Campus Life with Elitists of the Left, Right and Center

"You write stories for the Brown Daily Herald," Professor R. Burr Litchfield explained to me in the middle of one of his lectures, "and pigeons fly in the window and poop on the desks." He was correct, yet he pointedly avoided mentioning what Ernie Hemingway and Andy Bernstein '93 used to do to pigeons. Leaving us historians to ponder the perishable, opaque, unexplicit evidence of their passing, the birds flew off to demonstrate Litchfield's Theory of Heraldry to columnist Meg van Achtenberg, the one remaining person who, they hoped, could weave their respective experiences into a seamless postmodern narrative ringing with coherent meaning. Not finding her at home, they left this campus an even more alien, baffling place for those who cannot accept that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in their philosophy.

They, in turn, analyzing and pigeonholing everyone's every move, make this a more interesting place for the rest of us, propelling us to define ourselves in self-defense. Faced with more stereotypes than we ever dreamed existed, people here have to speak on behalf of groups in which we ourselves are atypical. Everyone here either breaks a widespread stereotype or perpetuates a false one: at Brown the average Southerner is Jewish, the average Washingtonian is white, the typical Asian-American is affluent. But I discovered the biggest stereotype of all at my first anti-racism workshop, when the coordinator cautioned that I could speak only as a rich suburban white kid like himself. While his assumptions are probably true about most Brown students, they make the many whites who don't fit the wonder-bread mold invisible - even to each other. The most painful thing one can say to any category of people is simply that they don't really exist, except perhaps as an irrelevant lower, deviant, or self-denying form of the "standard" culture.

This is why I bristle when my housemate calls me white, even though I call myself that. My close extended family's white identity is less related to income, genetics, or pigment than one might think. White means two things for us: a social caste role which has meaning only in relation to the black caste, and a geographical, Protestant culture which proudly defines itself against most of the things "white" means to affluent Northerners.

When Paige Cox '89 said, "I never knew I was the other until I came here," I instantly knew what she meant, though I had never heard of "the other." Being overtly Southern here is not a healthy experience, but no Southerner who has been through a place like this will ever again impose ethnocentrism on anyone else. Most Northerners here, with the innocent cruelty of children, speak of us like something out of a (non-Southern-produced) movie or cartoon. Our manners of speech are so different that even I cannot maintain my cultural relativism in classes where the most rude, thoughtless interruptions and posturing drown out all attempts at respectful, dignified discourse.

I am fabulously wealthy compared to most Americans, and excruciatingly destitute compared to most Brown students, so I guess that makes me middle-class. Because I went to a decent college, most people of a certain class back home will always presume that I am a pitiful, unwhole human being, incapable of living a well-rounded normal working life, at least until proven otherwise. Meanwhile they get to give me lectures on "real life," whether they know me or not. As self-destructive as their superstitions are, they have observed generations of educated cosmopolitan people who are proudly ignorant of ordinary people and things, who avoid all knowledge of the skills that sustain life, yet can move into an area and instantly feel at home and demand that everyone else conform to them.

Such people used to claim that their culture served the true interests of the poor, but growing numbers are getting in touch with their real feelings about them and espousing an overt, honest elitism. Though they don't label themselves, they're here. You encounter them in conversations, incessantly mentioning Madison while really thinking of Hamilton and Burke, and in classes, solemnly reminding everyone that of course society needs an elite.

This has gained vogue along with the unimaginative defeatism which holds that our fundamental values are incompatible - for example, liberty and equality. Since the furthest extremes of left and right like to hear this, it is seldom challenged even by moderates, who now see moderation as a 50-50 tradeoff between two extremes, rather than as standing for some unifying principle. Yet America enshrines liberty because it is an equal human right, and equality inescapably implies liberty - if none of us is above another, then no one or two or billion people can govern others without their consent.

A related fashionable defeatism concludes that ecology is necessarily elitist. This appeals to pure elitists, Leninists, greener-than-thou ultraists, genuine liberal guilt trippers who want company, and especially would-be populist conservatives who would have us believe that my friends and I, with our army boots and fourth-hand backpacks, are oppressing the common folk who just want the government to build more lakes and roads for their $60,000 powerboats and RVs. Certain business interests have good reasons for wanting us to believe that thrift and knowledge are unattainable by "real people."

The elitists are also isolated in a way that is new, at least to me. I grew up thinking university students were starving paupers, and those who are closest to me still fit the profile. Yet the public, and the administration, clearly see Brown students as immature people with more time and money than they can use. The elitists are rarely reminded that some of them are here because better students couldn't afford to come, while many more of us owe our luck to the under-education of brighter, poorer contemporaries.

Thus insulated, perhaps they can't see that proletarian anti-intellectualism is not natural, but learned. My cousins weren't born thinking history is boring and poetry effeminate - it takes years of training to get that stupid. I have been called anti-intellectual for using plain saxon words in my accent, and elitist for insisting on clear thought, grammar, and a sense of history, but I would reverse the charges. I know that anyone who understands football can understand the exclusionary rule. I have some idea of how much potential brilliance this country wastes.

What can I do about it? So far, I only do what is necessary for other reasons. I don't treat strangers as friends or vice-versa, I don't act servile in service jobs, and I treat others in such positions as the independent, perceptive people they usually are. I have spoken up in my grating accent in seminars, and read Dante on the plentiful breaks at my municipal hydrant-testing, pipe-laying, dealer-chauffeuring job. So far, it hasn't got me killed, and it might have made a few people think. We who are stretched between two or more worlds have a penchant for blowing up all our bridges at once, but a few charitable observers might find us especially credible by virtue of being unexpected. Just by openly being who we think we are, we have the power to make long-established categories look ridiculous, suggesting that this really is one world, throughout which consistent standards can be upheld.