Elitist and Proud of It

A couple of weeks ago, stuck in a car at the crack of dawn with my husband controlling the radio, I involuntarily listened to a few minutes of Rush Limbaugh. He was belaboring the fact that so many of the current President's advisers and appointees graduated from Harvard. Limbaugh framed this phenomenon as, not exactly a conspiracy, but an example of blatant favoritism and "it's who you know, not what you know." He seems to view the circle of Harvard alumni around this administration (and I haven't done any investigation to find out whether he's exaggerating their prevalence) as evidence of contempt for non-Ivy-League universities and, in general, for anybody who doesn't belong to what he considers the "intellectual elite" of this country.

Now, I concede that if it's true that the administration overwhelmingly favors alumni of Harvard over those of any other institution, a bit more diversity might be welcome. The element of Limbaugh's rant that really made my teeth gnash was his mockery of what he presented as an upper-crust, Ivy League accent. By implication, the entire shtick seemed to denigrate intellectual claims in general. The attempt to make precise speech funny in itself implied that any pretension to a superior educational background is, per se, laughable.

I'm too young to remember Dwight Eisenhower's presidential campaigns against Adlai Stevenson; I was only eight years old during the second one. I've read, though, that a major reason for Stevenson's defeat was that the public saw him as an "egghead," too intellectual, as opposed to Ike's folksy persona. American culture seems to have a persistent anti-intellectual streak that I find quite disheartening.

My idol, C. S. Lewis, discussed this subject in "Screwtape Proposes a Toast," an appendix to his THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS back in the 1950s. The senior demon Screwtape advises up-and-coming tempters to encourage the human tendency to be suspicious of any claim of superiority. When taken to the desirable (from the diabolical viewpoint) extreme, people can be taught to consider any mere difference a claim to superiority, therefore to be suppressed. Mediocrity will reign, fueled by people's desire to be "just like folks" and fear of being accused of thinking they're "better than" anybody else. Screwtape tells the story of a tyrant in ancient times who visited a fellow ruler and asked for advice in governing his realm. The other tyrant walked into a field of grain and snipped off the tips of any stalks that towered over the others. The clear message, "Allow no preeminence among your subjects," reaches its logical culmination in the twentieth century, when a would-be dictator doesn't have to trim the taller stalks. They'll bite off their own tips in a desperate attempt to "be like stalks." And Lewis wrote this in England over fifty years ago!

A chilling short story whose author and title I can't remember (I think it was called "The Examination" or something very similar) takes place in a future society where all adolescents have to take the government's exam at a certain age. We get indications that the teenage boy protagonist's parents are rather dull, ignorant, and incurious, but we don't make the larger connection until after his examination ends—and the authorities send condolences to his parents. He has been euthanized because his test score was too high. (If this had been a full-length novel, I'd hope the author would have explained who runs the country after all high-IQ citizens are killed off. But it's still chilling.)

Nowadays, many of our media spokespersons treat "elite" as a dirty word. Especially the "intellectual elite," supposedly out of touch with the needs and aspirations of ordinary people. (As if a certain level of education disqualifies one from belonging to the people.) During the last presidential election, a Baltimore SUN columnist lamented the common politicians' ploy of trying to demonstrate that they're just like the rest of us, "just folks," not part of that dreaded elite. The columnist said she didn't want people just like her in charge of the country. She wanted somebody a lot smarter. I'll drink to that!

Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt