Ross Douthat emerged from Harvard with some serious hang-ups. I don’t know why. He grew up in New Haven, so it’s not like Cambridge was a foreign planet. He graduated magna cum laude, which ain’t too shabby. Yet, his first instinct upon graduation was to write a book ripping the place: Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class. Here’s how Stephen Metcalf summed up Privilege:
In the end, Privilege is more a symptom than a diagnosis. The wound-up, overachieving children of the wound-up, overachieving professional elites find themselves ensnared in a paradox: the more intense the competition for social rewards, the more advantages their parents feel compelled to confer on them, and at earlier and earlier ages. Even as these children compete harder to achieve more, they may suspect they are less and less deserving. This is a recipe for neurosis, in which a style of condescension appropriate to the old Protestant upper crust mingles nonsensically with the gaping insecurity of the striving middle classes. And this is precisely the voice in which Privilege has been written.
Of course, Douthat’s gaping sense of insecurity went deeper than mere suspicions about his right to rule America. Let us quote from page 184 of his book.
One successful foray ended on the guest bed of a high school friend’s parents, with a girl who resembled a chunkier Reese Witherspoon drunkenly masticating my neck and cheeks. It had taken some time to reach this point–”Do most Harvard guys take so long to get what they want?” she had asked, pushing her tongue into my mouth. I wasn’t sure what to say, but then I wasn’t sure this was what I wanted. My throat was dry from too much vodka, and her breasts, spilling out of pink pajamas, threatened my ability to. I was supposed to be excited, but I was bored and somewhat disgusted with myself, with her, with the whole business… and then whatever residual enthusiasm I felt for the venture dissipated, with shocking speed, as she nibbled at my ear and whispered–”You know, I’m on the pill…”
Because their vodka-soaked guest-bed love-making was going to be so meaningful until it turned out that it might not be the potentially life-alterering experience that results in unwanted children.
I suppose that growing up in the shadow of Yale and spending four years at Harvard does give you some kind of ingress to talk about The Secrets of Princeton, although I don’t presume to pontificate on the Secrets of Cambridge, never having lived there. I found Susan Patton’s advice to Princeton freshman girls both familiarly humorous and embarrassingly cringe-worthy. I’m both of that world and not of that world.
It calls to mind an experience I had with some friends during the Princeton Reunions about eighteen or so years ago. Late at night, after much too much alcohol, my friends and I were strolling along McCosh Walk when a man in his late-40’s, handsome, nattily-dressed in casual wear, and arm-in-arm with a gorgeous woman, greeted us much too warmly. One of us asked him how he was doing. “Not too bad, I must say,” he started, without breaking his pace. Soon he was beyond us, but he carried on, “for a man of my position, wealth, education” and so on until his distance muted his words and we could hear no more.
We laughed and laughed at his unapologetic arrogance and self-satisfied manner. He quite rightly was feeling like he had it all. And he did. Yet, he assumed we did, too. Or would. It might have been a little intergenerational…the old talking to the new, but it wasn’t condescending. It was more like, “Here’s what you have to look forward to, so of course there’s merriment!”
I laughed at Sarah Potter’s arrogance, but I understood it for what it was: the elite talking to the elite. On that level, it’s hard to call something feminist or anti-feminist and be sure those terms can possibly apply. Her point was straightforward. Princeton girls are extremely smart and they will never have a bigger pool of smart men to marry than during their time at Princeton. So, go find a husband because you’ll never be happy with a man who isn’t your intellectual equal, and the pool of those men is going to shrink fast once your college days are over.
Good advice? Bad advice?
Your mileage may vary. But at least it was about brains, not class.
She didn’t say that you’ll never find a bigger pool of rich boys to marry. But that’s how Ross Douthat took it. And his transformation of the point from one about intellectual compatibility into one about perpetuating privilege is a sign that he isn’t getting over being bored and somewhat disgusted with himself any time soon.
