The New Elite’s Silly Virtue-Signaling Consumption, by Benjamin Schwarz.
Today’s ascendant class, which emerged in the late 1970s and burgeoned in the 1990s, has been called the “educated elite,” the “cosmopolitan class,” the “new establishment,” the “creative class,” the “meritocratic elite,” the “exam-passing class,” the “metropolitan class,” the “new face of wealth,” the “labor market elite,” the “new upper class,” the “bourgeois bohemians,” the “anywheres.” …
Owing to transformations in both information technology and the international economic system, the national and global economy has rewarded people blessed with high cognitive abilities and glamorous academic achievements. The winners include, most conspicuously, those who control and manage the international flow of capital and of information in its various forms …
This elite has been inculcated with a set of attitudes, shibboleths, and aesthetic preferences that … trace … [to] the 1960s. … These commentators have consistently identified “diversity” and “tolerance” as the qualities to which the new elite most reverently genuflects; “environmentalism” and “healthism” as its ethos; and … what they variously characterize as “self-cultivation,” “self-fulfillment,” and “self-expression” as its animating pursuit.
A social and political outlook based on self-fulfillment easily lapses into self-indulgence. …
This consumption comes in two forms. One is tangible (the right greens purchased at the right market, the right street food purchased from the right food truck, the right handbag purchased at the right boutique, the right house purchased in the right neighborhood). The intangible form includes the right indie music, day school, college, and grad program. Either way, consumption becomes the dominant means of self-definition. …
Spending time, money and labor in pursuit of health has become a virtue, telegraphed by particular accessories (think yoga pants) and even the achievement of a particular muscular structure. The rampant “food culture” invented by the educated elite — involving the Stakhanovite quest and conspicuous consumption of usually expensive comestibles reckoned healthy, organic, “sustainable,” “ethnic,” and esoteric — is inexhaustibly and rapturously scrutinized by the New York Times, a paper that emerged in the 1990s as the national chronicler and sounding board of that class. …
Currid-Halkett convincingly argues that the consumer preferences of today’s elite — be it the approved podcast, TED Talk, or magazine; goat tacos from the farmers market, a five-dollar cup of Intelligentsia Coffee, ceviche at the Oaxacan restaurant in the approved urban enclave, or tuition for the anointed school — are now the primary means by which members of the educated elite establish, reinforce, and signify their identities. …
Many of the elite’s purchases are made in the name of protecting the environment. But the notion that self-denial — rather than buying things to gratify oneself — might better serve that end seems absent from the elite worldview. …
The same goes for the educated elite’s exercise regimens. … George Orwell and Christopher Lasch … reserved a circle in hell for exercise devotees. They recognized that optimizing one’s own well-being is evidence not of self-denial but of self-absorption, and is thus antithetical to what they saw as the approach to life required to safeguard family life and properly raise children. …
Currid-Halkett’s deconstruction of the painstaking measures Whole Foods deploys to inculcate its customers with the belief that “you are a better global citizen and healthier person” prompts the inevitable question: Better and healthier than whom? The educated elite’s spending decisions — decisions that, as Currid-Halkett lays bare, imbue the purchase of a $2 organic heirloom tomato with a peculiar virtue — beget and fortify that class’s conviction that its members are more conscientious, better informed, and more virtuous than those outside its charmed circle. …
Thus by means of what is, at bottom, a self-gratifying act, spending money — rather than by means of compassion, piety, courage, or self-sacrifice — a lucky elite has set itself above ordinary people by virtue of its aesthetic tastes and preferences, which it has elevated to a self-defined enlightenment. …
Reflecting and exacerbating the cultural divide, these cities have increasingly become culturally homogenous echo-chambers. The consumption patterns and cultural and political attitudes of, say, London, central Paris, the westside of Los Angeles, the northside of Chicago, Manhattan, Seattle, Northwest D.C., Toronto, and San Francisco resemble each other more than they do their outlying districts and suburbs.
As befits these engines of global capitalism, these cities and their inhabitants are pulling away with growing momentum from their native countries and cultures. Untethered from their localities, they are being transformed into an archipelago of analogous islands. Currid-Halkett is surely right that this process represents a divide between (to somewhat simplify matters) the cosmopolitans and the provincials, but it is hardly an equal struggle. The wealth, dynamism, and consequent self-belief are all on one side; the unorganized, self-defeating resentment is all on the other. The cosmopolitan elite will shape the world as that elite wishes, even if the results ultimately prove disastrous to all.
Indulgent consumption, reflective of a late stage civilization in decay. The soft and stupid heirs of those who built the civilization are living off its capital, letting it run down. I’ll bet Islam can hardly believe its luck.
hat-tip Stephen Neil
