#14: What’s with the snobbishness of traditional elites and intellectuals?
Did Modi 'embarrass' India in the US? Why are many 'wordsmith intellectuals' snobbish and resentful?
Remember PM Modi’s visit to the United States last month? There’s a ton to unpack on increasing US-India cooperation in defence, science, technology, etc., but I don’t have any meaningful insights on that. Instead, I will talk about something orthogonal that happened during the visit but isn’t unique to this one.
There was, predictively, criticism and downplaying of the visit's success from the usual quarters. Some reminisced about the reception of Dr Manmohan Singh, Nehru and Indira Gandhi. All that is okay except for a barrage of insults about Modi’s struggle with speaking in English, which has become common during his foreign visits. This is absurd and, frankly, disgusting.
Proficiency in English used to be a marker of exclusivity and ‘merit’ in India. However, times have changed: ordinary Indians are no more ‘embarrassed’ about such irrelevant things. And that’s a damn good thing. Neither are other countries judging our head of state on their grammar and diction — just as we wouldn’t judge Biden on how he speaks Hindi.
Many of these non-sensical insults come from traditional elites: otherwise ‘woke’ people who write polemics on decolonisation, inclusivity and whatnot. Much of their frustration appears to be from struggling to come to terms with their decreasing influence and proximity to power.
Sanjay Baru’s recent book India’s Power Elite traces the rise of new elites after 2014, who tend to be provincial and vernacular. A recent piece by Shekhar Gupta makes a similar point about a growing new elite. I strongly suggest checking it out (after you’ve finished reading this piece!).
Or, you can read: College pedigree, daddy’s name, BBC accent no longer golden ticket. India has a growing new elite by Shekhar Gupta.
The snobbishness of ‘intellectuals’
Beyond this specific incident, I’ve generally wondered why many intellectuals are snobbish and resentful. And they also tend to be disproportionately opposed to capitalism. Of course, I don’t mean to generalise: this does not apply to many — perhaps most — but there are enough of them to have contributed to this stereotype.
I’m referring to a caricature of what Robert Nozik refers to as ‘wordsmith intellectuals’: “those who, in their vocation, deal with ideas as expressed in words, shaping the word flow others receive. These wordsmiths include poets, novelists, literary critics, newspaper and magazine journalists, and many professors”.
Perhaps snobbishness is one way to feel superior, as these wordsmith intellectuals think they’ve been ‘wronged’ and not adequately valued by the current system. Nozik has an interesting take on this:
The schools… taught the principle of reward in accordance with (intellectual) merit. To the intellectually meritorious went the praise, the teacher's smiles, and the highest grades. In the currency the schools had to offer, the smartest constituted the upper class. Though not part of the official curricula, in the schools the intellectuals learned the lessons of their own greater value in comparison with the others, and of how this greater value entitled them to greater rewards.
The wider market society, however, taught a different lesson. There the greatest rewards did not go to the verbally brightest. There the intellectual skills were not most highly valued. Schooled in the lesson that they were most valuable, the most deserving of reward, the most entitled to reward, how could the intellectuals, by and large, fail to resent the capitalist society which deprived them of the just deserts to which their superiority "entitled" them? Is it surprising that what the schooled intellectuals felt for capitalist society was a deep and sullen animus that, although clothed with various publicly appropriate reasons, continued even when those particular reasons were shown to be inadequate?
You can read the full essay here (it starts from page 1, then continues through pages 9 to 11). I’m not sure I entirely agree with the piece, but something to think about.
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