Snobbery Read online

  That lawyers have slipped in social prestige is almost too obvious to require mention. Evidence for this is everywhere, from lawyer jokes (Why don’t sharks attack lawyers? Answer: Professional courtesy) to the representation of lawyers in popular culture. Two recent novels by young writers evidence a cool disdain for the legal profession: “Law school was a word I kept lodged at the back of my mouth,” notes the young protagonist of Jonathan Rosen’s novel Eve’s Apple, “like a cyanide tablet, just in case” In Valerie Block’s Was It Something I Said?, a character dating a woman lawyer notes that law was an “unimaginative choice” as a career for a man but still acceptable in a woman.

  Lawyers were once thought erudite, honorable, trained for leadership. They are now thought, at best, a dreary necessity to negotiate an astonishingly intricate web of laws that, the suspicion is, these spiderish creatures have themselves erected to add to their profits; at worst, and perhaps more often, they are viewed as corrupt, without integrity, pigs at the trough, the enemies of decency. Famous lawyers there are in America—Johnnie Cochrane, Alan Dershowitz, Vernon Jordan—but none seems in any way admirable, another index of the drained prestige of the law as a profession. Some of the most interesting careers in America today seem to be those led by men and women who went to the Harvard or Yale Law School but chose not to practice.

  Although there is much talk about increased church attendance in America, and religious revivals are announced almost monthly, the clergy, too, has lost its standing in American life. As recently as fifty years ago, clergymen of all faiths were figures of prominence: the Reverend Norman Vincent Peale, Rabbi Stephen Wise, and Bishop Fulton Sheen are only a few of the names that had national resonance. Billy Graham may be the last clergyman to have had fame of this kind, but somehow he has lost it, perhaps because of his too close connection with Republican politicians. Today the only names associated with religion are also bathed in the greenish light of the deeply dubious: the Reverends Jerry Falwell and Jesse Jackson, or the scandalous Jim Bakker and what seemed for a while the endless parade of priests accused of child molesting, or the vaguely comic Reform rabbis vying with one another to see who could depart further from Jewish tradition and do the first nude bar mitzvah. The Catholic Church in America, as is well known, cannot marshal a sufficient number of priests to staff all its institutions, which is one reason why Catholic higher education, no longer taught by an impressive priesthood, has seemed so sadly diminished in recent decades.

  Part of the loss of prestige, social and intellectual, of the American clergy is to be found in the loss of authority of religion itself, despite all the talk about religious revival. Religion has had to become flexible, to unbend, to meet its audience more than halfway, and in doing so has begun to seem as if it is selling itself. Retaining dignity—not to speak of assuming grandeur—while selling is not an easy trick, and contemporary religion has not come anywhere close to mastering it. One result of this is that its cadre of clergy for the most part no longer retains the admired position among the professions or in the greater society that it once held.

  The loss of prestige among engineers and inventors—whose founding figure in American life is Benjamin Franklin—is more complicated. Toward the close of the nineteenth century, engineers and inventors were the nation’s great heroes. Such was the popularity of Alexander Graham Bell that he was photographed more than any man in the United States except the president. Thomas Edison, who did not bother to go to high school, was a source of endless stories, most having to do with his natural genius. Henry Ford was another such figure: the self-made man who improves his society—building cars, inventing the assembly line, raising wages—while also immensely enriching himself. The man with mechanical skills and inventive capacity was everywhere admired. Charles Lindbergh, the Lone Eagle, along with being the first pilot to cross the Atlantic on a solo flight, was also an inventor of some seriousness, having a number of patents to his credit. Until he besmirched his reputation by naively allowing his name to be connected with some of the leading Nazi figures, he was easily the greatest American hero of the first third of the twentieth century.

  Engineers and inventors, with their pragmatic spirit, were doing the work of building the country: laying down roads, setting up bridges, building the vast and complex infrastructure of immense cities. Hoover Dam, the world’s greatest single piece of practical sculpture, was the work of American engineers. Competence was the trademark of engineers. The least mistake on their part and many lives would be forfeit. Astonishingly few such mistakes were made. Engineers brought water, spread light, helped crops to grow, extracted fuel and minerals and wealth from the earth—they did the work that men once invoked the gods to do.

  Yet engineers, too, have now lost their standing. Not through earning too much money, nor through a reputation for lubricity, nor even through a loss of belief in the aims behind their work. The twentieth century is likely to be remembered for its blessed advances in labor-saving and health-restoring technology. “We are now in the midst of a technological revolution that is full of surprises,” the philosopher John Searle not long ago wrote. “No one thirty years ago was aware that one day household computers would become as common as dishwashers.” Yet at the close of the century engineers seemed figures of little or no interest, gready limited, dull, déclassé. Why?

  Even though a high level of technology is absolutely required and everywhere enjoyed, the people who produce it seem a good deal less than elegant, as elegance is currently construed. Nerds we call some among them. Dullards we tend to think most of the rest of them. (Even Bill Gates, said to be the world’s richest man, can’t quite excite the American imagination.) Whether designing bridges or computer software, they lack panache, a sense of participation in the wider and subtler and more stylish life of the country. Poor clods, most of them don’t seem to recognize that there is a world out there in which what one wears, eats, drinks, holds opinions about can count for a great deal—for almost everything, really. All they seem to worry about is the job at hand—and then, when that is done, the next job. No longer good enough.

  Teaching, particularly university teaching, once held prestige, at least in some quarters, but today this is less and less so. The old criticism of university teachers is that they were “academic,” a word that stood in nicely for “theoretical” and therefore “out of it”; Shaw did teaching grave damage with his famous aphorism: “He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.” The title “professor” always conveyed a slight comic tinge, and was also conferred on the man who played the piano in the bordello.

  Still, a kind of idealism attached to the job: professors were after all working with the young, entrancing, inspiring, instilling passion for things of the mind. The element of sacrifice also entered in: professors worked for low wages because of their love for the work. But professors are now often quite decently paid, with many full professorships bringing in well over $100,000 a year, and in certain subjects (chiefly in the sciences and social sciences) a great deal more money is available through consulting. Then, too, professors as a general group have shown so little courage in times of university crises that it was difficult to think of them standing for much of anything but going with the flow, in whatever direction it happens to lead. Perhaps I am biased against the professoriat, having taught in a university for too long, but my own sense is that the serious teaching nowadays is done in grammar and high schools—important, necessary work that is less recognized and vastly under-appreciated.

  For a brief spurt, jobs with a large payload of idealism in them were much admired. Young people thought to become investigative journalists, after the pattern of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who helped bring down the Richard Nixon administration. Marine biology was big for a time, with its promise of saving the whales and talking to the dolphins. Becoming a forest ranger, or anything to do with the environment—which really meant anything to do with helping save the environment—also put many points on the board. But toda
y all these do-gooding jobs seem peripheral, nowhere any longer quite center ring.

  Somehow the emphasis in American life is on a different order of work, and hence of worker. The agent, the broker, the trader, the marketer, the investment banker, the all-purpose executive, the operator, the entrepreneur, the man or woman who does not provide the service or the product but helps bring it to market, usually acquiring a solid profit for him- or herself along the way—these are the figures who seem most admired in American life just now. (One of the most sought-after jobs by recent graduates at the better universities is that of junior-grade consultant, working for Andersen Consulting, McKinsey & Company, or other such firms.) “Just now” is a time when the country has shifted from a strong manufacturing, mining, farming, logging country to one where the main emphasis is on service and information and entertainment. Such people aren’t everywhere openly admired—they may even be despised a little—but they are nonetheless thought to be the insiders, the people with the lowdown on how things work, the folks at the controls, the smart money.

  Less and less in the middle and upper middle classes in America does one encounter anyone who actually makes something; instead most people work at shuffling paper, playing with numbers, making deals, disseminating knowledge, conveying news. People who make things have been given the title “content providers”—helluva phrase, that—but for the most part they are not the powerful players. The action has gone elsewhere, to the purveyors, conveyors, middlemen. (Although the children of the upper middle class are allowed a slightly fashionable dip in downward mobility: one’s daughter may become a chef, or one’s son do restoration carpentry, without social disgrace resulting.)

  The one major exception is that of artists: painters, performing musicians, even not very successful writers have been able to retain a purchase on prestige. “Artists,” Saul Bellow has said, “are more envied than millionaires.” Oddly, those literary artists in our era who have been most handsomely rewarded—Arthur Miller, E. L. Doctorow, Toni Morrison, Edward Albee, Cindy Sherman—seem to be those who have been most critical of what they think the corruption of the country in which they have flourished. The gods of capitalism, we must assume, love a joke. Because of the cachet that culture has in contemporary America, to be even a not very good poet or a hopeless painter is still to be thought “creative,” to have a higher calling. Besides, if one isn’t good at one’s art, one can always teach it in universities, turning out hundreds of young people quite as mediocre as oneself.

  Allied with the prestige of art, even bad art, the great gong of fashionable success is perhaps most resoundingly rung by young men or women who work in the movies or television. Some years ago I was hired by Warner Brothers to write a screenplay based on a short story I had written, and nothing I had done until then had attracted anything like the same excited interest on the part of family, friends, acquaintances, even strangers. During this time, too, I learned that a good number of young people working in the movies or television had earlier gone to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and other of the country’s tonier schools. They work in movies and television, I believe, not for the money alone—many of them come from wealthy parents, or could themselves make big money by going to superior law schools or doing an M.B.A. and subsequently getting a well-paid job in a corporation. They choose to do so because they sense that in the business of mass entertainment lies the greatest gloire—that combination of fame, riches, power, and leisure—now available in America, even if it entails heartbreaking compromise, turning out meretricious work, and sucking up to some clearly loathsome characters. Although most Americans cannot name three screenwriters or two television producers, although it does not say much for the United States at the beginning of a new century, mass entertainment appears to be where the real action is, at any rate as measured by the admiration of the young.

  Still, something has changed in the very nature of ambition that has altered snobbery in regard to occupations, or what I think of as snob-jobbery. The traditional pattern of ambition posited a success built on solid foundations, coming to fruition after long and careful work, with the ease of more than sufficient money nicely in place to massage the worn muscles used in accruing genuine achievement. No longer. Ours is an age that needs to retire the word millionaire, since it has made a million dollars seem rather a piddling sum. It’s an age when one hopes to score early, not to have to wait long past forty to retire to some artificial community such as Santa Fe, New Mexico, there to live in a vastly expensive house on an unpaved road. (Houses on well-paved roads—such are among the twists of snobbery in our time—are less expensive in Santa Fe.) It’s an age when loyalty even to one’s own creations—the product one has designed, the company one has developed, the pride of ownership—is made to seem a little, make that a lot, beside the point. The new ideal of ambition is to get in, score early and big, and get out.

  For a brief period, a new hero began to appear on the scene, the young entrepreneur, who started up a dot-com on Monday morning and by Friday was worth $60 million (a dream that seems now to have crashed). But the dot-coms, and these young men and women—jeans-wearing, scooterriding, fruit-juice-drinking—seem to have succumbed to the stodgy laws of economics: a useful product with a real demand for it is required for any lasting success. In time all but the solidest of such enterprises began to go under.

  Ambition and snobbery tend to be linked, except where ambition—in science, in serious art—is pure, which means that it does not entangle itself with worldly success. Snobbery, which rarely questions the world’s valuations, goes with the flow, sometimes wishing to swim just a bit upstream ahead of most other people. The jobs the world values the snob values. In the snobbery sweepstakes, being a physician, though not what it once was, still counts for something; a successful lawyer, if making great sums, need not wince in perpetual shame; a clergyman, having become a variant of salesman, has a hellaciously hard row to hoe; and an engineer, if he is any good, probably won’t notice or care how little he is regarded. But it’s the day of the middleman: the fellow who creates little, builds less, changes lots, but develops nothing enduring—just takes the cash and makes certain he or she gets the vice presidency, the best table, the fine wine, the excellent opera tickets. Prestige, at this moment, lies with them.

  6

  O WASP, Where Is Thy Sting-a-Ling

  THE HISTORY of the world, in one interpretation, is the history of fallen aristocracies. If true, no century was more intensely crowded with history than the twentieth. With all the talk of changes in the world around the time of the new millennium, quite overlooked was the all but complete closing down of the European aristocracy. Henry James once called aristocracy “bad manners organized,” which may or may not have been so, but aristocracy stood for deference—and privilege and prestige—also organized.

  The deference and privilege were genuine and extensive. In his elegant book The Secrets of the Gotha, Ghislain de Diesbach recounts how, in Europe, the upper aristocracy could stop trains when the mood to do so took them. “The Empress Elizabeth of Austria frequently did this to visit a chateau she had seen from the window of her compartment, or simply in order to relax a little by walking on foot in the country-side. The slightest journey involved a considerable display of forces, red carpets at the station, authorities clad in frock-coats to make speeches of welcome, platoons of cavalry, bouquets of flowers and above all fanfares to drown the seditious shouts of the anarchists.” Yes, it was good to be empress.

  The history of the past century—poof!—wiped all this away. With the exception of the monarchy in England, the principality of Monaco, the honorific monarchies in Sweden, Spain, and a few other places, and the occasional pretender wandering, dazed, around European spas, aristocracy today is all but done, gone, kaput. The name of a European aristocratic family is sometimes licensed to a clothing or perfume manufacturer, or an Italian or French aristocrat, usually hustling wine, pops up in the pages of Vanity Fair or Town & Country magazine
s, but that’s about it. From the 1917 revolution in Russia through two world wars with a major economic depression in between and through the smash-up of empire everywhere in the world, aristocracy emerged as one of the permanent casualties of the twentieth century.

  An argument could be made that it was on its way out long before the Russian Revolution sounded its first death knell. In the middle of the nineteenth century, what became known as the title search—that of American heiresses seeking down-on-their-uppers aristocrats for husbands—was well under way. This provided Henry James and Edith Wharton with a swell literary subject. When in 1895 the Comte Boni de Castellane married Anna Gould, the daughter of Jay Gould, the American financier, he threw a fete for three thousand in the Bois de Boulogne, on you’ll never guess whose money; and it took the shameless Comte eleven years to go through $5.5 million of Gould money before a divorce—and nine years later an annulment—was arranged. This didn’t stop Miss Gould from next marrying the Prince de Sagan, of the house of Talleyrand-Périgord.

  If these and other such marriages speak to the impoverishment of European aristocracy, ready to barter pedigree for purse, they speak quite as vociferously to the American yearning for aristocracy. This yearning, though it could never be openly declared, seems always to have been present. (“Only stupid people,” wrote Horace, “assess people by their genealogy,” but stupid people have never been in short supply, and they continued to be so long after the fall of the Roman Empire.) A group of Americans after the successful revolution from England wanted to declare George Washington our king. Aaron Burr always carried himself as an aristocrat; Alexander Hamilton, the more talented man, was thought vulnerable because of his illegitimate birth. Members of the Adams family, itself immensely talented, never had qualms about asserting their social primacy by way of their intellectual distinction. Henry Adams, the best writer among them, was entirely comfortable in his hauteur.