Empire of Illusion (17 page)

The specialized dialect and narrow education of doctors, academics, economists, social scientists, military officers, investment bankers, and government bureaucrats keeps each sector locked in its narrow role. The overarching structure of the corporate state and the idea of the common good are irrelevant to specialists. They exist to make the system work, not to examine it. Our elites replicate, in modern dress, the elaborate mannerisms and archaic forms of speech employed by calcified, corrupt, and dying aristocracies. They cannot grasp that truth is often relative. They base their decisions on established beliefs, such as the primacy of an unregulated market or globalization, which are accepted as unquestioned absolutes. “In a corporatist society there is no serious need for traditional censorship or burning,” Saul writes, “although there are regular cases. It is as if our language itself is responsible for our inability to identify and act upon reality.”
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I was sent to boarding school on a scholarship at the age of ten. By the time I had finished eight years in New England prep schools and another eight at Colgate University and Harvard University, I had a pretty good understanding of the game. I have also taught at Columbia University, New York University, and Princeton University. These institutions feed students, no matter how mediocre, the comforting reassurance that they are there because they are not only the best but they are entitled to the best. You saw this attitude on display in every word uttered by George W. Bush. Here was a man with severely limited intellectual capacity and no moral core. Bush, along with Scooter Libby, who attended my pre-prep school, exemplifies the legions of self-centered, spoiled, intellectually limited and wealthy elitists churned out by places like Andover, Yale, and Harvard. Bush was, like the rest of his caste, propelled forward by his money and his connections. The real purpose of these richly endowed schools is to perpetuate their own. They do this even as they pretend to embrace the ideology of the common man, trumpet diversity on campus, and pose as a meritocracy. The public commitment to egalitarianism alongside the private nurturing of elitism creates a bizarre schizophrenia.

“There's a certain kind of student at these schools who falls in love with the mystique and prestige of his own education,” said Elyse Graham, whom I taught at Princeton and who is now doing graduate work at Yale. “This is the guy who treats his time at Princeton as a scavenger hunt for Princetoniana and Princeton nostalgia: ‘How many famous professors can I collect?' and so on. And he comes away not only with all these props for his sense of being elect, but also with the smoothness that seems to indicate wide learning. College socializes you, so you learn to present even trite ideas well.”

These institutions cater to their students like high-end resorts. My prep school—remember, this is a
high school
—built a $26 million gym. Not that they didn't have a gym. They had a fine one, with an Olympic pool. But they needed to upgrade their facilities to compete for the elite boys and girls being wooed by other expensive prep schools. Princeton is so overcrowded with glittering new buildings. There is almost always a building project under way. It has devoured its once-rolling expanses of green and become cramped and claustrophobic. While public schools crumble, while public universities are slashed and diminished, while for-profit universities rise as our newest vocational schools, elite institutions become unaffordable even for the middle class. The privileged retreat further and further behind the walls of their opulent, gated communities. Harvard, like most institutions, has lost money. Its endowment fell $8 billion over four months in 2008, and by 2009 had officially declined by some 30 percent. Harvard's investments, once they have been disentagled, may have shrunk to half their former value. But Harvard remains very well endowed. It still has at least $20 or $25 billion. Schools like Yale, Stanford, and Princeton are not far behind.

At the elite institution, those on the inside are told they are there because they are better than others. Most believe it. They see their money and their access to power as a natural extension of their talents and abilities, rather than the result of a system that favors the privileged. They are carefully socialized in chapel, on groomed playing fields, in dormitories, and within the natural, exclusive gatherings they have with the powerful and the rich. They are members of the same clubs and fraternities. George W. Bush and John Kerry, who ran for the presidency in 2004, had each attended Yale and had been inducted as undergraduates into the university's secret and exclusive Skull and Bones society.

John D. Rockefeller III, an alumnus, was our graduation speaker the year I finished prep school at Loomis-Chaffee. The wealthy and powerful families in Boston, New York, or Los Angeles are molded by these institutions into a tribe. School, family, and entitlement effectively combine. The elites vacation together, ski at the same Swiss resorts, and know the names of the same restaurants in New York and Paris. They lunch at the same clubs and golf on the same greens. And by the time they finish an elite college, they have been conditioned to become part of the inner circle. They speak an intimidating language of privilege, complete with references to minutiae and traditions only the elite understand. They have obtained a confidence those on the outside often struggle to duplicate. And the elite, while they may not say so in public, disdain those who lack their polish and connections. Once they finish their schooling they have the means to barricade themselves in exclusive communities, places like Short Hills, New Jersey, or Greenwich, Connecticut. They know few outside their elite circles. They may have contact with a mechanic in their garage or their doorman or a nanny or gardener or contractor, but these are stilted, insincere relationships between the powerful and the relatively powerless. The elite rarely confront genuine differences of opinion. They are not asked to examine the roles they play in society and the inequities of the structure that sustains them. They are cultural philistines. The sole basis for authority is wealth. And within these self-satisfied cocoons they think of themselves as caring, good people, which they often are, but only to other members of the elite or, at times, the few service workers who support their lifestyles. The gross social injustices that condemn most African Americans to urban poverty and the working class to a subsistence level of existence, the imperial bullying that led to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, do not touch them. They engage in small, largely meaningless forays of charity, organized by their clubs or social groups, to give their lives a thin patina of goodness. They can live their entire lives in state of total self-delusion and perpetual childhood. “It is for people in such narrow milieux that the mass media can create a pseudo-world beyond, and a pseudo-world within themselves as well,” wrote C. Wright Mills.
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The people I loved most, my working-class family in Maine, did not go to college. They were plumbers, post-office clerks, and mill workers. Most of the men were veterans. They lived frugal and hard lives. They were indulgent of my incessant reading and incompetence with tools, even my distaste for deer hunting, and they were a steady reminder that although I had been blessed with an opportunity that had been denied to them, I was not better or more intelligent. If you are poor, you have to work after high school or, in the case of my grandfather, before you finish high school. You serve in the military because it is one of the few jobs in which you can get health insurance and a decent salary. College is not an option. No one takes care of you. You have to do that for yourself. This is the most important difference between members of the working classes and elites. If you are poor or a member of the working class, you are on your own.

The elite schools speak often of the diversity among their students. But they base diversity on race and ethnicity rather than on class. The admissions process, along with the staggering tuition costs, precludes most of the poor and working classes. The system is stacked against those who do not have parents with incomes and educations to play the game. When my son got his SAT scores back as a senior in high school, we were surprised to find that his critical reading score was lower than his math score. He dislikes math but is an avid and perceptive reader. And so we did what many educated, middle-class families do. We hired an expensive tutor from the Princeton Review—its deluxe SAT preparation package costs $7,000—who taught him the tricks and techniques of standardized testing. The undergraduate test-prep business takes in revenues of $726 million a year, up 25 percent from four years ago. The tutor told my son things like “stop thinking about whether the passage is true. You are wasting test time thinking about the ideas. Just spit back what they tell you.” His reading score went up 130 points, pushing his test scores into the highest percentile in the country. Had he somehow become smarter thanks to the tutoring? Was he suddenly a better reader because he could quickly regurgitate a passage rather than think about it or critique it? Had he become more intelligent? Is it really a smart, effective measurement of intelligence to gauge how students read and answer narrowly selected multiple-choice questions
while someone holds a stopwatch over them? What about families that do not have a few thousand dollars to hire a tutor? What chance do their children have?

Elite universities, because of their incessant reliance on standardized tests and the demand for perfect grades, fill their classrooms with large numbers of drones and a disproportionate percentage of the rich and well connected. Joseph A. Soares, in
The Power of Privilege: Yale and America's Elite Colleges,
used Yale's internal data to show that 14 percent of the students attending in 2000 were “legacies,” children of alumni. And at Harvard the most generous donors, those who give more than $1 million, are grouped together in the Committee on University Resources. The 340 committee members who have children at or past college age have 336 children who are, or were previously, enrolled or have studied at Harvard—even though the university admits fewer than one in ten candidates overall,
Inside Higher Education
reported. According to Daniel Golden, who wrote
The Price of Admission: How America's Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges
—
and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates
, Harvard has something called the “Z list” (on which the university refuses to comment) of about twenty-five to fifty well-connected but academically borderline applicants. These wealthy applicants are told they can enroll if they defer for a year.
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The list is a major tool for lining up big prospective donors. Soares and Golden illustrate that you can, if you are rich enough, almost always buy your way into an Ivy League school.

I have taught gifted and engaged students who used these institutions to expand the life of the mind, who asked the big questions, and who cherished what these schools had to offer. But they were often a marginalized minority. The bulk of their classmates, most of whom headed off to Wall Street or corporate firms when they graduated, with opening salaries starting at $120,000 a year, did prodigious amounts of work, and faithfully regurgitated information. They received perfect grades in both tedious, boring classes and stimulating ones. They may have known the plot and salient details of Joseph Conrad's
Heart of Darkness,
but they were unable to tell you why the story was important. Their professors, fearful of being branded “political” and not wanting to upset the legions of wealthy donors and administrative overlords who rule these institutions, did not dare draw the obvious parallels
between events in the Conrad novel and the failures and discontents of the Iraq occupation and American empire. They did not use Conrad's story, as it was meant to be used, to examine our own imperial darkness. Even in the anemic and marginalized world of the humanities, what is taught exists in a moral void.

The bankruptcy of our economic and political systems can be traced directly to the assault against the humanities. The neglect of the humanities has allowed elites to organize education and society around predetermined answers to predetermined questions. Students are taught structures designed to produce these answers even as these structures have collapsed. But those in charge, because they are educated only in specializations designed to maintain these economic and political structures, have run out of ideas. They have been trained only to find solutions that will maintain the system. This is what the Harvard Business School case method is about, a didactic system in which the logic employed to solve a specific problem always, in the end, sustains market capitalism. These elites are not capable of asking the broad, universal questions, the staples of an education in the humanities, which challenge the deepest assumptions of a culture and examine the harsh realities of political and economic power. They have forgotten, because they have not been taught, that human nature is a mixture of good and evil. They do not have the capacity for critical reflection. They do not understand that for every answer there arises another question—the very basis behind the Socratic academy's search for wisdom.

For Socrates, all virtues were forms of knowledge. To train someone to manage an account for Goldman Sachs is to educate him or her in a skill. To train them to debate stoic, existential, theological, and humanist ways of grappling with reality is to educate them in values and morals. A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, which fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death. Morality is the product of a civilization, but the elites know little of these traditions. They are products of a moral void. They lack clarity about themselves and their culture. They can fathom only their own personal troubles. They do not see their own biases or the causes of their own frustrations. They are blind to the gaping inadequacies in
our economic, social, and political structures and do not grasp that these structures, which they have been taught to serve, must be radically modified or even abolished to stave off disaster. They have been rendered mute and ineffectual. “What we cannot speak about,” Ludwig Wittgenstein warned, “we must pass over in silence.”
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