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ONE of our favorite controversies over the last few moths has been the tussle over Excellent Sheep, the William Deresiewicz book that criticizes the obsessive pragmatism and money worship that’s come to define the Ivy League experience. Simultaneously, one of our least favorite recent developments has been the destruction of the magazine The New Republic by a callow Silicon Valley rich boy and his tech-utopian sidekick.
I would not have thought of connecting these two issues, but they seem to have a natural affinity: In a Salon interview, Deresiewicz reminds me why I’ve come to read his work so avidly. “We’ve basically reduced what it means to be human to market terms, to getting and spending,” he says. One of his culprits is postmodernism, which he associates not with Thomas Pynchon or the films of Godard but “the time of neoliberalism or Reaganomics or market fundamentalism, where the only thing that matters about you is your function in the marketplace.”
And he says:
We’ve always been a society where the market has been the dominant cultural and political factor but, historically, most of the time there have been counterbalancing institutions— and we can broadly call those institutions “culture.” That’s meant the churches and the universities and art and thought and journalism.
What we have today is, first of all, a time when the balance is really getting out of whack. The market has come to predominate in a way that it hasn’t in a long time. The other thing is that those very institutions of culture whose job it is to fight for and speak for other values like learning for its own sake, or beauty or justice or truth, they are being captured by the market. They have been bought by the market and been turned to serve the ends of the market. That’s true in higher education and it’s true in journalism. It’s also true in the churches, if you think about, for instance, the prosperity gospel.
What [New Republic owner] Chris Hughes doesn’t understand is that The New Republic has never made money. The Nation loses money now, Harper’s loses money now, and they’ve been reliant on benevolent plutocrats who recognize that there are more important things than the market and are willing to run them not as profit-making institutions but as institutions that have value for other reasons.
The whole interview is worth reading, especially when he calls Hughes an “entitled little shit.”
The problems with higher education might be even deeper and more systemic than even Deresiewicz describes. In continental Europe, private universities are almost universally forbidden by law. They are seen as perpetuating classism. How can we have universities for “entitled little shits” and not expect that they will be deeply invested in plutocratic values?
The book thus comes across to me as a bit superficial. It fails to recognize that our educational system is systemically plutocratic, a fact that imbues almost every facet of our intellectual and cultural lives. The book more-or-less reiterates the arguments of the mid 60s when young people became disenchanted with the establishment and began to look outside it for more authentic and meaningful ways of living. The movement ultimately faded away into yuppiedom because it failed to address and change these systemic problems.
The European 68ers did a little better because they turned their movement into now quite powerful Green parties that have been able to establish and continue more progressive forms of government and political thought. It was also much easier for them, because the Social Democracies of Europe provided a much more supportive environment for the changes the Greens wanted to create.
Beginning in the 70s, neoliberalism, a massive, totalizing economic philosophy was gradually imposed upon the world with very few people aware of what was even happening. So on the positive side, Deresiewicz’s critique of neoliberalism is a welcome change. It shows that people are becoming aware of what it is and its problems. He speaks in a simple and direct way that young people might take to heart. But will they see that these problems can only be solved through fundamental systemic changes? In the interview he says we can work through the two political parties. That’s not true. They are owned and operated by the plutocracy. These are the problems with his thought that trouble me.
OTH, in chapter 7 of his book, he speaks about the needs of students to be true leaders, think for themselves, and create systemic changes.
Agree w a lot of that, but Europe also in austerity and opted for the idiocy if the Euro. Much of their system is better than ours, but 68ers hardly unqualified success.
And the plutocratic values came before the entitled little shits.
Three thoughts:
1) The economic problems (austerity) in Europe were created by the collapse of the housing bubble which was a manifestation of American neoliberalism.
2) Through the efforts of people like Hamilton, our privileged class was essentially constitutionalizedly shortly after America was founded, and is in many respects a continuance of British classism. A culture of “privileged little shits” has existed in the USA from its founding, and our ancient Ivies were specifically created to serve them.
3) Whatever challenges the European Greens face, there is no substantively comparable political movement in the USA. The values of their 68ers thus have a far firmer base and influence in Europe.
One other thought. The Euro, or the idea of a unified currency, might not be such a bad idea. The problem is that the Maastricht treaty that defines the EU’s economic policies was strongly influenced by neoliberalism. Another case of the philosophy being implemented without the knowledge or consent of the people.
Agree that neoliberal market worship — which is of newer vintage than Hamilton or the Brit aristocracy — part of problem. It will continue to leave wreckage in its wake
Let me also distinguish between two different kinds of plutocrats which I think follows the contours of William D’s argument:
We’ve always had class differences and class privilege in this country (and in every country since the dawn of time.) But the old WASP upper- and upper-middle class, for all its faults, believed in hard work as well as (in many cases) the consumption and support of culture. The post-Reagan Sunbelt conservatism, especially the Christian fundamentalist and libertarian brands, are very different.
The transition, to put it succinctly, from the George HW Bush upper class to the George W Bush upper class has been bad in all kinds of ways. Not least of what it means for culture.
(I say this as someone who is good friends with W.’s culture czar, who would not agree with me on this.)
At the same time, the neoliberal philosophies that created this transition were not formulated by any larger segment of the US population or voting block, but by small groups of elites at places like the U. of Chicago which were then implemented by elites on Wall Street and in Washington. Sunbelt conservatism is one of the facades American plutocracy uses to politically legitimize itself. In reality, average Americans have almost no influence on the political system. It is controlled by a financial elite, as recent Princeton study shows:
http://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf
To save time, an easier to read overview is here:
http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/civil-rights/214857-who-rules-america
Agree w most of that, though without Sunbelt businessmen and billionaires, the conservative movement of Goldwater and Reagan and all those think tanks and bogus foundations would not have existed to spread the neoliberal gospel…
Very true. It’s important to follow neoliberalism all the way back to its origins in Austrian School economics and its later promotion by the U. of Chicago beginning in the 1950s where people like Friedrich Hayek exerted a strong influence on neoliberal economists like Milton Friedman.
Ronald Reagan listed Hayek as among the two or three people who most influenced his philosophy and welcomed Hayek to the White House as a special guest. Margret That was also a devotee. Hayek and his associates were fanatic anti-Rooseveltians. The USA dismantled the New Deal after WWII while the Europeans strengthened their Social Democracies. This became a major historical divide between Europe and America and resulted in the quiet culture war that exists between the two continents..
And of course, when it comes to education and servicing “privileged little shits,” the USA with its private university system is in an entirely different league from Europe. Upon graduation the little shits move to Wall Street and Washington to run American plutocracy — a political system where average people have almost no influence. Our elites schools thus go beyond servicing privileged children and become part of a system of political and economic oppression.
Just read the review of Culture Crash in Slate by Evan Kindley, which comes across as fairly ironic given the things I’ve said here. Kindley has a Ph.D. from Princeton and teaches at Claremont McKenna, one of the most selective liberal arts colleges in America – a place that discretely caters to privileged children. In short, he is a product of our plutocratic educational system and strongly invested in its values.
Not too surprising to see Kindley speak of public arts funding as “government intervention,” and using reactionary buzz words about how artists have a sense of “entitlement” – an neoliberal way of saying “why don’t you go out and get a real job?”
Apparently we are to expect that artists are in the independently wealthy crowd — like so many of those students at Claremont McKenna…
Scott Timberg has challenged the establishment’s neo-liberal economic philosophy. We should expect that the plutocracy will to do a number on him.
Ha I appreciate the defense! I did find it hard, as someone still paying off his student loans, most of them from a state university, as a struggling freelancer who lost his home to foreclosure and recently totaled a 20-year-old Honda, to be called “entitled.”
Of the top 100 feeder high schools for Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, 94 are private.. They supply 20% of the students for these three universities, but represent 0.3% of the nation’s 31,700 high schools. All together 930 schools sent students to Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, but more than half of them sent less than 1%, as opposed to 20% for the top 100. The 94 private schools in the top 100 are extremely expensive. Most of their students are given a sense of entitlement from the day they are born. Our education system is classist and one of the fundamental foundations of American plutocracy.
Again, we see why private schools and universities are against the law in continental Europe. And we see the ironies when the American plutocracy has the audacity to talk about a sense of entitlement in middle class people.
I have read your piece and both interviews of Deresiewicz in Salon. Most of his observations seem quite right. You spotlight the bigger issues well. I imagine your book does more of the same for many associate issues.
In 1991, my daughter was accepted into Princeton at age 14. It was the closest college to our home and, with (mucho) financial aid, the cheapest. She worked hard in Molecular Biology, became Managing Editor of the Princeton Daily, and was greatly influenced by John McPhee and others in truly traditional liberal education ways. She made life-long friends with others not”entitled”. She interviewed Nat Hentoff and Jim Lee (of Marvel and DC); she wrote film reviews and a widely distributed gag Course Description for The Simpsons before the whole world discovered its treasures. For at least some of the student body, the elite education provided all the fabled opportunities that Deresiewicz and you rightly revere. My daughter and her friends never intended to become wealthy or”entitled.” I think they really enjoyed their elite education.
College does not seem very enjoyable in 2015.
When I was at Wesleyan in the late 80s/ early 90s, I was so much more interested in learning something — and there was so much to learn — and having fun than getting ready for Wall St or coming up with a killer app.
That said, as a middle class kid on financial aid, I was in some ways naive. I got a truly incredible education there, but I am still paying it off, and for middle-class kids younger than me, as state support has been cut, it’s gotten far worse. Were I looking at colleges today, I could NEVER go to a school like that.
Even if the overall trend William D. describes is true and his proposed solutions much needed, there are still many idealistic students and professors. Hardly anyone goes into classical music, theater, or dance with the idea they are going to be rich. In fact, they pretty much expect poverty. And its not so different in many academic fields. I was struck by how many unemployable post-docs continue to hang out in our universities and continue work and research with little or no pay. They are devoted to the work but have no where else to go. These economic conditions force students into fields that pay, and into obsessive careerism.
We should also note the truly massive changes that have been imposed on European universities based on the Bologna Process. Continental universities were known for very open, unstructured curricula which allowed students to engage in deeply cultured, long-term forms of study. Through the Bologna Process this has been changed to the pragamitc, market-oriented approach of American universities (also used by the UK and Ireland.) The problem’s William D. sees are thus now deeply embedded in Europe as well, and directly through American concepts. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bologna_Process