In a snob-free zone: is there a place where one is outside all snobbish concerns--neither wanting to get in anywhere, nor needing to keep anyone else out?

• Author: Epstein, Joseph

BY THE LATE 1960s, THE OLD WASP social ascendancy in American life, after showing many cracks, was beginning to break up in earnest. The Ivy League colleges, as Nicholas Lemann has shown in The Big Test, had begun to turn from places where students were admitted by ancestral right into meritocratic institutions that looked to SAT tests to direct their admissions policy. The old Society page, with its news of old-family weddings, cotillions, and charity balls, began everywhere to be replaced in newspapers by the Style page, a very different thing. The Social Register became the subject of jokes. The Episcopal Church, once a bastion of Wasp life--an Episcopalian, the old joke had it, was a Presbyterian who lived on his investments--turned sentimental leftist. How many heterosexual Episcopal priests does it take to elect a bishop, a new joke asked. All three, the answer is. Soon one began to hear reports that many children of established Wasp families--Rockefellers and others--were feeling guilty about their inherited wealth, and looking for ways to redistribute it in the larger society.

The Wasp old guard put up the white flag without a shot being fired. Suddenly bars began to drop: in formerly restricted neighborhoods, in previously elite country and city clubs, in once white-shoe bank, law, and investment firms. Once-snobbish institutions loosened up, opened up, disappeared. The closest thing to an aristocracy that America had known was now most prominently in evidence in the magazine ads of a small grey-haired Jewish designer named Ralph Lauren (ne Lifschitz). Perhaps the best analogy to the Wasp self-divestment of power is that of the British giving up their empire. Both may have felt that the need to do so was inevitable--and quite possibly it was--but each came away diminished, disliked, even a little despised for having done so. To this day in America, the Wasps are the one group about which-in a politically correct atmosphere--jokes can be made with impunity.

One might have thought that the steep decline, if not the complete demise, of the Wasps would have put a powerful crimp in snobbery itself. Quite the reverse. What in fact happened is that snobbery became open to everyone: One could claim an essentially snobbish superiority on the basis of one's ethnicity, one's status as a victim, one's children's achievements, one's good taste, one's with-it-ness, one's culture, one's knowledge of wine, grub, or movies. We were all free to be snobs now, and the temptation to act on newfound freedom is never all that easily resisted. Who among us, after all, doesn't, not so deep down, feel rather superior to the next person? And yet, might there be a place where one could be outside all this madness?

Envy League Graduates

Is there a snob-free zone, a place where one is outside all snobbish concerns, neither wanting to get in anywhere one isn't, nor needing to keep anyone else out for fear that one's own position will somehow seem eroded or otherwise devalued? A very small island of the favored of the gods, clearly, this snob-free zone, but how does one get there?

To be well-born is a start. To be blessed with ample talent cannot hurt. To have been fortunate in one's professional, marital, or personal life will provide a genuine boost. To have won the lottery on an $80 million payoff week would be a serious help. And the easiest way into this zone may be not to care at all, to feel no aspiration, envy, resentment, anger at social arrangements, to live contentedly within oneself and be shut off from the whole damn social racket. Yet this last, the cultivation of sublime indifference, may not be the easiest but the toughest way of all into the snob-free zone.

Let me attempt to draw the portrait of a man (one could do something similar for a woman) who might have a chance for a...