Prime ministers, politicians and newspaper columnists have joined chorus to decry the elite.
Malcolm Turnbull used the word “elite” in the pejorative last month to describe the mainstream media. Senator Bridget McKenzie used it this week to describe people opposed to lifting the ban on Adler shotguns. Miranda Devine also used it this week to describe persons that frequent the Qantas chairmans’ lounge and may be swayed by Alan Joyce’s commitment to marriage equality.
“The national carrier of the world’s most egalitarian nation ironically boasts the most elitist VIP lounge of any airline,” she wrote of the lounge – where membership is by invitation-only.
The whole world is now in on it with global populist leaders riding to success on the back of a scorn for the elites.
Elites is a malleable word. In its pure sense, it means a select group that is superior in terms of ability or qualities to the rest of a group or society. Now it is used more broadly – taking in habits of consumption, not just access and use of hard power.
Consumption means not just of difficult novels, or blasphemous plays or appreciation of the art of Bill Henson but foodstuff: lattes, and chardonnay, and all the things the decadent elites drink when plotting against the proles (the term latte-sipping elites is getting quite dated, I must say).
In France, if you are an elite they award you with a Legion of Honour. In Australia, to call someone an elite is now an insult.
We go in cycles with our hatred of elites. When I was a child, all I yearned for was to be an elite. I didn’t want the money but being in the thick of it seemed interesting, and the parties looked fun.
But living in a country town, elites were thin on the ground. Deplorables were everywhere – myself included.
At the age of eight, I wrote to the then prime minister Bob Hawke, seeking advice on how to become an elite, like him. Hawke wrote back to the effect that I should work hard at school and then join a union.
Like an Antipodean Adrian Mole I counted my spots and smeared toothpaste on my skin at night – reading in Dolly Doctor that it got rid of pimples. At night, covered in toothpaste, I dreamed of power.
Moving to the city with toothpaste still in my pores and a letter (stained now) from a Mr RJL Hawke in my sweaty paws, I set out to meet the elites, in the hope of an adoption.
It was a good time to aspire to be an elite. Why? Because of Paul Keating. He spoke the language of Mahler, and antique clocks not Glocks. There was no binary oppositions in his vision; to reward and celebrate the arts didn’t mean to denigrate or reduce the capacity in other areas. Australia was a bigger country back then – there was room for it all.
Take yourself back to November 1994. Hot on the heels of the high court’s decision on Indigenous land rights in the Mabo case, prime minister Paul Keating was announcing his big, fat arts policy, Creative Nation. In language that would be unimaginable to hear in politics today, Keating spoke about how much the arts is tied to the economy. A healthy arts scene, a healthy economy. Natch. But it’s more than that. “The arts define any nation,” he told the ABC, plainly, as if it was self-evident.
Of course, Keating being Keating – he spoke not just in the language of policy, but poetically. The last six months had been exciting. Mabo had released something in Australia, some tension or pain. He talked about what the Chinese call “qi” – a life-force or energy. “People now feel good about Mabo, that something wrong has been righted … Or put right.” The country’s subtle energies are recharged, things get balanced.
When the life force of a country is flowing, “the arts pick up these eddies … currents in national life and push them along as well”.
There was, implicit in all of this talk, the nation’s need for elites. We couldn’t all be average. We needed a high court bench that could have the imagination, intelligence and compassion to make a decision such as Mabo.
And in the arts, there was a need for people who could read the currents: who were good enough to make the daring, brilliant, dark, difficult stuff, and those who were hungry and smart and sophisticated enough to support and consume it.
There is right now the temptation to murmur a local version of that rotten incantation, “make Australia great again”. To wish to go back to 1994 – but without the high interest rates. We still need people who can create the currents and those who can read them. We need elites.
But once again, anyone who aspires to a certain version of greatness or success are labelled an elite in the pejorative sense – to be scorned and mistrusted, to have their place in public life questioned or invalidated.
So next time someone who is powerful, someone who is actually in the real sense of the word – an elite (like our prime minister) – perhaps we shouldn’t be listening to what they are saying about the these dreadful elites, but asking why they are they saying it.
