A Surfeit of Snobbery

“We don’t need to associate with their kind, they are below us.”

Surely this type of dark-age bigotry was relegated to nothing but memory. Snobbery seems part of that bygone era of unpleasant memories here at our enlightened institution of learning—an era that was long ago replaced by the egalitarian progressive paradise that is today’s Cambridge, Mass. Today, we tell ourselves, Harvard students are accepting of those different than us, and would never exhibit any of the mannerisms of those old, dead, white, European males we so often mock.

Well, truth be told, Harvard—or at the absolute minimum a significant part of its student body—remains a bigoted and close-minded place. The targets of abuse are all that are different, not the mindset that some are too unworthy, too unintelligent, or simply too annoying to grace our campus on even the briefest of visits.

Tuned in to the many ongoing debates on campus, I have been dumbstruck by a spate of opinions that smack of the one thing that each of us probably swore we would never exhibit: old-school snobbery. That’s right, snobbery: the unwarranted and self-congratulatory intellectual snobbery that tries to castigate an entire segment of the student body—athletes, for example—as unworthy and unnecessary to student life, and the snobbery that suggests we are all too important to be bothered with the foolish plebeians who see fit to visit our campus. This sort of snobbery is also evident at Harvard during debates about politics—remember the fake IQ charts that showed dumb people vote for Bush—or any sort of moral issue—witness what happens if some poor soul tries to cite the Bible in an any argument over anything.

This resurgence of snobbery is initially perplexing because in our society, and at self-styled progressive institutions such as Harvard in particular, the cries “elitism!” or “snobbery!” are usually debate-ending ones. There is really not an effective retort to being called a snob, the meanness of the accusation being virtually the only factor working against its use. Typically, if one is ever accused of elitism or elitist sympathies, the only way out is a melodramatic, and often pathetic, “race to the bottom.” This race is essentially a contest over whose grandparents suffered more oppression or worked in a more degrading profession, and the rhetoric employed quickly reaches Ciceronian heights.

However the somewhat confounding rebirth of snobbery makes perfect sense if one remembers that, for all of our protestations to the contrary, Harvard students are just people. Normal people. Granted, we may be very smart and some of us might be hard working, but, fundamentally, we are not at all different from those we often mock and disparage. That this needs to even be stated is evidence of how bad things have become, but let us remember that people are, more often than not, selfish, narrow-minded, and prejudiced. Thus we see Harvard students writing that athletes as a whole are a mark of shame on the University, and that we should do something about the groups of elderly people who come here as tourists.

As the self-declared best and brightest, I would suggest that we have a duty to master the baser instincts of our nature—including rising above the inevitable impulse to automatically declare ourselves better than some group of “outsiders.” Don’t castigate those with whom you are not familiar, for rather than sounding enlightened and intelligent, you come across as precisely the things you accuse others of being: stupid, unworthy, and, worst of all, really, really, annoying.



Mark A. Adomanis ’07, a Crimson editorial editor, is a government concentrator in Eliot House.