Elizabeth Bennett and the Ideal of the "Accomplished Young Lady"

It is a commonplace to praise Jane Austen for her insight into the "manners" of the society of her time. I have to admit that, as is so often the case with the received wisdom about literary figures of that standing, I found myself a skeptic. Certainly I recognized that Austen has been a font of information about the life of provincial English gentry (I think, for example, of how Thomas Piketty made good use of Sense and Sensibility to explain matters of income, wealth and inequality in Capital in the Twenty-First Century), but her outlook generally struck me as extremely conventional--as tends to be the case with those writers who get to be so exalted, perhaps in the Anglosphere more than elsewhere. (More than the great continental traditions of which I know, for example, those writers occupying the highest pedestals in the English-speaking world tend to be "Establishment poets," with the esteem for Austen in particular oft-noted as a matter of the nostalgia many of the hyper-privileged have for a genteel hierarchical society in which the lower orders are scarcely seen, still less often heard, and even less often mentioned, at least so far as the never very observant elite notices.)

Still, the dialogue about the idea of the "accomplished young lady" in Pride and Prejudice made me rethink that posiiton. Said dialogue began with Mr. Bingley's remarking with characteristic credulousness how it is beyond him that "young ladies can have patience to be so very accomplished as they all are," for he is "sure I never heard a young lady spoken of for the first time, without being informed that she was very accomplished." Of course, his sister and Mr. Darcy proceed to correct his misapprehension, setting a clear standard for what they think ought to merit recognition as "accomplishment," according to which the truly accomplished young lady "must have a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing, and the modern languages," while improving her mind continuously "by extensive reading," and besides this "possess[ing] a certain something in her air and manner of walking, the tone of her voice, her address and expressions."

The point made Darcy remarks that he has only met six women in his life who meet this standard of accomplishment--at which declaration Elizabeth Bennett expresses surprise that, with the bar set so high, he can actually ever have met any, for she "never saw such a woman . . . such capacity, and taste, and application, and elegance, as you describe, united'" in a single person.

Predictably Elizabeth's remark did not go over well with that stuffed-shirt Darcy, and a little unpleasantness later the conversation is at an end. Still, as I said, it resonated with me--because of what this "accomplishment" signifies, namely the attainment of a certain leisure-class ideal of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure, testifying to great wealth at the disposal of oneself or one's family. After all, where was one to get the time, the money, to become so accomplished, especially without any sort of practical use for all the skills and knowledge acquired so laboriously and expensively in mind? Only a very, very few had all that--such that they were a way of advertising how privileged one was, and gulling the simple into feeling deeply inferior. Moreover, because even the few who have the time and money are not necessarily going to find the actual business of acquiring all the elements of "accomplishment" to their taste, one was unlikely to meet anyone who had it "all," or even came close--while easily encountering a great many pretenders looking to impress simpletons.

That admiration for "accomplishment" of this kind, accomplishment which screams upper-class privilege not in spite of but because of its lack of usefulness; and the belief that such people are in some deep way going far beyond life's wildly unequal distribution of opportunity "superior"; remains very much with us. As much as ever I am struck by how Hollywood hacks, ever the raging conformists no matter how much culture warriors condemn their alleged "liberalism," strive to impress on us the idea that some character--because they are wealthy and of "the elite"--is superior to us in the audience, and to do it in the exact same ways that Bingley and Darcy talked about, like advertising implausible musical or linguistic skills (they always play the piano beautifully, they are always polyglots), or past reading (able to recite literary classics from their invariably photographic memories). Meanwhile, any number of people lie about those things--like their musical knowledge, the number of languages they speak, the reading they have done.

Alas, I suspect very few recognize the soundness of Austen's instincts when she expresses irony toward this fantasy of "accomplished" gentility--and fewer still have the benefit of equally sound instincts as they look at the drivel splashed across the screen today.

"The Habit of Invidious Comparison"

One of Thorstein Veblen's more memorable traits as a writer was his constantly coining striking phrases simply by calling things what they are. Indeed, in his classic story of fascism-come-to-America It Can't Happen Here Sinclair Lewis' protagonist Doremus Jessup lamented to himself that the young people of his day were "[g]etting their phrases from the comic strips instead of from Shakespeare and the Bible and Veblen" (emphasis added).

One of those phrases of Veblen's that particularly stuck in my memory was the "habit of invidious comparison"--the habit of judging one thing, and especially one person, against one another not merely for the sake of better understanding their qualities or making rationalistic practical choices, but the hierarchy-obsessed establishment of some order of precedence in which one is "better" and the other "worse" that can only leave those below envying those on the top (hence, "invidious"), and this all the time, as a matter of course, because that is just what they do. Raised in his book The Theory of the Leisure Class Veblen identified that habit with said "leisure class"--and in turn, with the barbarian values that this exemplifies, not least their explanation of outcomes (the spoils of the hunt and the raid) in terms of a fuzzy notion of personal prowess rather than in any rationalistic way.

In this day and age, in which people brought up in a country that is officially a republic, which they will tell you has no social classes, and in which all are supposed to have been "created equal," will completely unthinkingly speak of one person as "better" than another because they were born to that supposedly nonexistent privilege and another was not, because they have money and the other does not, it is very clear that the "habit of invidious comparison" is exceedingly pervasive in our time, to the point of being a neurotic compulsion, with all that says about where we are along the spectrum extending from barbarism to civilization.

What Does it Mean to Be Civilized? (A Look at Veblen's View of the Matter)

For most these days I suppose the words "civilization" and "barbarism" have a rather old-fashioned, even pretentious ring. Yet anyone looking very deeply at social science can hardly avoid older work which makes use of such terms, often in ways that I think can still be deemed relevant.

Certainly one sees such usage in the work of Thorstein Veblen, as with his classic The Theory of the Leisure Class, where the usage is all the more notable for not proceeding along the lines they might expect from our everyday speech and writing.

For example, looking at the court of a monarch such as that of England, with its orders of precedence and minute protocol and ostentation, those who understand "civilization" in its everyday sense may think all that the epitome of civilized behavior.

But for Veblen it is the extreme opposite. As he explains the term it is the barbarian who is obsessed with hierarchy and inequality, with some being above and some being below to such a degree that descent from those who were above means much; obsessed with intricate, ostentatious ways of living, and the "conspicuous consumption" they bespeak. By contrast the civilized are egalitarian and matter-of-fact.

This disparity in its turn this reflects other differences between the civilized and the barbaric. The outlook of the barbarian, Veblen explains, is defined by their living by predation--by the aggressive pursuit of dominance over others, over other humans in particular, and the personal prowess to which they attribute their acquisition of such dominance, all the way down to mystical notions of personal force, and advertise such pretensions to superiority with the wastefulness of their consumption. (The palace is absurdly large--and this shows that they can afford absurdly large expenditure, which in turn testifies to the prowess that enables them to get hold of so much, proving they are "more" than others, demigods, even.) By contrast the civilized person lives not by predation on others, but by industriousness--that is to say, productive work on nature, in which work they emphasize less prowess than diligence. That work is oriented to the maximization of the creation of utilities--making for a relatively peaceable and "practical" outlook to which the ruthless violence and wastefulness of the barbarian are anathema. And their work trains them to the explanation of the world in terms of impersonal, highly material cause-and-effect rather than what the rational would think of as mystical nonsense.

In short, think of the barbarian as the "warrior" come to pillage, the civilized as the farmers, artisans and others on whom they would prey as they would the animals they hunt or herd, with, of course, feudalistic aristocrats and monarchs the glamourized, gilt-encrusted version of those pillaging warriors (whose "houses," ultimately, originated in exactly such fashion).

As one might guess from such a conception Veblen had thought that, while the world was far from having wholly gotten over barbarism, the progress of technology, commerce, industry would strengthen the tendencies to civilized attitudes, and weaken the barbarian ones, because of how hard material reality shapes people's minds over time. However, in his critical book The Theory of Business Enterprise (my review of which got a lot of page views from people whom I suspect were looking for something else) he argued that there were forces conducing to the maintenance of old-time barbaric values. Among them was that where those involved with technology were required to think in materialistic, civilized, cause-and-effect terms by their very work, like the engineer and the factory manager, others further removed from it went on thinking in the old ways, the property- and contract-minded businessman or lawyer thought in terms of the old frameworks (with the businessman concerned with acquisition rather than production, the lawyer with "the interpretation of new facts in terms of accredited precedents, rather than a revision of the knowledge drawn from past experience in the matter of fact light of new phenomena," making "facts conform to law").

The result was that the outcome of the contest between these forces was uncertain--while today it seems the barbaric is very much alive, and not merely in latterday monarchism. Ours remains a world where people still identify wealth with individual prowess and mystical personal force, and still justify extreme inequality on the grounds of such a personal "it," saying that some are "better" than others simply because they have money--while showing off that they have "money to burn" whenever they get the chance. The result is that while the techno-industrial system underlying modern life would not have been remotely conceivable without an enormous amount of civilized thinking the conventional wisdom of the day-to-day life making use of it all, in a great many ways that count, remains unalloyed barbarity by Veblen's standard.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Idiocracy

I recall happening across Mike Judge's Idiocracy on cable at about the time of its premiere there. I remember being astonished that a twenty-first century film would so blatantly make a case for dysgenics--specifically the prospect of (presumably) low IQ "poors" out-breeding the (presumably) high IQ upper strata--as a danger to civilization. However, I took it for an edgelordist chase after cheap laughs by the man who brought the world Beavis and Butt-head. (It still seemed possible to take ultra-reactionary material that way back then, with the reception of South Park at the time exemplary of the tendency.) And I probably would not have given the film very much thought afterward were it not for its exceptional persistence in the pop cultural memory, the particular character of which says a lot--only a few critics noticing the more disturbing elements of the premise (which, if anything, seem the more apparent in the wake of Judge's later work, like his six-season prestige TV hit on HBO, Silicon Valley--"Elitist porn," Rick Paulas calls Idiocracy, words equally applicable to Judge's HBO show).

One of those few who has noticed, Adam Johnson, raised an important point when he noted who it was that treated the film as such a reference point in recent years--liberals invoking Idiocracy again and again in the wake of Donald Trump's recent electoral ascent. This seemed to him deeply incongruous--enough so that the title of his piece asked why liberals "love referencing" what was "one of the most elitist and anti-social movies ever." However, the fact may be less incongruous than it seems. If by liberal we mean "left" then this is indeed unfitting--the tendency plausibly reflective of liberals having ceased to be liberals, as many have charged has been the case, with Chris Hedges, for example, announcing the "death" of an American liberal class corrupted and demoralized by its proximity to and the temptations of power, by endless war, by its own hostility to the more fully leftward counterparts against whom it consistently sided with the right, and one might add, by its defeat after defeat after defeat for decades.

However, if by liberal we mean "centrist" then there really is no dissonance. American liberalism, after all, emerged less from adherents of socialism of the Marxist or any other variety, or from movements of labor or the poor, but a more upper-class Progressivism that was afraid of the left rather than influenced by it, and certainly as it developed at mid-century looked more like an update of classical conservatism for the realities of twentieth century America. That package most certainly included an insistence upon society's dependence on an elite--and distaste for the "swinish multitude" it feared would trample everything it valued into the mud under its hooves--such as is all too clear in that film.

The Problem With "Confidence"

These days the language we speak seems filled with usages for trivializing and dismissing the problems of the disadvantaged, above all when the disadvantaged speak up about them--like the accusations of "entitlement," "narcissism" and "self-pity" used to beat down expressions of what may be legitimate grievance on the part of those whom society has treated less well than it may have been obliged to do. In fact, this, rather than genuinely calling out the failing in those who really do have that failing, seems to me the principal use to which the word is put these days.

So does it go with "confidence." All you need to "succeed," they tell you, is "confidence." If you have "confidence" you will do just fine. If you lack "confidence" you will not. If you "succeeded" it was because you had "confidence," and if you "failed" it was because you did not have it.

This thinking, which is simple-minded in the extreme, not only slights hard material fact in favor of nonsense about "personal force"--plain and simple barbarous thinking, as Veblen knew. It threatens to reduce getting through life to a matter of striking stupid poses. And having done so it tells those who may never have a had a chance at all that they failed because they did not strike such poses often enough or correctly enough--rather than, perhaps, because of where they started out in life and how society distributes opportunity with regard to careers, or anything else--so that once again those tearing into them can have the satisfaction of snarling in their faces "You have no one to blame but yourself!" And the even more important satisfaction conformists so often take in deflecting what might have turned into a criticism of the status quo--especially when stinging those "life" has treated less well than they comes as a bonus.

Remembering "Nixon vs. Kennedy"

As I have had many an occasion to remark I found the praise for Mad Men wildly exaggerated--not unlike the Saturday Night Live parody of the critical raves for The Sopranos (for which Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner had previously been a writer). However, this is not to say that the show did not have its points of interest, and I have recently found myself recalling a major scene at the end of the first season (in the episode "Nixon vs. Kennedy") in which the scheming Pete Campbell has discovered the truth about Don Draper's past--that Don, actually born Dick Whitman, was an Army deserter who stole the name, identity, life of an officer named Don Draper--and, after failing to blackmail Don into giving him a promotion with that information, goes to their ad agency's senior partner Bert Cooper with the information.

Bert's response is "Who cares?" Even if true, a thing Bert did not necessarily concede (indeed, he refers to Campbell as having "imagined" the story he tells), the fact would have made no difference to him. Japanophile that he is, he cites the saying that "A man is whatever room he is in"--and as he goes on to say, it is Don Draper who is in the room with them. At any rate, "This country was built and run by men with worse stories than whatever you've imagined here." And that is essentially that.

Dramatically it is rather a damp squib--the plot about Campbell's struggle with Draper simply fizzling anti-climactically, as was so often the case in what I saw of the show. Still, the more I think about the scene the more I find myself liking Bert--not least because of the unflappability, and wisdom, he displayed in the situation.

"Who cares?" indeed.

Alas, today the sensibility seems very different--enough so that it would probably take a good deal of courage to handle the situation the same way in any current production.

Is China's "Lying Flat" Movement the Wave of the Future?

These last couple of years China's "lying flat" movement has been making the news internationally. The phenomenon may recall to mind such phenomena as Japan's hikikomori, or American stereotypes of the country's young men turning into basement-dwelling gamers rather than getting jobs, dating, marrying and starting families. However, in line with the reality that conventional Western opinion is quick to regard forms of nonconformism and dissent that it would condemn in its own country in a foaming-at-the-mouth manner as heroic when they emerge in a place like China (or Russia), the coverage of the Chinese phenomenon differs significantly. Where the tendency has been to conceive of the hikikomori as sufferers of a mental disorder of wholly psychological rather than sociological significance, and Americans dropping out of the job/dating market as lazy, immature or worse (rather than sick, merely unvirtuous), where discussion of the "lying flat" is concerned there is an acknowledgment that there is a social conflict here, with the young rebelling against the "rat race" and what it stands for, a life devoted to the grueling careerism summed up as "996.ICU," and the consumerism that keeps them chained to it--with this a response to the brutality of working life in contemporary China, and one might also speculate, the slowing of material progress for the many as the country's earlier frantic economic growth slows down.

In bluntly discussing those aspects of the matter we find ourselves looking at aspects of contemporary reality the conventional prefer to ignore or dismiss--not least that, contrary to the aspirational rhetoric and the pontification of the Jack Mas of the world, the world of work as many, and likely most, experience it in the modern world, is a truly wretched thing, suffered through solely for the paycheck people need in order to live and for no other reason; that for decades slow growth and stagnant or declining incomes for the many have been a function of people being asked to work harder for less, with no prospect of better, only worse. We also acknowledge another thing commonly ignored or dismissed, namely that young people just entering the job market, often after a more brutal and brutalizing pursuit of educational credentials than their parents experienced (think of just how nuts the Cult of the Good School has gone), get the worst of it while being least resigned to it, being at the bottom of the hierarchy while having fewer of the commitments that make working people afraid to rock the boat. (They are less likely than their elders to have homes, marriages, children, the more in as knowing something of their declining prospects even before hitting the market they have been cautious.)

We also find ourselves facing the fact that all this, far from being unique to China, increasingly the norm the world over, and producing backlash all over the world. (Americans dismiss their basement-dwelling gamers as refusing to grow up. They have a tougher time dismissing the long gainfully employed adults, who so recently helped to hold the world together amid an unprecedented pandemic, driving the country's Great Resignation.) Meanwhile billionaires and government officials who think snarling sanctimoniously at those poorer and younger than they will make them fall into line only make themselves even more ridiculous than they already are with (yet another) display of that kind of self-importance that leaves the parody-minded comedian nowhere to go.

Contemplating all this one may wonder if there might not be a better way may wonder if society could not, at this stage of development, when at least in the richer countries growth has been so weak for so long in comparison with what came before, that even the most Establishment economists toss around words like "secular stagnation"; when it seems that much of the work we do may be of questionable value, while rising consumption may not necessarily be the best way to deliver a better life, and past a certain point may actually be failing altogether in providing that; when at least the hope is emerging that we could perhaps give vastly greater numbers of people a decent life at orders-of-magnitude lower cost and material throughput, all of which seems the more important amid the ecological crisis; a reconsideration of how we live, and expect other people to live their lives, is not grossly overdue. We may, for example, wonder if society should not have a "slow lane" for those for whom frenzied attempts to get ahead that seem increasingly futile are not the essence of a fulfilling life. However, in anything like today's world such a compromise looks like a fantasy at best.

Some Thoughts on Douglas Coupland's Piece on Elon Musk

Some time ago I (rather belatedly) happened upon Douglas Coupland's much talked-about piece about Elon Musk.

I would not have wasted my time clicking on the link had I known who Coupland was, but not knowing better I had a vague idea that he would at least attempt to offer an appraisal of Musk's record as an entrepreneur and in the course of it say something that I had not heard a million times before--perhaps actually succeeding in telling me something I did not know, or making me rethink what I already knew, if only a little.

Instead this piece, which had few facts and less analysis but many, many assertions, was just Coupland trolling--in exceedingly colloquial and vulgar fashion and at very great length--everyone who is not a devoted member of the Cult of Elon Musk, vehement about how the man is superior to you, you personally, repeating it again and again. The item's title is actually "'The Smartest Person in Any Room Anywhere,'" while phrases and words such as "huge IQ" and "Ubermensch" and "measurably, scientifically, clinically and demonstrably the smartest person in any room anywhere" (the title is a quote by Coupland of his own words) are peppered throughout, and not content with celebrating Musk he sneers in his opening paragraphs that anyone who thinks Musk is a [expletive deleted] is "stupid." Interestingly this appears in the course of the following passage: "what's in it for you to dis someone you don’t know, anyway? Being negative is a stupid person's way of trying to appear smart without actually being smart," Coupland apparently oblivious to the fact that "dissing someone you don't know" is exactly what he is doing on a colossal scale.

Or is he oblivious? At this point you might think from the muddle-headed, hyperbolic material ("smartest person in any room anywhere," etc.) that I have quoted that "Coupland's being ironic and we are not supposed to take him seriously"; or even that "Coupland is satirizing billionaire worship generally and worship of this billionaire in particular." But the tone of the rather long piece is less than consistent (it runs over two thousand words, and significant stretches of it betray no sign of self-awareness), while postmodernists like Coupland as a matter of course provide themselves such escape hatches whenever they mouth off (one may think of it as "cowardice masquerading as 'playfulness'"--it is, as I have said again and again over the years, part of what makes reading their material such a waste of time). At any rate, even if Coupland really is playing the satirist that hardly makes his joke a good one, for at least three reasons worth mentioning:

1. A joke your audience doesn't get--a joke your audience doesn't even realize a joke--is by definition an unsuccessful joke. And in looking about the Internet I have yet to see evidence of anyone taking this item as a joke.

2. The audience which, predictably, reacted negatively to the piece is sick and tired of the kind of thing Coupland had to offer. Few these days would sit through a racist or sexist harangue and then let the writer off on the excuse that they "were being ironic." This was the class equivalent, sneering and snarling at the "losers" for over two thousand words that if they had been made to feel small, well, that was because they deserved to be so, because they were inferior to the great Ubermensch; and those irritated or offended at something they took as more than just a waste of their time--as a statement intended to taunt and demean and humiliate those who are not billionaires and dubious about the elevation of this billionaire in particular to something akin to godhood; who in 2022 can only be sick and tired of the sneering and snarling, which in its original version is so extreme and so silly than the satirist, the parodist, has nowhere to go with it--have no obligation to allow the lame dodge. (Indeed, they could fairly take his remarks as a provocation, with the social media reaction testifying to their being far more successful that way than as a piece of socially incisive humor.)

3. The item in question ran in The Guardian, a far from likely place for an extended joke of this nature (again, over two thousand words!) while given the shifting of that newspaper's editorial line in the wake of its Jeremy Corbyn-bashing recent years one would be less sure than before that the publication would not run a piece of economic royalist snarling at "the common man." (Certainly in my glances at the publication I have noticed how it has gone from being a forum for critics of neoliberalism--with such criticism extending to the specific record of New Labour and Tony Blair--to increasing allotment of space to players of the tedious "neoliberalism isn't a thing" and "Tony Blair was more left-wing than he was given credit for" games. Indeed, even now the author of a recent article criticizing "warmed up Thatcherism" couldn't resist taking a cheap shot at Corbyn in which he inaccurately, even incomprehensibly, compared him to Tony Benn--whether one views him positively or negatively, a very different figure with very different stances in a very different time.)

The result is that the plausible explanation is that either

1. Coupland and the Guardian were coming at the audience from the elitist territory of Ayn Rand and Ludwig von Mises (but with even poorer argument and prose colloquial to the point of sub-literacy); or

2. Coupland and the Guardian tried and failed to make a very questionable, Onion-style joke because the joke looks so much like their actually coming at the audience from the elitist territory of Ayn Rand and Ludwig von Mises (but with even poorer argument and prose colloquial to the point of sub-literacy).

Whichever one you go with, it reflects very poorly on both the author and the publication which accorded him the space on its platform.

From Idiocracy to Silicon Valley

It seems rare that anyone mentions Mike Judge's film Idiocracy and his HBO show Silicon Valley together, but it seems to me that the two works are both sides of the same coin. "Elitist porn," Rick Paulas calls the dysgenics-themed Idiocracy with its brutal mockery of the "low IQ," which the film in characteristically conventional fashion equates with the "lower class." However, as it takes up the subject of those that people of conventional mind regard as the "high IQ," equating this as they do with the "upper class" (or at least, those who might be on their way up into that class, not least "startup"-running IT types), the words "Elitist porn" seem to me to be equally applicable to it--if the fact is even less often appreciated than is Idiocracy's elitism. Indeed, so far as I know critic Kevin Reed is alone in identifying and making explicit this aspect of the show in his review of its first two seasons, remarking the show's writers' "admiring . . . the culture they are criticizing," and "never bring[ing] viewers to a point at which this peculiar phenomenon can scarcely be questioned" for utter and total lack of any sort of critical social vision, such that "[o]ne could hardly think of a more conventional and shallow approach to the complexities of life in Silicon Valley." Alas, without such conventionality and shallowness the show would never have been such a darling of the prestige TV-loving critics--and doubtless, Judge not done nearly so well as he must have out of it.