Gotham Diary:
Primates
19 May 2015
Regular readers will be familiar with my assertion that, if you’re reading this Web log, you are a member of that elusive class, the American élite. I don’t mean — needless to say? — that the American élite reads this Web log, but only that anybody capable of reading these entries with pleasure will have had the benefit of the kind of education, as well as some of the “life experiences,” that are known, regrettably, only to a lucky few.
“Lucky few,” however, is by no means just another pretty way of saying “rich.”
Like an urban Dian Fossey, Wednesday Martin decodes the primate social behaviors of Upper East Side mothers in a brilliantly original and witty memoir about her adventures assimilating into that most secretive and elite tribe.
Excuse me, but this is a misuse of “elite.” Ghastly plutocrats with hedge funds — those ritzy parking lots for other people’s money — may be a secretive tribe, but nobody, save perhaps the more witless watchers of television, is looking up to them. Or to their wives.
Wednesday Martin — Dr Martin to you, if you can keep a straight face — is a primatologist who married a millionaire, or something like that. Her new book, Primates of Park Avenue, is coming out at the beginning of June. An excerpt, or a summary — a “tasting” is probably the mot juste — appeared in Sunday’s Times. Kathleen and I did the don’t-know-whether-to-laugh-or-to-cry thing. Mostly, we were horrified by the irruption, at the wealthiest levels of New York life, of manners associated with much poorer folk, viz immigrants from socially conservative places (in other words, everywhere). According to Martin’s précis, the men and women with whom she tried to fit in lead sexually segregated lives. They even have dinner parties at which the men sit at one table and the women at another.
The commingling of men and women on equal terms has been the hallmark of élite society in the West since the days of Louis XV. It has taught men how to care about other people’s lives and women to care about other people’s families. To turn your back on this heritage is to step back into a past with no future. In my opinion, a planet overrun by mere primates would not be particularly worth saving.
Part of me can’t wait to see Martin’s book, to swallow it in one great giggly guzzle. Another part of me is faintly nauseated, as is also the case with Look Who’s Back, Timur Vermes’s Hitler book, which is funny but, to say the very least, unnerving. I haven’t been able to get very far into it — but then that’s largely Maeve Brennan’s fault, and Angela Bourke’s. Bourke is Brennan’s biographer: Maeve Brennan: Homesick at The New Yorker: An Irish Writer in Exile devotes fully half its length to Brennan’s Irish background and childhood, bringing her to the age of seventeen and the beginning of her sojourn in the United States. I have learned a great deal about early modern Ireland from Bourke’s book, and I have wandered through the surprisingly fresh hell of Brennan’s short stories. Look Who’s Back, in contrast, plays with material that is all too familiar. Primates of Park Avenue promises to be just as bizarre as Vermes’s account of a miraculously reconstituted Hitler (he wakes up on a sunny summer day in the Berlin of 2011), but its heart will probably be just as dreadful.
Nothing very interesting ever happens when men or women gather by themselves.
***
Almost as thorny as pinning down a definition of “the élite” is settling the meaning of a “liberal education.” I collect books on the subject, even when I know that they’re not likely to be very good. Consider Fareed Zakaria’s In Defense of a Liberal Education. It is, like everything else that I’ve read by Zakaria, a protracted speech — an oration intended to excite feelings. Although it has a lot of good things to say about its subject, it is not specific, and it draws heavily on the musings of businessmen for its persuasive arguments. Yet again, liberal education is seen as a kind of nourishing soup, with plenty of wholesome ingredients. Properly digested, it teaches its consumers how to write, how to speak, and how to learn.
Books like this are unhelpful, because they focus on the personal benefits of a liberal education, and leave important social benefits in the background. They seem mesmerized by the uselessness of liberal education, as if this could somehow be a good thing. This uselessness, they hastily argue, is only apparent. But they don’t attempt to describe the actual usefulness of a liberal education, usually begging off with the excuse that to do so would be coarse and heavy-handed. We must take it on faith that a careful reading of The Portrait of a Lady is a good thing, because different readers derive different insights from the novel. or from any novel. People who write as casually about liberal education as Zakaria does suffer from schizophrenic impulses: they hanker for a “common core,” but are determined to preserve the student’s right to take whatever courses catch his or her fancy. Zakaria writes about this conflict, but he does not seek to resolve it.
As I said the other day, the key objective of liberal politics is self-government. This means that every level of social organization — the individual, the family, the neighborhood, the commercial enterprise, the public institution, the town, the city, the nation — is to be capable of governing itself without outside interference. This is not to say that laws and regulations are unnecessary, but only that they’re signs that self-government is, at some level and at a particular moment in time, not effective. The ideal liberal polity would require no laws and no regulations.
I see very few liberals on the scene today. Political argument is limited to two points of view: the rejection of “society” by libertarian conservatives, and the vilification of “selfishness” by champions of social justice. Neither of these parties has much of anything to say to the other, so actual political discussion is just about nil. It’s worse than that: each side is doing little more than waiting for the other side to disappear.
A liberal education would teach men and women to govern both themselves and, in cooperation with others, the world. It would do so by teaching men and women about themselves as individuals who must cooperate in the world: it would have to teach them about the world as well. I have oulined the specifics before, and I shall do so again.