Luxury Beliefs

T.S. Eliot famously made the point, though he was hardly the first. One could go back to the New Testament reference to the “body of Christ,” Paul’s metaphor for the church.

Like the human body, the church has a head, hands, and all the other varied parts that together enable it to function as it should. There are those called to preach, some to evangelize, others to care for the poor and needy, and still others tasked with whatever the community requires, no matter how seemingly insignificant.

No one role is considered more important than another. Each must work together for the church to succeed in its godly mission. The sum, in other words, is greater than its constituent parts.

Everyone must accept his or her role. If the hand tries to be the head, problems arise. God has assigned to each of us specific gifts at birth. Using them to accord with God’s will is perhaps life’s greatest undertaking.

Identifying these gifts can be a challenge. The fact is, some people miss their calling, which not only diminishes their life’s purpose but denies God’s kingdom the benefit of their unique contribution.

When remembering some of the things I thought I wanted as a kid, I shudder. Not only would I have been highly ineffective in these endeavors, but I would have been miserable as well.

So, getting back to Eliot, he famously railed against what is currently all the rage: egalitarianism. Years earlier, in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville similarly warned of the implicit dangers within America’s nascent democracy, specifically the potential degeneration of society into mere “equality.”

Such, he feared, would reduce human effort to its lowest common denominator, all but short-circuiting the proper pursuit of humanity’s highest achievements. Shorn of its loftiest aspirations, a bland leveling would develop, as the God-given distinctions among human beings are effectively abolished.

All societies, Eliot maintained, require a leadership class, one consisting of those tasked with identifying, establishing, and modeling the higher good.

After all, no society on earth, past or present, has ever lacked a leadership or “elite” class. Even societies dedicated to radical equality have them.

Take, for example, present-day North Korea, Venezuela, China, Cuba, as well as the former Soviet Union. In these “egalitarian” societies the people in power (often members of the Party) live lives those they claim to serve can only but dream of. The disparities are often grotesque.

The question, then, is not whether an elite class should or shouldn’t exist (since wherever human beings live in community there will be one), but what kind of elite class, whether good or bad (or somewhere in-between).

This natural ordering is analogous to all human powers, which can be used for either sacred or profane purposes. In and of themselves, they’re neutral entities.

Anger, for example, can reflect God’s righteous judgment, in seeking to right what is wrong (good). But it also can be used to hurt and debase others (bad). The misuse of anger, however, does not mean it is, in and of itself, illegitimate. It’s all in the way it’s used.

Thus, the real question with respect to the elite class is not whether it should exist but how it functions, whether for good or ill..

For Eliot, the key factor in distinguishing between the good and the bad hinges on the relative unity or disunity between and among the classes. An elite class that is integrated with other elements of society is generally to the good. Each segment of society (or “body”) functions as it should, in a coordinated and unified manner that seeks the benefit of all.

Problems arise when the elite class cuts itself off from the rest of society, living in isolation, in a world unto itself, in a bubble. This unfortunate scenario is what Eliot perceived in the late 1930s, and it’s only gotten worse.

In his eye-opening 2012 book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, Charles Murray, using statistics carefully complied from the federal government and other sources, shows that during this short 50-year period the upper echelon of American society has separated itself dramatically from the middle-and-lower classes, and by virtually every measure and standard.

In the 50s and early 60s, when I was growing up in a wealthy New York suburb, the rich were far more apt to be involved in the community, in its churches, its public and private organizations, as well as its charities. They were a part of things.

Today, as Murray’s painstaking research reveals, such integration has largely ceased. This is evidenced in the ever-increasing disparities in education, income, and other socio-economic indicators. A self-imposed, hermetically sealed sequestration of the elite is virtually complete.

Murray confirms what most of us already know intuitively, that the elites attend the same schools, work in the same careers, and live in the same locales (in what he calls “super-zips”). A person living in one of these super-zips, he suggests, has far more in common with those in New York, Malibu, Silicon Valley, London, and Hong Kong than those living in the next town or county.

This has created, as Eliot warned, a sealed-off bubble within which the elites live and prosper. Gone is any meaningful interaction with, understanding of, or sense of responsibility for those living outside its rarified heights. Life is just that different there.

Curiously, within this elite bubble exists a strict uniformity of beliefs, values, and norms, ones its denizens violate at great peril.

In a recent, widely published article, ‘Luxury Beliefs’ Are the Latest Status Symbol for Rich Americans, Rob Henderson recounts a conversation with a former Yale classmate.

“Monogamy is kind of outdated,” she tells him, and not good for society. Traditional families are old-fashioned and society should “evolve” beyond them.

Henderson proceeds to inquire about her background and asks whether she herself plans to marry. She does. She says she’s from an affluent family and works in the high-tech sector. She also says she was reared in a traditional family setting and plans on having a traditional family herself! But, she’s quick to add, marriage shouldn’t be for everyone.

So how to explain such incongruity?

“In the past,” Henderson argues, “upper-class Americans used to display their social status with luxury goods. Today they do it with luxury beliefs.”

“[As] trendy clothes and other products become more accessible and affordable, there is increasingly less status attached to luxury goods.”

That’s where “luxury beliefs” come in, “ideas and opinions that confer status on the rich at very little cost, while taking a toll on the lower class.”

This is reminiscent of Charles Murray’s marvelous turn of phrase – that the upper class refuses to “preach what it practices.” As Murray documents, and as Henderson’s Yale classmate’s comments betray, the elites tend to live very traditional, bourgeois lives.

It’s their rhetoric that suggests the opposite.

“One example of luxury belief is that all family structures are equal,” Henderson writes.

“Evidence is clear that families with two married parents are the most beneficial for young children. And yet, affluent, educated people raised by two married parents are more likely than others to believe monogamy is outdated, marriage is a sham or that all families are the same.”

Unfortunately, such “relaxed attitudes” about any number of social issues “trickle down to the working class and the poor,” those who otherwise lack the social and economic capital to withstand the real-life effects, the by-products of the rhetoric the upper class espouses but doesn’t live by.

This also applies to religion, where elites tend to be more atheistic or non-religious, though Murray reports greater church attendance in wealthy suburbs (where luxury beliefs are reinforced in a Christian key?) than in working class neighborhoods.

Same with the work-ethic. This particular luxury belief maintains that “individual decisions don’t matter much compared to random social forces, including luck.” This sentiment, Henderson reports, is very common among his Yale and Cambridge (U.K.) classmates. They “work ceaselessly and then downplay the importance of tenacity.”

The problem is that “if the disadvantaged believe random chance is the key factor for success, they will be less likely to strive.”

Not surprisingly, the elites “are the least likely to incur any costs for promoting” these luxury beliefs. It’s the “unprotected” classes, as Peggy Noonan once called them, those who listen to the elites and mimic them, who pay the price for their casual, irresponsible rhetoric.

Henderson closes by saying that some among the upper class don’t always agree with these luxury beliefs, or at least have doubts.

“Maybe they don’t like the ideological fur coat they’re wearing,” he concludes. “But if their peers punish them for not sporting it all over town, they will never leave the house without it again.”