Have I been in the Ivy League too long?
Okay, so, my judgment is not quite as harsh as this one, but I was reading this now-infamous piece by Jessica Roy (I know I’m a week late, but give me a break) and I was thinking the entire time: wait, what’s wrong with any of the events that occurred at this party — it sounds just like Harvard!
Especially the following passage, which I assume was meant to be the most condemning:
Sebastian lives with his parents in a multi-million-dollar brownstone in Brooklyn. There were Persian rugs and chandeliers; the fireplace mantle had pictures of Sebastian wearing a suit as a child. On his parents’ armoire sat a set of old keys and a couple of grams of coke for anyone who might be interested. I felt sad for him, for having all of these assholes in his house who made fun of him for making peach Cosmos. He was an empty trust-fund hipster in his parents’ mansion where all the literary kids came to play.
Everyone there went to Columbia or Harvard or Yale. They argued over grammar and syntax, the difference between a metaphor and a metonymy. Someone sparked a joint and everyone drank and simmered in their own self-congratulatory pseudo-intellectualism. For the first time in my life I felt intellectually inferior. I could not name my favorite passage in The Recognitions. I was tongue-tied.
Without telling her what the article was about, I read the above two paragraphs to Kennedy, and she responded, “So … what’s the big deal?”
I mean, maybe we’re completely desensitized to pretension and intellectual arrogance and all of that, but honest-to-god, the above scene probably has played out before me upward of 20 times in the past three years of college. I have friends whose parents live in lavish mansions and friends who enjoy drugs (legal or not) and friends who regularly discuss linguistics, philosophy, politics, or all of the above during a single dining hall meal. I’m not really sure what’s so terrible about any of that. I’m pretty sure that’s why there is a place like Harvard: so that weird ass kids too smart for their own good have more of the same to hang out with.
And yes, Jessica complains that people are fake, dishonest, or sucking up to get ahead, but knowing Harvard kids, they could also just be socially awkward, conflict-shy, or assholes indifferent to being treated badly by other assholes. In fact, that probably describes 90% of the people I hang out with. That doesn’t make them bad people nor does it even make them pretentious. I have begun to slowly hate that word because even though I use it all the time to describe my classmates, its implication is that the person being pretentious is showing off just to show off. I know for a fact that aforementioned friends are not trying to show off how smart they are. They just happen to be unfortunately saddled with way too much intellectual curiosity and not enough common sense to shut up when appropriate.
Jessica goes to NYU, which might as well be Ivy League but without the history, and is clearly a more than decent writer, so I don’t get why she feels “intellectually inferior” in front of these people. I go to Harvard but I don’t know what the fuck a metonymy is and I’m too lazy to Google it right now so I’m just going to ask Kennedy (who happens to be into linguistics) when I finish this blog entry. About 70% of the time, I have no idea what my friends Tripp or Leo or their German philosophy fan boy pals are going on about but it really doesn’t faze me. Usually, I make out the words “Nietzsche”, “singularity”, “Foucault”, and then give up. But does it make them pretentious or even pseudo-intellectual for talking about this shit? No, because even though I find it boring and infuriating that this is what I must listen to while eating an already unappetizing meal, I know that Tripp and Leo genuinely find Hannah Arendt interesting. There’s a reason they’re friends with each other: common, boring interests.
So that’s why I find it so hard to get riled up about this conspiracy of the literati. None of the people Jessica went to this party with are significant to anyone but a select group of twenty-somethings in New York, just as none of my friends are significant to anyone but a select group in the college policy debate circuit and maybe the Currierwire mailing list. Perhaps Harvard has finally succeeded in brainwashing me, but more likely, I think Jessica’s impression of the influence of Gould, Gessen, and the like is just overinflated. I could also be one of those “underage Lolitas in slutty dresses” she’s talking about.
