The American Cultural Elite Has No Faith in Itself

So it looks abroad.

The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, the CNN are venerable news institutions that weigh in on the state of America and the world, shape public opinion and culture. All are led by Brits. The editor who turned around Vanity Fair was Tina Brown, a Brit. She went on to transform the New Yorker, the country’s most respected longform magazine and cultural beacon. Her Vanity Fair successor was Graydon Carter, a Canadian (another Canadian, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, heads the Metropolitan Opera). Vogue, the third of the Condé Nast holy trinity of magazines, is led by Anna Wintour, a Brit (she is also Condé Nast’s artistic director). Her best buddy, Andrew Bolton, who heads the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is also British. His boss, Max Hollein, who is in charge of the entire museum, is Austrian. The MoMa chief curator responsible for its unparalleled success was Klaus Biesenbach, a German. His former foe and that of many other museums’ directors, and arguably the most preeminent art critic in America, was Robert Hughes, an Australian. Speaking of preeminent, one of America’s most popular intellectuals was Christopher Hitchens, a Brit.

I can go on, but you get the picture. The American cultural elite has no faith in itself and prefers to fill top posts with expat talent, mostly from Europe, a continent where cultural education still carries an aura of prestige. We in America have discarded whatever vestiges of esteem an education in humanities have carried a long time ago. The United States, founded by Puritans and colonized by peasants, had, by and large, never much need for aesthetics. The country has decided long ago that, as President Calvin Coolridge allegedly pronounced in the 1920s, that “the business of America is business.” Today, it is not writers or artists who are hailed as American heroes, but businessmen, investors, and CEOs. One can’t throw a stone without hitting another think piece of that particularly revolting American strand of pragmatism that questions the value of a college education in humanities. And since the only measure of success in America is money, they are not exactly wrong, as witnessed by the dismal salaries of the culture class (except for those exports at the top). In America intelligence exists only in the service of making money, as depicted in the immortal bar sign featured in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, that reads, “If you are so smart, why ain’t you rich?” Last year the New Yorker wondered about the death of the English major on American college campuses. The highest paid person on a state payroll in each of the fifty American states today is the college football coach, who often makes ten times the salary of a university president. Scores of people devour the faux wisdom of American business leaders immortalized in their ghost-written bestselling books.

In vain American intellectuals like Mark Twain, H.L. Mencken, Richard Hofstader, and Saul Bellow had lamented, decried, and savagely ridiculed American ignorance – Americans don’t care. The Puritans famously discarded all aesthetic and cultural concerns; they had the Bible. The waves upon waves of poor (and also very religious)  immigrants that came after them had no need for culture either; they needed to survive. These forces have formed the backbone of America, which only needed the intellectual class whenever it was useful for making technological inventions that propelled the country in the avenues of business and warfare.

But the backbone is just that, and the country has always had a small elite concerned with the matters of culture. But since that elite bathed in the filfthy water of American pragmatism and religiosity, which itself birthed so few great cultural artifacts, it has always looked in awe to Europe. Imagine a wealthy young person born in America coming to London or Paris or Vienna or Rome for the first time, encountering the kind of art and architecture they could never imagine existed? Perhaps they have seen a few pictures beforehand, but how could they measure up to the real thing? It is no wonder that the American elite quickly learned of its own cultural inadequacy and began to look at Europe with reverence. In relation to Britain in particular, post-revolutionary America was like the early Roman empire; it may have conquered Greece, but it looked at its culture with unbound veneration. In the words of the Roman poet Horace, "Conquered Greece took captive her savage conqueror and brought her arts into rustic Latium."

The cultured Britain had no qualms about exploiting young America; it sent luminaries like Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde on American tours to educate the savages in the finer points of culture. They came and left with the appropriate level of disdain, as befits a typical British snob. American cultural figures like Man Ray and Ernest Hemingway would go the other way, usually to Paris, hoping that the aura of its modernist milieu would rub off on them. In turn Paris sent Christian Dior to educate American women with diktats about bourgeois style. And how much poorer culturally would America be if the rise of totalitarianism in Europe did not force the likes of Mies van der Rohe, Marc Chagall, and Leo Strauss to immigrate here? The Jewish diaspora alone has contributed to America’s culture beyond measure.

But the Jews were only begrudgingly accepted by the American WASP elite, who still wistfully looked at the decaying Anglo-Saxon world. Needless to say, the same went for black culture, which enriched the country so much. But black culture came from the ground up, a direction in which the American elite did not care to look. And that mentality is still alive and well. And so the American elite, with money but without faith in its own cultural and intellectual abilities continues to hire the cultural help from abroad. And the expats continue coming. Why wouldn’t they? The salaries are higher and the public more gullible. They may secretly pinch their noses, the way Peter Fallow, the English expat journalist in Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, did, at the stench of American philistinism, but the sweet perfume of the dollar must provide much needed relief.