America Has Too Much of the Wrong Elitism
Editor’s Note
This essay from Glenn Ellmers is a response to Alex Priou’s “How to Be an Elitist,” which argues that liberal education and the great books offer a necessary defense against the mediocrity of democratic mass culture. Priou’s original essay appears here. Ellmers challenges Priou’s diagnosis, arguing that America’s deeper problem is not insufficient elitism but the ideological conformity of its ruling institutions.
I read with great interest my friend Alex Priou’s “How to Be an Elitist” — an invigorating call to escape our growing mental torpor and spiritual malaise by returning to the great books. He discusses a one-day seminar, sharing the title of the essay, in which students discuss writings by Winston Churchill and Leo Strauss that address “how modern mass democracies tend to degrade political and educational institutions.”
Priou is certainly right that our best universities foster lazy complacency and regard intellectual boldness with suspicion. I commend Alex’s efforts, and the efforts of his school, the University of Austin, to provide an alternative. But I would like to suggest that there are some important considerations that the essay overlooks. This paragraph is what I take to be the central argument:
Herein lies the paradox of a regime such as ours. The best thing about freedom is that you can live any life you want. And the worst thing about freedom is that you can live any life you want. We have jettisoned the sclerotic hierarchies of old as arbitrary, but with them have gone the sensible, natural hierarchies to which they appealed. Baby and bathwater thus share the same fate. The cream still rises, to be sure, yet it is decidedly in spite of our collective tendencies, not because of them. We dare not say publicly to the children of others what we say privately to our own, that they are wasting their time, their talents, and their opportunities on idle pastimes and entertainment, the evil end that lays claim to our leisure. Vigilant opposition to the lowering of expectations, to the flattening of all heights, is required, if more is to be made of oneself than a cog in the commodification of one’s attention for likes, views, and clicks. To live well today, one must first stand athwart.
