The Technocrat and The Cult of the Good School

For some decades it has been common for social critics to speak of professionals, "experts," technocrats, "the overclass" (Michael Lind's term, that one) or what have you as a distinct social grouping with a shared political sensibility that has been important in political social life because of the group's numbers, functions, affluence, social standing and broad cultural influence.

I think there is at least some truth to that view. Indeed, the outlook of the "professional" seems to me to have played a formative role in the political centrism that has dominated the mainstream of American political life for nearly a century now. If as I have said again and again centrism is readable as an extension of the American and Western conservative tradition, applying the classical conservative outlook to a liberal political and economic order, the specifics of the prevailing adaptation do reflect the outlook of professionals (a group whose conservatism is important to understanding its attitude toward its work, and toward society and its place in it), while centrism has an important base of support in the professional groups.

Still, I also think that one can make too much of professionals' supposed apartness from other groups, not concurring in how far apart from the "business class" some treat them as being. In the age of the MBA and "Big Law" and a thoroughly corporatized and financialized health care sector, in which engineers and lawyers rise through the ranks of their firms to become CEOs, the distinction between "professionals" and "business" can seem extremely overrated, especially at the top--business thoroughly "professionalized." At the same time the old-fashioned independent professional (like the lawyer or doctor with their own small practice) is themselves a businessperson, often servicing the needs of business. And at least among those simply doing well their being in the same tax bracket produces a certain commonality of interest between them (most obviously in opposition to high upper-bracket taxes, the more in as the use of the revenue so gained by the government is intended to benefit people other than themselves). Indeed, the up-and-coming lawyer in the blue-chip firm would seem to have far more in common in outlook and personal interest with an affluent businessperson than they would with, for example, a similarly professional schoolteacher (whose income, status, self-interest are, when looked at without illusions, make them working rather than "middle" class to the extent that that term ever had meaning).

The result is that the differences are often subtler than some make them out to be, with one matter that analysts of "the overclass" make much of their educational snobbery. This does not seem to me to me to be limited to the professionals by any means. But I do think it can be admitted that such snobbery has a different significance for the more elite, more technocracy-committed, professionals than to other elite groups. For the rich generally sending their children to an "elite" (read: exclusive and expensive, whatever the quality of the education it confers) college is simply what is expected of youth of a certain social standing, such an education one of the rituals and trappings of their social class little questioned, all as those looking for more justification find it easily enough in the view of college as a place for rich people to store their grown-up kids for a few years, a furthering of their socialization, an opportunity to integrate them into and develop the social networks of the elite. For the professional of the kind described here, however, there seems a snarling vehemence about attendance at such a school as a legitimator of the exalted status they demand and insist they deserve, proof that they are mentally and morally superior to those who never had occasion to park their car in Harvard yard, whose disadvantage and deprivations they regard as equally deserved--and thus not the problem of those more richly rewarded by what they insist (again, snarlingly) to be a meritocratic social system.

I think that in many ways this has been a more obfuscating and pernicious perspective than the view of elite college attendance as the mere badge of social privilege it has always been, and never ceased to be because it passes off what is almost always partly, and certainly usually, social privilege as if it were such superiority. Yet the different attitudes are merely parts of a common elitist package that in the end has far more to do with the money about which "respectable" persons are so reticent to speak than it does the "edumacation" they are so eager to extoll. Indeed, the next time you see the courtiers of the elite platform some "expert" for the purpose of telling the public what to think and shore up their "Because I say so" on the basis of their "credentials," rather than being awed by how they spent a decade after high school moving from Harvard to the Sorbonne to Oxford in the course of accumulating a mass of nearly unmarketable degrees, ask "Who paid the bill?" during all those years, and all that travel. And then after hearing the banalities they will almost inevitably speak ask yourself "Was the intellect I just saw on display worth the money?"

I think you already know the answer to that.