I had been hoping for Mary Harrington, who was supposed to speak in Cambridge yesterday, but she pulled out, and in her place was an American called Robert Henderson, a doctorand here. He coined the phrase “Luxury beliefs” which are the postures taken up to indicate high social status now that most other signifiers have been devalued. The canonical example is the demand to “Defund the police” which absolutely nobody outside the Professional Managerial Class takes seriously for a moment.
Henderson is an interesting case: the child of an addict and an unknown father, he was taken into care at the age of three, and worked his way up from the Californian fostering system into the Air Force, where he spent seven years before going to college on the GI bill, ending up first in Yale and now in Cambridge, where he has fallen in with the more radical and imaginative parts of the Conservative party and been offered a place on Katherine Birbalsinghe’s commission for social mobility. I’d have liked to talk to him properly, and to find out more about both his past and his style of thought. But if no agent has approached with the idea of packaging him as the next JD Vance the market has failed.
As a lecturer, he was good: not particularly charismatic, but clear, smart, and commanding. And I would certainly go along half way with his thesis. Luxury beliefs exist. There are certain claims that are pretty much1 infallible class markers and which are held (at least partly) because only the rich and secure can afford to suppose they are true. The classic example on the American left is “Defund the police”; on the English Right it would be the profession that Jacob Rees Mogg is a serious politician2. On the English Left, I guess it would be faith in Jeremy Corbyn.
The question is how much you can deduce from their existence. Henderson first came across them at Yale, where almost all of his classmates came from backgrounds unimaginably distant from his. And there are two parts to his observations about his Yale classmates.
The first is so to say anthropological: here is this weird thing they believe which no one without an expensive education would take seriously for a moment.
The second is to ask what advantage this belief gives those who profess it, and to go from there to assume self-interest in holding them.
Note the difference. The first observation says that these beliefs are markers of a certain class position, and they are Veblen goods in the purest sense. They are not useful in themselves. They are valuable only because most people don’t have them or can’t afford them. In this they are like the fourth Bugatti in Nick Mason’s garage. He’s never going to drive it but the fact that it’s there tells you a lot about his place in the world.
The second says that the profession of these beliefs is in some way useful to their professors. Luxury beliefs are not costly signals. They are status signals, in as much as no one outside a particular class is likely to profess them; but within that class the only cost would come from denying them. Henderson’s position on this seemed to me ambiguous. He suggested in the questions that they could be self-interested in an entirely Machiavellian way, rather like SBF’s altruism schtick: it is always possible that one of your competitors actually believed all that stuff about being kind, and so handicapped themselves in the struggle for advantage. But I think that usage is simply old-fashioned hypocrisy and tells us nothing about the social position of the user.
On the other hand, there are clear advantages to be gained by academic stotting, as traditionally taught in the Oxford Union but nowadays in Gender studies as well, where you defend a clearly ridiculous belief with such energy and agility that your opponent gives up and goes off to argue with someone else. Hi there, Professor Dennett.
There is also the rather more conspiratorial approach which holds that these beliefs are adopted because of their usefulness in the struggle between classes, rather than for status with a class. I’m not convinced by this. That’s partly because it seems to come with a penumbra of anti-Semitic paranoia — “Hollywood elites are debauching our children”. More cogent is the observation that the American PMC of my acquaintance simply don’t register the reality of anyone outside their class. Their consciousness of the poor is almost entirely abstract. Any damage to the poor by policies based on luxury beliefs is invisible and certainly unintentional.
A Marxist would say they were blinded by their class consciousness in a way that neither the poor nor the openly neofash capitalist can be.
For the moment, the idea of “luxury beliefs” is a tool of the American Right, and perhaps of the Right in this country: it’s certainly intended as such by the organisers of the talk I went to. But there are elements which could feed into a rather different critique. The question that levers open new vistas is “what happens to a luxury belief that spreads outside the elite?”. Capitalism makes available to almost everyone all kinds of material status symbols which once denoted membership in the upper classes. They then lose their function as status symbols but go on to change the world anyway. The obvious example here is private cars.
Suppose there were beliefs that once were held only by the upper classes, and were at least partly markers of status, which later became democratised. The obvious one is the construction of human life not as a realm of duty but as an arena of heroic choice (in practice, shopping). Lord Byron could be Byronic only because he was a Lord. By the mid twentieth century, anyone in Bohemia could aim for the same behaviour. By the end of the century it was taught in schools and in society as an immutable and foundational fact about human nature3.
You then get what is described by Conservatives as “a loss of moral guardrails”. Specific kinds of bad behaviour which once were available only to the privileged few are democratised. The sexual marketplace expands to include everyone on earth.
What next can be marketised, and subjected to the tyranny of choice? After sex, I suspect the answer will be death. If we think of support for voluntary euthanasia as a luxury belief — at the very least one that can only be held by people who expect to live for as long as they would like to do, which is a pretty good definition of not being in poverty — then we can see how this is going to have terrible effects lower down to social scale. But that is a subject for another little essay.
There must be working class communists somewhere outside the Colombian mountains.
Roger Scruton actually made this claim to me once.
See Linda Woodhead on “Values as the new religion” and the generational shift from living for others to living for yourself.
Welcome to America where, leaving aside the ultra-rich and the underclass, luxury beliefs are the only way in which the upper middle class distinguishes itself from the working class.
The basis of luxury beliefs is the elite valorization of toxic femininity: I am woman, hear me whine. Don’t talk tough, don’t play rough, cultivate sensitivity and compassion, commit to self-care, obsess about physical and mental health, care for the environment—the realm of Mother Earth. Weakness is chic: let everyone know about how you have been traumatized by micro-aggressions and how careless remarks have made you feel ‘unsafe’, go to therapy and do yoga.
In this scheme, the police and the military are or course bad because they use force. Elites can afford to defund the police because they don’t live cheek-to-jowl with a criminal underclass. Open borders are of course good because elites don’t have to deal with lower class immigrants turning their neighborhoods turned into casbahs or favillas. In any case, they can make the noises and be applauded for their smarmy-feminine compassion and sensitivity.
In my class last semester I had to deal with a student, a good student, who wanted to write her term paper on ‘My Mental Heath Journey’. I was polite and helpful, and got her on to a better topic. But this disgusting smarm is a feature of weak chic among the elite and the promotion of toxic femininity.