THE DEATH OF HILTON KRAMER IN MARCH, two days after his 84th
birthday, may seem to put a period to that vital, confident era of
postwar modernism that corresponded to America’s emergence as the
dominant power—or “hegemon” to use the currently favored jargon—of
the free world. In fact it was the era of the free world itself, an
idea that has gone out of fashion since it became polite to treat
the rival powers of Russia and China as if they were free
themselves and not just the rump of the same old brutal oligarchies
trading under a different name. While the free world was still a
going concern, however, Kramer was one of its greatest champions
against the “intellectuals” of the left who had made it their
business to obscure and denigrate all that made it free, including
the modernist tradition in the arts. Of that tradition he was also
the most prominent champion of his time, especially in defending it
against those whom he regarded as its illegitimate offspring among
the postmodernists.
At any rate, with his passing, more than just his own
unmistakable critical voice has been stilled. Writing in
Philanthropy Daily, William Schambra pointed out that the
New Criterion, the magazine Kramer co-founded with the
late Samuel Lipman in 1982 (and to which I am a longtime
contributor), also belongs to a different era—an era in which
conservative foundations took so expansive a view of the
conservative project that they understood it to comprehend the
promotion of conservative tastes as well as anti-communism and
economic liberty. “It is therefore difficult to imagine,” Mr.
Schambra writes,
where a Hilton Kramer and Sam Lipman would turn today, to fund a
project as remote as is The New Criterion from the
well-defined and carefully honed mission statements of our largest
conservative donors. In fact, the conservative movement in general
might be living off—and failing to replenish— the cultural capital
still with us in institutions like The New Criterion,
initiated during and left over from the era of broad-based
intellectual activism undertaken by [Michael] Joyce, [Richard]
Larry, [James] Piereson, and [Leslie] Lenkowsky, when they ran the
most significant foundations.
A lot of the problem, as Mr. Schambra recognizes, is anxiety on
the part of these foundations and their staffs about “donor
intent”—by which is meant the right of philanthropies founded by
conservatives to remain conservative. It is easy to cite examples
of the foundational version of the tendency described by
O’Sullivan’s First Law, namely, that “all organizations that are
not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.” Since the
Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie, MacArthur, and other big foundations
have all followed this well-worn path leftward, those which retain
some tether to the principles of their right-wing capitalist
founders are understandably concerned to keep their missions
narrowly defined and carefully monitored, preferably by means of
quantifiable “metrics,” in order to avoid a similar fate. For the
same reason, I think, they also recognize that it is wise to stay
well away from culture and the arts which, as I pointed out in
these pages last year (see “Preening to the Converted,”
TAS, April 2011), have become leftwing almost by
definition. But of course this is precisely why it is so important
to support the few who, following the example of Hilton Kramer,
continue to toil in the cultural fields even though they are of a
conservative persuasion and must endure even worse things than the
smug condescension that characterized so many of the posthumous
tributes to that great man.
Another reason why conservatives tend to see culture as alien
territory is what is called, invariably with pejorative intent,
élitism. As an apologist for what used to be called “high culture,”
Hilton was a proud élitist. But most conservatives nowadays
associate a social or a cultural élite with the political one so
memorably described by Angelo M. Codevilla in our July/August issue
just two years ago as “America’s Ruling Class.” Part of Mr.
Codevilla’s point, however, was that America’s supposed meritocracy
was really no such thing, that instead of the blindly graded
examinations throughout the system that make France a genuine
meritocracy (whatever else it may be), the social profiling by
which we mostly choose the undergraduate population at our élite
universities produces instead a privileged class whose title to
privilege depends less on genuine talent than on holding the right
opinions and adopting the right social attitudes. “Our ruling
class,” he wrote, “recruits and renews itself not through
meritocracy but rather by taking into itself people whose most
prominent feature is their commitment to fit in.” And “the more it
has dumbed itself down, the more it has defined itself by the
presumption of intellectual superiority.”
BY CHANCE, I HAVE LATELY HAD OCCASION to read The Rise of
the Meritocracy (1958) by Michael Young, later Lord Young of
Dartington, the British sociologist who first coined the term. It
is not a theoretical defense of meritocracy but a hard-hitting
satire against the whole concept, written in the assumed persona of
a naive technocrat congratulating the system that had produced him
for its perspicacity in so doing. “What a splendid result it is!”
this innocent burbles. “No longer is it just the brilliant
individual who shines forth; the world beholds for the first time
the spectacle of a brilliant class, the five per cent of the nation
who know what five per cent means.” In his old age Lord Young was
forever being annoyed by the unironic use of “meritocracy” by
politicians and others who simply assumed that it must denote a
desirable thing. Shortly before he died, he published an article in
the Guardian taking to task Tony Blair, then the prime
minister, for this lazy habit of mind:
It is good sense to appoint individual people to jobs on their
merit. It is the opposite when those who are judged to have merit
of a particular kind harden into a new social class without room in
it for others. Ability of a conventional kind, which used to be
distributed between the classes more or less at random, has become
much more highly concentrated by the engine of education. A social
revolution has been accomplished by harnessing schools and
universities to the task of sieving people according to education’s
narrow band of values.… The new class has the means at hand, and
largely under its control, by which it reproduces itself.
From the left, Lord Young anticipated Angelo Codevilla’s
argument from the right nearly a decade later, and both find an
echo in the new book by Charles Murray, Coming Apart (see
the review by William Tucker in our April issue), which does so
much to document the ways in which class distinctions in white
America have hardened almost into castes. Ironically, Mr. Murray
points to the relevance in this context of “merit” in its older
sense—not, that is, as mere academic talent but as the moral virtue
whose absence is associated with economic and social decline.
His argument has resonated with ordinary Americans of all
classes who have become dimly aware that incurring a ruinous load
of debt in one’s 20s in order to obtain a credential of limited
relevance to one’s subsequent career merely because it also
promises access to the élite is as outrageous an imposition on
talent and ambition as its promise is likely to prove illusory.
Rick Santorum was appealing to the same sense of vague and
unfocused discontent when, rather clumsily, he accused President
Obama of snobbery for holding out the plainly absurd prospect of
“college”—and, therefore, élite status—for everybody. It’s not that
our president is a snob, though he may be that too; it’s that he is
a fantasist and a con man promoting privilege for an influential
group of his own supporters on the bogus grounds that it will
eventually become privilege for everybody.
Of course, Mr. Obama owes his own election in large part to all
the media hyperbole about his braininess, which would have been of
much less effect without the unspoken equation of intelligence with
merit characteristic of the meritocracy. My favorite political
cartoon of the recently concluded primary season was one by Clay
Bennett that appeared in the Chattanooga Times Free Press
and was reprinted in the Washington Post. It showed a man
in a baseball cap who has just put a Rick Perry sign in the front
yard of his suburban bungalow. With the hammer still in his hand,
he says to his neighbor, who is leaning across the fence between
their two houses, “Electing smart people isn’t working.” It borders
on the heretical, nowadays, to suggest that electing smart people
even needs to “work”—that it is not, in fact, self-justificatory.
That’s because smart people, like other rent seekers, derive their
entitlement to power not from what they do but from what they are.
That’s also characteristic of the “intellectuals” against whom
Hilton Kramer did battle. He, at least, always understood that
intelligence was justly valued for its own sake and not as an
entitlement to power and status.
Of course, Mr. Obama owes his own election in large part to all
the media hyperbole about his braininess, which would have been of
much less effect without the unspoken equation of intelligence with
merit characteristic of the meritocracy.
