Luxury Beliefs And Education: An Intro

So here's a new rhetorical framing device that you may have seen cropping up here and there. 

Luxury beliefs.

It's an interesting concept. Its coiner is Rob Henderson, currently a Cambridge scholar, but with a striking backstory ("I suspect I'm the only student at Cambridge University who lived out of garbage bags as a child"). Here's his description of luxury beliefs

Ideas & opinions that confer status in the upper class while inflicting costs on the lower class.

Here is another description:

Luxury beliefs are those that act as status symbols for the elite. In the past, the elites showed their wealth and status by having luxury goods. However, since it’s much easier to obtain luxury items today, the elites now have to display their status by having a set of “luxury beliefs.”

Bari Weiss, who says that once you know the term, you start to see it everywhere, gives it a shot.

Perhaps most obvious is the notion of defunding the police, in which overwhelmingly wealthy, educated people who live in safe neighborhoods call for a policy that would leave lower-class people living in high-crime neighborhoods vulnerable. But also, say, the idea that monogamy is an outdated, oppressive institution. Most of the people espousing this view raise children with the economic and social benefits of intact, stable families. And so on.

Henderson has found an audience mostly among conservatives who see this is a means of puncturing liberal elites. I have some issues with it; for instance, I think Henderson leans way too hard on the notion that elites adopt these beliefs as a performative stance rather than because they, you know, actually believe them. Also, some of his examples have an awful lot of corners chopped off in order to make them fit neatly into his model.

Still, part of this idea resonates for me. It's not unusual for folks who have relative wealth and privilege to get all let-them-eat-cakey about ideas that are simple and cheap for them, but not so much for others. And you can notice it lots of places, once you look. And I find that some places are not very liberal at all.

For instance, "Just comply with the authorities and you won't have any trouble," sounds virtuous and very common-sensey--if you are a rich white guy. 

And we are loaded with this stuff in education. For balance, I will note that the left-leaning notion of replacing all disciplinary action with meditation and meetings sounds great if you're in a school that doesn't deal with regular violence, fights, and disruption.

However, there's also the belief that we just need more great charter schools like Success Academy, which sounds great if you are envisioning a charter that, like SA, carefully curates its student body and just lets public schools carry the weight of all the students the charter doesn't want. You can get all virtuous about how capping charters is denying all of these deserving students a choice while ignoring that the charter wouldn't necessarily accept them in the first place.

Or the education-to-prosperity pipeline (which, honestly, I can no longer tell whether this is a right-tilted or left-tilted policy idea). Like the success sequence that Henderson alludes to more than once (marriage, then kids), this confuses cause and effect. While he notes that poor and working class out-of-wedlock births are up and not so for the affluent, he doesn't consider whether we are talking cause or effect, but simply chides affluent folks who pooh-pooh the value of a traditional nuclear family. That cause-effect thing matters; if a high marriage-wedlock rate is a result of affluence and not a cause, then the idea that everyone should just get married if they want a better life is the real luxury belief. 

So ditto for the notion that getting a good education is what will lift people out of poverty. It's a nice belief--if you're someone who's well off. You can pretend it's the result of merit and hard work and not the accident of birth, even as the data shows us that school success is not necessarily the path out of poverty.

But I think the most striking non-liberal luxury belief is the belief in free market education. If we just gave everyone a voucher and turned them loose in a free market of education, everyone would be in great shape--say people who enjoy the benefits of being winners in a free market. In fact, I'd argue that unwavering belief in the power of the free market to deal with all situations is itself a luxury belief, held by people who are market winners. A free market education approach would leave them right where they are--able to acquire whatever education benefits they wish for their children--and would put additional burden on folks who already struggle to manage their children's education. 

This model of luxury beliefs rears its head any time we talk about policy without discussing the people most likely to be negatively affected by it (or don't even try to figure out who those people might be). 

There is one other thing that strikes me about the luxury beliefs concept. We already have a term for people who, knowingly or unknowingly, enjoy an unearned benefit for themselves while failing to see or acknowledge how people who lack that benefit are affected-- white privilege. 

So while I think Henderson's work is an interesting first draft, I think it could be more useful if expanded. First, work on the fact that none of these beliefs are confined to elites. Second, lose the notion that they are some kind of performative virtue signaling with no basis in actual belief. Third, admit a little more loudly that they aren't confined to any single part of the left-right spectrum (I suspect some aren't really related to the political spectrum at all). I'm intrigued, but not convinced.