We all have people in our lives who have the admirable and sometimes irritable ability to dissect, analyze, compliment, and condemn with uncanny accuracy.
Some are close friends or colleagues. Some are strangers to us and remain at a distance in the public sphere. Critics of art, literature, or film, fashion editors and media publishers, political pundits, experts (real and so-called)–we know who they are. We know what they do.
What they do is act as tastemakers and gatekeepers, arbitrarily blessing the talented and favored or banishing the incompetent and unworthy. Like it or not, their comments carry weight, and they know it.
As their tastes are held to be more refined than the masses, they assume an elevated position in society. While they may inform public opinion, they remain distanced from it. Theirs is not a two-way street. Theirs is not a democracy.
We often refer to them as snobs. This is rarely a compliment, but in the article below we learn that it might be good for us to have them–and listen to them–even if we don’t always like them.
Country Life on Snobs and Snobbery
Enjoy.
- BGT
I’ve come to believe that snobs aren’t born, they’re made. Take my own upbringing: if I sat at the dinner table without a napkin on my lap, chewed with my mouth open, or slurped my drink, my father would literally throw me out of the dining room. We weren’t wealthy—we were solidly middle class—but in the 1960s and 70s there was a cultural push to “rise above” your station. Good manners and proper appearance were seen as a way of moving up in the world.
Now, as an older dad who has spent time on different college campuses, I notice how different things are. From a distance, it’s nearly impossible to tell an Ivy League student from one at a community college: the uniform is the same—lounge pants, hooded sweatshirt, and noise-canceling earbuds. Contrast that with the 70s or 80s, when a parent visiting campus would likely see Lacoste polos, khakis, or J. Press jackets. Today’s look is what I half-jokingly call “boxes with legs.”
The shift isn’t just on campus. At the end of the 20th century, you could walk into a well-known coffee shop and be served coffee in a proper ceramic cup. Now it’s disposable paper or plastic, everything to go. The sense of refinement, of aspiring upward, seems diminished. And yet, just as societies need inventors and leaders, perhaps we still need snobs too—their haughtiness, irritating as it can be, acts like a cattle prod pushing the rest of us to polish up, to aim higher.
At the risk of being a snob, it’s “irritating ability”, not “irritable ability”.
There is a time and a place for snobbery. There is also a right way and a wrong way to be snobby. Discernment is important.