A writer I admire, Andrew Sullivan, recently released a missive (now behind a paywall) about the media response to a mass shooting in Atlanta. Mass shootings are not a Ruminathan topic. But what struck me is Sullivan’s insistent use of the term “media elites,” and not in a complimentary way.
What grabbed my attention wasn’t the spectacle of a media elite trash-talking media elites. Hypocrisy is a highly forgivable vice in my book in any case, but in Sullivan’s would be a grossly unfair charge. The former editor of the New Republic and titan of the blogosphere has taken principled positions that risked ostracism from his ideological milieu, and with similar courage has declared independence from the traditional media “establishment.” What strikes me instead is the increasingly negative connotation of the term “elite.” Sullivan’s undertone of a sneer as he writes “elites” is not as pronounced as Donald Trump’s – it’s hard to match that – but it’s there.
What are elites, and what is wrong with them?
These are questions I’ve been asking myself for some time and for many reasons, not the least of which is that I surely count as someone’s idea of an “elite.” Just having the leisure time to write a blog puts me in rarefied company. Gallivanting around the globe to teach managers at multinational corporations about leadership and finance clearly makes me one of the cosmopolitan beneficiaries of globalization. In Capital and Ideology, Thomas Piketty describes how center-right and center-left parties around the world have become dominated by commercial and educational elites, respectively. By most definitions, I fit squarely into their intersection.
All this to say that my interest in elites and their moral standing is not merely intellectual. Mind you, I’ve never felt elite, especially because my life has run on tangents to society’s true inner circles. I know that I am no closer to pulling levers of power than your average bus driver. Maybe I know that more acutely because my path takes me within distant sight of the doors of the antechambers of power on rare occasions.
Here’s something else I know. Life sometimes throws several crises at you at once. When that happens, you go into fire-fighting mode. And when you’re sprinting from one fire to the next, you have neither the time nor the attention to devote to fire prevention. It’s only when you have time to catch your breath and stop worrying about surviving that you can think longer term. Not only can you turn to fire prevention, you can think about whether “No Fires” is the right goal to aim for, whether having a controlled little fire burning all the time might not actually be helpful.
When we don’t or can’t carve out time to allow our minds to wander freely we cannot give our lives direction and meaning. And it’s not only about time, it’s about the kind of attention you can dedicate. The fire-fighting mindset is irreconcilable with the mindset you need for thinking about direction and meaning.
What’s true for individuals is true for organizations, of all sizes. We tend to think of the division of labor in terms of breaking down production processes into the smallest individual steps, as in Adam Smith’s nail factory. But another division of labor occurs between those who keep busy on the day-to-day smothering of fires, and those who think longer-term about the organization’s direction and meaning. The latter are elites.
Elites are usually able to stake out a disproportionate amount of society’s resources, as Piketty documents exhaustively in Capital and Ideology. On one common interpretation, elites – who by definition are those who set direction for organizations – enrich themselves by shaping the organization’s rules to their personal advantage. That’s undoubtedly true, at least in some cases. The question is: Why do the rest of us put up with it?
I would argue that we put up with it because – regardless of their motives – elites need reliable access to a sufficient level of resources to allow for leisure. As an organization, we free some of us up from survival pressure and fire-fighting so that they have the time and mindspace to think about direction and meaning. In the language of game theory: In the strategic interaction between elites and non-elites, we have settled into an equilibrium in which both sides cooperate through a division of labor, both sides reap material benefits compared to the base case where everyone goes their own way, but one side benefits more than the other.
Both game theory and the empirical research from behavioral economics (and history!) show that these arrangements are remarkably stable even if they are not equally advantageous to all participants. It’s part of this notion of an equilibrium that it doesn’t really matter by what path you reach it, e.g., marauding tribal chieftains setting themselves up as landholding aristocracy. Once reached, it’s hard to perturb the equilibrium because the immediate alternatives are disadvantageous to at least one party and possibly to all parties. Equilibria can be perturbed, and a future Ruminathan will explore under what kinds of circumstances that is likely to happen. But the new equilibrium may be no more egalitarian than the one before, or if it is, it might also be to everyone’s material disadvantage.
So we can and should have debates about who plays the role of elite, and by what processes we promote people into those positions. But as long as we accept the underlying premise of the division of labor, we will have elites and they will enjoy material privileges, not because they “deserve” or “earn” them in any moral sense, but because material privilege is a necessary condition for elites to be able to play their assigned role.
Having acknowledged that I might be considered a member of an elite: Is this just a self-serving defense of my own privilege? Probably so. My self-doubt is too well-developed to categorically deny it. But as I have argued elsewhere, we don’t get very far by dismissing others’ arguments based on their motives alone.
And here is what I will say: I think we have for too long, with too little reflection, and too enthusiastically placed all our chips on the division of labor. No material gain may be worth pushing some people into permanent fire-fighting mode while outsourcing all direction-setting and the search for meaning to others. We may want to take a step back and carefully consider the true costs of the division of labor.
Of course, right now, only elites have the leisure to do that reflection.
The Ruminathans 