Charles Durning Carroll

The devotion of modern life to the concept of equality has had the perverse effect of making the word “elite” into one of the most toxic words in the language. One can be called many bad things in life, but few are as bad as being called an “elitist.” To be an elitist in modern parlance is to view oneself as better than others, to turn up one’s nose, to look down upon ordinary people. Elitists are generally thought of as standing against justice and fairness because in the view of others they represent themselves as a permanent class of the elite. Elitists, if you believe this view, possess a self-regard as a superior and unchanging group who view non-elite others as less-than-human. Elitism, as understood in the popular imagination, is fundamentally anti-democratic because it rejects the idea that in the end, we are all the same and possessed of certain natural and inalienable rights. Elitists, to most, are avatars of an ancient atavism in their apparent devotion to a concept of innate superiority that predates even the 18th century Enlightenment and its ideas about human equality. This conventional idea about elitism is completely mistaken.

The Reality of Hierarchy

Why is the word elite so reviled even among those who are accused of being such? Modern society, particularly the American society which will be the focus of this essay, lives in a fantasy of equality. As an abstract concept equality is good; from the idea of equality flows the concept of human dignity — the idea that we are all entitled to basic rights such as respect, security, and freedom. Human history shows an inexorable rise in certain aspects of equality within particular social categories, so for example, the idea of a wealthy and powerful Black woman such as Oprah Winfrey, while perhaps still too rare, is no longer unheard of, as it would have been for the first two centuries of American society. To be a gay man in modern American society in the 21st century is a point hardly worth notice, unlike in the very recent past, when being gay was associated with powerful social taboos against effeminacy and transvestism. On the strictly social front our fantasies of equality have started to come true.

However, our dreams of equality must be tempered by the reality of hierarchy. It is a deeply unfortunate but nonetheless necessary fact that human society depends upon hierarchy to sort and organize itself. In the warren of tasks that occupy a busy day, some tasks are necessarily more important than others; some things must be done first and have priority. All human organizations, from families, to corporations and national governments, rely upon hierarchical leaders to assign priority, delegate responsibility, accept accountability, and solve problems. On the purely pragmatic front Karl Marx’s dream of a communist utopia fails simply because someone must organize the kitchen to make breakfast.

Whereas modern society has shown a tendency to progress towards equality along certain social lines, the tendency to create large organizations to solve complex problems has driven equality in the other direction. In a hunter-gatherer society with little or no property and a social organization no larger than a tribe of a few dozen roving individuals, equality is largely the norm. However, anyone looking at the organizational chart of a global corporation would be stunned at the myriad complexity and hierarchy it depicts. If modern life has made us more socially equal it has correspondingly made us more organizationally unequal. We are exchanging a narrow equality for a broad inequality and losing in the bargain.

Hierarchy and inequality seem to be inversely proportional — as social inequalities decrease (a Black man can become President of the United States), economic inequalities increase (CEO pay and the profits of multinational corporations continue their inexorable rise).

The point to be made here is this: as long as hierarchy remains, inequality will remain as well. This is a point that for me, personally, I was a long time in accepting, for it has powerful implications for the equality struggle.

If, as I believe, hierarchy is not only an inexorable fact of human life that all our wishing and make-believe cannot render moot, but also bears an apparently inverse relationship to equality, then one is left to wonder whether equality is what we should be fighting for at all.

Perhaps you are of the school that the economic inequalities we experience are less important than the social ones, or that the cost of the equalities you prefer is worth it. But thinking this way requires accepting that full equality is permanently limited by the preference for only a particular kind of equality — that social rights are really functionally equivalent to economic rights, that, for example, to give Black people the right to vote is effectively to allow us to ignore the pollution that plagues many Black communities. As each subgroup obtains its equality, one might argue, equality expands for all. Yet manifestly this is not what happens. Equality (which is different from rights) is far closer to a negative-sum game than we’d like to admit. Yet once basic rights are achieved, equality it seems, remains the only thing worth fighting for. But what is the struggle for equality worth if the equality obtained in one place is outweighed by equality losses elsewhere?

Cultural Relativism

Modern society has wholeheartedly embraced cultural relativism. This is the idea that all cultures are equally valuable. To some degree a fundamental respect for human dignity and the idea of equal rights makes cultural relativism a moral necessity in modern culture. At the same time, cultural relativism as a movement is one that eats its own children — if all cultures are truly the same then the question of what is preferred or what ought to be done can no longer really be reasonably answered. Arguments fall back on strictly personal preferences and biases.

Cultural relativism is a great equalizer. From it flow, for example, the ideas on the left “that we must get rid of whiteness” (something I was told here on Medium), and the idea from the right that liberty allows one not to wear masks during the Covid-19 pandemic. While these statements may appear very different to many, they share an indifference on the part of speakers to acknowledge their own participation in the social systems they are criticizing. In essence, neither of these ideas attempts to deal with the myriad and complex ways in which the advocates of these positions are incorporated into the societies and systems they criticize.

Let’s take a broadly accepted social truth — wealthy white men dominate modern society. What is the source of this domination? Simply: hierarchy. You can argue that there are other forces — racism, sexism, even the mainstream media that portrays wealthy white men as the source of virtue. None of these claims is false, but they are also severely limited because they adamantly refuse to deal with the real driver of the condition — the fact someone must dominate lest society descend into social chaos. Cultural relativism must make peace with the fact that someone will be in charge; the only question that remains is — How will we choose those who will lead us?

Fighters for social justice, always representing some group or other, promise us a golden paradise once the representatives of their group is finally in charge. Get rid of white men as the historically dominant group, we are told, and justice will finally be achieved. What these groups never reckon with is the necessity of hierarchy. Fighters for social justice rarely acknowledge the reality that hierarchy is power and that power corrupts. Power, however, is also the means by which organize society, and we cannot do without it. So we are left at the bottom with a paradox — hierarchy both is necessary and is the fundamental source of our injustices.

Cultural relativists of the social justice sort pretend that the paradox of power does not exist. They promise us the whole pie and deliver only a piece. Yet intellectual honesty requires accepting the paradox of power. From the perspective of those who have the least amount of equality, it makes sense to over promise — revolutions are driven by emotion instead of reason, and without the promise of a certain golden age, many would not be moved to social change. Students of social justice movements will remind me that without the ferocious persistence of revolutionaries our progress towards any sort of equality would have been much slower. Compromise is the enemy of justice, some might argue. And yet we must ask, what happens when we move from Marx’s ideal dreams of equality, to the reality of instituting social change? How can we best shape society through necessary but also unjust social institutions?

Questions about the best ways to institute social change matter because once the revolutionaries have raised awareness, and sometimes taken over the institutions and the levers of power, they must still make choices about how to organize priorities. Too often such choices descend into tyranny of one sort or another. We support new leaders and new choices only to find that we have merely traded one face for another — the tyranny of the heterosexual white man has been exchanged for the tyranny of the black lesbian. Yes, the face is different, the gender and sexuality are different. Something perhaps has altered, and yet indubitably equality has not been achieved; hierarchy retains its immutable force and only grows as institutional structures are created to ensure fairness, diversity and other moral goods.

Elitism as Optimal Choice

The roots of the word “elite” are linked to the word “elect,” in essence, to choose. “The elect,” a term with strongly negative connotations in our modern usage would have meant in the past merely those who who were chosen by others to lead. From a denotative standpoint an elitist is simply someone who believes in making good choices, in electing those people who will themselves make excellent choices for others.

It would seem, looking at our modern political landscape in the early 21st century, that we are sorely in need of elitism, for elitists, instead of trying to take our choices away from us, are interested in expanding them for us. The difficulty in choosing elitism, however, lies in accepting that not all choices have equal value. If we choose vanilla, we cannot also choose chocolate. Elitists appear to want to take things away from us, because the elitist compels us to accept this fact: we cannot have everything. Elitism, contrary to the generally accepted view, does not oppose social change. On the contrary, elitism requires us to recognize when social change is necessary and make the best choice given the circumstances.

Elitism accepts, even embraces, the paradox of power — someone will be charge and that person or people, regardless of their skin color, gender, sexual orientation, or past history will make some unethical, unfair choices. This truth may be hard to accept, but accepting it is necessary. Our leaders may make some good choices too, but whether they are a white man or a black woman, or handicapped or gay will have nothing to do with the quality of their choices. Black lesbians are not inherently more ethical than heterosexual white men. In seeking ways to expand choices for black lesbians, they will inevitably create hierarchical structures that will exclude others. The stronger their commitment to the choices of black lesbians in particular (or whatever the leader’s preferred reference group may be), the more likely it is that they will make unethical choices for people from other groups.

In this sense, self-regard, an overwhelming sense of one’s social group identity, is often a more reliable predictor of unethical behaviour than are the conventional categories of identity by which we usually read people’s character today.

Elitism also accepts another difficult truth — sometimes other people know better than we do. The willingness to be wrong, to be proved wrong, is a key sign of someone who is an elitist. However, the elitist accepts being wrong only when evidence compels the elitist’s re-evaluation. This is challenging at the best of times, but especially so now, because today, in so many cases, we take emotion as our only needed evidence. Of course, our emotions have always been an important source of evidence, but modern life has raised feeling to a status where little else aside from emotion is needed to make many of our moral decisions.

While this not the place to engage in a long disquisition on the hugely complicated role of emotions as evidence, suffice it to say that for the elitist, physical conditions in the world, and questions about the conventional meaning of words are also important in decision making. The elitist tries to withhold judgement before condemning others. At the same time, the job of the elitist is to recognize when the facts of the world require working to change laws and policies to allow everyone to make optimal choices.

Elitists, despite the almost universally negative connotations of the term, are, if they are indeed elitists, among the guardians of our democracy. Democracy has significant problems, notably, the fact that due to the paradox of power, it cannot deliver equality or fairness to everyone. Democracy is always a form of relative tyranny. The elitist knows and indeed mourns this fact; for the elitist life is inevitably tragic. From the acceptance of this tragic sense of life, the elitist both derives meaning and seeks to make the best choice available. By both acknowledging the inevitability of injustice AND working against it, the elitist seeks to avoid the greater tyranny of populism.

Democracy is about giving choices to people about how to govern their own lives. Despite its problems, most people feel that democracy remains the best way to run societies. The role of the elitist is to ensure that people make the best choices for their own lives. In terms of leading or choosing leaders, this may in some cases this may mean choosing leaders who require that we make trade-offs about choices. Some choices may reduce other choices down the line. The example of climate change, for example, is one place where certain choices made today are likely to reduce the available choices in the future. In this case, then depriving people of choices today may represent the best choice for them tomorrow.

Elitism is hard because sometimes the elitist must stand against against the societal vogue for various populisms and do what is best for others even at the risk of a reputation. Like Dr. Thomas Stockmann in Ibsen’s “Enemy of the People,” (this is where the the conventional prejudice arises) in some cases the right thing to do is not the popular thing to do.

Depriving people of choices against their will if it leads to more choices for everyone is both a form of relative tyranny AND a means of preserving democracy for the future.

The Elitists and the Tyrants

How do you tell the tyrants from the elitists since sometimes, admittedly, they look the same? This is easier to explain in theory than to engage in in practice. Here we confront again a paradox: to the tyrant the elitist is another tyrant; to the elitist an elitist is another elitist. Nonetheless, there is a distinction. The tyrant seeks power for its own sake and does so by denying the paradox of power, e.g. they pretend that all will be well and good when they are in charge, they are morally pure and free of guilt; they are quick to cast aspersions on the imperfections of others yet fail to see and publicly acknowledge their own imperfections. Elitists, on the contrary, accept and use power only as responsibility — they serve not themselves or their preferred social group, but a transcendental principle of human choice beyond equality or freedom; they accept in themselves and are often generally believed by others to be imperfect, flawed, sometimes unworthy.

Tyrants are found among the powerful and also frequently among those seeking power. Elitists are rarely found since they often appear to be tyrants and in some cases turn into tyrants when they forget the paradox of power and begin to view themselves as saviours.

Elitists cannot save us; that we must do ourselves, but they are the best option we have for leadership in a complex and imperfect world.