Snobbery

 

“Sketch in the Lobby of the House of Commons” 1881

     I do not doubt that I have been, out of my hearing, called a snob.  I would much rather attend the Metropolitan Opera than the Superbowl, and, in fact, I have never in my adult life watched any sporting event.  I could not name a single tune of Beyoncé or Taylor Swift, yet I could easily distinguish Mozart from Brahms.  I have read three dozen books by Trollope and none by Stephen King.  I have visited Kathmandu yet never mean to set foot in Epcot Center.  Am I here strutting or simply stating facts?  Do these preferences make me a snob?

     Perhaps the court of my gentle readers could use more evidence.  If I am to be deemed a snob, I must have achieved that status as early as my teen-age years.  In my freshman year of high school we read Great Expectations, but our class was given a shortened version, which I spurned.  For several weeks I, probably with a degree of ostentation, carried a fat unabridged edition.  During my junior year, the literature textbook [1] contained a photo essay on Richard Wilbur, whom I have always admired as a virtuoso poet and a skilled translator, but I saw that the editor’s goal in featuring him was quite clearly to demystify his arcane profession by depicting a fairly young, rather good-looking, casually dressed writer in a cardigan sweater  who would not put off the young.  Does my feeling patronized by this appeal constitute snobbery?

     Art museums at one time displayed the visual art of the past with considerable dignified reserve, only labeling works with title, artist’s name, and perhaps a date.  Once these institutions conceived the ambition of increasing their appeal to the general public, they began adding further information, historical, biographical, and interpretive.  Like textbook introductions to poems, such editorial additions may have aided some, but at the cost of substituting the predigested views of accepted experts for the viewer’s or reader’s direct and spontaneous responses.  Then, perhaps with the 1972 show The Treasures of Tutankhamen in the British Museum which reached the Metropolitan in New York in 1976, was born the blockbuster show with its greatly expanded publicity expenditures followed by even greater revenues. King Tut’s free publicity even reached Saturday Night Live where it inspired Steve Martin’s amusing song about “the boy king.”  Those with a genuine interest in ancient art noticed that a new profit-oriented, business-based model had replaced the earlier aims of education and scholarship.

     According to the New York Times eighty percent of visitors to the Louvre come to see the Mona Lisa [2].  I can personally report that once they have entered the room these tourists do not even study the painting. Instead, standing shoulder to shoulder, they take selfies of themselves trying to capture Leonardo’s work in the background, presumably to prove to their skeptical friends that they actually made the trip.  Is it snobbish to think that these people are getting no experience of art whatsoever and would have a better time at Disneyland Paris?

     Turning to music, for the past week and a half I have been attending the Bravo!Vail music festival. The program includes celebrated performers, a good admixture of old and new music, and an admirable inclusion of non-white musicians and composers.  Yet, in pursuit of larger audiences, the organizers have also included such programs as a showing of The Princess Bride with the Dallas Symphony playing the soundtrack, then another evening devoted to movie music, and, far worse, an entire program in which a reduced corps of orchestral musicians aided by rock performers sang pop songs of the ‘80s.  Such programs scarcely display the classical performers’ skills. The semi-orchestral arrangements of top forty songs are surely no improvement over the original versions.  I do concede that the music of movie composers like John Williams at least potentially deserves a place in the concert hall, but I suspect their place in the program was motivated less by the value of their work than by the artistic director’s ambition to sell tickets to people who liked Stars Wars and Jurassic Park.  The kids in the audience who were waving their light sabers are not, I think, more likely to ask their parents to bring them back to hear Mozart.  Does my distaste for the replacement of aesthetic values with financial ones make me a snob?

     As a teen, I was fiercely loyal to “Chicago’s fine arts station” WFMT, often listening with friends and sometimes taping broadcasts of operas or symphonies.  The station allowed the inimitable Studs Terkel his Wax Museum, and relaxed its braces for Leadbelly and Tom Lehrer on the Midnight Special every Saturday evening, but concert hall music was central.  Now, with classical an ever-declining share of recorded music sales, the far fewer surviving stations playing Bach and Brahms tend to program only single movements while the music occupies ever-decreasing segments of the day.  Their standards and their respect for the audience has deteriorated.  And in my youth my taste was not so peculiar.   A 1955 study of the Minneapolis Symphony (now the Minnesota Orchestra) revealed that the median age of its ticket-buyers was 33, very close that of the nation as a whole, with students making up nearly a quarter of attendees [3].  Now game shows and interviews with pop singers and comedians and endless discussion of the news have supplanted the original cultural role of NPR outlets.  One hears virtually no poetry at all on even the best community-supported stations.  In spite of radio’s being an ideal medium for the art it has, I suppose, too few enthusiasts to merit inclusion in regular programming when public stations as well as commercial ones are courting numbers.

     Something comparable is seen with public television.  Early PBS shows had been largely those which could not survive in the marketplace and yet were considered worthy: lessons for GED or language-learning, music, plays, both classic and modern.  Yet these so-called “educational” stations began to play for a mass audience with soap opera-like features like BBC’s Forsyte Saga in 1967 which, due to the actors’ accents alone, seemed somewhat classy.  While aiming for a mainstream viewership doubtless increased their revenues, the gain came at the cost of diluting the role of such stations, making them more like all the money-oriented outlets to which they had once been a real alternative. 

     Higher education has been similarly degraded.  The ignorant used to complain about professors being evaluated on research rather than on teaching, but this objection is based on a misconception of the role of colleges which in fact represent the only place in modern society where scholars and scientists may pursue new knowledge for its own sake, without regard to financial considerations.  Universities have turned into vocational schools, with their administrators often welcoming the change in hopes that it might bring both new tuition-paying students as well as funding from commercial enterprises, while “impractical” majors like Classics fall to the wayside and the idea of a liberal education is quite forgotten.  My wife accuses me of pretending to aristocratic values by maintaining that no one should have to be bothered by the obligation to earn a living through work for wages.  I prefer to think that aesthetic and intellectual pursuits, which are, after all, ubiquitous in human society, are not elitist, but rather profoundly popular.  The manipulation of symbols, cognitive exercise in general, is the most characteristically human of occupations and one of the most pleasurable.    Pursuit of knowledge, like art, is a self-justifying activity.  One knows it is good because it is so achingly beautiful, and one knows beauty through pleasure, whether contemplating Euclid or Homer, Max Planck or James Joyce.   Yet the fact remains that many people who are surely in no way less human do not care to engage with thinkers and artists and might consider those who do pretentious. 

     Surely the worst sort of snob is a long-winded one, and I fear my evidence, whether tending toward guilt or innocence, has accumulated to a great enough heap, but for any meaningful verdict to be rendered one must first define the offense.  Snobs have been spoken of for only a few hundred years and the current usage is considerably more recent.  Some authors maintain that the word arose from the expression “sine nobilitate,” abbreviated “s. nob.,” which, without evidence, they claim appeared in university records and lists of ship passengers to indicate people who might be addressed without the use of a title.  Though this ingenious origin has been disproven, it is not entirely wide of the mark. 

     Those who were first called snobs could scarcely have been taken for noble even at first glance.  Francis Grose’s A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue in 1785 contains this entry: “Snob, a nick name for a shoemaker.”  Quite likely the  prior and underlying meaning is simply a person of the lower classes of whom the cobbler was merely representative, though this can only be speculation about speech unrecorded in print.  A bit of doggerel titled “Epitaph on a Cobler” from 1790 begins “Here lies poor Bob/ An honest snob.”  Cambridge undergraduates around the same time called the townspeople snobs (while at Oxford the term was cads), rather as if I and my fellow students at the University of Illinois had referred to the locals as farmers, whatever their occupation.

     Thus from the start the term was associated with class, though ironically, today it is the Cambridge students who would be called snobs.  The term was popularized and its meaning altered by Thackery’s Book of Snobs the title page of which announced that its author was “One of Themselves,” that is, a snob.  Thackery provided a succinct definition: “He who meanly admires mean things is a Snob—perhaps that is a safe definition of the character.”  In practice, however, he used the term in several senses.  Some of his examples conform to the early meaning of vulgar or plebeian, for instance the man who eats peas on a knife or picks his teeth with a fork.  Again, to contemporaries it is the diner who feels superior due to practicing more genteel table etiquette who would be the snob.  Still the enduring comedy of the practice is suggested by the anonymous verse, variously attributed to Edward Lear, Spike Milligan, Ogden Nash or Shel Silverstein:

 

I eat my peas with honey,

I’ve done it all my life;

It makes the peas taste funny,

But it keeps them on the knife.

 

     Yet Thackery extended the word’s meaning from working class people to those of the middle class who, usually incompetently, ape a fashionable lifestyle.   Major Ponto and his wife bankrupt themselves by imitating their “betters.” The author is subjected to their daughters’ incompetent piano-playing. The Pontos relish the company of the disagreeable Lord Gules because of his aristocratic birth and the family us financially ruined by their son’s expenditures to maintaining an upper-class facade.         

     There remained only one further twist to bring the current sense of the word.  Today one may properly be called a snob if one feels that one’s possessions, material, intellectual, or even spiritual, make one superior to those less gifted.  Looking down on others is an error of taste, it is unseemly, and constitutes the real heart of true snobbery.  The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest example of this barbed sort of snobbery has to do not with financial or aesthetic but rather religious one-upmanship, citing Shaw’s The Doctor’s Dilemma (1911): “All her childish affectations of conscientious scruple and religious impulse have been applauded and deferred to until she has become an ethical snob of the first water.”

     The sense of sharpness that soon accumulated around this sort of disdain is exemplified by Orwell’s relentless experience of his wealthier classmates’ contempt as scholarship boy in a prestigious school.  “I suppose,” he comments, “there is no place in the world where snobbery is quite so ever-present or where it is cultivated in such refined and subtle forms as in an English public school.” [4]  Yet he noted a sort of snobbery as well among waiters who identify with their genteel clientele and even  among tramps who wish to let everyone know that they had “come down in the world.” [5]  

     I might defend myself by claiming my fondness for the films of Chaplin and the Marx brothers, the cartoons of Winsor McKay and of George Herriman, and the music of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, but all of these are artists who, though they worked in popular genres, are applauded by intellectuals.  My cousin compiles evidence on the considerable role of people with my surname in Scottish history, but a coat of arms has no significance for me.  I curse neckties and find my wardrobe in  the Salvation Army, but I am afraid I might here approach a form of inverted snobbery which has surely a different meaning entirely.

     I must fall back in then end on my insistence that I feel no shadow of superiority to those of differing tastes.  Unfortunately, the best support for this claim is subjective.  I can only depend on what I may hope is a reputation for broad sympathies, extending to all those who have found a way to agreeably pass the day on this black earth, whether it be among those who relish Taylor Swift or Stravinsky, Hamburger Helper or bouillabaisse, Star Trek or Wallace Stevens.  If I have failed to convey my appreciation for the myriad sorts of sensibilities that flourish in our species, my readers may be assured that I embrace those who fancy professional wrestling no less than those with a taste for Noh drama.  Perhaps we potential snobs not only cultivate special tastes; we may be a special taste as well and attract only those who will be amused by our affectations.  Let each enjoy what is found to be enjoyable, whether it be playing at being a snob or laughing at those who do.

 

 

 

1.  New York Times, Jan. 28, 2025, “Mona Lisa to Get Her Own Room as the Overcrowded Louvre Expands.” 

2.  I think it may have been Norman Foerster’s American Poetry and Prose, but I am uncertain.

3.   Greg Sandow, “Age of the Audience, Once More,” Arts Journal Blog for December 18, 2007, at artsjournal.com.

4.  The Road to Wigan Pier (1958), p. 169.

5.  Down and Out in  P:aris and London (1933), p. 89.

This and That 2

If these brief pieces were called flash essays would they seem more au courant?


     For many years I have wondered how it can be that the rotation of the moon is so precisely coincidental with its revolutions that we on earth see only a single side. It seemed to me implausible that the correspondence could be so precise that there would be no change even over thousands of years. Only recently did I read the simple explanation. It seems the earth’s gravitational pull is exerted on the surface of the moon. While the moon’s lesser pull is manifested on earth in the tides, the more powerful earthly pull on the moon caused one lunar side to bulge out such that that side was permanently locked into the earth’s attraction.
     I retain, though a scientific curiosity about a biological point. While I can understand the function of our human bodily hair, I do not see how the hair on the head can have evolved to grow indefinitely. Surely hair on the top of the head will become inconvenient to any individual after a short time. It is worse than a peacock’s tail. Hunter gatherers without control of fire must still cut their hair. But there is no animal (though some come close) who, without artificial breeding, has developed such troublesome hair. How can this have happened?



     One might think that the idea of a philosophia perennis is a modern convenience, picking from belief patterns which were a portion of the web of culture in a given time and place only those tenets that appeal to our own age. Out of original context and juxtaposed instead to practices from far different environments, can the ideas they imply retain meaning? Does not such a selection inevitably speak more of the modern synthesizer than the ancient devotee?
     On the other hand gathering the elements of faith and belief that are most widespread must infallibly indicate those which are most essential for our species. Elements that are less meaningful, more accidental fall away, revealing more clearly what is significant. I, at any rate, accept the idea of a psycho-spiritual unity of our species transcending the admittedly powerful and myriad differences that separate us and impede understanding.



     In these belated days, when modern higher education has virtually vanished having given way to vocational school, and money has displaced knowledge as the goal of a university education, the etymology of the word school is worth remembering. It is derived from the Greek scholē, meaning leisure, or the activities of leisure such as learned research or disputation. Thus the disinterested and playful use of our most highly developed capabilities is removed from banal job training.
     Similarly, the liberal arts are those studies that cultivate intellectual growth without regard for making a living. Their study is characteristic of free people which is to say those who are unemployed. Liberal arts are opposed to the servile or mechanical arts which may be quite necessary to one’s comfort but boring when examined for their own sake. Though the term “liberal arts” was not used until late in the Middle Ages, it indicated the verbal and philosophic skills which according to the ancient Greeks were essential not only for citizenship but, more importantly, for the fulfilment of human potential.
     In this age, when technology has advanced to the point that work merely to support ourselves need take very little of anyone’s day, we fin d that many are working far longer hours than their Stone Age ancestors. Of course, most people today must perforce make a living, but that fact need not lead to the abandonment of true education and pure research, directed at no application whatever, self-justifying, the highest end of humankind. How absurd to see mortuary science and turf management as college subjects, but they are little worse than business schools and degrees in communication. When universities made a place for the so-called learned professions of law, medicine, and divinity, they little knew that these guests in the home of higher education would, like invading barbarians, seize entire institutions and take over.



     I am amused as I watch words turn into their own opposites like minute Derridean yang-yin fireworks. A number of such so-called contronyms have long existed in the language: apology, bolt, cleave, dust, garnish, peer, sanguine, strike, and the like. I feel I see several others transforming before my eyes.
     Everyone has heard “literally” used to mean figuratively; “cordial” to mean coldly polite, and “nonplussed” to mean indifferent or unaffected. Such objections are time-limited. One need only open Henry Watson Fowler to find his distaste for the use of “meticulous” to mean what it does to everyone today.

 


     Many homosexuals today make a polemical point of their sexual orientation as a fundamental identity. It is important for them to assert gayness as an element of their nature. Yet it is clear from ancient Greek and Roman history and a good many Islamic courts, medieval and more recent, that a considerable number, though not all, men will engage in same-sex activities if such liaisons are approved or tolerated by society. Surely the fact must be that people – men and women – occupy a variety of places along a spectrum from very strongly heterosexual to equally strongly homosexual in preference. Given taboos and sanctions, many more mildly attracted to same-sex relationships will fail to act on such impulses, while those with more intensely defined tastes will find them impossible to resist.
     Further complicating factors exist. In animals homosexual behavior is commonly observed, but may usually be regarded as a simple error, since individuals virtually never display a consistent proclivity for homosexual partners. Even this is not an absolute rule, though. Ten per cent of rams among domestic sheep refuse to mate with ewes while readily having sex with other males. Finally, it is little surprising is social and psychological factors are powerful in directing even such elemental behavior. Our genitals, of course, cannot tell what may be stimulating them. We know only in the mind.

 


     I have read many explanations of medieval courtly love conventions. To some they imply social norms that accept adultery, while to others the poetry was always part of a sophisticated game involving strictly circumscribed ritual flirtation. To some they are a sign of the influence of Arabic poetry such as Ibn Hazm’s The Ring of the Dove, to others a reflection of Catharism or Mariolatry. To some courtly love is merely an apparition which does not in fact exist. Why has nobody suggested the simplest and most likely element in what is surely a phenomenon with multiple causes: the attitude of vassalage before the feminine is nothing but an accurate representation of the male’s total subjection to sexual allure? Who among men has not felt very like the wolf in the 1940s cartoon whose jaw drops to the floor as his eyes bug out at the sight of a lovely female figure? The poems seem to me to exaggerate not one bit.



     In this area the word town is used to mean a subdivision of a county, the political unit elsewhere called a township. In some instances such as where I live in Goshen the town has the same name as one of its municipalities. Thus, as one departs Goshen, a sign declares “entering town of Goshen” when in fact the driver is leaving the village of Goshen, what in common usage is called a “town,” and entering the countryside. This usage applies throughout New England.
     In much of the United States townships (as they are more generally called) are a sort of phantom political division without independent governance. As a child I relished knowing that I loved in Milton Township largely because one never heard the name.
     Townships under that name are thickly populated and, in popular usage, non-white in South Africa (and colonial Rhodesia), or simply thinly populated as in Scotland, Australia, and Canada,

In Defense of a Useless Higher Education

SUNY Albany just closed their Classics Department. Where is solidarity? Professorial protest? Student objections? I'm afraid that most Americans have lost sight of the unique role of higher education.


      I judge universities by the strength of their Classics departments, and the list of institutions in the running is shrinking yearly as the field that dominated European high education until the twentieth century is altogether dropped by one school after another. I would argue that mine is a just evaluative method, not because of my own affection for Greek and Roman literature, but because Classics provides a test case of whether a school is pursuing the true role of higher education: the cultivation of knowledge for its own sake. The undergraduate studies to learn how to think: how to take in information, process it, and generate original ideas. On the graduate and professional levels, the very same activity continues on the level of research, the production of new knowledge.
     Intellectual work is surely the definitive capability of our species, and a person thinking hard resembles a cat about to pounce. Each practices the skills perfected by the evolution of the codes of eons of DNA. The observer can scarcely doubt that the cat enjoys the hunt even if it prefers to dine on pelleted cat food, and, for humans, the value of using the brain is likewise dependent on no practical ends.
     Research of various sorts is conducted in a number of contemporary institutions, most of them large corporations, but nowhere except in the university is it viable for its own sake. Experiments that might result in a lucrative and patentable discovery can always find funding; pure research has only one home. It is true but irrelevant that often discoveries by “pure” scientific researchers have proven useful. It is unlikely that the Classicist’s findings will be influential outside his professional circles, yet they possess nonetheless a share in the grand unfolding project of human knowledge that is nurtured only at universities.
     The unfortunate fact is, of course, that research in higher education is less and less independent. America’s romance with capitalism and today’s budget crises have combine to lead colleges and universities to seek ever more “alliances’ with big money, tailoring their programs not to the professors’ own interests, but to the ends that will attract money. The call of these sirens is inaudible, of course, to the Classicist, whose field, rigorous though it be, is unlikely ever to draw much cash.
     The modern university is increasingly a vocational school. The notion that a liberal education will prepare the student for any sort of problem-solving has faded before the unashamed advance of training for jobs. It is true that historically, universities have sometimes included courses in preparation for “the learned professions” of medicine, law, and the church (though many doctors, lawyers, and clergy prior to this century had no college training). Few people practicing these professions ever do research (professors in the fields do), but these historic exceptions have been overwhelmed by endless explicitly vocational programs of no scholarly or scientific pretensions, boasting instead graduate hiring rates and starting salaries and creating an environment completely inimical to the disinterested pursuit of knowledge. Even soi-disant friends of higher education think they can make their apologetics only by pointing to economic advantage, though by its very nature state-sponsored research properly belongs only to those intellectuals whose work would not be supported by the market. Money-making is a different game altogether.
     These ideas are entirely out of step with the thinking of politicians and the populace today; indeed, they would find little acceptance even among academicians. The church controlled European higher education for many years. Then, after a brief period of secularism and at least a facade of ideals beyond the dollar, corporations have come to dominate, and learning cannot fail to be the loser. The question is simply whether we want to trust the progress of the species to those seeking to produce new knowledge or those pursuing personal wealth. Which is likely to better serve humanity?