Snobbery Read online

  In America, with the demise of Wasp upper-class culture, it becomes less and less easy, as I have said, to describe the class system. One could, I suppose, begin with something called the superclass, which would include the vastly wealthy—people worth $500 million or more—but the number of such people, though it has grown in recent years, is nowhere large enough to constitute anything resembling a social class. At the bottom, one might posit a lumpen lower class, composed of habitual criminals, drug addicts, and people who for one reason or another have taken themselves out of the game. But all that lies in between—the vast majority of the population—becomes fairly tricky social terrain.

  In an old joke, a plumber presents a man with a bill for $486. Staggered by the bill, the man says, “You weren’t even here an hour! I’m a neurosurgeon and I don’t charge that much.” “I know,” says the plumber, “that’s why I left medical school.” Money, the point is, no longer defines social class. Donald Trump is worth I don’t know how many millions, but his confident vulgarity will always keep him from being viewed as other than monstrously rich (perhaps more monster than rich), and if he were to be certified as upper class, many others put in that category would doubtless do what they could to find a new social class to fit into. The huge sums earned by athletes and entertainers has further confused notions of an orderly class structure. Nor can anyone easily define the middle, implied in the term middle class. Poverty fines are set, based on annual incomes, but some years movie actors, choosing not to work and to collect unemployment insurance, may technically fall below the poverty fine. It’s all a great mess.

  George Orwell once described himself as lower-upper-middle class, and in doing so brought what seems to me an impressive precision to his social standing. His father had been a civil servant; Orwell had gone to Eton, though not afterward to university; he had served as a young man in the imperial police in Burma; he was a writer and lived in a combined working-class and bohemian manner, and not yet a landowner (as he would become in a minor way in Scotland during his last years) nor wealthy, though at the close of his life he would be well-off from the royalties of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-four. Lower-upper-middle class sounds dead-on right.

  I cannot place myself anywhere near so precisely. I write; I have taught at a university of fairly high reputation (Northwestern); I went to one of the country’s better universities (the University of Chicago); I have arrived at a stage—partly a function of my own and the prosperous age—where I do not worry overmuch about money; I have some friends who are very wealthy, others who scrape by; I know some distinguished people, and a few in high places. I know my social origins (Jewish and lower middle to middle class), but they seem to have less bearing on things today than they did thirty or forty years ago. I always think myself Jewish, but I have a far less clear conception of my class. Sometimes I refer to myself as among the so-called educated class, which I also say with a light salting of irony and an insistence upon that so-called.

  Tom Wolfe, a man for whose status radar I have the highest respect, recently wrote: “Any fool sociologist could tell you there are only two objectively detectable social classes in America: people above the bachelor’s degree line—i.e., people who have graduated from four-year colleges—and people below it, who haven’t.” This, though accurate enough, takes in only part of what I mean by the so-called educated class. What I mean is that I and my (social) classmates live lives bounded by ideas—notions is perhaps the better word—of elegance, by concern for our health, by interest in culture and entertainment, and by much else that derives not only from our having gone to college, but because our having done so has been one of the central experiences of our lives. Most members of the so-called educated class haven’t had all that much firsthand experience of the sort of elegant lives they wish to live, and so many of the notions upon which they base their lives derive from books, journalism, movies, and other secondary experiences.

  Members of the so-called educated class really think of themselves as the enlightened class. Taste ranks high in the scheme of what we value—higher perhaps than anything else—and gives our lives a nervous quality. This class, writes Jilly Cooper, calling them the upper middle classes, “are the silliest and most sensitive to every new trend.” To accuse a member of the so-called educated classes of a want of taste is an insult of a profundity worthy of an invitation to a duel. Always changing, being subject to the greatest disputation, taste is above all things susceptible to snobbery. This is perhaps why snobbery runs high among the educated class.

  A new conception of this class has been suggested by David Brooks, who, in his book Bobos in Paradise, contends that there is a new upper class in America. This new upper class, Brooks finds, is marked by the old bourgeois ethos of moneymaking and acquisitiveness but is radically different from former American upper classes in its bohemian spirit. Brooks’s Bobos go in for egalitarianism, environmentalism, health-mindedness. Their habits of consumption, though by no means inexpensive, tend to be inconspicuous. Brooks believes that this new spirit of the bourgeois combined with the bohemian, from which derive the term Bobos, is sweeping the boards. He nicely illustrates his point through the examples of current-day retailing, politics, and status arrangements, arguing that “even the scions of the old Wasp families have adapted to the new mode.” Brooks’s central idea, that the bourgeois and the bohemian spirit have now combined, is both an amusing and a useful one, but Boboism sometimes seems too thinly spread—just about anyone who has been in a Starbucks or has a penchant for Ben & Jerry’s ice cream would seem to qualify—to constitute anything like a real social class.

  Next to the novelists, the best sociologists—the sociologists themselves, I’m afraid, are almost never the best sociologists—are the marketing experts. And the marketing experts, in attempting to sell their goods, no longer think primarily of social class in doing so. Too many unpredictable things have happened in recent years to make social class any longer a reliable guide to marketing. Consider only the phenomenon of kids from wealthy white suburban families taking their cue on what’s in style in footwear, jeans, and other apparel from inner-city black kids. In former days, fads tended to percolate from the wealthiest end of the social scale downward; now they seem quite as often to boil upward.

  Instead of social class, marketers now talk about something called “clusters,” which have given them, the marketers, a new cartography of American life. Mobility, social fluidity, and new immigration are only a few of the social factors that have made the earlier division of upper, middle, and lower classes seem crude, if not altogether obsolete. One such marketer, Michael J. Weiss, in A Clustered World, sets out no fewer than 64 clusters, an increase of 55 percent, he tells us, over a few decades before. Thus people are divided by the settings in which they live (from Elite Suburbs to Rustic Living) and within these divisions into smaller groups defined by income or age or ethnic status (including “ethnically mixed urban singles,” “mid-level white-collar couples,” “middle-income empty nesters,” “Hispanic middle-class families,” and so on and on). Beyond the selling of goods, clustering seems rough-hewn, based as it largely is on that imprecise, blatant term lifestyle. But it does show up the greater crudity of a three- or even a nine-category class system as an adequate way of describing American life.

  My own aspiration in connection with social class, which I suspect may be shared by a great many Americans, is to live, or at least think, altogether outside it. The ample middle class, whence I derive, has been derided, but I happen to think that there is much to be said on its behalf: it imbued one with, among other things, concern about the future, caring for one’s family, bringing order to one’s life—none of these insignificant things. Yet somehow measuring other people—above, below—from a middle-class perspective seems an irrelevance to the world we now live in, and therefore without much point.

  At the close of his book The Rise and Fall of Class in Britain, David Cannadine invokes America as a model of a classles
s society. By classless he does not mean without inequalities of wealth and power, such as all societies have had, but one in which these do not translate into “corresponding inequalities of social prestige or social perceptions”; one whose members don’t think of an unbridgeable divide between “us” and “them”; one in which the middle class swallows up all else; one in which the chief difference between the rich and the poor, as Lord Beaverbrook once remarked, is that the rich have more money.

  Is this a true picture of American social life? I’m not sure that it is, but it does seem accurate as a description of the way American society is tending. The word class came into being in the middle of the eighteenth century to describe social differences; it may well be that by the end of the twenty-first it will be retired for want of usefulness. But its gradual disappearance, as we shall see, scarcely means the disappearance of snobbery. The absence of strict social-class boundaries may even, in odd ways, work to increase it.

  8

  Such Good Taste

  TASTE HAS BEEN one of the major ways of defining social class. For some, such as the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, it still is. The upper classes, in this reckoning, do not bowl, nor do the workers listen to J. S. Bach. But this, too, has long been shifting. Many years ago, for example, it was bruited about that the most affluent television audience was that which watched the rather brutish game of professional football—hence all those commercials for Mercedes, Lexus, and Cadillac.

  Tradition, or what passed for tradition in a once reasonably secure upper class, both set and ruled over taste. The way the most revered members of that class dressed, furnished their homes, dealt with one another in public, amused themselves, and behaved generally was, ipso facto, good taste. Taste was what people in possession of social power said it was. But with the all but complete demise of Wasp culture and the steady erosion of the old class system, taste has fallen more into the realm of the professional tastemakers, those editors, designers, decorators, museum curators, critics, etiquette handbook writers, movie and television producers, and others who ignite fads, set trends, keep the rest of us—or those among us who have decided to care about such matters—guessing, hopping, and jumping.

  The cliché had it that there was no accounting for taste, and the cliché, within limits, was often right. Except in particular instances, no one has really accounted for taste, at least not altogether persuasively. Instead people tend to argue over it. “You say there can be no argument about matters of taste,” Nietzsche has Zarathustra say. “All life is an argument about taste.” Some of the questions people argue about include: Whence does taste derive? Why does it seem to come so naturally to some people and to others not at all? How important is taste as a sign of intelligence, of character, of moral worth? Can taste be taught? And, not quite the same thing, can it ever be learned?

  These are but a few of the questions about taste for which no one has managed to account. But one thing that is not in question is the centrality of taste to snobbery—and more and more so in our day, when there is perhaps more anxiety about taste than at any other time.

  There isn’t, in fact, taste, but tastes, several different tastes operating simultaneously in the culture and sometimes even in the same person. Far from being universal, taste is highly particular. To cite a wild example, cosmetic breast surgery in Brazil has preponderantly been in the direction of reduction of breast size, where too large breasts are thought to be “Negroid.” In neighboring Argentina, breast surgery has been mainly in the direction of enlargement, because the fantasies of Argentinean men run to abundance. Taste—go figure.

  Fashion has been said to be the motor force behind taste. Sometimes it is, but sometimes it is quite unconnected with it. Every age has its characteristic taste, often given names by art and other historians: Baroque, Empire, Biedermeier, and the rest. In time, the age itself grows tired of that taste. Boredom plays a role in the regularity with which taste seems to change. The roots of taste, Hilton Kramer has argued, “lie in something deeper and more mysterious than mere fashion.” For one thing, its timetable can never be predicted. For another, as Kramer writes, “the denial of certain qualities in one period almost automatically prepares one for their triumphal return later.”

  People who pride themselves on the possession of taste are confident that they know what is beautiful. But what is beautiful is an extremely complicated question to which a major branch of philosophy, aesthetics, has for several centuries devoted itself without much success. Perhaps no more salutary exercise awaits the person who is confident he or she knows what is beautiful than the discovery—demonstrated with careful scholarship in such works of art history as Francis Haskell’s Taste and the Antique and Gerald Retldinger’s The Economics of Taste—that entire ages have vastly undervalued individual works, often whole bodies of visual art, whose majesty is now thought to be beyond argument.

  The painting of Vermeer is only one of many egregious examples. In the middle of the seventeenth century in Spain, mere casts and copies of ancient sculptures were more highly regarded than original works by Velazquez. In the latter part of the eighteenth century in England, Joshua Reynolds, the painter and first president of the Royal Academy, scored off Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese as inferior painters, claiming that they were little more than decorators, chiefly interested in color at the expense of form. These are not instances of experts being put off by avant-garde or experimental works. They are instead glittering examples—and scores more could be instanced—of highly intelligent connoisseurs misapprehending beauty that now seems obvious to all.

  Beauty and what passes for good, even exquisite taste are sometimes but not always congruent, and certainly they are not necessarily so. The range of the beautiful is broader than the range of the tasteful. A Praxiteles sculpture, a Limoges demitasse, an Arabian stallion, a noble act, an infant’s smile—these are but a few from the uncountable immensity of beautiful things. Good taste is much narrower. It has to do with decorum in behavior and in things; it frequently has to do with preferences that grow out of social class; it is almost always influenced by the spirit of the times. Taste is a system—a not very systematic system, to be sure—of preferences. Taste often dictates what is beautiful, but is frequently proven wrong in its diktats. Taste has its limits, even good taste. “Good taste,” Jules Renard wrote, “may be nothing but a fear of life and of the beautiful.” God, or, if one prefers, Nature, creates beauty; men and women create taste.

  To begin with its broadest division, there is good and bad taste. Lionel Trilling, apropos of the photographs of Walker Evans for the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, after noting their “perfect taste,” went on to say that he was “taking that word in its largest possible sense to mean tact, delicacy, justness of feeling, complete awareness, and perfect respect.” Edward Shils, who edited Minerva, a magazine devoted to science and higher learning, once accepted an article from a contributor with the proviso that he remove the heavy jargon from his writing. “Not a problem,” said the man, “jargon or no jargon—I suppose it’s only a matter of taste.” “Quite right,” Shils shot back. “It is only a matter of taste—good taste or bad. Remove the jargon.” In less clear cases, dispute can be endless about what constitutes correct taste, and in the hands of a snob taste can be wielded as a cruelly effective weapon, used to keep all sorts of people outside the gates.

  The domain of taste extends to things large and small, in houses and cars, art and jewels, food and wine, and to a thousand other items that can result in someone’s looking down his or her nose at someone else. Where there exists the possibility of preference, there you will find taste. There is taste in people, in behavior, and relativists would argue that there is taste in morals. There is even a comedy of taste, which goes by the name of Camp and which operates by standing what normally is regarded as good taste on its head, deliberately mocking the decorum of good taste in favor of the hideously showy, garish, or otherwise vulgar. (Vulgar, a word with a long histor
y, today is mainly understood as a violation of what passes for good taste.) There are, finally, people who pride themselves on being everywhere and always in good taste. For them, what are taken to be violations of taste are no mere venial sins. In this category are to be found many secret—and lots of not so secret—snobs.

  Taste can be tyrannous to those made nervous by it. And those who are nervous about it include just about everyone who is not absolutely confident of his or her preferences in possessions, culture, behavior. Perhaps the only people untouched by the tyranny of taste are those who haven’t any notion that such a thing exists. Some people might consider it a badge of honor to be thought out of fashion, but fewer are prepared to be written off for being without taste. My guess is that most people would be less offended to have it said of them that they have bad judgment than that they have bad taste.

  Taste is not by any means arbitrary. “The essence of taste is suitability,” wrote Edith Wharton. “Divest the word of its prim and priggish implications, and see how it expresses the mysterious demand of the eye and mind for symmetry, harmony and order.” Some things—generosity, courage, kindness—are always in good taste. “Taste is good sense,” the aphorist Geoffrey Madan wrote. Something to it, but Reynaldo Hahn, the composer and Marcel Proust’s dearest friend, widens the meaning of taste in a useful way when he writes: “By taste I do not mean that superior and transcendent ability to comprehend what is beautiful which leads to good aesthetic judgment. . . . By taste, I mean a wide-ranging instinct, a sure and rapid perception of even the smallest matters, a particular sensitivity of the spirit which prompts us to reject spontaneously whatever would appear as a blemish in a given context.” Hahn continues: “A particular sensitivity of the spirit is necessary in this sort of taste, as well as emotion and a certain fear of ridicule.”