Prelude to the foregoing

This might offer some context for this.

At Gifthub, Phil writes:

She is a pocketbook on two legs, an ATM, she is a lead donor, she is a target, a quarry, a prospective client, an ideal client, a customer, etc. To see one another not under the aspect of "use value," but as fellow frail creatures, each seeking, each alive for such a short time, and so often less than our full selves, that way of seeing is a kind of civic love. You know something? That is meaning of the word philanthropy.

and:

"And in short measures life may perfect be." Yes, but not exactly what we mean today when we talk of outcomes, measurement, and management. How much we have lost, haven't we, of what might have been our Noble Nature? You can't hardly measure how far we have fallen, into the businesslike, can you, since Jonson wrote so limpedly in imitation of the ancients?

In an email, Phil asked me a question that's probably been on his mind, and certainly has been a governing thread of both of his primary blogs:

How do we reconcile elite traditions with democracy?

I consider Phil a friend. He and I have kept in touch over several years. In one of his modes he appeals to humanist traditions emblematized by a teacher we both had the good fortune to study with, though not at the same time, Bart Giamatti. Giamatti was an enigma, a man who more or less had an entire academic career before he was 40. His main man was Edmund Spenser, but his book on the earthly paradise in Renaissance epics was pure sprezzatura, a seemingly effortless voyage of the scholar bee doing the work of entire hives of JSTOR regulars.

Another significant teacher we shared was Paul de Man. Though both Giamatti and de Man were on the Comparative Lit faculty at Yale at the same time, I'm not aware of their ever engaging in any forum or public dialogue. Giamatti, a born leader who seemed to earn (and deserve) enthusiastic loyalty at every turn, became president of the university, and then, and you'd have to know him to have this seem at all encompassable, Baseball Commissioner (succeeding Peter Ueberroth). De Man chaired the French Department, became a pivotal link between USian and Continental critical theory through his and J. Derrida's preoccupation with the power of texts and language. The notoriety enjoyed by the term "deconstruction" in part was due to certain implications, baleful when all is said and done, for the pretensions of scholarship across the humanities. De Man went on to become poster boy for a certain sort of tarring and feathering after his wartime writings were found. Instead of addressing some of the more disconcerting readings he'd been offering of Rousseau, Hegel, Kant, and the like, the USian academic community was pleased to offer much ado about what they construed as anti-semitic, collaborationist stuff that de Man chose not ever to reveal. His reputation suffered disaster; the bearings of his late work -- which questioned the grounds of academic assumptions about entire fields of knowledge -- are still out there, but with the rap he's got, everyone thinks they're off the hook. They're not. His work will survive the obloquy.

For Phil, as for me, Giamatti and de Man represent two key moments in a certain shared tradition of learning: the humanistic, heroic union of contemplation and action in the figure of the Renaissance Man on the one hand, and a skeptical questioning via a critical philology, an attention to linguistic components of texts, rhetoric, and problems of knowledge traceable through a line running from Diogenes through Montaigne, Rabelais, Pascal and Fred Schlegel and some heavy hitting Germans to Baudelaire and Nietzsche on the other.

Both men were enormously witty, attuned to people, overworked, and generous with their time. It could be argued that de Man was the plague infecting the rose in Giamatti's vision of academia as a humanistic paradise. It could be argued that without the searching, caustic imagination that people like de Man brought to academic self-understanding, the garden would be even sicklier. Giamatti will forever be remembered for dealing courageously with another sick Rose. De Man, despite the forthright tribute of an honest friend, is still in the doghouse, where USians, with strangely patriotic fervor, place public figures linked deservedly or no to any scintilla of anti-semitism.

Anyway, all this is by way of offering some context for something I wrote in response to Phil's email. I've no idea whether this will help anyone make sense of that. But there it is.

Amid the stately frontispiece of poor

An email exchange, some context setting here. I added a few links and emended a few phrases mostly for clarity.

How do we reconcile elite traditions with democracy? - Phil asked, sending along this link and a quick reference to A.B. Giamatti and his sense of what is noble.

To Phil:

Bart Giamatti would have a lot to teach us about the possible relations of elite traditions and democracy. He might start by parsing the terms -- are all traditions elite? There are cultures and folkways that maintain a kind of eternal now of wisdom and practice among the poorest on the earth. Are all elites traditional? Are all elites rooted in the same source of eliteness? etc.

I don't know, the two things, "democracy" and "elite tradition," seem like two optimizations, each of which requires some sacrifice of the other in order to fulfill its own realized whatness. It's why, even as the poor and random waifs of democracy might have their noses to the windowpanes of private entitlement, the poor saps attending "ivory snow" decorumed events occurring in cultural and human vacuums more than likely pine for the "jazz clubs" or other rawness, the demotic ferment of open inspiration.

I spent a little time on that IPI site you linked to; its buttoned up reek of pillow mint struck me as essentially a different flavor of this, this, and this sort of thing -- the same worldwide migration of sharks circling around the hint of blood, just a different rhetorical costume.

I keep thinking there is vast opportunity for hilarity in these programmed elite masques. A Fred Wiseman docu-satire, a staging of yes-men intervention, a peeling away of the napkin from the rawer appetite beneath.

I guess I'm wondering if an aim of reconciling these things makes sense. I mean, the goal is - really it is - noble. But a synthesis that somehow avoids destroying what is so valuable in each is difficult to imagine.

The country house is a genre, a vast system of ideas, values, about man and his world, society, justice, art, law, order. The book of the people begins in Genesis with a bunch of miserable goat herders getting chosen. One of them, running from his brother's wrath, sleeps on a stone, dreams a dream, and realizes he's in the house of God. This is an entirely different system, only the image of the house is in common between them. If one is, like Peter Karoff, informed by both worlds, a certain restlessness is understandable, even necessary, if one happens to be alive at all.

I certainly can't envision a synthesis. But it seems entirely worthwhile to ask with you, what can each of these worlds learn from the other? From what you've written, Tracy Gary sounds like one who can speak to that. Confronted with democratic openness, certain Institutes might provoke a shattering laughter. Still, the man in the street approaches the works of aristocratic aspiration with a certain degree of respect or risks idiocy.

Noble Cubeta, you are writing - and we are learning from you about all this - from your perch where these worlds sit in unstable adjacency. Aristocrats walk among the million in disguise in order to feel alive, free. But when they mix among their own, walking around with their ivory snow labels, protected by buffers of time and distance and access and police, they are free to be "themselves."

low Things clownishly ascend. -

How to make any headway in your question, this quest. We might not yet know whether any reconciliation is in the cards. Consider the motives and appetites of the players. Currently among the quite extraordinarily wealthy (at least in the US) there is the appetite for private experience and pedigreed paideia. Affluent communities are being built with faculties for ongoing education. Ivy League schools offer tours to fabulous locales for those who can afford them.

I guess I'm saying, there is need, in both realms. Different needs, where one might be in a position to help the other. The possibility of exchange has to start, I'll wager, in the willingness of those in each to be open to the idea that they and their worlds do not know everything, or have everything. Can they learn from those they constitutively exclude?

The Ben Jonson vision of measure invokes music, harmony, over spectacle, in part because it derives from a calm unblinking awareness of mortality. The Big Legacy can't cheat death. Perhaps this is where the marshaled forces of USian wealth and poverty can find common ground, this absence of ground who respects no rank, no distinction, no privilege.

I know none of this helps. What can we do -- that's not a rhetorical question. You are asking important non rhetorical questions. What can I do that might be of use?