John Cook emailed me in response to a comment* I made at his blog. Here is my reply:
How about breaking it down. Have people suggest sanctimonious occupations and make a sanctimony list for them. We could poll people as to which occupation is the most sanctimonious, but those answers might be more revealing of envy. We could perhaps trick poll-takers into describing how important/unique/etc they think their occupation is. How do you think police/military would fare? Farmers?
*For those who don’t feel like clicking, it was short enough to copy: Which professions do see themselves as being like every other profession? I propose we dub these “the unique professions”.
June 15, 2010 at 4:21 pm
Academics have a high sense of their own importance. Police and firemen, military personnel, or farmers, do not in my observation. They don’t hold themselves out as moral exemplars, but are often held out as such by others, especially politicians.
I do not know how many times I have heard politicians lament the fate of the “family farm.” Their hearts never bleed in the same fashion for the local grocer, hardware man, or insurance agent, even though hard times are just as hard for such small business owners as they are for the farmer.
June 15, 2010 at 5:44 pm
By and large, I suspect the only people who view themselves in a career fashion as highly important are those who aren’t particularly important AND have high status.
Proles need self-esteem trips like everyone else, but they generally don’t believe that their jobs are profoundly significant. Even professions like garbage collector, which we’ve learned from strikes and interruptions of service are actually quite vital for everyday life, in my experience don’t consider themselves more to be what they are.
But doctors, lawyers, professors? Egad.
June 15, 2010 at 10:06 pm
Michael, I often hear rhetoric from military/police that all we have we owe to them. This can come in the idealistic version or your-dog-owns-your-house version.
melendwyr, how do you determine importance?
June 16, 2010 at 11:14 am
What you ‘often hear’ depends on which military/police personnel you listen to. There is much pronouncement of the kind you describe from op-ed writers, from veterans (who are of course trying to make a case for maintaining or increasing their benefits), and at military or police funerals. All of it is a variation on Kipling’s “Tommy Atkins”:
“For it’s Tommy this, and Tommy that,
An’ ‘Chuck ‘im out, the brute!’
But it’s ‘Saviour of ‘is country’
When the guns begin to shoot…”
Kipling, like many of the op-ed writers and Memorial Day speechifiers, was never a soldier. On the other hand I have known quite a number of actively serving military men, including a few officers of flag rank, and I never heard such fustian from any of them. Similarly, the law enforcement personnel I have met mostly talk about their profession with a kind of peculiar humor. Back when “Barney Miller” was on TV, more than one cop in my acquaintance told me it was truer to life than any of the shoot-em-up police dramas.
June 16, 2010 at 11:45 am
“How do you determine importance?”
By imagining a world in which the person/profession has been removed, and determining which of the things I value (and to what degree) have changed.
It’s not quite at the level of the zinc-abolishing leprechaun filmstrip, but it gets close.
If the farmers vanished (and could not be replaced), our society would last at most about a year before collapsing into a frenzy of cannibalism and starvation. If the academics vanished, a certain amount of scientific research would stop… and that’s about all.
It’s good to have (competent and intelligent) English majors and art historians, but we could easily get along without them if we wished.
June 16, 2010 at 12:27 am
Military people believe we’d all be forced to attend mosque in the worldwide Islamic caliphate if it weren’t for them.
June 16, 2010 at 2:20 am
I noticed one of your links on a certain reactionary blog. Does this mean you are a Deus Ex fan?
June 16, 2010 at 6:36 am
Speaking of Deus Ex, game designers are pretty sanctimonious.
I wish I was back in that industry :(
June 16, 2010 at 11:31 pm
The remark on Kipling is a great opportunity to link to Orwell’s take on him.
Yes, Jayson, I am a fan. Back when I played computer games, Deus Ex (and Fallout!) was one of my favorites. It was actually the reason I upgraded from a 486 to the computer I have today.
I guess I hadn’t paid enough attention to game designers to know how sanctimonious they are. Some of them certainly seem more full of themselves than their output entitles them to be.
June 18, 2010 at 3:33 pm
The Orwell essay on Kipling is one of his better things. Parts of it, his reflexive left-wing denunciation of the Empire, have not worn well as we’ve seen how much more brutal and corrupt the successor regimes have turned out to be than the Raj ever was. On the other hand, consider:
“…Somehow history has not goine according to plan. After the greatest victory she had ever known, Britain was a lesser world power than before, and Kipling as quite acute enough to see this. The virtue had gone out of the classes he idealized…”
Something parallel to this has happened in the United States. With the Cold War won, the anti-Communists and conservatives (both those who rejected Communism’s attacks on religion, and those who deplored its incursions on private property) never enjoyed the fruits of moral victory. In the process of fighting Communism the country had become too much like its enemy. And the conservatives were mistaken in thinking that by defeating collectivism abroad they could make short work of it domestically. The exotic politico-economic species had by then become as thoroughly thoroughly acclimated here as the carp and the buckthorn, and as impossible to extirpate.
Another great passage is:
” He (Kipling) does possess one thing which ‘enlightened’ people seldom or never possess, and that it a sense of responsibility. The middle-class Left hate him for this quite as much as for his cruelty or vulgarity. All left-wing parties in the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something which they do not really wish to destroy.”
Think of Barack Obama denouncing “Wall Street” when its investment bankers gave him 3 times as much money as they did McCain – or Al Gore traversing the globe in a private jet as he inveighs against fossil fuels and greenhouse gases.
Finally, and somewhat to my point about what actual soldiers believe as opposed to what their advocates do:
“Can anyone imagine any private soldier, in the nineties or now, reading ‘Barrack-Room Ballads’ and feeling that here was a writer who spoke for him?”
June 18, 2010 at 6:47 pm
The general thrust of this feels like snark without enligtenment to me.
June 18, 2010 at 7:21 pm
Michael, Andrew Bacevich has written similarly about the Cold War. Which reminds me, what a disappointment that the potential paleo/communitarian vs liberal/libertarian showdown at Cato Unbound seems aborted. Not that I agree with the non/anti-liberal right, but the point of negative returns to reading is far way.
H.A, there was some snark there but I also tried to give an opening for people to seriously discuss the issue. I invite you to re-rail the conversation onto a more enlightening track.
July 20, 2010 at 9:23 pm
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