The following piece was first published in my personal newsletter. I am sharing it with the NOL community as introduction to displays of social ignorance and the role I think it plays in social Marxism.

He may call himself Mr Pelham to his heart’s content. He is Lord Hexam in this house.

~ Downton Abbey

Carson the butler says this in response to learning that Lady Edith Crawley’s husband, Mr. Bertie Pelham, has just inherited the Marquessate of Hexam from a cousin. Bertie doesn’t want to assume the title until his cousin is buried, but Carson reminds the staff that system of aristocracy doesn’t work like that. The king is dead, long live the king. Mr Pelham is now Lord Hexam whether he wills or not. A little knowledge of the system and possibly a little less cognitive bias might have prevented an embarrassing episode.

Back in March 2021,  The Independent issued a small clarification without any fanfare: On 12 March 2021 we published an article headlined: ‘I’m a black British member of the aristocracy. I love the royal family — but I know what Meghan said was true,’ written by Alexander Maier-Dlamini in which he was described as the “Marquess of Annaville – the last of the Irish peerages”. This was incorrect, there is no Marquess of Annaville in the Irish peerage. The article in question ran in the midst of the fallout from the Duke of Sussex and his wife’s interview with Oprah in which they described his family as racists and British and American society as equally racist, just in different ways. In particular Meghan Sussex implied that her son was denied a title due to his mixed-race heritage (he has a title, Earl of Dumbarton: the parents won’t use it.). The Marquess of Annaville threw his weight behind the Sussexes, arguing that he knew they were right because of his personal experiences. However, there is no Marquess of Annaville.

The fake Marquess turned out to be a 22-year old American student from New Rochelle, New York, with very little knowledge of titles, peerages, aristocracy, or manner in which any of those structures worked. The only true things about the man’s claims are that his name is Alexander Maier-Dlamini, his spouse’s last name is Dlamini (which wouldn’t be part of Alexander’s title), and he is Black. Correctly, he is African-American, but that was not his claim: since he purported be a peer of the United Kingdom, by extension he was claiming to be Black British. After Debrett’s proved that there was no Marquessate of Annaville, he confessed to his fraud.  In a statement he said, “There is no title in the peerage related to me whatsoever. I do apologize greatly to those institutions involved with a mechanism like this, many of which I’m obviously not familiar with.” “Not familiar with” is an understatement.

The fact that The Independent ran this man’s op-ed represents an appalling lack of due diligence. The Independent quietly deleted the article, but not before I and a horde of netizens read it. In almost no time, other publications and the general public established that there was no Marquessate of Annaville, a fact that the newspaper could have been checked by a quick search of Debrett’s online database, or Burke’s Peerage database. These two resources both require subscriptions to access the databases, but considering The Independent is a major publication, it is reasonable to expect them to pay for such things as part of basic due diligence. But there were other tells which make the fact that no search was done on the fake marquess inexcusable.

He signed his article “Lord Alexander Maier-Dlamini, Marquess of Annaville.” This is a mix of forms. The first, “Lord Alexander Maier-Dlamini,” is the form for a younger son, and it is incorrect to use this for the peer, i.e. the holder of the title. Alexander Maier-Dlamini claimed to be the Marquess, and therefore would be the peer. The correct form for the peer is either: 1) Alexander Maier-Dlamini, Marquess of Annaville, or 2) Lord Annaville. This is very basic information that is part of simply being socially aware and is freely available. Back when I was interning at AEC in Vienna, Debrett’s website provided free information on the etiquette of writing titles. The fact that The Independent didn’t catch Maier-Dlamini’s incorrect use of form is beyond me.

According to one of the netizens who helped catch him, even after apologizing for his fraud, Maier-Dlamini continued to publish as a fake aristocrat under the name “Lord Zigmund Annaville,” purportedly the brother of “Lord Alexander.” There are two things to notice that are wrong: 1) “Zigmund” is a phonetic spelling of the German “Sigmund,” and while it has been used historically, it has not been used in mainstream European society since at least the 1800s; an aristocratic family is unlikely to make that mistake; 2) Annaville is the peerage, not the family name, so a younger son would not use it. Peers and their wives (but not the husbands of female peers) may use their peerage as their last name. So it is correct to refer to Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge as Catherine Cambridge. It would not be correct to call her younger son, Prince Louis of Cambridge, “Louis Cambridge.” If Lord Zigmund really existed, his correct form would be “Lord Zigmund Maier.” He would use the family name.

As a commentator at the time pointed out in an article I haven’t been able to find, claiming to be the 11th Marquess should have been enough to trigger red flags with the people over at The Independent. Assuming an average of three generations per century (father, son, grandson), the peerage would have been created around the 1600s, possibly even earlier, and the family could potentially be much older. Marquesses tend to be senior peers of whatever realm they are in, so therefore it is impossible for no one to have heard of a Marquess of Annaville if the title really existed. Given the presence of the aristocracy in British history, the Marquesses of Annaville or other members of the Maier family would have been all over the history books.  For a comparison, the 11th Duke of Marlborough died in 2014. The Dukedom was created in 1689 as an upgrade for the then-Earl of Marlborough. The Churchill family (they re-hyphenated their name to Spencer-Churchill in the mid-twentieth century) is one of the most storied in British history, having produced Sir Winston Churchill, who was never confused about whether he was Winston Churchill or Winston Marlborough. He easily could have been: when he was born, he was second in line behind his father Lord Randolph Churchill. Fortunately for history, the 8th Duke married late in life and had a son; if he had not, Winston could have been the duke in World War II and as a peer would have been barred from becoming Prime Minister. From what I know, Lord Randolph Churchill and Winston were a little squiffy when their brother and uncle’s new wife produced a son, who effectively destroyed their hopes of acceding to the title. Perhaps one can attempt to be charitable and assume that Alexander Maier-Dlamini thought peerages worked like the U.S. presidency: the incumbent vacated after at most eight years. Hypothetically, this could explain why the Annaville title was so far along in holders but no one could remember the incumbent’s predecessors.

As part of his op-ed, Maier claimed that he was constantly having to explain his lineage and how he came to be a marquess as no one believed a Black man could be a titled aristocrat. In doing so, he revealed the time contradiction — if the Annaville title was an old one, everyone would have remembered his father’s marriage to his mother when it was announced twenty some-odd years ago. No, this is not an assumption; in order for a son to inherit his father’s titles, the father has to have been married to the mother at the time of the child’s birth, otherwise the child is illegitimate and cannot claim his father’s titles. A marriage for someone as important as a Marquess would have been announced in the major newspapers. Of course Maier-Dlamini also revealed his ignorance of the existence of the Black and other minority life peers sitting in the House of Lords in Parliament.

For the other part of his claim that people racially profiled him, it is believable that that detail missed vetting given how many people seem to be unaware that there are plenty of people of African or other minority descent married into the British aristocracy, in addition to the ones  holding peerages in their own rights. The Marchioness of Bath, wife of the 8th Marquess, is the daughter of an Oxford-educated Nigerian chief. Her words in response to questions about being a Black marchioness were, “I see my role as a practical thing: as a wife, mother and someone with a responsibility to maintain this incredible estate. I aspire to a future where [my skin colour] is not a defining characteristic.” Lord Mountbatten’s great-granddaughter and first cousin twice removed (granddaughter of first cousin) of Prince Philip is married to a Black man, with whom she has three children. She and they are in the line of succession for both the Earldom of Burma and the British throne. She put up a picture of her children and grandmother, Lady Pamela Hicks, Lord Mountbatten’s second daughter on Instagram in April 2021, a month after The Independent ran its fake story.

There’s probably no connection, but one wonders. And lest anyone think that it’s African-Americans who seem to have trouble with the British aristocracy, indisputably Black American Candace Owens is married to the Honourable George Farmer, son of Michael Farmer, Baron Farmer. Owen’s and Farmer’s son is a mixed-race member of the aristocracy. Her retort in response to issues of titles and race was “If you have seen a picture of Archie and you believe he suffered anti-black racism, then call me a Nigerian prince and give me your credit card number.” In claiming racist profiling, Alexander Maier-Dlamini revealed that he was unable to transcend the boundaries of his own limitations and concocted stories which might fit the experiences of a young man from New Rochelle, but which reveal that he didn’t do the most basic research on the group of people whose membership he claimed.

Alexander Maier-Dlamini’s failure to research or to understand the intricacies of aristocracy is his own. The Independent giving him a platform is theirs. It would be nice to say that The Independent’s editors suffered from bias confirmation, that psychological condition where because the data appear to fit preformed conclusions, one doesn’t check. The reality, though, is that there were so many signs that Maier-Dlamini was a fraud that there is no explanation for the editors’ failure. Even the most bias-blinded person should be able to stop and say “wouldn’t a real aristocrat know whether he is Lord Annaville or Lord Alexander?” Since the answer is “yes, a real aristocrat would know.” That should have triggered a fact check.

If a person were to receive a letter with the salutation “Hey girl!” and the closing “Kindly,” one would naturally start to make conclusions about the author. One might conjecture from the salutation that the letter is between intimates, though it could equally signify that the author is unaware of appropriate salutations for written communications. The closing “Kindly” would probably trigger a second of cognitive dissonance. “Kindly” has passive aggressive undertones, which is one reason etiquette guides discourage using it. This type of analysis — what sort of person wrote this letter? — relates to social class.

In October 2021, The New York Times’s literary arm, New York Times Magazine, published a story on a multi-year tussle between writers Dawn Dorland and Sonya Larson. In the process of lawsuits, Dorland’s side subpoenaed Larson’s group chats with other writers in which those who also knew Dorland discussed in frank terms how irritating they found her. As part of a court order to indicate types of research Larson did for her work, her lawyers submitted a list of resources which included a handful of academic research on the subject of “White Savior” complexes. To be fair to Larson, it is important to her short story that one character is Asian-American and the other is Caucasian, so it is logical that Larson would read some sources on the subject, as well as the others submitted which were on topics such as alcoholism or psychological conditions. However, as Larson herself is a mixed-race Asian-American and Dorland is Caucasian, followers of the case latched on to the detail as representative of the underlying problem between the two writers. In my opinion, dragging race into the Dorland-Larson debacle represents a problem of vocabulary: modern society has taken to using political race-based terms to describe issues of social class.

The salutation and closing described in the first paragraph come from an email Dorland wrote to Larson. The author of the New York Times Magazine story on Dawn Dorland and Sonya Larson chose to interpret Dorland’s sign off, “kindly,” as a sign of her altruistic mindset.  

To summarize a situation that occurred over several years, Dorland donated a kidney and created a Facebook group as a platform where she talked about her experiences in real time; Larson wrote a short story in which she used elements of some of Dorland’s story; the story won literary accolades; Dorland accused Larson of plagiarism and contacted the Boston Book Festival for promoting the story along with some of Larson’s other work; Larson sued Dorland for tortious interference and the courts found in Larson’s favor; Dorland countersued Larson for copyright violation; the courts ruled for Larson, citing that Larson hadn’t used enough of Dorland’s writings on the topic to qualify remotely as copyright violation; Dorland maintained that Larson had violated her rights and mounted a campaign to discredit Larson within professional literary circles.

Larson is the daughter of educated professionals. Her Caucasian-American father and her Asian-American mother are university professors. That said, her maternal grandparents were working-class immigrants who worked hard for their children’s futures. Dorland had an unstable childhood as the child of itinerant agricultural workers; eventually she ended up in Los Angeles. She obtained two graduate degrees, one from Harvard Divinity School and an MFA from University of Maryland. Given that she took a degree at a top university, one can argue that she had a ticket into the American bourgeois, if not the grands bourgeois. In this way, the American system worked: she was not denied opportunity based on parental background; she was welcomed as an equal within a professional network. In a broad sense, the two women were on a level of some parity: Larson was an established writer, but Dorland was a Harvard graduate.

The decision to project a racial narrative onto the debate was not Larson’s as is evident in the legal documents her lawyers submitted and the story itself. Those who latched onto a racial interpretation of the debacle missed to a great extent that while the story contained a traditional dichotomy, working-class minority woman opposed to a wealthy, though uncultured Caucasian for narrative purposes, the dynamic between the real people was, if anything, reversed. Based on cultural norms from around the world, who would start life higher, the child of a university professor, or the child of an itinerant laborer? In real life, a dynamic that works for fiction can be, and often is, inverted.

In one of the ping pong lawsuits, Dorland sued Larson for Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress, citing that “Larson abruptly ceased speaking with Ms. Dorland” and had moved to “ostracize Ms. Dorland from their mutual acquaintances in the writing community.” The judge dismissed the IIED suit out of hand. Dorland’s charges were based on an earlier claim that she and Larson had been close personal friends. And this is where class differences start to show up. As a citizen journalist has found, Dorland met Larson around 2007 by dint of attending writing workshops at the arts center where Larson worked, but they were not the close friends Dorland portrayed in her lawsuits. Larson categorically stated via her lawyers that they “were never alone in the same room,” which implies all of the social activities close friends do, e.g. going to restaurants, cafés, or movies together, never occurred. This does not ipso facto mean Dorland lied; rather, the difference can indicate that there was a misunderstanding of proximity. Dorland rubbed shoulders with Larson for around seven years before moving away from Boston; Dorland attended Larson’s partner’s mother’s funeral; according to Dorland’s testimony, Larson attended Dorland’s going away party and presented a “meaningful gift.” Finally, and of more immediate interest to the judiciary, Dorland told Larson about her familial history. Depending on who is asked, this last is interpreted as either a sign of a friendship or as a sign that Dorland was an over-sharer. Both women could be correct in terms of their assessment of their friendship. What could be glancing and low-commitment contact in Larson’s social strata — in the American upper-middle class, one does not attend a goodbye party without a gift and one makes an effort to put some thought into it (after seven years, one should know enough about the recipient to choose an item that won’t trigger allergies and is in a pleasing color; this is simply common courtesy) — might be signs of deep friendship in Dorland’s. The lack of clarity in this is one reason the court ruled that there was no Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress.

At this point, any racial issues remained part of the fictional short story. However, once the case went public, the racial dynamic took over the narrative in certain quarters. The polemic therefore bore little resemblance to the original problems between Dorland, Larson, and Larson’s friends. The latter two had problems with behaviors which were low-class, though neither Larson nor her friends are people who are likely to use that term. Use of racial language obscures the class issue, which undeniably matches contemporary sensibilities. After all, discussing the case in terms of class — on one side, a woman reveals medical procedures and conducts herself in a manner others might perceive as overly familiar, overly ebullient, while on the other side, a group of more established professionals decry her lack of gravitas, dignitas, or sense of privacy, while possibly sending out a snobbish aura — opens up an uncomfortable recognition of the existence of class divides, something which American society would prefer to ignore.

Throughout all of human history, societies have had acceptable and unacceptable behaviors. These are often cast in terms of upper- or lower-class. This is normal for humans. Attempting to deflect the matter is to ignore a fundamental part of how humans negotiate with each other. Creating a red herring of race issues serves no one. To the contrary, doing so increases problems as questions of conduct take on a political tone. Which is even less helpful as politics are polarizing enough without conflating class differences with political differences. Anecdotally, I know many people from the right and the left who are upper-class in their manners, tastes, activities, and professions, but equally I also know many people from both sides of the aisle who are decidedly lower-class in their behaviors, dress, entertainments, and lifestyle. Confusing political leanings with social class, as some people I know have, is truly not helpful. Having good table manners, dressing correctly, or behaving appropriately with others is not a matter of conservative or liberal, Republican or Democrat, but if a person has tangled “Conservative” with “polished,” or “slovenly” with “Liberal,” then one will see political boogeymen in every corner of life. 

In the 1999 remake of the film The Thomas Crowne Affair, there is an interesting snippet of dialogue:

Woman: The thing that impressed me most… was getting from Glasgow to Oxford on a boxing scholarship.

Crowne: Not bad for a wee lad from “Glasgee.” It was easy. Rich kids can’t box.

As readers of NOL would know, Oxford doesn’t offer sports scholarships, meaning that this origin story is not only implausible, it’s impossible. What this speaks to, aside from the inattention of the screenwriter, is a phenomenon of performance for a certain demographic: That is to say the telling of stories with information tailored to the understanding and assumptions of a particular group, or groups, of people. In the case of The Thomas Crowne Affair, that group is Americans for whom collegiate sports and higher education are synonymous, or those whose understanding of higher education is framed by their local institution, which offers sports scholarships. By extension, such people are not in the Oxbridge or even the Ivy League’s orbit as they would then be aware that the former don’t offer sports scholarships and that at the latter, even though some sports-related scholarships are offered, sports are held in open contempt by the student body. No one works hard to attend these places to then be jocks. The problem with demographically targeted performance is that it creates division, one which is based on fiction but whose consequences can be all too real. If a person doesn’t know how things work in another part of society, if his or her knowledge is based on stories-with-an-agenda, then he or she will see discrimination or rejection where there is none.

I have written before about meeting a childhood acquaintance for the first time in over twenty years and discovering that she was angry and bitter toward society for not recognizing her imagined precocity. She had moved to a town which is known as a resort frequented by the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, visiting dignitaries, etc. Telling me of her experiences, she became distraught – distraught! – that these people were polite to her. She comes from a family which might be described as Gucci socialists, so I inferred that she had a worldview which presumed that rich people, successful people be rude or arrogant toward the “working man.” Realizing that she was not elite and that her perceptions of the elite were wrong was a massive blow to her constructs.

As the case of Anna Sorokin, alias Delvey – the young woman who swindled her way around New York City for a year before being caught and charged with fraud – revealed, what tripped Sorokin was her lack of knowledge of the way elites truly behaved. One of the girls whom Sorokin attempted to involve in her subterfuges stated that she could be exceptionally rude to service people, which was one of the red flags to the hotel management who eventually unmasked her. The exact words were: “she could be oddly ill-mannered for a rich person. Please and thank you were not in her vocabulary.” She was hoisted on the petard of her own fantasies. I, myself, am waiting to see if this little detail makes its way into the two upcoming television dramas about the Sorokin swindle.

There’s a film from 2004, In Good Company, which stars a young Scarlett Johansson, among others. The film is a fairly good representation of how a placid, self-satisfied middle-class man was dragged, kicking and screaming, into the digital age. But, interestingly, the first clue for the parents in the film that the world doesn’t work the way they thought it did is when their eldest daughter, played by Johansson, is injured, costing her her tennis scholarship to an unnamed college in upstate New York. She comes home and informs her parents that without the scholarship, there’s no point in returning to that college because its reputation isn’t good enough for her to be able to progress professionally and socially coming out of it. She’s already arranged to transfer to NYU but needs her parents to cover her fees as she’s transferring mid-year, when all scholarships or financial aid have already been awarded. The daughter’s announcement is the beginning of her parents’ world collapsing in an avalanche of new information: “Not all colleges are created equal! The tennis scholarship wasn’t worth it – now she has a damaged arm and is behind academically! Well at this rate, she’s never going to win a merit scholarship. No problem, we’ll take out a mortgage on the house. Oh, damn! Dad’s lost his job because the magazine where he works is moving from print to digital and he can’t figure out how to use a computer!” The film is an interesting study of what happens when a couple, that fancies themselves as worldly wise and upwardly mobile, discover how little they actually know. The world doesn’t work the way they thought it did and everything that they believe themselves entitled to is stripped away.

Arthur Schopenhauer wrote in his essay “Psychological observations,” published in English as part of a collection of his essays titled Studies in Pessimism, “Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.” This quote, taken out of context, is much beloved by self-help authors. The full quote is:

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world. This is an error of the intellect as inevitable as that error of the eye which lets us fancy that on the horizon heaven and earth meet. This explains many things, and among them the fact that everyone measures us with his own standard—generally about as long as a tailor’s tape, and we have to put up with it: as also that no one will allow us to be taller than himself—a supposition which is once [and] for all taken for granted.

Schopenhauer was commenting on Shakespeare’s Hamlet in this paragraph. However, it is a succinct description of the intellectual heresy of the pseudo-middle class. They take their own limited experience as how the world works, e.g. sports scholarships, and measure society according to their tailors’ tapes, e.g. world views requiring rich people to be rude.

According to legend, American wit Dorothy Parker was asked at a party to create an epigram using the word “whore;” without hesitating, she said “you can lead a whore to culture but you can’t make her think.” Mental or knowledge poverty, be it social or cultural, cannot be alleviated by mere exposure. Such poverty has nothing to do with lack of material means. It exists solely in the four or so inches between a person’s ears. In the same way, mental or knowledge wealth cannot be redistributed. As the Bolsheviks found, the only way to redistribute this type of wealth is to blow a person’s brains out.

The pseudo-middle class (or the muddle-class), with its limitations and tailors’ tapes, isn’t the backbone of society. At best, it’s a parasitic entity; at worst, a cancer. The bourgeois, of the type studied by Deidre McClosky, with their high-quality educations, discipline, courtly manners, and work ethic, are the backbone. Not everyone who falls into the general category “middle class” is bourgeois. In fact, I go so far as to say based on my own experience that the majority of middle class people are not bourgeois because we are at a point in history where true bourgeois values and lifestyle are demonized as “elitist.”

Recently to improve my German, I began viewing a soap opera titled Altes Geld (Old Money). The series was so bad, I stopped watching halfway through the first season. The show follows a super-rich family as they move from travesty to depravity and back. While the characters are presented as an old, established family, in truth they aren’t. The family made their fortune by collaborating with the Nazis. At the time the show aired, their fortune would have been only seventy years old. As a friend of mine said in response to the premise, “that isn’t old money—just an old way of making it,” meaning crony capitalism and opportunism, not siding with the Nazis. Despite my reaction to the series and its anti-rich message, it did make me think about what is “old” and what this means in the sense of legacy or tradition in a society, which in my view is turning increasingly toward fictions as part of a nostalgic utopian vision.

The so-called patriarch in the tv series pontificates on familial tradition and the way things have always been done. As they are a new family, I’m fairly certain the patriarch’s monologues are satirical; after all the family isn’t old enough to have any real traditions and the way they’ve done things is certainly not to be emulated. Yet, an attitude, a posturing of being people who know things, have tried-and-true ways of doing things which is (probably) satire on a soap opera appears in real life as a trope, repeated with gravity by public figures, often in the context of a “decline of the middle-class.”

A common feature in the declinist narrative is a supposed failure of public, or in American English, state schooling systems. Attached is an implicit or explicit middle-class proclamation of “this is the way we’ve always done things,” a claim which is taken at face value by both speakers and audience. Yet, it isn’t. At best, the “middle-class way” dates to post-World War II, much like the ersatz old family and their traditions in Altes Geld.

Anecdotally, I know one arch-Conservative who is devoted to the declinist narrative, particularly in relation to public education. He is a first generation public schooler. His own parents, who were of the War generation, attended private religious schools. Lest readers misinterpret the religious aspect, pre-World War II, private schooling offered by religious institutions was often the only option for children whose parents were of modest means but who wanted something better than a local state school.

The arch-Conservative’s parents were part of a phenomenon discussed by David Willett in his book The Pinch: How the Baby Boomers Took Their Children’s Future – And Why They Should Give It Back. Willett, who always has to issue a disclaimer that he is a boomer himself, talks about how the boomers were betrayed by the War generation as they were the ones who, for the first time in recorded human history, stopped putting the next generation first in that they stopped trying to find the best educations for the boomers. People who in previous generations would have sent their children to private schools, and who themselves had usually benefited from attending such schools, sent their children (the boomers) to public school instead. Willett argues that the boomers themselves were the victims of intergenerational theft; their crime was perpetuating it on their children, through repeating the patterns of their own parents.

Although Willett limited his study to Great Britain as that is his area of expertise, I can anecdotally say that a similar phenomenon occurred in the US. My grandfather was a boarding school boy, kept there at great expense and effort on the part of his coal miner father who wanted something better for his son. My grandfather, who fulfilled on his father’s dreams (graduate degrees from good universities, Naval commander, successful business owner) though, did not repeat the pattern exactly and his children attended (initially) an absolutely rubbish public school. If there was any logic to that decision, it was “that’s the way things are,” though he of all people should have known that there was no need for deterministic attitudes. To repeat: both coal miner’s son and boarding school boy – during the Great Depression!

Returning to the first-generation state schooler, his children are second-generation public schoolers, and he complains about how expectations for them have not matched reality—an infallible sign of decline. But the chasm between expectation and reality is society’s fault, in his declinist narrative. That his own parents betrayed him and he then foisted that betrayal on his children is not a factor. No, public school is a “tradition” in his family. Yes, in the same way a new money family whose fortune is not even a century old can have traditions.

The gulf between the pre-War and the War generations did not occur in a vacuum. To close, I ask the reader to contemplate the following paragraph from Virginia Woolf’s speech “The Leaning Tower,” which she, a devoted Marxist, gave in 1940 to the Workers’ Educational Association:

(NB: Virginia Woolf used the term “public school” to signify old, private preparatory boarding schools, not state schools in the American sense.)

There are two reasons which lead us to think, perhaps to hope, that the world after the war will be a world without classes or towers. Every politician who has made a speech since September 1939 has ended with a peroration in which he has said that we are not fighting this war for conquest; but to bring about a new order in Europe. In that order, they tell us, we are all to have equal opportunities, equal chances of developing whatever gifts we may possess. That is one reason why, if they mean what they say, and can effect it, classes and towers will disappear. The other reason is given by the income tax. The income tax is already doing in its own way what the politicians are hoping to do in theirs. The income tax is saying to middle-class parents: You cannot afford to send your sons to public schools any longer; you must send them to the elementary schools. One of these parents wrote to the New Statesman a week or two ago. Her little boy, who was to have gone to Winchester, had been taken away from his elementary school and sent to the village school. “He has never been happier in his life”, she wrote. “The question of class does not arise; he is merely interested to find how many different kinds of people there are in the world…” And she is only paying twopence-halfpenny a week for that happiness and instruction instead of 35 guineas a term and extras. If the pressure of the income tax continues, classes will disappear. There will be no more upper classes; middle classes; lower classes. All classes will be merged in one class. How will that change affect the writer who sits at his desk looking at human life? It will not be divided by hedges any more. Very likely that will be the end of the novel, as we know it. Literature, as we know it, is always ending, and beginning again. Remove the hedges from Jane Austen’s world, from Trollope’s world, and how much of their comedy and tragedy would remain? We shall regret our Jane Austens and our Trollopes; they gave us comedy, tragedy, and beauty. But much of that old-class literature was very petty; very false; very dull. Much is already unreadable. The novel of a classless and towerless world should be a better novel than the old novel. The novelist will have more interesting people to describe—people who have had a chance to develop their humour, their gifts, their tastes; real people, not people cramped and squashed into featureless masses by hedges. The poet’s gain is less obvious; for he has been less under the dominion of hedges. But he should gain words; when we have pooled all the different dialects, the clipped and cabined vocabulary which is all that he uses now should be enriched. Further, there might then be a common belief which he could accept, and thus shift from his shoulders the burden of didacticism, of propaganda. These then are a few reasons, hastily snatched, why we can look forward hopefully to a stronger, a more varied literature in the classless and towerless society of the future.

A classless society built on betrayal of the futures of the young generations and treachery toward the sacrifices of the pre-World War II generation, that is the “tradition” of the modern middle-class. Their society is not even a century old, but it is already presented as a utopia of stability and homogeneity. It is time to recognize it for what it is: an ill-informed charlatan aping both the mannerisms of true tradition and the honor and dignity that come with it, while proclaiming itself the epitome of a classless society.   

In 2009, the film An Education came out. It was a Bildungsroman of sorts but it was beyond a coming-of-age story. It showed the life of the aspiring, post-World War II nouveau riche middle-class. The protagonist is a schoolgirl whose aspirationally-minded parents send her to a private school. They have no notion of what a good school is, how to tell if one is good, or why a person should attend one; they only know that “all the best” send their children to fee-paying schools. In the process, they’re swindled. The film’s characters descend into wallowing self-pity as nothing works out quite right for the protagonist. The story showcases a reality that we’re dealing with today. A fiction created by and for the post-War nouveau riche is collapsing. Those caught in its net do not recognize that what is collapsing is a fantasy, believing instead that the social order is declining, that a social contract has been broken.

Adam Smith wrote in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759),

The rich man glories in his riches, because he feels that they naturally draw upon him the attention of the world, and that mankind are disposed to go along with him in all those agreeable emotions with which the advantages of his situation so readily inspire him. At the thought of this, his heart seems to swell and dilate itself within him, and he is fonder of his wealth, upon this account, than for all the advantages it procures him. The poor man, on the contrary is ashamed of his poverty.

In the twenty-first century, achievement replaces riches as a font of glory. And that is good. It means that we have reached a point where being monied by itself is no longer a distinction. Achievement is the currency of the realm now (if anyone wants to imagine me saying that in the voice of Cutler Beckett from Pirates of the Caribbean, please feel free). What we face today is a society of rich men whose hearts have dilated but who haven’t reinvested their wealth to procure advantage. And herein lies the rub: procuring advantage requires savoir-faire and those who built and benefitted from the society of post-War nouveau riche for the better part don’t have it.  

The savoir-faire needed is a type of street-smarts, but for life and careers rather than the literal streets (though it’s good to have that as well). This knowledge is not particularly secret, yet when caught out, the nouveau riche middle-class squawks and cries foul. Take for example Abigail Fisher and her lawsuit against UT-Austin: the young woman required the Supreme Court to validate UT-Austin’s assertion that graduating above average from a public school, playing in a section of a youth orchestra, and being one of two million Habitat for Humanity volunteers did not make her remarkable. The Abigail Fisher story is not one of racism or affirmative action. It’s a story of lack of savoir-faire. A person who thinks that any of the extracurriculars entered into evidence at the trial were résumé enhancing is as deluded as the parents from An Education who thought that merely forking out money ensured social mobility, a better life, the prospect of great things.

Making unfounded assumptions is part of the nouveau riche middle-class’ lack of savoir-faire. A lawyer I know has made it well into adulthood without knowing that advanced degrees from Ivy League schools are fully funded, i.e. free. Believing that he could neither afford an academic advanced degree nor that it would pay off professionally, he pursued law at a school where he received in-state tuition. He suffers from a stagnant career and fears that he doesn’t have a vocation for law. In contrast, this lawyer has already been surpassed by another attorney I know who is still in her twenties. In addition to being fiercely intelligent overall, she is worldly-wise. When she decided on law school, she pursued only Ivy Plus schools exactly because they were the ones with the best funding and scholarships; name recognition was an aside. She received merit-based full tuition funding, a stipend, and major professional opportunities because she was a prize winner.  

Nor is it an anomaly that the highest tiers of education are free, or less expensive than people assume. Those who have read George Elliot’s Daniel Deronda know that Daniel was on track to win a fellowship which would refunded his tuition at Cambridge to his father Sir Hugo Mallinger. This was a huge honor which had almost nothing to do with money. Sir Hugo was fabulously wealthy; he didn’t need the money refunded – though of course it would have been nice. The honor was the primary attraction for him. “Daddy paid all my tuition” can’t be put on a résumé; “___ Fellow” or “winner of ___ Scholarship” can be. To be clear, I fully support parents saving for their children’s college. But I have had genuine conversations with people who told me that even though their children qualified for merit scholarships or grants, they wouldn’t apply for them because “those are for poor people.” The middle-middle class’ false pride of refusing to apply for scholarships and grants, euphemistically call “paying their way,” has only disadvantaged middle-middle class children as they arrive at the ages of twenty-two, twenty-four, twenty-six without plums, without proof of their abilities, without signs that someone, some institution took a bet on them and that they held up their end of the bargain. Further as Daniel Deronda’s story shows, this false pride has never been the way of the upper-class.

A lack of savoir-faire affects in career shaping as well. I know two artists, one of whom is quite young, just over thirty, and highly successful; the other has had an unnecessarily disappointing career. Artistically, both are remarkable. The difference between the two is that since undergraduate the first has submitted her work to art journals, competitions, galleries, any opportunity where her art could be seen. Acceptance rates are less than one percent, and it is entirely standard for artists to apply multiple times to a single opportunity. The first artist has learned to take rejection on the chin, get up, and reapply. She said to me once, “all grant applications want to know what journals you’ve been published in, what shows you’ve had and where; all the journals and competitions want to know what grants you’ve won, where you’ve been published, and what shows you’ve had. The only thing to do is to keep having shows, keep applying, keep building.” Her persistence shows as she wins more and more prizes which in turn lead to bigger opportunities. She’s already developed a name and reputation within the professional community.

In contrast, the second artist submitted her work to a handful of opportunities when she graduated but gave up when the everything ended in rejections. Now, decades later, she understands how the “numbers game” works, and she’s submitting her work for consideration again. Just because she “didn’t know” she has lost decades she could have spent building her professional reputation and career. She lives in a kind of disappointed daze, wondering why things never quite worked out. She’s reached the point where she can afford to support herself by art alone, but she feels as though somehow some vague, inchoate rules of the game have been broken.

This is not about having money. The artist who has drifted and the first lawyer both come from and have enough money to do anything they might desire. This is about knowing how things work. In the age of the internet, such ignorance and lack of savoir-faire is inexcusable, and it is only right for it to be treated as a flaw. Back in 1905, my great-grandfather who had grown up in unfathomable, though genteel, poverty managed to figure out that Harvard doctorates were fully funded. He pursued one to the benefit of himself and his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. If he could gather information and take action in 1905, in a part of the country without telephone, running water, electricity, or proper roads, what excuse is there for people today?

Gathering information and then taking action has another name: meritocracy. Both the left and the right have united against meritocracy, as predicted by Michael Dunlop Young, the man who coined the term “meritocracy.” Both sides agree that the meritocracy is bad because it is unfair, it breaks social bonds, however fictious. The rub with meritocracy is that it favors those who have savoir-faire over those who do not.And perhaps it is unfair. For example, the artists are equal in that each is technically strong and expresses interesting concepts with their art. Subjectively speaking, I would pay to go see the work of either of them in galleries. Yet one is ahead of the other in her career because she knew what was needed to cultivate her professional reputation and promote her work.

The second lawyer, the first artist, the UT-Austin students who had superb applications all earned their laurels because they took the extra steps of gathering information and learning how the world works. We owe nothing to people who won’t inform themselves, who create fictions about how the world around them works and then become angry when their ideas are shown to be fantasy. Saying that we are in a social contract with such people is coercive because such a contract compels those with savoir-faire to be the custodians of those without it. It would mean that Abigail Fisher would have to be admitted to the school of her choice because she “didn’t know” that all her extracurriculars were ordinary; it would mean that the first lawyer would have to be elevated to equality with the second one, even though the first one is literally less knowledgeable about the law, because he “didn’t know” that better quality legal training was in his grasp; it would mean that we would have to hold the artist who “didn’t know” to submit to journals and gallery competitions as equal to one who has a strong career and recognition because she submits her work regularly. How is this world, a society of excusing ignorance, pandering to an affluent but uninformed, uninquiring people, more fair than a meritocracy?     

As we celebrate the approval of the Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine, it is hard to imagine that anyone might take offense at the existence of an inexpensive, transportable solution to the pandemic. Yet this is exactly what I have encountered. A friend who is an arch-Conservative (note the capital C) responded with hostility during a discussion on differences between the Oxford and Pfizer vaccines. The issue was that my friend couldn’t accept the scientific evidence that the Oxford vaccine is superior to the Pfizer one. He fixated on the fifteen-billion-dollar subsidy Pfizer received from the US government to create their vaccine. For the Conservative, it was as if to admit the difference between the vaccines was unpatriotic since one was bought by the US taxpayer. His objections were not based on scientific evidence or ideology but upon identity and background.

During the discussion, my Conservative friend brought up the Oxford team’s continuous publication of their data as if that action somehow lessened their research’s impact or validity. The final paragraph on the Oxford research team’s webpage says:

This is just one of hundreds of vaccine development projects around the world; several successful vaccines offer the best possible results for humanity. Lessons learned from our work on this project are being shared with teams around the world to ensure the best chances of success.

The implication was “well, they’re just wacko do-gooders! They’re not going to make a profit acting like that!” The idea being that legitimate scientific research bodies behave like Scrooge McDuck with their knowledge. On a side note, this type of “Conservative” mentality has greatly damaged public perception of capitalism, a topic I’ll return to at a later point.

Members of the Oxford vaccine team are assumed to be in the running for the Nobel Prize, and for this, odds of winning are proportionate to the speed with which the broader scientific community can check findings. The Conservative could not overcome a mental block over the fifteen billion dollars. The difference is one of vision. To put it bluntly, Oxford is aware as an institution that it has existed for almost nine hundred years before the creation of Pfizer and that it will probably exist nine hundred years after Pfizer is no longer. Oxford wants the Nobel Prize; the long-term benefits – investment, grants, funding awards, etc. – far outweigh any one-time payout. As to the long-term outlook required for Nobel Prize pursuit, the willingness to pass up one benefit in favor of a multitude of others, it is alien to those whose focus is short-sighted, who are enticed by single-time subsidies or quick profits.

The conversation represented a problem which caused F.A. Hayek to write in “Why I am not a Conservative,”

In general, it can probably be said that the conservative does not object to coercion or arbitrary power so long as it is used for what he regards as the right purposes. He believes that if government is in the hands of decent men, it ought not to be too much restricted by rigid rules. Since he is essentially opportunist and lacks principles, his main hope must be that the wise and the good will rule—not merely by example, as we all must wish, but by authority given to them and enforced by them. Like the socialist, he is less concerned with the problem of how the powers of government should be limited than with that of who wields them; and, like the socialist, he regards himself as entitled to force the value he holds on other people.

In the case of the vaccine, the Conservative I spoke with had the idea that since the government sponsored Pfizer’s version, Americans ought to accept placidly the Pfizer vaccine as their lot in life. Consequently, coercive policies, for instance refusing the AstraZeneca vaccine FDA approval (something which hasn’t occurred – yet), are acceptable. Behind this facile, even lazy, view lies an incomprehension when confronted with behaviors and mindsets calibrated for large scale enterprises. Actions taken to achieve long-term building – in this instance the possibility of winning a Nobel Prize – are branded as suspicious, underhanded. At an even deeper level lies a resentment of AstraZeneca’s partner: Oxford with all of its associations.

Rather than being a malaise of big C “Conservatism,” the response, detailed in this anecdote, to a comparison between the vaccines conforms to Conservative ideas. Narrowness of mind and small scope of vision are prized. As Hayek pointed out in 1960, these traits lead to a socio-cultural and intellectual poverty which is as poisonous as the material and moral poverty of outright socialism. My own recent conclusion is that the poverty of big C “Conservatism” might be even worse than that of socialism because mental and socio-cultural poverty can create circumstances leading to a longer, more subtle slide into material poverty while accompanied by a growing resentment as conformity still leads to failure. When class and ideological dynamics invade matters such that scientific evidence is interpreted through political identities, we face a grave threat to liberty.  

About six months after I graduated from Columbia, a couple who knew members of my extended family asked me to lunch unexpectedly. Not wishing to be rude, I went. As it turned out the couple had an agenda; they wanted to talk about having their daughter apply to Ivy League graduate schools.

Their daughter had recently graduated from a private liberal arts college and was having trouble finding permanent employment in a field and at a level her parents considered acceptable given the cost of her education. In fairness to her, she was interning at a non-profit in NYC. Her parents, though, had unrealistic expectations and seemed to feel that having paid for her to go to a “prestigious” private school, she should have entered the workforce at a much higher level.

The parents had some highly specific questions, ones that were so precise that I suggested they needed to contact someone in admissions at the respective universities or speak with an application consultant. In retrospect, I suspect they may already done so and the feedback hadn’t been favorable. Their questions were focused on seeing if there might be workarounds or special exemptions for the graduate program prerequisites. While there are, their daughter wasn’t eligible for any of them.

The parents were visibly angry, unable to accept that their daughter’s endless sports and community involvement, which they had so carefully funded, were meaningless in the face of program prerequisites. The graduate programs had foreign study abroad components, so the language prerequisites, which the daughter couldn’t meet, were immutable. Additionally, as the programs was designed for those interested in careers such as publishing, journalism, or policy writing, all applications demanded a large and exceptionally high-quality writing sample. To have an idea of what was expected, think of Princeton University’s standard 50,000 word (i.e. a small book) undergraduate thesis.[1] The daughter had neither the language skills nor the writing sample. In the case of the former, the private college her parents had chosen didn’t offer modern languages at anything resembling the level expected; for the writing sample, the young woman simply didn’t have one. Her parents were vague as to the reason, but I think she may have chosen an academic track which didn’t require an undergraduate thesis.

The parents weren’t completely sure which upset them more: that their capability as parents was under review, or that everything they thought was “valuable” or “worthy” had been found wanting. Sports? Irrelevant. Door-to-door political canvassing? Commonplace. The parents were proud of having provided certain experiences, such as trips to Disneyland, ski trips, and cruises. These activities have importance as symbols of a financial middle-class with enough liquidity to spend on recreation, but the daughter couldn’t include them as significant in personal statements. In this, the daughter was disadvantaged compared to Abigail Fisher and her discovery that 1,999,999 other people in any given year are Habitat for Humanity volunteers. 

The episode revealed a bankruptcy of mind, culture, and outlook which is the poverty of those whose incomes are firmly middle class but whose intellectual knowledge and cultural capital is lacking. Like the person of my previous post, there was a trust in the opinions of the majority and an uninquiring faith that doing x, y, and z is guaranteed to lead to immediate status, security, and success. The financial but not social or cultural middle-class has realized that parts of life and social experiences are out of reach; Not because they were originally off limits, but because too much time has passed, and individuals, such as those in this story, are behind the curve when it comes to specific skills and types of knowledge. People, entire sections of the population, have gone so far down a particular path, it’s too late to turn back.

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[1] In case readers are wondering if it is possible to access this type of writing preparation at the undergraduate level outside of the Ivy League, it is. Speaking from my own experience, most liberal arts colleges and large universities offer an Honors track or program through which participating students receive the support and guidance to write longer, more advanced papers and theses.

About a year ago, I had dinner with a friend who I have known more or less my entire life. We hadn’t seen each other in over ten years, though, not since she started college. During the interval, she became an inveterate social climber – at one point avowing completely seriously that she was open to marrying a rich man if it meant that she could have a flat in one of the world’s most expensive cities. She was also an expert at being woke. The contradiction in her thought processes – her craving for a life of riches and luxury and her woke “eat the rich” attitude – caused me to recognize the fuel behind the attraction redistributionist ideologies have for young Americans.

At some point in her trajectory, my friend had pitched on using the education system to climb the social ladder. In fairness to her, there is a pervasive idea that this is a valid approach; J.D. Vance mentioned it in the conclusion to Hillbilly Elegy. Choosing between the flagship state university and a small private liberal arts college, she picked the latter, which was a “social” school held in high esteem regionally and thought to be intellectually rigorous.

Upon graduating and moving two time zones away for graduate school, she made two unwelcome discoveries: 1) she was behind academically and intellectually, and 2) her college had scant brand-name value in the broader world. According to her, her graduate university’s student body was comprised of the children of America’s elite and “who didn’t get into Harvard.” She held a teaching assistantship for 101-level English literature classes and was discomfited to find that her freshmen students were better writers with a broader sense of literature and the humanities than she. She mentioned that she found out about entire chunks of the English literary canon from them, which is appalling given that she had majored in English at her liberal arts college.  

When Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig died, his executors found the manuscript for his novel Rausch der Verwandlung among his papers. The book’s title in English is The Post-Office Girl,[1] and it tells the story of a 1920s provincial girl who assumes a false identity to join the privileged world of her relatives. Everything works out – until it doesn’t:

Unwittingly Christine revealed the gaps in her worldliness. She didn’t know that polo was played on horseback, wasn’t familiar with common perfumes like Coty and Houbigant, didn’t have a grasp of the price range of cars; she’d never been to the races. Ten or twenty gaucheries like that and it was clear she was poorly versed in the lore of the chic. And compared to a chemistry student’s her schooling was nothing. No secondary school, no languages (she freely admitted she’d long since forgotten the scraps of English she’d learned in school). No, something was just not right about elegant Fräulein von Boolen, it was only a question of digging a little deeper […].

After Christine is unmasked, she returns to her previous life but this time she’s angry and bitter, aware now of the existence of another world, one lost through her own irresponsibility. Most of the book is about the girl’s mental unravelling. When I first read the book, I thought his ending of suicidal thoughts and participation in serious criminality to be melodrama for its own sake. Now, I think he was on to something.

In Zweig’s book, the root of the problem is the anti-heroine’s discovery that what is top-notch in her village isn’t held in the same esteem elsewhere: “[W]hat was the showpiece of her wardrobe [a green rayon blouse] yesterday in Klein-Reifling seems miserably flashy and common to her now.” My friend recounted a similar experience cast in academic terms. She slid through high school and college without any struggle. Upon starting her MA, she had difficulty keeping up with her cohort. Three years after starting a doctoral program, her dissertation proposal was rejected, with the evaluators citing lack of languages as one of the reasons. This last is interesting because it connects to Zweig’s list of faults that expose Christine’s real social standing. In the case of my friend, her background became equivalent to Christine’s blouse: haute couture in one locale and unsophisticated in another.

For both the Bright Young Things of Zweig’s world and my own generation more generally, there is a question over culpability. In the book, Christine’s aunt agonizes over the girl’s uncouth manners and dress, repeatedly reminding herself “how was she to know?” My friend and her parents assumed that “the system” would take care of her. Sure, the public school wasn’t great, but it also wasn’t too terrible and everyone else was going there. The college was the best and most expensive private college in the region, so surely the faculty and advisors there knew what they were doing.

This is not to say that there weren’t red flags if one knew where to look. For example, the college offered only two years of accredited foreign language training. My friend acknowledged this contributed to the problems with her first proposal. However, my friend also admitted that she hadn’t considered the curriculum when she picked the college. Her focus had been purely social. Consequently, the truth is that she chose her path at the moment she picked her values.  The fact that her measurement system didn’t hold up well to broader scrutiny is her fault.

Zweig’s anti-heroine contemplates suicide in response to her inadequacy; kangaroo courts, or cancel culture, are more my friend’s style. Not much has changed over the course of a century. In Zweig’s time, self-destruction was the default choice; in ours, destruction of others is the preferred MO. The source of the anger, though, is the same: envy stemming from inadequacy. Unlike the Bright Young Things, though, the modern generations chose their inadequacy.

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[1] Much of the crucial action is set in a Swiss hotel, and Wes Anderson has said that the book was one of his inspirations for The Grand Budapest Hotel.

With the collapse of a false sense of stature comes a disintegration of perceptions of personal dignity. The Dunning-Kruger Effect says that a person’s incompetence masks his or her ability to recognize his own (and others’) incompetence. Building off this concept, I hypothesize that many of the social tensions we are experiencing today are a result of a type Dunning-Kruger Effect wherein those who are incapable eventually become aware of their inability or unsuitability.

In 2010, Dr. David Dunning, now retired from Cornell University and one half of the Dunning-Kruger name, gave an interview to the NYT on the eponymous Effect. The genesis of Dunning’s research came when he read about a bank robber who made no attempt to conceal his face, resulting in his being apprehended in less than a day. During his interrogation, the man revealed that he had covered his face with lemon juice, having developed the notion that lemon juice would make “him invisible to the cameras.” He’d even tested the concept beforehand by taking a picture of himself after putting lemon juice on his face. He wasn’t in the picture (Dunning suggested that perhaps camera was pointed in the wrong direction) and concluded that the idea was sound. As Dunning put it, “he was too stupid to be a bank robber but he was too stupid to know he was too stupid to be a bank robber.” As the story of the robber illustrates, though, there always comes a moment of reckoning, where the reward of stupidity, unintentional or willful, is paid.

When I was a recent music grad, I obtained a position as a fellow with a small liberal arts college orchestra. Ostensibly, the school was one of the best of its type, but its weaknesses became apparent fairly quickly. During one rehearsal, what began as a discussion of the minuet form evolved into the conductor having to introduce the students to Jane Austen. The students all assured the conductor that they “had taken” Literature 101 and 102. As it turned out, only one of the students had read Jane Austen, and the girl had done so on her own time as Austen was no longer taught in the curriculum.

The conductor queried the students as to why they thought they could play music while being ignorant of its broader cultural setting. The students became surly in response, retorting that “she isn’t on the reading list,” as if such a statement was all the justification needed. The dynamic in the ensemble was already rocky as two weeks before all but two students had skipped rehearsal to attend a varsity soccer match. The conductor had chastised them for their unprofessionalism, pointing out that missing rehearsals is cause for termination in professional ensembles. As a defense, the students cited college regulations which said that all sports events took precedence over other commitments. In other words, the conductor could not discipline skippers if they missed to attend a sports event.

At the end of that year, the conductor resigned, and I followed one term later. I made the decision to leave after two students for whom I was responsible said in front of me, “at least this one [the new conductor] respects us. [The old one] always treated us like we were stupid, didn’t know things.” As someone who was present, I can testify that the conductor was a model of patience and positive leadership. The students truly didn’t possess the basic knowledge reasonable to expect from third years at a supposedly good private liberal arts college. And they had no interest in remedying their deficiencies. They saw any situation where their ignorance displayed itself as a “gotcha” setup.

Technically these students didn’t fit the Dunning-Kruger pattern as they possessed enough knowledge to know they didn’t know. There is, perhaps, a similarity to the bank robber’s lemon juice in that the students made a blanket assumption that completing college-assigned reading was sufficient to turn them into literate people. Where this notion originated is beyond me, as it is common knowledge that extracurricular reading is a vital component for success at elite institutions. Just like the robber’s, the students’ ignorance was appalling – and much less amusing.

For our non-American readers, it is a conceit of small private liberal arts colleges that they are educating/raising (this is key) the leaders of the future. There is some justification for this view since these colleges can provide a door into better institutions. It is, however, rare to find a national-level politician, industry leader, or public figure who hasn’t at least finished his or her education at one of the über-competitive, big name schools or universities.

The stars of this particular anecdote were convinced that they were destined for great things. A challenge to their knowledge base was an assault on their identities, and therefore their sense of stature. Granted, their unprofessional behavior had already cost them their dignity, but they didn’t know that. The sense that dignity might be a distinction to be earned and not granted through entitlement escaped them. In a modification of the Dunning-Kruger Effect, the students had no dignity because of their ignorance and unprofessionalism but they were too stupid to know that they had forfeited their chance to be respected.