The Serious Aspect of Snobbery

The haughty people of the earth do languish. —Isaiah

Snobbery is the unwillingness to like something unless at the same time it makes one feel more important, or, at least, doesn’t seem to make one’s importance any the less. This means that a person doesn’t want to like the outside world unless one can approve of oneself first, in the way with which one is “familiar”: a way which, likely, is bad. To like oneself first and what may be true or lovely second, is the source of dull evil.

Every evil that shows itself in a minor or frivolous way has a source in common with what seems graver evil. Unkindness is grave and snobbery seems minor, but they come from the same thing. The unwillingness to do justice to a book is related to the unwillingness to do justice to a whole people, or to man in general.

The loveliest thing that can happen to a person is to like oneself through doing pleasing justice to something else. If there is a dislocation or disruption between liking oneself and liking other things, ugliness has been supported; and ugliness is evil contemplated.

Snobbery is the inability or lack of desire to appreciate justly. It is a phase of injustice, therefore. Injustice may show itself in a frivolous form, but injustice itself is not frivolous.

They Would Ask

If persons were wholly alive, and wanted to approve of themselves deeply, the first things they would ask of themselves would be: What do I like? How much do I like? Why do I like what I do?

I can imagine an Aesthetic Judgment Seat where a person would be asked by an Aesthetic St. Peter: So, how much did you like on the earth that God made? Why did you like it? Did you want to see the thing you might like for itself, or did you first make sure you would gain something by liking it, or at least lose nothing in the way of position?

There is an obligation we have to see beauty and meaning wherever they may be, in whatever form they take. The need to be aesthetically just is an ethical need. To see something as beautiful, or to say it is, when it isn’t—because our acquisitive ego saw it as most convenient that way—is ethical ill-doing, along with aesthetic ill-doing. Not to see something as beautiful that is beautiful—because the acquisitive or protective vanity stands in the way—is also ethical ill-doing. When it is felt in this world that there is an obligation we have to see, for ourselves, what has beauty or meaning, a great, fine change will have taken place in the universe.

True Individuality

In a big sense, the true meaning of individuality is against snobbery. Individuality implies the desire to see for oneself whatever is so, whatever is beautiful, whatever has meaning. A person will want to see a thing for what it is, because that way his very self, his complete, uncorrupted individuality, can take care of what it is, come to show itself. We can listen to others—we should. We can get hints; we can acquire data from others. But everything we feel should have a cause beautiful enough, big enough, exact enough for our feeling it. In the long run, however we come to them, our feelings must be our own. When they are truly our own, the structure and freedom of the whole universe will be in delightful, accurate, mighty accord with ourselves.

Snobbery doesn’t work this way. A person with snobbery doesn’t ask, doesn’t keep on asking, whether an object or person deserves a certain attitude or feeling. The question is, What will happen to me if I feel this way or that way, say this or that? In looking at matters this way, the person with snobbery has defiled his own individuality, befouled the true idea of self.

An opinion truly had is coherent with all that is outside of the person having it. All facts go along with a true notion of truth, a lovely notion of loveliness. This opinion or notion is had, it is true, as a unique irreducible thing by an individual, but the very sincerity, authenticity, particularity of the opinion makes it go along with all that is in the world otherwise. Individuality, particularity, uniqueness are not against universality, reality, factuality: they are universality, reality, factuality in the form of one self, one person, one mind. When we reach ourselves, when we meet what we are, when we get to the true depths of our unrepeatable I, we find the universe again, reality again: tremendous and subtle, immediate and unexplainable fact again.

In this matter, our greatest hope is our greatest obligation. We must be true to ourselves by getting feelings which are our feelings, about outside objects, about people, about music, events, poems, books, countries, statements. When we are false to our greatest desire, the desire to see the universe for ourselves, we are false to other people too. This falsity occurs easily.

The person with snobbery, false to his truest feelings, is false to his own individuality and to all else. A person who does not want to see his own feelings as they are can hardly be good for anyone else. The greatest aesthetic monition is also the greatest ethical monition: Find out what you feel, and show it.

Snobbery is, then, a corruption of individuality. It is unkindness—for the unwillingness to be just is unkindness. It is insincerity, for sincerity means first the wish to have feelings based on what things or people are, not on anything else.

All Kinds of Ways

Meanwhile, snobbery shows itself, as in Thackeray’s time,* in all kinds of ways. There is the snobbery of those who want to read only the “great classics” and the snobbery of those who, caring only for the latest bibliographical manifestations, look down on the past, and its devotees. In this field, not the most terrible, there is, as in other fields, mutual contempt, doing no good to either side. There are the persons who keep their ear to the ground of art criticism because they do not wish to, or are afraid to, look at pictures for themselves. There are those who want to see poems only in the dreary coagulated way to which their personalities are accustomed. There are those who look down on anybody caring for poems at all. Even now, there are the persons with snobbery who can’t think that poems may be written after Burns, Byron, and Tennyson.

Snobbery is shown by persons who came to some place by ship or wagon, early. It is shown by persons who, reading the Bible so many hours a day, disdain people who don’t read the Bible with such quantitative fervor. There is snobbery in persons who see too much in New York and in persons who see only bad in the renowned city. There is snobbery in persons not going after money, and in persons going after money. Children have their snobberies and so have parents. Slender girls have their snobberies and so have stolid gentlemen, who would have worn massive watch chains years ago. There is the snobbery of the Southerner and the Southwesterner; of the Pacific Coaster and of the Easterner; and of the Middle Westerner. There is the snobbery of the person who works with his hands and of the person who doesn’t.

People can show their like for music in a way evincing snobbery, and do, every evening. There is the snobbery of the furious searcher for old jazz records—lovely things, though, most of them—and there is the snobbery of him who goes after hearing old stringed instruments in decorous milieus, vibrating with distinction.

Snobbery is connected, as everyone knows, with furnishing a home. You can be snobbish in being “comfy” and snobbish in not being. You can be snobbish about rugs, pipes, birds, blinds, food. Snobbery of course stalks, haunts, delicately glides along the campuses. Every college is an opportunity for a new variation of snobbery.

Snobbery is had by persons close to God, by persons who see God as hovering, by choice, over their breakfast or supper tables. There is the snobbery of those who think they have suffered more than other people. There used to be snobbery within assertive agnosticisms and atheisms. The “scientific mind” of the moment has given the come-hither to snobbery, as has the “non-scientific” mind. Both dogma and the relative have been advocated with snobbery.

Sects have their snobberies. I can’t think of any without. A High Churchman could welcome snobbery in the past, and so could a Quaker, and I don’t see why it should be different now.

Automobiles are in relation to snobbery. Butterfly hunting is. Dancing is. Newspapers are. Giving birth is not unrelated.

Everywhere

Well, by now it should be plain that snobbery is everywhere a person can be. Whether one is alone or in a crowd, one has the chance of welcoming it.

Snobbery is so omnipresent, so ubiquitous, so dazzlingly, oppressively multiform because its source is the desire to like oneself, or what is close to oneself, before truth as such, as it is everywhere, is liked. While we want to be comfortable with ourselves first and to see second, Isaiah will be right. Isaiah said in his prophecies that there is an indisposition on the part of people to like themselves and truth at the same time. Contemporary snobbery shows the indisposition is very much around, long after Isaiah.

If there is any snobbery in this paper, add it to the list.