to a more advanced lesson."

Roses and electric shocks, the khaki of Deltas and a whiff of asafœtida–wedded indissolubly before the child can speak. But wordless conditioning is crude and wholesale; cannot bring home the finer distinctions, cannot inculcate the more complex courses of behaviour. For that there must be words, but words without reason. In brief, hypnopædia.

"The greatest moralizing and socializing force of all time."

The students took it down in their little books. Straight from the horse's mouth.

Once more the Director touched the switch.

"… so frightfully clever," the soft, insinuating, indefatigable voice was saying, "I'm really awfully glad I'm a Beta, because …"

Not so much like drops of water, though water, it is true, can wear holes in the hardest granite; rather, drops of liquid sealing-wax, drops that adhere, incrust, incorporate themselves with what they fall on, till finally the rock is all one scarlet blob.

"Till at last the child's mind is these suggestions, and the sum of the suggestions is the child's mind. And not the child's mind only. The adult's mind too–all his life long. The mind that judges and desires and decides–made up of these suggestions. But all these suggestions are our suggestions!" The Director almost shouted in his triumph. "Suggestions from the State." He banged the nearest table. "It therefore follows …"