How to Be an Elitist

Professor Alex Priou on the pursuit of excellence.

We are quite pleased with our freedom. In prior ages, we like to remind ourselves, rigid social hierarchies constrained men of talent to follow in the footsteps of their fathers, regardless of whether they were capable of more or deserving of less. A royal nature might by circumstance have been confined to a life of trapping birds or raising rabbits, while a long line of mediocrities occupied the throne. It was and still is unnatural for the best to be ruled by their inferiors. Thankfully, our modern economy and the educational institutions that support it allow for unprecedented flexibility in the ways of life available to the average individual. Untethered from the past, the ambitious and disciplined have some hope of attaining their full potential, while the slothful and indecisive will squander their resources in indolence. We reward the most productive members of society with riches and recognition that would have escaped their likes long ago. It is of this freedom that we are proud.

Yet a quick look around our institutions reveals that we encourage also a collective aimlessness, a general lack of seriousness in the ends we allow our most precious resource, the young, to pursue. We are slow as a society to pass judgment on their choices. Reasonable worries are dismissed with a wave of the hand. “He’s living his best life,” we say. Or, “She’s pursuing her own truth.” Nietzsche, I think, put it best: we believe we have invented happiness, that it’s whatever we want it to be, nothing more. And then we blink, in empty-headed self-contentment. Young men and women graduate from college knowing at twenty-two what they ought to have learned by sixteen, having acquired in that extra time all the bad habits that come from working little and thinking less. And for that they earn a “college degree,” whose true value does not extend much beyond the cost of the heavy stock paper and fancy printing. Economically we reward industry and inventiveness, yet socially we are guilty of an indefensible toleration of vice.

Herein lies the paradox of a regime such as ours. The best thing about freedom is that you can live any life you want. And the worst thing about freedom is that you can live any life you want. We have jettisoned the sclerotic hierarchies of old as arbitrary, but with them have gone the sensible, natural hierarchies to which they appealed. Baby and bathwater thus share the same fate. The cream still rises, to be sure, yet it is decidedly in spite of our collective tendencies, not because of them. We dare not say publicly to the children of others what we say privately to our own, that they are wasting their time, their talents, and their opportunities on idle pastimes and entertainment, the evil end that lays claim to our leisure. Vigilant opposition to the lowering of expectations, to the flattening of all heights, is required, if more is to be made of oneself than a cog in the commodification of one’s attention for likes, views, and clicks. To live well today, one must first stand athwart.

I recently discussed this problem with some students attending UATX’s high school honors program in Austin this past June. The course was called “How To Be An Elitist,” a title meant to appeal to a dissatisfaction with the present and a longing for more, while suggesting tongue-in-cheek that everything one needs to know about excellence can be learned on a single Sunday afternoon. Students read and discussed two essays, Winston Churchill’s “Mass Effects in Modern Life” and Leo Strauss’s “What Is Liberal Education?” Together they offer a remarkably lucid and accessible diagnosis of our problem, how modern mass democracies tend to degrade political and educational institutions. Both offer biting critiques of how society, in expecting so little of us, habituates us to expect very little of ourselves. Young men and women everywhere would do well to read and discuss them. And any parents reading this ought to encourage the same.

Churchill observes that events have largely fallen out of the control of individual men, that rather chance or history rules our lives in every essential respect. No longer, then, do “the Master Teachers, Thinkers, Discoverers, Commanders” chart the course of civilization. Rather, at their heights sit “vacant Thrones.” And so we find “strutt[ing] conscientiously around the seats of the mighty decked in their discarded mantles and insignia” an “array of blameless mediocrities.” The only exception in our “scientific and organized civilization” is Science. Yet who sits atop this peak are not individuals but large corporate bodies: “The throne is occupied; but by a throng.” Leadership of these and other entities, including the state, therefore falls on men “admired for their free and easy manners, their readiness to mingle with all classes, their matter-of-fact work-a-day air, their dislike of pomp and ritual.” Today, we tend to ask ourselves if we’d enjoy having a beer with a presidential candidate before deciding our vote. Churchill is right that such a sovereign is “no longer a figure of mystery and awe,” and he rightly worries, too, that he “looks upon himself as quite an ordinary fellow.” “The question is whether the sense of leadership, and the commanding attitude towards men and affairs, are likely to arise from such simple and unpretentious customs and habits of mind.” Perhaps, we might counter, our mass society no longer needs great men. Perhaps not, Churchill concedes. But if somehow the systems we rely on should collapse, and we have taken no trouble to prepare our leaders for greatness, then to whom will we turn in our hour of need? Will nobody be there?

What matters, then, is that we educate the young for greatness, regardless of whether they will ever encounter opportunities for it. On this topic, students set aside Churchill for Strauss, whose appreciation for the connection between liberal education and greatness proves much deeper. For Strauss, liberal education is above all the cultivation of our intellectual faculties, and such cultivation should be understood as precisely as the cultivation of the soil, as agriculture or horticulture. The term “culture,” therefore, should not be used in the plural and indiscriminately, as in our phrases “corporate culture” and “drug culture,” but in the singular, as “the culture of the human mind.” Our lax use of this lofty term leads Strauss to paint a much darker picture than Churchill had, with his “vacant Thrones” and “blameless mediocrities”: “If we contrast the present day usage of ‘culture’ with the original meaning, it is as if someone would say that the cultivation of a garden may consist of the garden’s being littered with empty tin cans and whiskey bottles and used papers of various descriptions thrown around the garden at random.” Dark though this cloud may be, it bears a silver edge Churchill’s does not. For Churchill is convinced that our age is a high plateau, well above the peaks of the past, yet lacking “a monarch peak, with base enormous, whose summit is for ever hidden from our eyes by clouds.” Strauss disagrees. He contends that the ancient peaks rise high above us today, no less than those in ages past. For “the greatest minds…are extremely rare. We are not likely to meet any of them in any classroom. We are not likely to meet any of them anywhere. It is a piece of good luck if there is a single one alive in one’s time.” Practically speaking, then, we have access to these minds “only through the great books.” But still, they rise high above us.

Strauss poses the question, “What can liberal education mean here and now?” And he answers, “Liberal education is the counterpoison to mass culture, to the corroding effects of mass culture.” It is through a great books style education, then, that one most effectively stands athwart the worst tendencies of our time. Or, as Strauss puts it, “Liberal education is the necessary endeavor to found an aristocracy within democratic mass society. Liberal education reminds those members of a mass democracy who have ears to hear, of human greatness.” UATX’s great books curriculum and culture of excellence, in academics as in character, consist of such reminders of greatness, day in and day out. We take seriously in everything we do the challenge to educate, not just in this or that civilization and culture, but in civilization and culture simply. Last Fall, our President Carlos Carvalho delivered an address with the title, “In Defense of Inequality,” where he exhorted the incoming class to embrace their excellence, whether it lay in their curiosity, their intellect, their courage, or their achievements. It may be a long time before the West needs “a monarch peak, with base enormous.” Yet indispensable for the present is a taste for what separates such mountains from our molehills. And yes, it takes more than a pair of essays and a Sunday afternoon.

---

Alex Priou is Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Austin (UATX). He is the author of three books on Plato, most recently Musings on Plato's Symposium, as well as numerous articles and chapters on the history of political philosophy.

*The views expressed in this essay are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the University of Austin (UATX), its faculty, staff, leadership, or trustees.

Follow the University of Austin

X | Facebook | Instagram | LinkedIn | YouTube | Substack | Spotify | Apple