Customer Reviews

In Defense of Elitism

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The best thing about "In Defense of Elitism" is its bluntness and mostly unapologetic tone (I don't know why Henry feels compelled to trot out his liberal credentials). The greatest flaw of the book is that Henry sorely overlooks a glaring irony: most of the tenets of cultural illiberalism and "identity politics" that he rightly assails were formulated and propagated by the elite. What Henry is really attacking is not egalitarianism but a self-insulated elite that panders to a misguided notion of egalitarianism. It is not the "elite" but the majority of middle-class America that has held most steadfastly to the individualist ethos that Henry praises, and it is only now that the "elite" is beginning to "rediscover" values that they have long dismissed as products of the sexist, racist, ignorant, and philistine masses.

Interestingly, Henry has something in common with the liberal "elite" he despises, which is a contempt for the middle-class aesthetic. He reveals this in the seventh chapter, easily the worst of the book. He includes both sensationalistic news coverage and family photo albums in his indictment of our culture of celebrity (often appropriately called "star-f***ing") without distinguishing between the pernicious and the harmless. His tirade against karaoke is just plain weird--does he object to having fun?

Perhaps Henry's book should have been titled "In Defense of Merit" instead. His main thesis seems to be that people should look up to the successful and seek to emulate them, not destroy them, and that the aristocracy of talent has an obligation to encourage our better angels.

Unfortunately, this laudable reassertion of the individualist/meritocratic ethos is clouded by an authoritarian impulse that is more in line with the traditional notion of nobility rather than a society based on objective rewards and punishments. The problem of elitism is that all too often people appoint themselves as elites and then seek to impose their will on the rest of society like some Niezstchean superman. If you truly believe that you have ideas and values that are superior, the best way to enforce these ideas and values in a manner consistent with a (classical) liberal society is to SET AN EXAMPLE. Instead of sitting back and whining about how the masses are "uncultured" or turning yourself into a social hermit, get out there and DO SOMETHING about it. If your ideas and values are truly the best, the great filtering process of time will serve you and people will come to you. Henry never provides a call to action in a clear and forceful way, and by this failing his book merely adds to the cacophony of complaint.

In two sittings, I became familiar with one of the least appreciated and most forthright books of the decade. I do hope it is one day revisited, for William Henry has written what can only be described as a blistering attack on the self-righteousness and intellectual bankruptcy of the contemporary American scene. Inflicting his venomous attacks on both the Left and Right, Henry demonstrates that what threatens America is not a lack of "morality," but rather an unhealthy obsession with mediocrity. He sees Americans for the fat, complacent, utterly jaded people that they are; childishly cynical, self-promoting, and appallingly ignorant of anything even remotely resembling enlightened thought. Henry rightly indicts our leanings toward softness and the elevation of a "bottom up" philosophy; a process which uses a perverted populism to attack achievement, distinction, and the very idea of quality. Postmodernism certainly leads the pack in terms of blame for this mess, but there are enough failing grades to go around.

Henry pursuasively demythologizes the sacred creed of the American Left. By setting his sights on affirmative action, Afrocentrism, multiculturalism, and other ideological myths, and examining them from a liberal's perspective--he calls himself a "card-carrying" member of the ACLU, among other things--Henry faces correctness with power and wit. Short on scholarly citation, but long on anecdotal insights, it is a challenging, even encouraging, book to those of us who defy the mediocre uniformity of Liberal America's education, politics and art. It is a call to defy crudeness, ignorance, and the perpetuation of lies and mythologies that trap people in the culture of dependance. The greatness of America was the promise of rewarding the spirit of excellence. In many ways, this is what Henry demands from us. This book will become suggested reading for all my graduate education students.

As far as I can tell, Henry's thesis is that in order to achieve true egalitarianism, you must have a form of elitism. By elitism, he means the making of distinctions and then, sometimes, ranking the things you have distinguished. I expect this book is infuriating to just about everyone who reads it. Progrssives will cringe at some of his social policy suggestions. Conservatives will hate his laissez-faire attitude towards things like gay rights. And most readers will feel flayed by his discussion about how to label himself, since some portion of his views appear to be repugnant to everyone.

And yet, it is an enormously thought-provoking work. Henry was passionate about his ideas, and the prose is driven by this passion into readable, urgent passages. As fas as I can tell, Henry was a moderate, and an old-fashioned liberal. And yet he believed some things which are generally believed by modern-day conservatives. So what was he? His confusion about that seems to have been more due to how the word "Liberal" has evolved its meaning over the last 150 years than to anything else. This confusion lead him to sit down and write this book, where he tries to work out (in front of his readers) just what he believes and how that fits with his other beliefs and activities.

The question of how to make egalitarianism work is one of the great open questions of the 21st century -- it is not even clear that egalitarianism *can* be made to work. This book provides one man's answer to the question of what a working egalitarianism might look like.

I sure don't agree with all his conclusions. He has latched onto at least one serious insight, and articulated it clearly. Where the book loses focus is in his floundering around to justify some of his political positions. Nevertheless, this book is a smoothly written path into the heart of some of the critical dilemmas of the modern world. And I don't have to agree with all his answers to value Henry's framing of the questions.

William Henry was a two time winner of the Pulitzer Prize (once for reporting, once for criticism) and served as Time Magazine's culture critic. Apparently, he was a pretty standard issue left wing intellectual. But modern American life gnawed away at him until he wrote this brief, cogent attack on the mindless egalitarianism that he saw destroying the nation. In a nutshell: elitism assumes equality of opportunity and then places emphasis on excellence and success while egalitarianism, instead, emphasizes equality of results--success is no longer a good thing and excellence is suspect. The egalitarian assumes that differences in performance are the result of insidious discriminatory factors rather than an inevitable outcome dictated by natural talents and tries to both handicap those who perform well and coddle those who perform poorly.

Harris does a creditable job of surveying the popular culture to marshall facts for his argument. The sheer weight of the data he offers on topics like affirmative action, Afrocentrism, Women's studies, social promotion, etc., makes a pretty irrefutable case that America's cultural elites have ceased to be elitist and have abandoned themselves to a set of political standards based not on quality, but on a system of political entitlements. Now, this is hardly a new argument. Indeed it was one of Alexis de Tocqueville's chief concerns; that a nation that was so obsessed with equality would eventually abandon the idea of equality of opportunity in favor of the demand for equality of results. No, it's not the novelty of the argument that makes this book noteworthy. What makes the book fascinating is the hilarious psychodrama which unfolds as Mr. Henry adopts this conservative argument, while trying to justify himself to his liberal cohort.

Before he really gets going, Mr. Henry offers us his Left bona fides:

I am fully aware that much of what I deplore as retrograde tribalism or wrongheaded moralism is regarded by large sectors of the population as progress. I am also painfully conscious that taking the postures I do may condemn me to accommodating some pretty strange bedfellows--racists, male supremacists, patriotic zealots, reactionaries, religious exotics, and assorted other creeps. I confess to being a white Ivy-educated male who is married and lives in the suburbs (in kind of a nice house, actually.) Yet I am not a right-winger, and I hope I am not a nut. I am still a registered Democrat, a recipient of awards for civil rights writing from the National Conference of Christians and Jews, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation and the Unity in Media contest based at historically black Lincoln University. I am a card-carrying member of the ACLU and a donor to abundant left-of-center social causes. My boyhood heroes were Hubert Humphrey and Martin Luther King, Jr. At a party in Washington some months ago I hurriedly crossed the room to avoid even being introduced to Pat Buchanan, and my wife and I have donated copiously to the electoral opponents of Jesse Helms.

No, seriously. I didn't make this up. I know it reads like some kind of Stalinist Show Trial self-denunciation or cocktail banter from a Tom Wolfe character, but the guy actually wrote all that. And as the book goes along, we're treated to all kinds of tidbits about his black or gay friends and his deep sensitivities for the unfortunate, usually just before he sticks the shiv in some representative of a minority group. It's a hoot.

But the end result is that, contrary to the title, while he presents a devastating attack on egalitarianism, he lacks the courage of his convictions and does not honestly defend the elitist values that he espouses. He backs away from the logic of his own arguments and refuses to explore why the Elite Culture of which he is so fond is fundamentally a product of white Christian straight men. He ignores the fact that the rise of egalitarianism and the pace of the attack on elitism have quickened in the seven or eight decades when the franchise and political power have been rapidly expanded to the very people whose work product he suggests does not measure up to traditional elite standards of excellence. Watching the virtual self-hypnosis that he had to go through just to go out as far on a conservative limb as he did, it is no wonder that he could drag himself no further. No wonder, but it is too bad.

Mr. Henry died shortly after the publication of this book, so we'll never know whether he eventually would have been able to face the full import of his own argument. Instead, he leaves behind a very entertaining, though ultimately incomplete, polemic against the sorry state of American culture.

GRADE: B-

This book argues that some people are more competent than others and that some cultures are more valuable than others. Henry discusses the manner in which American institutions elevate egalitarianism, derogate elitism, and end up as incubators of mediocrity. He offers seven criteria by which one can identify a superior human culture. In doing so he offers mettlesome arguments against many of the dogmas that afflict the academe and the rest of our society. He offers the idea that people should be judged not on politicized identifiers like gender or race but on merit alone, and he defines, rather plausibly, what "merit" is. Even if you don't agree with Henry, or if you're annoyed with him for speaking up in this manner, you have to admire his precise and unafraid writing. He is someone you must consider.

This book is a stand out in the annals of efforts to show why trying to equalize everything ends up as a failure and a morass of crudeness and mediocrity. Unlike many conservatives who just take the secular culture and the ACLU to task this book is actually thoughtful, balanced and not trying to bring back the good old days of cardboard piety. Instead it argues for a call to excellency and standards and a renaissance of deeper, classical learning rather than a preoccupation with fads and pop psychology. It shows that if you throw every whim, every garbled nonsense and every passing crisis made personal philosophy into the same pan you don't end up with a melting pot but a politically correct wasteland without brilliance and diversity. It isn't an indictment of liberal advances rather than an outcry for forfeiting the dumbing down of the citizenry and that goes for the one track minded fundamentalists as well as the grudge bearing self-worshippers of every stripe.

America's vital lie is egalitarianism, claims William A. Henry III, and with a "rising tide of mediocrity" what we need is to call to excellence, as well as the renewed confidence to say that some ideas, people and things are simply better than others. In other words, we need more elitism. In this well reasoned (though not rigorously argued) treatise, Henry's unflinching conservative opinions will no doubt infuriate some, especially as he applies his central thesis to multiculturalists, feminists, affirmative activists, and others. But he provides some thought provoking arguments that I thought made the book worth reading.

Henry begins by outlining his views of elitism, which he believes has been unfairly derided. He believes that at its core, elitism embraces excellence, not snobbery. Realizing that, we should reclaim the confidence needed to sort out, rank, and decide between competing ideas and values. Elitist societies uphold objective standards, embrace rationalism, and respect accomplishment. They also believe that competition brings out the best in people more than coddling does, and that people who make the most of themselves and contribute the most should be rewarded for their achievements.

Those ideas aren't pervasive today as Henry would like. Instead, many embrace the notion that "everyone is pretty much alike, that self-fulfillment is more important than objective achievement, that the common man is always right & needs no interpreters or guides for his thinking, and that society should succoring its losers rather than honoring and encouraging its winners to achieve more and therefore benefit everyone." If we believe that everyone is equal, then success and failures are anomalies, and therefore luck determines our fate more than hard work, talent, intelligence, or initiative. Rugged individualism & self-reliance falls out of fashion, and is replaced by an "entitlement mentality." Objectivity & rationalism are viewed as cultural artifacts, no more valid than intuition or other more primal ways of viewing the world. We believe that

"all of the children are above average," much like in Garrison Keillor's fictional Lake Wobegon, despite that fact that our children's test scores are falling relative to children in other nations.

Although the Declaration of Independence proclaims that "All men are created equal," Henry believes it's been a grand folly to take that idea to the extreme, seeking not just equality in a legal sense, but also equality of outcomes in every field. People are not equal - some people are brilliant, some dim, some hearty, some handicapped, some slothful, some productive. And as a result, some of society's rewards are distributed unequally. But we don't know what to do with inherent inequalities in the egalitarian, democratic USA. We assume that "fair" competition would result in all groups sharing equally in society's rewards, and that any differences must be the result of an unfair system.

In the end, Henry's arguments are sound, and worth reading and considering. But this is by no means a balanced book, and that's why I didn't find his arguments more persuasive. He doesn't acknowledge the complexity of some of the issues he discusses, nor does he anticipate counter-arguments and refute them. For example, he believes in providing equal opportunity to pursue excellence, but ignores the historical (and sometimes legally sanctioned) lack of opportunity for women, blacks, immigrants, etc.

Society will always struggle with what to do with the successful, talented, or lucky versus the poor, short-changed, and unlucky. Ultimately, the extent to which we correct these discrepancies requires that we know how much of one's success is due to individual choices, and how much due to random chance, and how much due to society's help or hindrance. Separating these influences is a difficult if not impossible task, and thus the debate between egalitarianism and elitism will no doubt continue.

People who say the word "elite" with a sneer have no concept of what it really means. Mr. Henry explains what I have long suspected -- that being "elite" is not the same thing as being a snob. This is an excellent book that I recommend for anyone who gets the two concepts confused.

I love this book because it's praise of meritocracy flies in the face of political correctness. William Henry would no doubt agree with Margaret Thatcher's theory that not all men are created equal. Some of smarter or more ambitious than others. It is these stalwarts of society who lift up the rest of us.