In Defense of Elitism William A. Henry III Doubleday, 212 pp. $26.95 Review by Reed Woodhouse Featured in BBR January/February 1995 The author of In Defense of Elitism, the late William A. Henry, was an accomplished media and cultural critic for Time Magazine, whose earlier books included a study of the 1984 presidential election, Visions of America. His writing in the present book, published about the time of his premature death at 50, has the virtues and vices of Time, of political reportage, and of journalism in general. In Defense of Elitism is, on the one hand, a lucid, flexible and sharply-written soliloquy by a man who was a self-defined liberal and who supported many of the causes whose excesses he deplores in these pages. In this respect, Henry's book is a useful survey, not only of the various hyperbolic follies of our time, but of a particularly well-informed, decent man's attempt to put them to rest. On the other hand, the book seems hampered by its own rhetorical ease, a journalistic vice I have noted in many other books by magazine writers. It is not so much convincing as plausible, its arguments a little too shallow to carry home, its method too anecdotal, and even its refreshing candor a bit too bright and shining, like a schoolboy showing his mother a good report card. In that respect, In Defense of Elitism strikes me as an understandable and honorable attempt on Henry's part, but one that will neither persuade readers of any other conviction than his own, nor inspire like-minded readers with new zeal. The book seems, for all its fluency, indeed because of it, one revision short of success. It needed tightening and specificity before seeing the light of day. I can only imagine that Henry, sensing his life was coming to an end, was eager to publish the book even in its unfinished state rather than leave it a mere torso at his death. One can admire, therefore, the courage of his resolute good cheer, his constant attempts at fairness and understanding, while regretting that he was unable to bring them to bear in any more radical way on the subjects at hand. The man behind this deliberately provocative "defense of elitism" was a self-described "registered Democrat, a recipient of awards for civil rights writing [and] a card-carrying member of the American Civil Liberties Union"-quite as much egalitarian as elitist, in fact. But he believed that in the perpetual strife in this country between egalitarianism and elitism, the former had been "winning far too thoroughly." In his opinion, egalitarian zeal has overstepped reason in its demand for immediate equality of social outcome, rather than a slower, more achievable equality of opportunity; and in so doing has become parochial, even paranoid. Egalitarians have made a radical and irresponsible jump: if various disadvantaged groups are not "proportionally" represented among the American elites, then elitism itself must go. There must be no more invidious distinctions among good, better and best, whether among people or thoughts or cultures, whether in the present or even in the past. Reason itself must yield to "nonrationalistic forms of knowledge" (as one radical TLS writer put it). Standards of evidence and proof are not necessary for the melanin theory of black culture, by which the molecule responsible for blacks' skin pigmentation is held to be a mystical source of energy and intelligence. Traditions of taste must be not only questioned but dismissed in order to achieve in art the "proportional representation" we now demand in government. Consequently, a second-rate author like Aphra Behn must be talked of as if she were fully equivalent in achievement to Dryden. The goal of education must be self-esteem rather than self-knowledge. And the general theory behind this dismantling of excellence seems to be (as Henry puts it) "If one can't win, then one changes the rules." In Defense of Elitism, then, is not a defense of any particular elite but of the idea of excellence, which Henry feels is being abandoned. Henry turns out to be in fact an old-fashioned meritocrat, combining a liberal's belief in the career open to talent (no matter whose) and the conservative's in the individual nature of talent. In Henry's blunt phrasing: "Some people are better than others-smarter, harder working, more learned, more productive, harder to replace." And these people are the ones who must be recognized, encouraged, and trained for positions of leadership in our society from an early age. Not to do so would be imprudent for society, and unjust to the talented. He is therefore a predictable and funny foe of the movement to stop ability tracking in public schools (the "theory" of this movement is that "bright children ought to be helping slow ones rather than maximizing their own achievements and pulling ahead.") He notes a similar movement in games, whereby "an elementary school class is apt to be divided into so many teams that no one is the last chosen. Children are thus supposedly shielded from noticing who is better or worse." Harder to swallow, and certainly harder to prove, is Henry's assertion that some cultures are better than others. (Better for whom, is the immediate question.) He lists seven criteria by which to judge the comparative superiority of a culture: social liberty, relative freedom from want, modernity in science, permanent art objects appreciated by other cultures than one's own, widespread education, cultural expansionism and hierarchical organization. As he must have been well aware, each of these criteria demands searching definition and awareness of contrary views, neither of which Henry has the space or ability to offer. The world-view that underlies his preferences-for they are not yet principles-is a late version of the Whig view of history: rational, progressive, commonsensical. (Even more Whiggish is his eighth, uninsisted-on criterion, freedom from theocracy.) But one need not be a woozy relativist to see that, admirable as these criteria are, they seem to leave out as much excellence as they include. Take a quality as hopelessly indefinable as the "douceur de vivre" which a dispossessed French aristocrat found in socially-rigid pre-Revolutionary France, or that spirit of unjudgmental, unambitious "love" which Luciano De Crescenzo finds in the utterly desperate slums of Naples. While no one would want to construct a polity based on the douceur de vivre or on love, they are sometimes by-products of quite "inferior" polities, and seem arguably a human achievement as great in its way as that of putting men on the moon. I'm not sure Henry could account for excellence that was not expressed as worldly success. What Henry misses, perhaps what he cannot bring himself to see, is that even if one is, like himself, a real egalitarian, believing in the right of all people to opportunity, vast numbers of people in our country will never take that opportunity, may never know it exists, may believe themselves (possibly correctly) forever shut out from the glittering world of power, money and esteem. I am not talking only about the so-called urban underclass, but about the many people from many classes who know that they have no special gift, no passport to any elite. What can we do with, or for, them? It is here that meritocratic fairness loses its beauty and begins to seem hard-hearted. Henry himself is not hard-hearted, and herein lies the contradiction that hovers just beyond his reach in this book. He cannot see, or cannot bear to see, the cruel implication of his otherwise decent meritocracy: that the career open to talent is so obviously closed to untalent. At the same time, Henry is surely right in his exasperation with dogmatic egalitarians who mock the sufferings of the untalented by the patronizing pretense that talent doesn't exist or doesn't matter. In Defense of Elitism is thus the honorable embodiment of a dilemma rather than a satisfying answer to it. Reed Woodhouse is a Contributing Editor of the Boston Book Review. &copy1995. Boston Book Review. All rights reserved.

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