JOLLY DAYS

Entitled Mediocrity

The PBS show last night surveying some young Chinese to give an idea about Chinese society is related to this article by a Yale English professor, which grapples with the same material, but with reference to elite schools in America: the conflict between social ambition, status seeking (via money), and the question of value, of social good, of the interior life.

The first disadvantage of an elite education… is that it makes you incapable of talking to people who aren’t like you. Elite schools pride themselves on their diversity, but that diversity is almost entirely a matter of ethnicity and race. With respect to class, these schools are largely—indeed increasingly—homogeneous.

In terms of the value systems expressed in elite schools,

I’ve been struck, during my time at Yale, by how similar everyone looks. You hardly see any hippies or punks or art-school types, and at a college that was known in the ’80s as the Gay Ivy, few out lesbians and no gender queers. The geeks don’t look all that geeky; the fashionable kids go in for understated elegance. Thirty-two flavors, all of them vanilla. The most elite schools have become places of a narrow and suffocating normalcy.

It is not normalcy, but conformity that he is describing. He goes on,

The elite like to think of themselves as belonging to a meritocracy, but that’s true only up to a point. Getting through the gate is very difficult, but once you’re in, there’s almost nothing you can do to get kicked out. Not the most abject academic failure, not the most heinous act of plagiarism, not even threatening a fellow student with bodily harm—I’ve heard of all three—will get you expelled. The feeling is that, by gosh, it just wouldn’t be fair—in other words, the self-protectiveness of the old-boy network, even if it now includes girls. Elite schools nurture excellence, but they also nurture what a former Yale graduate student I know calls “entitled mediocrity.”

Those who are seekers…

It’s no wonder that the few students who are passionate about ideas find themselves feeling isolated and confused. I was talking with one of them last year about his interest in the German Romantic idea of bildung, the upbuilding of the soul. But, he said—he was a senior at the time—it’s hard to build your soul when everyone around you is trying to sell theirs.

The Chinese youth who are trying to make it in their own society, a crude variant of Western capitalism, where value is money, are now facing the same quandary. In the interstices in Chinese society, as in American society, you see hope. One of the young Chinese, a doctor, seemed to have societal good as at least part of his calculation. The close bonds and deep respect for tradition and parents, the sense of societal context, is something I fear will be lost in China as it dances forward, unexamined, to the familiar tune of wealth as status.