Esteem Systems

 Back when the rising generation of MAGA acolytes were still seen as news, one often heard people complaining about how the Josh Hawleys and Elise Stefaniks and J.D. Vances of the world were supposed to be smart enough to know better. "What's the matter with these people?" they would ask. "They all have Ivy League educations! They all went to Yale or Harvard for undergrad and/or law school. Yet, here they are catering to the lowest common denominator in our politics. They have become right-wing culture warriors, opposed to everything that higher education is supposed to inculcate in people, despite their own elite educational pedigree!"

To my mind, though, there was never any paradox about all this. Nothing could be more predictable. The same type of people with the inner drive to wedge their way into the U.S. Congress will also be the type of people who will wedge their way into elite institutions of other kinds. They tend to be people who crave power: and getting into certain academic institutions is a path to power, just as entering politics and parroting the emergent ideology of one's chosen party is a path to power. 

The implication among the people complaining about this is often something like the following: "Donald Trump holding these views I could understand. He's an idiot! But why are all these Harvard- and Yale-educated lawyers toeing the same line?" They are forgetting that Donald Trump also has an Ivy League education. Perhaps this should make us question what we think we know about Ivy League educations. Perhaps the thing to realize here is that an Ivy League education may not be what it is cracked up to be.

Opening themselves to these doubts, people may nonetheless start to protest: "But aren't you supposed to get a good education at these schools? Aren't you supposed to learn how the world works there? Don't they teach critical thinking skills, and imprint on people a set of humanistic values?" Well, first of all, just because you've heard about humanistic values doesn't mean you are the kind of person who finds it hard to jettison them as soon as it becomes politically advantageous to do so. And secondly: no, they don't teach those values. They teach the value of a certain prestige hierarchy. 

But this then raises the question—which is often what people who complain along these lines are really getting at—why, having learned the value of the Ivy League–based prestige hierarchy, do they then proceed to betray it in their politics? Since they plainly embraced this educational prestige hierarchy enough to go to Harvard or Yale in the first place, why do they then make a great show of rejecting it, once they are in Congress? Why do they embrace populist rhetoric and cultural positions that are popular primarily with the segment of the public that never attended college? Have they exchanged one set of values for another? 

The answer to this is also simple: no, they've kept both. They've realized that the coolest thing on the far right is to prove that you can beat liberal elites at their own game. The ideal right-wing senatorial career is to attend an elite institution, prove that you can emerge on the other side of it with your extremist beliefs intact, and then go on to use the power and prestige you accumulated at that school to subvert the very institutions that gave you that power (think Stefanik using congressional hearings to torpedo the leadership of Harvard). 

And many of those institutions won't actually mind this, anyway, because they too are motivated by power, and they will embrace MAGA if it becomes sufficiently plain it is the going thing. Elite institutions are not actually a bulwark of liberalism, in case anyone was still deluded on that point. They are avatars of the currently ascendant ideology. In a fascist America, they would be fascist too. If MAGA truly gained the upper hand across our politics and cultural institutions, they would follow suit. It wouldn't take long. 

But how do the Hawleys and Stefaniks and DeSantises and Vances of the world justify these dual roles in their own minds? How do they both seek and revel in the prestige that comes from being associated with certain elite institutions while simultaneously casting themselves as popular tribunes and advocates for the masses? Again, the answer is simple: they are inconsistent. And in this regard, they are no different from most people across time and place. 

I was thinking about this because I've been reading Edmund Leach's (no relation) classic ethnography, the Political Systems of Highland Burma. Leach writes in this book about how the Kachin societies of northern Burma simultaneously express two different political ideals that at first blush appear to be polar opposites of one another: the gumsa system, which is hierarchical and feudal; and the gumlao system, which is egalitarian and democratic. Different Kachin villages, he writes, will identify more strongly with one model than the other. But, on closer inspection, elements of both often seem to be present in every Kachin micro-society, and it is often hard in practice to tell the difference between them. 

It may even happen, Leach writes, that the same individual will appeal to gumsa ideology in one context and to gumlao ideology in another. They may wish to claim the prestige associated with an aristocratic lineage, for instance, while also pooh-poohing in the abstract the idea that genealogy makes any real difference to a person's character. 

And, however inconsistent this behavior might be, it too should not surprise us. It should be familiar to us from our own society. The Kachins are simply practicing the art of the humblebrag. They are refraining from "dropping the 'H[arvard]-bomb" in polite company, just as the graduates of that school do, while also secretly glorying in their association with it. 

"Oh, you know, I do have ancestors that trace back to the gods. But I don't set too much stock in that sort of thing."

"Oh, I went to a school in Boston for undergrad. In Cambridge, to be precise." 

This cheerful inconsistency is the same that the Hawleys and the Stefaniks are practicing on the national stage. They are simultaneously drawing power and prestige from their association with the gumsa institutions of historic WASP privilege in the United States: Harvard, Yale, etc. And they are simultaneously purporting to disavow them, claiming to attach no value to these schools. They are portraying themselves as gumlao populists, who will defend the interests of the common man (and it is indeed mostly men, for them) against these snooty East Coast elitists. 

As Leach puts it: "an individual may belong to more than one esteem system, and [...] these systems may not be consistent." He then observes that, if this sounds strange and confounding, it is no more so than human nature in general. He points out that the conflict between different "esteem systems" should be familiar to his British and other Western readers from their own societies. He points to the conflict that a "Christian businessman" may face between rival ideologies that equally claim his allegiance. But he might also have pointed to the frequent phenomenon in English politics of university-educated intellectuals being the staunchest Labourites. 

I, unfortunately, am someone who never learned this valuable lesson about how to navigate life. I have been cursed since childhood with the hobgoblin of consistency. I thought one was supposed to pick either the gumsa or gumlao life course and stick to it. In 8th grade, for instance, I decided that I wanted to be popular. I therefore became gumlao. I ran as a joke candidate in the election for class president and won by using a paper bag hand puppet to deliver my speech. I purposely got lousy grades in order to convey that I was a man of the people. I became the plebeian tribune of my middle-school class. 

But then, in 9th grade, I started to realize all over again that doing well in school was actually important for what I wanted to achieve in life. And so, I made a hard pivot in the other direction. I became single-mindedly gumsa. I said to myself—from now on, I can only care about intellectual things. I must become a nerd, and shed any claim to popularity. And so far as that goal went, at least, I succeeded. I don't think anyone in my adult life has questioned whether or not I am in fact a nerd. 

What I didn't realize—though—but that everyone else around me apparently already knew—is that the cool thing is to be both. One should be both academically-gifted and athletic. One should try simultaneously to succeed according to all the available "esteem systems." One should be a sort of Bill Clinton—half-good-old-boy and half-Rhodes-scholar. One should be able to have a casual conversation with the lads about "the game last night," while also being able to discuss Wittgenstein. This is not something I knew. No one told me. I can't imagine anyone told anyone else either—they just somehow knew it from birth. 

I have been "damned," like the "vast majority of men," as Hugh MacDiarmid once put it "by the curs'd conceit of being richt"—or, to put it another way—the cursed conceit of being consistent. I have only ever had room in my brain for one esteem system at a time. In this regard, I am rather like the protagonist of Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh. Young Ernest spends his youth hunting for a single philosophical code that will explain everything. He assumes that other people, who are not engaged in this search, must be terribly backward. But, as the narrator reminds him in contradiction, the reverse is true: "The men whom you would disturb are in front of you, and not, as you fancy, behind you; it is you who are the lagger, not they."

So it is with the Hawleys and the Stefaniks. They realized early on that one's ideology and approach to life don't have to be consistent. You can be gumsa and gumlao alike as the political expediency of the moment suits you. You can pretend to be a popular tribune, while secretly reveling in your elite bona fides. 

Such as them are among the saved and the blessed—the people who came into life already knowing the secret art of hypocrisy. They are god's chosen, the sheep who sit at the right hand of the lord. I, the hobgoblin of small minds, am among the damned, the goats—and rightly so—for my cursed conceit. 

But if I be damned, then it is by my own will. Because it still seems better to me, even knowing what I do now, to be an insignificant pleb with integrity, or even an East Coast snob with consistency, than to be a humblebragging hypocrite. As the protagonist of John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman realizes in one pivotal passage, when he turns down an offer of a highly-paid business position out of delicate aristocratic scruples—it is better at last to keep one's gentlemanly "spines" intact, one's spurious and irrational code, even if it makes one look ridiculous. It is better to stick to one's chosen esteem system, that is to say, even if it means spurning opportunities for advancement in others. 

I once wrote about something similar in a poem, and I stand by the words today: 

And maybe it is [easy, that is, to take the path of hypocrisy, and succeed in all esteem systems at once], but one knows the while
One would not do it if one could (and
Can); one recalls
A legend among some
Apologists (and anthropologists)
That the damned in fact desire
Their fate
Indeed they practically
Pray for it
And though one does not believe it, it seems
In one’s own case quite convincing.