In Defense of Elitism. - book reviews

National Review, Sept 12, 1994 by Tracy Lee Simmons

By William A. Henry III (Doubleday, 224 pp., $20)

THIS book could conceivably effect the rehabilitation of a much-maligned word. For most of its history, "elitism" lived as a useful tag meaning the will to separate the good from the less good, the superior from the inferior. As Mr. Henry--Time's art critic until his recent untimely death--rightly says, such "discrimination" did not necessarily bespeak political or social bias, but rather common sense. This book will likely satisfy the many who have suffered in discomfited silence as standards of quality and achievement have come under the gaze of those who would erase them in the name of compassion. Mr. Henry tackles affirmative action, feminism, multicultural fabrications, and other aspects of PC. But there's a toxic subtext to his otherwise able and lively explication. Assuring us that he isn't a "right-winger" or "nut"--and billing himself as "a card-carrying member of the ACLU"--he describes his mostly sound definition of a "superior" culture. In so doing he genuflects to liberal idols when he says that his preferred culture would include a "rational acceptance of birth control," which pretty well disqualifies just about all pre-modern cultures; when he asserts that it must "provide widespread, rigorous general education" (so far so good) so that its people aren't left in (get this) "agrarian ignorance"; and when he declares that "religious domination of a society is plainly backward and maladaptive in the modern world," missing the point that it's the modern world that has ushered in the rot decried by Mr. Henry, not religion.