The creative class against itself
(sort of)
Tell me if this sounds familiar: you, a highly-educated American creative-type, come across an article in a well-respected (dare I say elite) publication that, with self-awareness and panache, astutely deconstructs the sins of the creative class to which the author—and you, its audience—are invariably a part. Maybe you remember this (very good) one from the Atlantic in 2018, or the press storm for this book last year by an anti-meritocracy . . . professor at Yale. Maybe you read Anna Wiener’s stylish Silicon Valley memoir, Uncanny Valley. Or maybe you recently saw this sub-genre’s latest installment by David Brooks, also in the Atlantic—a self-conscious apology tour for his 2000 book, Bobos in Paradise.
I remember reading Bobos in college, sometime after Fussell’s Class but before discovering Veblen, and largely enjoying it in that way it’s enjoyable to read about things you’ve readily observed but perhaps not personally articulated. It was passed around my budding-Bobo college debate society with ironic self-satisfaction—obviously we were not above poking fun at ourselves; not being above poking fun at ourselves was practically a prerequisite to our membership in the creative class.
In the new essay, “How the Bobos Broke America,” Brooks wants to be the first to admit that his book hasn’t aged well (though, as outlined above, he’s not really the first). On the surface, his argument has shifted: the new aristocracy he once jovially commended for its openness to anyone with the right education and “cultural competencies” has been effectively rendered hereditary by hoarding the resources required for the next generation’s “meritocratic” attainments. “The task before us is to dismantle the system that raised us,” he opines, offering up some ideas for how to do it:
The only way to remedy this system is through institutional reform that widens the criteria by which people get sorted. For instance, we need more pathways to success, so those who are not academically inclined have routes to social leadership; programs like national service, so that people with and without college degrees have more direct contact with one another; and an end to policies like residential zoning rules that keep the affluent segregated on top. More broadly, changing this sorting mechanism requires transforming our whole moral ecology, such that possession of a Stanford degree is no longer seen as signifying a higher level of being.
But the explicit and implicit messages here are not quite the same. The problem is that most astute articles like Brooks’s—arguing for the dismantling of creative-class meritocracy to an audience more or less exclusively composed of creative-class meritocrats—also serve to enrich their authors’ meritocratic cultural capital, actually reinforcing the extant “moral ecology” that is antithetical to dismantling the system. We read this, and may come away thinking we want to tear down the power structures that bolster our privilege, but if we're being honest, are probably just as if not more interested in elegantly espousing such positions—and getting the sort of recognition David Brooks gets for it. The implicit message here isn’t really that you need to quit your creative job and dedicate your life to ending affluent residential zoning, but that being anti- such zoning is a culturally-informed position to hold in creative-class publications and at creative-class parties. I’m certainly not aware of Brooks abandoning his $2M home in Capitol Hill! It's the intellectual equivalent of Patagonia telling you not to buy their jackets; he’s having his zoning rules, and anti them too.1
We all are—and have been for a while, really. I thought about Brooks again while reading Trevor Cribben Merrill’s marvelous first novel Minor Indignities last week, which is set at Yale in the late 1990s and, with stunning verisimilitude, depicts the forerunning conundrum to the creative class’s campaign against itself:
Rex claimed that the child laborers of Bangladesh were just pawns. The protestors were the sort of people who went in search of the losing side in any battle, Quixotes more interested in striking romantic poses, in railing against injustice and defying authority, than in actually improving the living conditions of foreign workers.
The mere fact that Rex had argued for a given position was enough to make me take the other side. Irritated by the assumption behind his words—that he was immune to the sort of blindness he detected in the protestors—I said they genuinely cared about the victims of capitalist exploitation. The campaign against sweatshop labor, I reminded him, had been successfully waged on other college campuses, which proved the sense of righteous satisfaction that championing the downtrodden might afford wasn’t proof that it alone was inspiring the defenders. Still more, whatever the motivations of these naïve students, their efforts could keep the suicide nets empty. Spurred on by my objections, Rex took his argument to fresh extremes. Not only didn’t the protestors particularly care about sweatshop workers, he insisted, not only were the authority figures closest at hand, but they would soon cease to be interested in their crusade if victory proved too easily achieved, and would move on to some other lost cause, which would give them the opportunity to profess solidarity with the victims of injustice while relieving them of the need to change by even the tiniest increment their contemptibly bourgeois lifestyle.
Both Rex and Colin (the narrator) might be right, of course—indeed, genuine feeling is generally what lends such poses their romance. And the subject of their argument here is really secondary to the Girardian mechanics of mimetic rivalry in sophisticated debate. Still, the “lost cause” we’ve collectively moved on to is our “contemptibly bourgeois lifestyle” itself, and this new layer of cognitive dissonance necessarily alters both crusade and meta-analysis alike. We’ve become the Tom Steyers of Twitter, railing against and enjoying our billions in one breath. And our self-awareness that we’re doing so not only fails to unwind Bobo “meristocracy” but further entrenches it—our self-flagellation giving us a false sense of atonement, our vocal disapproval of “the system that raised us” comfortably lining our echo chamber. Maybe in 2018 such articles were a legitimate form of protest, waking us up to our complicity, but at this point they seem more akin to Rex and Colin’s purely abstract intellectual overlay—to quite useless meta-analyses like the one you’re reading now. This is not to say we don’t truly believe in institutional reform! Just that our toothless literary reproofs hardly serve to undermine the aristocratic hurdles they denounce, which positively thrive on such counterintuitive and even outright illogical “cultural competencies.”
I’m hardly opposed to abstract intellectual overlays and toothless literary reproofs—they’re basically my raison d’être. As I’ve said previously, I am a big fan of a certain kind of sophistry: the kind that doesn’t try to pass itself off as something else. There is immense pleasure in argument for argument’s sake, just as there is in art for art’s. What I am specifically lamenting here is this pervasive insistence in the literary zeitgeist that nonfiction, let alone fiction, must be “politically useful” when this very insistence often undermines both the actionable progressive agenda and great writing’s inherent justification of itself. I loved Wiener’s memoir, but it is far less valuable for its dubious political utility than the wonderfully luxuriant, perhaps even self-indulgent quality of her prose (game respect game). That Uncanny Valley is passed off like it’s Shoshana Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism or something is ultimately an insult to both of them. Same goes for David Brooks. I have considerable respect for his literary talents, but let’s not pretend dismantling meritocracy is among them. “Dismantling meritocracy” is not even a literary talent. When we market sophistry as activism, we subvert not only the power of activism but also the beauty of sophistry.
Very best,
Natasha
https://natashajoukovsky.com
See also the ludicrous Part I finale of HBO Max’s new Gossip Girl, in which (spoiler alert) Julien and Obie’s protest of the Navy Yard development Obie’s mother is spearheading devolves without an ounce of irony into a riotous back-alley make-out sesh—a party we can only assume will be taken back to the luxury of his parents’ house, aka the very spoils they were protesting.
It upsets me how much this resonates.