At a dinner party recently, I got chatting to the twentysomething children of some acquaintances. I asked them what they thought about a range of subjects and was intrigued, and slightly startled by their opinions, which ranged from a total disrespect for the police, to a rejection of marriage as a concept and a desire to legalise drugs entirely. Despite attending elite universities, they told me exam results didn’t matter. Without a hint of irony they told me they thought eco-activists should protest continually at airports to “educate” people about the harm to the environment from flying, while later telling me of their impressive long-haul holiday plans.
This conversation came back to me as I read Rob Henderson’s masterpiece, Troubled, a story of his life growing up poor in foster care in America, which has taken the US by storm. Henderson later joined the military, and then made it to Yale, where he encountered the top one per cent of society, and became fascinated by their affectations and mores which informed his theory of “luxury beliefs”, opinions which confer social status on the upper class, while often inflicting costs on those beneath them.
Henderson joins the great modern social anthropologists like Pierre Bourdieu, whose 1979 work Distinction, an ethnography of French society, argues that the social world functions as a system of power relations where minute distinctions of taste become the basis for social judgment. Bourdieu’s argument is that a “triadic structure” of schooling, language and taste is necessary to be accepted among the upper class. Nathalie Olah continues on the same trajectory in her book Bad Taste, where her argument is that “good taste” is a construct enforced by the elite to maintain the status quo.
Luxury beliefs confer social status on the upper class, while often inflicting costs on those beneath them
Henderson expands these theories into new territory, arguing that while in the past people displayed their membership of the upper class with material accoutrements, status symbols have become more accessible to the masses, and therefore have been devalued, so society’s elite have decoupled social status from goods and reattached it to beliefs.
He argues that graduates of elite universities generally occupy the top quintile of income, often wield outsized social influence and are disproportionally likely to hold luxury beliefs that undermine social mobility, not only because it ensures their superiority, but — and this part is crucial — they won’t be affected by the fall-out. Drug legalisation is one key “luxury belief” Henderson identifies in the book.
“A well-heeled student at an elite university can experiment with cocaine and will, in all likelihood, be fine,” he explains. “A kid from a dysfunctional home with absentee parents will often take the first hit to self-destruction.”
This is perhaps why a 2019 study found that fewer than half of Americans without a college degree wish to legalise drugs while more than 60 per cent of graduates do.
The statistics Henderson quotes throughout the book are damning. Compared with Americans who earn more than $75,000 a year, the poorest Americans are seven times more likely to be victims of aggravated assault and 20 times more likely to be victims of sexual assault. Yet many affluent people in the US are calling to abolish law enforcement.
Most egregious to Henderson is the luxury belief that family is unimportant or that children are equally likely to thrive in all structures. In Britain, marriage has become the biggest class divide of our times. Successive studies show the importance of married two-parent families on childhood attainments and outcomes. While students at elite universities are overwhelmingly likely to have grown up in a stable two-parent household, they often proclaim distaste for marriage, while the abandonment of it wreaks havoc for kids at the other end of the socio-economic ladder.
In a faux meritocratic world where everyone is “equal”, and yet the wealthiest 10 per cent of households hold 43 per cent of all the wealth, Henderson’s book highlights the concerning Orwellian development in society’s ever-morphing chimera that subscribing to opinions — thought itself — has become commodified into social currency. The world has never been such a complicated place and yet we now have a situation where an elite is hindering intellectual rigour in order to maintain their place at the top. There’s a new feudal system — beware.
