Building professional pride in age of snobs
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RECENTLY, my son tackled a few chapters of Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice.”
Asked to comment, he replied that he did not like those people for their “snobbishness.” Strangely, although I have grave doubts as to his ability to understand the masterpiece in its textual subtleties, snobbish was exactly how I found the people in the novel when I first read it.
So much so that I looked up the word in some dictionaries to see if etymologically “snob” might have some neutral or positive connotations.
But its origins ranged from “cobbler” to impostor, not much better than its modern meaning of “a vulgar person who affects to be better, richer, or more fashionable, than he really is.”
In “The English People: A Study of Their Political Psychology,” author Boutmy Emile Gaston (1835-1906) observed that the English do not believe in social equality, and would rather have all different classes in their society.
However strong the academic predilection to explain Chinese history in standard Western terminologies, since the Qin Dynasty (221-206 BC), Chinese society has shifted from one dominated by aristocracy to a plebeian society that derives much of its vigor from its social mobility.
In theory, nearly everyone could aspire to the ideal of “working the farmland back home in the morning, and paying tribute to the sovereign at the court in the evening,” said of someone of rustic origins receiving an audience of the emperor, after distinguishing oneself in the imperial examination.
And another sign of this social mobility was that officials fed up with court politics were often consoled by the idea of one day returning to the native family estate.
A scholar from Hong Kong told me recently that he had graduated from an elite school. So selective is its enrollment that it hinges much on if your parents are among its alumni.
By comparison, we have very proletariat origins. When I was young, children or adults who were particularly smartly dressed were more likely to be objects of ridicule than admiration.
But there is no denying that snobbishness is deep in human consciousness. There have been studies that if you show a monkey many pictures, it might show particular interest in the picture of the alpha male or alpha female. Given our genetic similarity, this preference is probably also built in us.
Therefore, human beings take pride in their abilities to splurge on something, although particular value is often attached to items that have no substance, such as overpriced handbags, cosmetics, celebrities.
I remembered that a couple of months ago I was having lunch with some journalists when the topic briefly touched China’s increasingly precarious middle class.
Rather than deliberating on the growing social stratification, a journalist from Beijing kept wondering about her own credentials for being included in this class. She was generally assured of her status, but then doubting, wondering aloud: “If I do not even qualify as one, then …”
To calm her, I put in philosophically: “One of the surest signs of middle class is their anxiety about their status.”
This anxiety stems from their perpetual fear of being excluded from the favored class.
But I cannot help being cynical. People of my generation still retain a distant memory of our egalitarian and proletarian origins, aspiring to the utopia where everyone is provided according to his needs. I guess most of our modern ailments come from our desire to gain one-upmanship over our neighbors.
Although we should fight hard against the tendency of being snobbish, there is every reason why we should take pride in our job as journalists.
I was once mortified when someone from an advertising company, upon learning about my job, exclaimed enthusiastically: “Oh, we are about in the same business!”
But is it really so very different in an age when professional prestige is increasingly pegged to the size of the salary, or is this felt distinction just a residual memory of a time when media people could afford to think of their job as more than a business?
Last week a colleague of mine sent me an article about a public relations woman, who observed: “A lot of my friends I went to journalism school with are in public relations now, because it pays better, but they really just get paid to lie for the company.”
One PR man working for a Chinese tech firm referred to his job as “the mafia guy who clears the crime scene of evidence after the murder.”
Journalism no longer makes much business sense, and that’s one added reason why it should make a lot of social sense.
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