SNOBBERY, THE AMERICAN VERSION
Joseph Epstein

("Better to be an ancestor," said Freud, neatly covering this point, "than to have them.")

In Europe, it used to be said, people want to know who you are. In the United States, they want to know what you do. A useful distinction, this, for it implies that in Europe whom you derive from, your family line, is the crucial datum, whereas in America what you do defines you. In America, one's work marks one socially...

Shaw did teaching grave damage with his famous aphorism: "He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches."

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.

In The New Yorker, of all places, a man from Helena, Montana, in response to an article about servant problems, wrote that the article 'filled me with paroxysms of class rage. As a forty-one-year-old working-class man who grew up poor... I've grown sick of watching people with money wring their hands and worry about the morality of hiring servants, and whether their servants love them, and how much working people deserve to be paid. Just understand that we don't love you, and that your money is always gained by our poverty and hard work, and that there is nothing noble about hiring somebody for pennies to do what you as an able-bodied person should be doing yourself.'

The working class, the so-called lower orders, received a boost from Dickens, for in any Dickens novel, someone from the working class is likely to be the repository of all loyalty, kindness, goodheartedness, and no-frills wisdom. All this is very close to nonsense, of course, for creeps and saints are to be found in every social class and exist across all class lines.

"'Elitist,' a politically supercharged word, is almost invariably another sour-grapes word, at least when used to denigrate people who insist on a high standard. The distinction, I believe, is that the elitist desires the best; the snob wants other people to think he has, or is associated with, the best.

To this day the longing for aristocracy on the part of Americans crops up in odd places. Royalty in close proximity seems to make Americans lose their balance, if not get positively goofy. Princess Diana, not long before she died, visited Northwestern University, where I teach. The spectacle of the university president, a smallish man in glasses, following the Princess about the campus, yapping away, reminded one of nothing so much as that of a chihuahua attempting to mount an Afghan hound.

He judged his colleagues by their skill at their discipline, and, apart from their characters, nothing else.

After the discovery of Hitler's Final Solution, anti-Semitism began to be less easily expressed and less openly enacted in, among other places, university quota systems. (Harvard's and Yale's admission policies called for allowing roughly 13 percent of Catholics and Jews among their student bodies.)

NORMAN MAILER - ARMIES OF THE NIGHT (Vietnam protest book)

Novelist Dan Jacobson, in an essay on his boyhood as a Jew in the town of Kimberley in South Africa:
"But anyone who has been the object of racial hatred knows that it is so wounding to its victim--more wounding than personal abuse directed against him as an individual--precisely because it denies his individuality. To every member of the spurned race it says: to me you will never be a person with a life and interests of your own, but always a representative of a species. Whatever you do will reveal only your speciesdom; and if you try to escape from it, that too will reveal the species you belong to."

Much snobbery is about denying the next person his individuality, or, when allowing it, permitting it only inferior standing.

Georg Simmel, the trenchant German sociologist, has suggested that the individual who takes a stand against fashion may do so out of personal weakness, fearful that "he will be unable to maintain his individuality if he adopts the forms, the states, and the customs of the general public."





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