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In my favorite novel, Red and Black, the colors represent the only way for the rise of low-born French. In the end, it’s not the army’s red tunic, nor the church’s black dress, as much as the white linen of the boudoir that elevates our stupid hero. A mayor’s wife and the marquis ’daughter are among those who are pushing her to get away from her eager situation. That “red” headline, I still think, is a wicked joke: not the color of the war but the sex, the old friend of the parvenu.
Or at least an ex-friend. In the last two centuries more professional careers have opened up outside of one’s class than denominable colors. At the same time, they have closed the oldest method of hypergamous love. “Diverse coverage” is an appropriate cold phrase for marriage between people who have learned it, combining material and cognitive advantages in the process.
In the middle of the last century, the following notes would mark me as a curiosity. I hardly know a person of my age who has a straight spouse with no degree. Among couples where one partner earns tremendously more, the other tends to lead to cultural tendencies, larger relatives, a useful passport, or a similar tie. (Looks don’t have enough strategic value to narrow the gap.) As for high school students, out of a hundred dates that are the most active each year, about 90 are with graduates from research universities. The transgressive evening is spent with a former student of art or theater school.
There are only female graduates who do not wish to marry under their credentials. I’m sure this mixes cause and effect. When men in high status used to end up with wives with regular studies, it didn’t necessarily reflect as much as the desire for alternatives. After expanding access to universities and workplaces to women, both sexes were freed up to be snobs. What a luxury we have used since the license. My conscience is not left alone with almost all the habits of the metro-liberal class that have been so polished and feathered in recent years. Its romantic isolation is an exception. Nor does private education do so much to create an important caste.
That’s why they took me along with ruthless erudition Talent Aristocracy. In his new book, Adrian Wooldridge tries to save meritocracy from the excessive class bone that Aldous Huxley predicted. Like the best non-fiction argumentative works, politics falls into the repair phase. The idea of “improving vocational education” can certainly improve life chances. The tax code can take much more than it can take on the racket of inherited wealth. But soon, a serious meritocrat encounters the intangible boundaries of his personal realm. Parents exchange their lives for their children with a non-antisocial hobby of being natural. And the most skilled of these car dealers will be double graduate teams. It is not up to society to do anything about an intimate choice like marriage. It is up to society to calculate the costs.
And these go beyond the link of social mobility. What stands out about the modern alpha couple is not so much the raising of the ladder as the grinding of the self-interest blandness. Hypergamy is repeated in the drama – Balzac, kitchen sink movies, Cinderella – Because someone from UBS is fascinated when there is no one in Freshfields.
The alleged subversiveness of sex between classes is not an issue (after all, there is still something about it). It is the contact and ultimately the synthesis of two different life experiences. The children who follow from this, as they each absorb a little, will be more round and imaginative. Often the associate may be the most disciplined, competitive, and highly functioning ruling class the West has ever known, but it is also the least original. Wooldridge is never better than when he explains the distance between their bohemian self-image and the monoculture of private life.
Send an email to Janan janan.ganesh@ft.com
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