Basic Instinct

American Outlook, September 1, 2002

Joseph Epstein: Snobbery - The American Version

The Englishman said to me, “oh you are writing for an American magazine.” The eyebrow arched, the lip curled, the cliché was confirmed over a smugly sipped cup of tea. English snobbery, again. To the rest of the world, it is our defining vice (full disclosure: I’m also from the scepter’d isle), something as English as military defeat is French. Fair enough: mine is a country obsessed by class. Only in England could a humorous essay (published in the 1950s by one of the Mitfords, naturally) on the distinctions between the language (“U”) of the upper classes and that spoken by everyone else (“Non-U”) become a national obsession. Lavatory was “U,” toilet was (and, some would say, still is) a social catastrophe. Of course, such refinement should be no surprise in a nation with a sense of class so acute that, only a few years ago, it was usually possible to tell a man’s social origins by his socks (ideally dark blue or black, calf-length, and never, ever patterned).

But if snobbery is our vice, it isn’t ours alone. England’s trick was to market its snobbery as the best in the world, and then to put it to work. In this, if nothing else, Britain succeeded brilliantly. In his Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire, historian David Cannadine makes the case that the British colonizers often co-opted the “native” social hierarchy (medals all ’round!) into their own in order to assist in the preservation of colonial rule. As any reader of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim will know, class did not always trump race, but as a prop (in both senses) of the glittering imperial structure, it certainly played its part. Even today snobbery remains a useful weapon in London’s diplomatic arsenal, most notably in the awarding of knighthoods to the occasional friendly foreigners. Step forward, “Sir” Norman Schwarzkopf.

Snobbery, then, is not confined to those damp islands off the northwestern coast of Europe. In his entertaining new book, Snobbery: The American Version, author and Northwestern University lecturer Joseph Epstein gives credit where credit is due (“the English are more practiced in snobbery than any other people”), but chooses not to linger too long in Albion. The main focus of his book is snootiness on the western side of the pond, “its perplexities and its perils, its complications and not least its comedy.” On a more serious note (this is, after all, a book by an American academic), he aims to examine “whether snobbery is a constituent part of human nature or instead an aberration brought about by any particular social conditions.” He succeeds admirably in the analysis of the first part of his objective, stumbles over the second, and has problems too with a third, no less important question: what exactly is a snob?

That last difficulty puts Epstein in good company. In his 1848 collection, The Book of Snobs, Thackeray complains that although “the word snob has taken a place in our honest English vocabulary,” it can’t be defined. “We can’t say what it is, any more than we can define wit or humor or humbug; but we know what it is.” Epstein has a similar problem. His notion of the “essence of snobbery” (“arranging to make yourself superior at the expense of other people”) seems to miss the point. Ray Kroc, no snob icon but the man who made McDonald’s what it is today, reportedly said that if he saw a competitor drowning, he would put a live fire hose in his mouth. Superiority is often achieved at the expense of someone else. Such leapfrogging has taken our species from mud huts to the moon. But how superior is that superiority? Epstein writes that “snobbery often entails taking a petty, superficial, or irrelevant distinction and running with it.” He’s right, and if anything is the essence of snobbery, that would be it. Some of his examples, however, are strangely unpersuasive.

Contrary to what Epstein suggests, the driver of a BMW 740i is indeed quite entitled to feel “quietly, assuredly better than the poor vulgarian in his garish Cadillac.” As is acknowledged elsewhere in this book, good taste is not the same as snobbery. Equally, whatever Epstein may think, the parent of a daughter “studying art history at Harvard” need not be ashamed of the “calm pleasure” with which he greets the news that the child of an acquaintance is able to manage only a major in photojournalism at Arizona State University. That parent has, in all probability, earned that moment of satisfaction. The snob is not distinguished from the man of taste by his ability and willingness to discern the difference between a Beamer and a Caddy but by the use he makes of that discernment. Coming to the conclusion that Harvard is better than ASU is not necessarily the mark of the snob: treating an ASU graduate worse, merely because of where he went to college, most surely is.

These lapses into a dismaying (and, one hopes, insincere) egalitarianism are the exception rather than the rule in this book. Epstein soon finds himself on safer ground. Like Thackeray (a comparison that he would, doubtless, accept with “calm pleasure”), Epstein is rather better at identifying snobs than at analyzing snobbery. From a vantage point of somewhat tweedy, curmudgeonly disdain, he offers his readers an enjoyably vicious introduction to the different types of American snob. They are presented as a ludicrous and absurd spectacle, lampooned with a vim and biliousness that is all too rare in an era wherein there is no offense greater than giving offense. Among Epstein’s victims are Susan Sontag (“when young, a knockout American woman who did a fairly decent impression of a European intellectual”), PC “virtucrats” (“What makes the virtucrat a snob is that not only is he smug about the righteousness of his views, but he imputes bad faith to anyone who doesn’t share them. Upon this imputed bad faith he erects his own superiority.”), Gore Vidal (“Self-love, which in him never goes unrequited, is sufficient for this remarkably confident snob.”), and foodies (“When did my dentist begin using the word pasta?”).

Epstein appears to concede that he himself may be something of a snob, but it would be wrong to dismiss his tastes (there are, for example, touches of PBS, academe, and the hair shirt in his rather ostentatious lack of interest in material gain) as routine examples of intellectual snobbery. As he explains elsewhere in the book:

High standards far from being snobbish are required to maintain decency in life. When the people who value these things are called snobs, the word is usually being used in a purely sour-grapes way. Elitist is almost invariably another sour-grapes word, at least when used to denigrate people who insist on a high standard. The distinction is that the elitist desires the best; the snob wants other people to think he has, or is associated with, the best. Delight in excellence is easily confused with snobbery by the ignorant.

Quite. The mere fact that he is so obviously comfortable using a shockingly abrasive word like ignorant tells the reader all he needs to know about Joseph Epstein.

Epstein is even prepared to risk being labeled snobbish about snobbery with his suggestion that American snobbery has itself gone down in the world. In a key chapter (“O WASP, Where Is Thy Sting-a-Ling?”), he chronicles how America’s old White Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite walked away from power (and, as he notes in a brilliant, brutal aside, “came away disliked, diminished, maybe even a little despised for having done so”), leaving snobbery unanchored, “setting it afloat if not aloft, to alight on objects other than those connected exclusively with social class,” including, presumably, pasta.

But that’s an exaggeration. Class sensibility was no longer so rooted in ethnicity or tradition as in the past, but, as Paul Fussell showed in his book Class (1983), it was flourishing well into the Reagan era. It continues to do so today, but, so far as snobs are concerned, class has lost much of its glitter. The years of fluid hierarchy and social change have taken their toll. Old notions of caste no longer suffice for truly effective one-upmanship. In response, snobs did what they had to. They evolved.

As snobbery is such a basic instinct, this was only to be expected. Yet, despite the fact that the force and existence of such an instinct explains much of what Epstein describes, he seems curiously unwilling to accept it. In an attempt designed, presumably, to satisfy his objective of seeing whether snobbery can be linked to “particular social conditions,” Epstein asserts that “snobbery as we know it today, [the] snobbery meant to shore up one’s own sense of importance and to make others sorely feel their insignificance” was rarely seen before the nineteenth century. The reason for its expansion, he argues, was the spread of democracy. By unsettling a previously fixed social order, democracy increased the level of insecurity within society. Epstein quotes H. L. Mencken’s observation that, socially speaking, the American is on a perpetually icy slope, wanting to climb “a notch or two,” but “with no wall of caste to protect him if he slips.” As an ersatz class system, snobbery could assist in the struggle to survive within a society that had become suddenly, and frighteningly, competitive.

It is an ingenious theory, but it fails. Snobbery, and its simpering handmaiden, deference, could be witnessed long before the emergence of mass democracy. Epstein need have no doubt that it is, indeed, “a constituent part of human nature.” Let’s take one example. “Novelists,” writes Epstein, “are our keenest sociologists,” and there were none keener than Jane Austen. At the time she was writing, the ballot box was yet to cast much of a shadow over England’s country gentry, and yet her novels are filled with snobbish tension and social unease. And that’s only natural. People have always understood that no social order can be guaranteed to endure forever. Our species has emerged through millennia of turmoil, conflict, disaster, and war, and the lesson it has drawn has been simple: there is never, ever a bad time to be jockeying for position.

If there’s one person who knows about jockeying for position, it is a snob. On its face, Epstein’s comment that “there is something deeply antisocial about the snob” seems puzzling. There is, on the contrary, no one more social. Lacking the talent to succeed on his own merits, the snob is forced to manipulate social convention in such a way as to ensure that he achieves that all-too-necessary commodity, status. Epstein’s complaint, however, is subtler: it is not the snob who is antisocial, but his methods. The snob, he grumbles, “is, in a profound sense, in business for himself,” to which the obvious retort is, “Who isn’t?” Where snobbery can be said to be antisocial is in the misdirection of effort and ability that it implies; but like it or not, its existence is inevitable in any functioning society: a successful organism will always attract parasites.

It is difficult to avoid the feeling that Epstein’s disapproval of his snooty subjects colors his other main theme: that snobs have no fun. His description of the miseries of the snob’s life is bleak indeed. Epstein contends that the snob has only one standard, “that of comparison,” and that this approach to life can bring no “lengthy contentment” because “comparison inevitably implies competition.” There’s something to this; the snob’s self-esteem may be unusually susceptible to the opinions of others. But this is only a question of degree: almost all of us worry about how we are seen by the outside world. Besides, what’s the problem with competition? Epstein’s notion that competition is automatically an ordeal is a view that I suspect (perhaps snobbishly) only an academic could hold. Competition can be agony (check out the scene in Bret Easton Ellis’s repulsive but perceptive novel American Psycho, in which various Wall Street types compare the quality of their business cards), but it can also be ecstasy (Ray Kroc again). It depends on the nature not of the game (which can be snobbish or not), but of the individual who is playing it.

The truth is that, disapproving of snobbery as he does, Epstein desperately wants to believe that snobs must, by definition, be unhappy. In this he is doomed to be disappointed. Like all primates, we are social animals, and therefore status in itself—deserved or not—can be a source of profound satisfaction. The rewards from the superficial can run very, very deep.

It’s not “fair,” of course, but so far as snobs are concerned, that’s just the point.