Jay Hughes on Preserving Dynastic Wealth in a Democracy

Went to a convention of morals tutors to wealthy families over the weekend. Heard Jay Hughes, a sixth generation attorney, speak on keeping wealthy families together for six or more generations so that the money stays in the family, along with influence, power, education, virtue, taste and ecstatic joy. Afterward I ran into the Happy Tutor, dressed appallingly in his best white rayon leisure suit, with the embroidered gold vest, who said that Hughes was a great exemplar of the fine old Wasp traditions of noblesse oblige and public service, as fine a product as a fancy Boarding School could produce in an aristocracy decaying into oligarchy, but that Hughes, in itemizing the counselors around a wealthy family ("homme d'affaires," "home d'confiance," "privy counselor," "Machiavel") had left out the rarest and most important, the True Fool. Hughes said his own father, also a confidante of wealthy families, had told Jay that attorneys are paid for knowledge and for courage, and in courage they earn their bread. But surely, the most courageous is the Fool? And that is why we have the proverbial expression, 'a Fool's courage.'

Well, I can say this. Jay has been a trusted counselor of dynastic families for 40 years and a thought leader in our profession, our calling to selfless service of wealth. What has the insolent upstart Tutor to show for playing the Fool? A Dumpster full of garbage, and a worldwide reputation as a pariah. He calls himself "Dungeon Master to the Stars," but his only client is a tired think tank hack who comes to him occasionally for a penitential beating. I think Jay Hughes knows a lot more about a life in the highly paid service of wealthy families than does some self-styled "Disciplinarian" eking out a poverty level living in Wealth Bondage. In any case, I found Jay's work on preserving Dynastic Wealth for 200 Generations inspiring. Why should rich people go from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations, when there are plenty of poor people and middle class schmucks around already who can barely afford a shirt? America needs an Aristocracy. I asked Jay in confidence, if that was not so, he drew close and whispered, "America was born from Aristocratic families, though it is politically incorrect to say so." He added, "What do you think?" I said, we need more true Aristocrats, unlike the vulgar bunch of social venture types, and second and third generation finaglers and connivers now in power, but first we have to stamp out the uppity riffraff, or we, the cream of the prep school crop, will be dining on Popeyes and drinking Thunderbird with self-educated peasants, like The Happy Tutor. At that point Jay and I were interrupted as the Happy Tutor, hearing his name, swaggered over, his atrocious bellbottoms dragging across the marble floor. "How's it hangin, Big Guy'?", he asked, cupping his crotch, as Jay moved off, smiling politely. You can see why Tutor is persona non grata in polite company. I always say, if you don't have something nice to say, say nothing at all. Things go a lot more smoothly when you leave well enough alone. That has been my experience. A good Privy Counselor knows when to keep his mouth shut. (Hughes did mention Richelieu or was it Tallyrand as a model counselor who made a mediocre king look good.  Jay did say a good Privy Counselor sleeps at the foot of, not in, the King's bed. But all the same we sure don't want to be buried together in some unmarked grave. I mean we morals tutors to the world's wealthiest families might recall the fate of our great precedessor, Rasputin, too.  Rasputin stands for the proposition that even waving Christianity about from on high will not fool all the peasants all the time, no matter how ignorant they might be. In the long run, I think Jay would agree, we can't perpetuate ruling families whether they be Tsars, Kings, or jumped up Social Venture Capitalists, unless the ordinary people allow us. We either have to invest a lot more dollars for political return with think tank work, softening up the public for oligarchy, or we might have to eventually back off a little and do something for the teeming millions of losers trapped below us.  Honestly, even I as a respected Morals Tutor to America's Wealthiest Families have been feeling the pinch a little, with gas prices up, and my tips holding steady.  My loyalty to preserving the well-being of dynastic families even unto the seventh generation is unswerving, but I am not an inheritor myself, and I do have to eat. 

Comments

[klaus]

You make this Hughes guy sound like a moron.

He's ugly too:

http://www.dbh.com/attorney_images/3049.jpg

Someone like that should get a nutritionist and personal trainer like those NPC people have!

[Phil]

Actually, he is brilliant, and probably the leading theorist in the field of counselling wealthy families on family values, family governance, and the preservation of the family over time. (I an writing for those who have read his work and know how good it is.) He is as good as our field gets. His ideas have had a huge influence on me, as they have had on all who work with wealthy families on family values, or as Jay says now, "virtues." The great unthought or unspoken question is that of the role of dynastic wealth in a democratic society. Jay addressed the question in a very gingerly way in our short post-presentation chat. I said, "oligarchy," about the time we were interrupted. I was struck by how often he invoked loyalty and service to wealthy clients as ideals. They are good ideals for an attorney, and for a privy counselor, but where does the obligation of wealth come in? The obligation to the larger society? Jay mentioned noblesse oblige as the answer, the virtue of the old aristocratic traditions of the wasp leadership of an earlier era, still carried on in Eastern boarding schools, and memorialized, as he noted, in Nelson Aldrch's fine book, Old Money. But that ethos has been swamped by the new money, social venture entrepreneurs, and the connivers who see political power as an open invitation to privatize for private interests the public good. Jay represents the best in the old tradition, the one so often deconstructed, of Anglo-American Wasp public service and philanthropy. You saw a dying flicker of it in Kerry, an old St Paul's graduate. You see it in Dick Minim. You see it in Peter Karoff, though he was not born into it, and in him it is still in tension with a passionate commitment to democracy. You see it in Tracy Gary, though in her too it is balanced with a commitment to social justice for all, even though she was born to wealth. She learned service in a wealthy family in which it was drummed into the heirs, as well it should be.

Klaus, in Jay, Tracy, Peter, you see a coming to voice in many ways of a tradition that goes back to Rome and Greece, through the England of the Empire, a tradition rooted in the liberal arts, and devoted to good manners, good taste, aristocratic disdain for pecuniary gain, and stewardship of family and community assets. The tradition stands for the noble, as opposed to the servile and the base. That is my tradition too, not because I was born into money, but because I was born into the liberal arts. It is also the tradition of Martial, Pope, Swift, and the Happy Tutor. I want to say that what is truly strongest in this tradition has not died, or ossified, but is alive in our ability to savagely critique one another and ourselves, no matter how the truth hurts. So, this post is written in solidarity with Hughes, as one prep school old boy to another, for he is a mentor and role model, but we must have the courage of our own first principles and what Hughes work stands for is Aristocracy based on great caches of inherited wealth. That is what it is all about, but it is never said. For were it said, the odds of maintaining it would be lessened. The plebes in the seats who think he is talking about family values of small time shopkeepers like themselves and their clients are mistaken, but Hughes is far to polite and politic to point it out. This is about dynastic wealth - the Bushes, the Harrimans, the Danforths, the Rockefellers, the Mellons. We shall see how the Gates family, the Waltons, the Coors family, the Omidyars, and the Skolls, play into all this. Will they use wealth to create aristocratic families? Will they become Oligarchs? Or will they give the money to charity, making their kids fend for themselves? And if some do give it away, and other families keep it, where will the balance of power in this country rest in a generation or two, especially if estate tax is repealed at the behest of these Dynasts? So, in this mix, I step out as a Moral Tutor to Wealthy Families and a damn Fool. My message is not much different from the message taught to kids at a place like Choate, Andover, Exeter, St Pauls, Groton, or Loomis where I boarded. The difference is that I teach in the streets, to all comers, and take the message as of more than academic interest. The issues I address are totally outside the public conversation about money and giving. No one is even talking about this stuff, about oligarchy, aristocracy, and uses of dynastic wealth in a democracy bent on empire. And few insiders comment. This is the verboten. What happens in Wealth Bondage stays in Wealth Bondage, and I am breaking the taboo, moving back and forth across the threshold taunting the very best people, like Hughes, Tracy Gary, and H. Peter Karoff, to engage me on this ground. So far, no takers, for this ground is perilous and the cost/benefit ratio not so good. Better to pass quietly among the wealthy, without spooking them, a mouse beneath the feet of the elephants. Teach children these things, in a good prep school, but to teach the liberal arts in the streets to wealthy ignorant and brutal adults, beware! Remember Socrates. He ended up dead for his temerity.

These are the central issues that obsess and upset me in working with wealth, and it makes me astonished to see how little they are acknowledged, much less discussed, by the wealth counselling professions, even when the emphasis is on "Family Values," and "Philanthropy." The Happy Tutor speaks out bravely, but no one listens to him. For the most part what you hear is the sound of silence. Those who know, like Hughes, don't say, and those who say, don't know. Well, Hughes says plenty, but very little about the role of dynastic wealth in democracy. He is too well bred to bring it up.

[Gerry]

Aren't there some deep and unanswered questions here? Are these traditions of learning and knowledge of value outside of the context of dynastic wealth? Aren't you angered by having been invited to the threshold but never invited in?

What master will you serve, those ancient values or the masters of the current dynasty? What is this courage spoken of if not to speak truth without regard for our personal stake in outcomes?

[Phil]

I have been across a few thresholds, coming and going, accepted, and tossed out like trash, or allowed to linger as a factotum, serving the means to ends. What you see here, Gerry, is a fracture in the dynastic system, between the old money of established waspy families who had an old fashioned sense of civic responsibility, or noblesse oblige, and newer insurgent families who see government service as another chance to rip and trip for allies and friends. Jane Jacobs has written about the difference between the ethic of service and honor among old monied types and the ethic of gain and commerce among the tradesmen types. We are losing the old ethic of stewardship, as stodgy as it may have been, and as snooty as it often was, and as white as it was, and replacing it sadly with something even worse. The courage spoken of by Jay may be or include the courage not only to tell truth to power, but also to do its uglier work, I am afraid, as may sometimes fall to the lot of attorneys who are close to the seat of power. Think of the courage it took to authorize torture here in America, before the law could be revised retroactively to permit it. Audacity is a virtue, in certain contexts, ones requiring victory. The thing I am trying to bring to the service is the difference between loyalty to those who hire you, and loyalty to the greater good. That is the conversation I was trying to start with Jay, but it is an unpalatable one in the context of polite conversation among consultants to wealth.

[Gerry]

I'm not sure you are understanding my point. In this post and thread you refer to the traditions of knowing that you are part of, and how those traditions are supported by the aristocratic world that Jay serves. But those traditions are not of and for wealth, as the exemplars of Jesus or Diogenes well illustrate.

It begs the question of what is really being taught in those places. Or maybe more to the point, what is taught, but not recieved. You were eager for the knowledge, but I fear most of the hiers you studied with learned about as much as W did in those same institutions. If the mission of these institutions were really to spread the tradition you so deeply value, then they would have long left behind the moderate style and the mediocracy it breeds.

[Phil]

Gerry, you express my own intransigent opinion. What seems to have been deconstructed in the libeal arts was the, shall we say, Enligthenment confidence in reason, justice, the good, the beautiful. It was shown to be in effect class-based, riven with contradiction, paradox, aporia, and self-interest. Fine and dandy, but when the bulwark of the older tradition of noblesse oblige was exposed as a fraud, what did it leave us with? Will to power, grubbing for money, the Fortune 400 of billionaires, and endless and unapologetic self-assertion and self-aggrandizement in all walks of life, allied with a bullying knockoff of Christianity. Hughes is Old School, literarly. This was an important post for me, because it is about "my own people" and their manners, mores, and ideals. You cite Diogenes and Christ as not exactly aristocrats, that is true, but they are embedded as was Socrates, or the Fool in Lear, in such a world of kingdoms and empires, of nobles and slaves. In each of them you have the deep question of service. How do we render unto Caesar what is Caesars? To what do we owe our Master? Hughes is a loyal servant - who prospers thereby and who helps the wealthiest prosper in spirit, excellence, giving, public service, and achievement, as well as in money. Yet he seems to see the world as did T.S. Eliot - that the cause of excelence is served by serving elites, who in turn raise up the base. I dont know that I disagree, in fact I see Tutor himself a kind of prep school Master who is playing games with the kids to teach them an elite tradition - a liberal art, the art of freedom. Yet the tension between elite liberal arts traditions and mass-mediated democracy and mediocrity is real. What Christ and Diogenes mean to me is that the best and deepest traditions belong to us all, and that it is up to the teacher to break through the students resistance, be the student no matter how high or so base.

[Gerry]

Can't add much to that. Only, the aristocracy itself is always in flux as well. The american robber barrons were the new money of their day and shunned by the well bred.

The question never asked is "Why dynasty?" in the first place. Why persue it and why should anyone support the institutions that perpetuate it. What if all of our children had equal access to resources for learning and play? Would those with the means make sure everyone, including their children have equal opportunities?

[Phil]

Tell you two answers, one wordly, one idealisic. Why people want to help families become dynasties is that dynastic families pay top dollar to those who can assist in that regard. From the idealistic perspective, some have made the case that urbane, educated, tasteful families, who have risen to a level above the grubbing for money in the market can go into philanthropy, volunteer work and public service, helping to uplift and entire society. That is the answer of say, a T.S. Eliot, and other apologists for "class" or classiness. We want at least a few human beings to rise to the highest capacities latent in all - and that takes the education, networks, manners, mores, and institutions, as well as the leisure associated with inherited wealth. So, we want money concentrated in a noble elite, so that we will not all be base, servile, common, or mere shopkeers, or shopkeepers writ large like Pierre Omidayer, Bill Gates and the rest of these pushing vulgarians. Got it?

When you speak of everyone, Gerry, you are speaking of the common ruck of humankind, the great unwashed. Why would we want to level all noble people down the median and the mediocre? Better nobles and slaves than society of complacent, middling ignoramuses. That view, and the language in which I expressed it has a deep and long history, going all the way back to at least Aristotle. Leo Strauss hits the tone perfectly in our era when he says that capitalism or democracy "builds on low but solid ground."

[Gerry]

From the idealistic perspective, some have made the case that urbane, educated, tasteful families, who have risen to a level above the grubbing for money in the market can go into philanthropy, volunteer work and public service, helping to uplift and entire society. That is the answer of say, a T.S. Eliot, and other apologists for "class" or classiness. We want at least a few human beings to rise to the highest capacities latent in all - and that takes the education, networks, manners, mores, and institutions, as well as the leisure associated with inherited wealth.

This argument doesn't really hold water. We are already agreed that there is no identity between stature in terms of wealth and celebrity and any real sense of quality. Sorting by hereditary wealth doesn't help this mission and in fact hurts it.

The sense I have is that dynasty is a form of protection, but from what? From the unwashed masses? Perhaps, but then the screening function should actually connect to the sorts of quality you are interested in promoting. Look, W is from a dynastic family, goes all the way back to the early days of the republic, and has used that entre to promote values most base and crude.

It all begs the question of why you would need a family safety net for losers if there is a functioning safety net for all of us. I don't want W to starve on the street, just for him to be kept away from the levers of control. The dynastic system of money based elitism is what enables him, the institutions give the impression of gravitas when there is none.

[Phil]

So, then you get into the "parties" of wealth, and their various codes of honor. Who should be putting pressure on those dynastic families who essentially abuse their power? Could come from below, but how is that working today? W is elected and much loved; to say he and the neocons abuse wealth and privilege rings hollow to those who worship with the President, and join him in the pits as NASCAR rallies, or join him around the flag. Where then might there be a check and counter-check? I honestly fault the group of which Hughes is a staunch member, as was Kerry, a group to which The Philanthropic Initiative, and Council on Foundations, for example, are well connected. Why are the norms and mores of public service not better enforced by peer pressure at the top? I guess, the new ways of thinking, the market-based, ultra-Christian ways, have simply exceeded whatever controls and tacit understandings that held wealth to some degree in check in the earlier Waspy old money world view. I wonder if Hughes might not agree that the old ethos of service has fallen out of fashion or been pushed aside, leaving lots of money and lots of vulgarity in high places as well as low - a most dangerous combination when the highest share, or at least conspicuously model, the faults of the low and the low have little vision beyond commerce, jingoism, and the local church.

What legitimizes dynastic wealth? The market is fair, is one answer. God is just, is another answer. Providence works in mysterious ways, is another answer. "Screw you, Pal, get yours" is the contemporary answer, one that Hughes would find distressing. I wish he were more outspoken, not about serving wealth, but the obligations of wealth to serve the greater good. He embodies the highest ideals, but he seems too politic, polite, or "embedded" with wealth, to say a rude thing about the abuses to which dynastic weatlh is put, in say, Argentina, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, or for that matter TX, or Washinton, DC.

[Gerry]

From this, via this:

Most scholars of education share this perspective, often referred to as "critical theory." Jonathan Kozol is of this school when he writes, "School is in business to produce reliable people." Paulo Freire of Brazil puts it this way: "It would be extremely naive to expect the dominant classes to develop a type of education that would enable subordinate classes to perceive social injustices critically." Henry Giroux, Freire's leading disciple in the United States, maintains, "The dominant culture actively functions to suppress the development of a critical historical consciousness among the populace." David Tyack and Elisabeth Hansot tell us when this all started: between 1890 and 1920 businessmen came to have by far a greater impact on public education than any other occupational group or stratum. Some writers on education even conclude that upper-class control makes real improvement impossible. In a critique of educational reform initiatives, Henry M. Levin stated, "The educational system will always be applied toward ? serving the role of cultural transmission and preserving the status quo." "The public schools we have today are what the powerful and the considerable have made of them," wrote Walter Karp. "They will not be redeemed by trifling reforms."

The cynical view is that the powerful want a different education for their children than for the rest, after all, their children must be prepared to lead and the masses must be prepared to be efficient worker bees. Fortunately the other books are their to be read and appreciated, the skills of reading are general and the world provides many stimulants to thought.

I must confess that talk of dynasty gets my back up. I come from lowly roots by these measuring sticks. The point is not that many will take up the challenge to think critically, but that all must be challenged to do so, and those who take it up should have the opportunity to demonstrate leadership.

If you have confidence that quality breads true in nature and nurture, then why would you need the advantage of dynasty to place your children well? It is not the unwashed masses that are feared, but the talented and motivated upstarts who want a place at the table.

The crudeness of thought that you critique in the "social entrepreneurs" and such is likely more a product of our bland educational system designed to socialize workers. Those few who break out economically are the ones who master what the economic system values and manage to ride some productive waves of change. They still have a limited scope of thinking from an impoverished education.

So the choice is between the hereditary incompetance of a GWB who has the opportunity, but just doesn't care, and the successful entreprenuer who is to busy learning how to make money to have time? Either way we all lose ... Sorry to rant, some of these spots are sensitive for me.

[Phil]

Sensitive to me too, Gerry; you are bringing out the very points I hope to get discussed. Here is how Hughes actually handled some of the thoughts you raise. He drew on a flip chart a bell shaped curve. He explained that dynasties are founded by an exceptional man or woman way out on the left hand tail. But, over time, families regress to the mean, as perhaps you say the Bush family did at some point in their history (opinion as to when might differ). From Hughes perspective there are two ways to keep the dynastic family intact, as its talents become increasingly meager. One way of course is education, mentorship, and the use of wise counselors, such as Hughes, me as morals tutor to Americas most dissipated fammilies, or the Happy Tutor as Dungeon Master to the Stars. The other way is for the family whose blood is thinning to have the "outlaws" who marry into the family keep the gene pool strong. So, the dumb daughter, with a huge trust fund, snags a Nobel prize-winning husband, and their kids are pretty bright. That is basically how Hughes framed it, without invoking the role of counselor as Fool, and without the irony I have employed here about disspated families, morons with trust funds, and the rest. But, he did take dynastic succession as a good thing, towards which much effort should be expended, and his premise went totally unchallenged by a room full of highly competent financial advisors and fundraisers. As you say, our educational systemm has failed us. The peasants are upset about the problems of the King and his moron offspring. And maybe they should be since the biggest moron is the Prince Regent.

As for you, Gerry, get rich, found a dynasty and all is well. Until then join me here in instructing the counselors to wealth on how to play the fool to good effect, without ending up in a dumpster like the Happy Tutor.

[tom]

This is clearly a major theme. It's amazing to me that nearly every time it comes up anywhere, it's with a nod to Aldrich. Like he's the one and only litter runt who outed the aristos, and now that it's been done, nevermore.

But is that really the case? Or does bimbo USia merely imagine it has a sane and culturally beneficent aristocracy? Just an offhand guess, but no significant literature comes to mind grounded in the class - except perhaps Vidal. Might it not be the case that the Mellons have been too busy cultivating the idea of aristoculture to actually have made anything of it? Or maybe the fact is that things like aristocratic traditions take periods to develop that are longer than the entire span of US history?

[Phil]

Aldrich is about the end of an era, the death of his tribe. Your hero, and mine, Trow, is also of that tribe and sings its dirge. Henry James, Veblin, and Edith Wharton come to mind, as does Robert Lowell. The culture of raw money is quite different. The old money was a culture - you might resent it but it was a culture in which people knew one another from Boarding School and The Club, and the Old College Tie and kept one another in check to a degree, held to a standard of sorts. Now, mostly it is about money, and power, and certain school connections may help - as the Katherine Austin Fitts links show - in professions like investment banking or the CIA, but in general the cultural element is missing. You don't have to major in the liberal arts anymore, better to major in econ. There is no class in high class. Class cohesion is now just collusion.

[tom]

James set his American wannabe aristos in European enclaves where the sources of USian wealth were usually things that could only be whispered in polite company - lug nuts. Aldrich offers a superb window on a certain way of being, a native vision of being in the world with a disarming simplicity of noble nature. It's not a matter of hating it, it's that it didn't appear to take root. Did it die, or was it simply outpaced by changes that reduced experience, the value of local cultivated authority, in favor of pre-digested "solutions" to every imaginable spiritual dis-ease?

I'm reading this and thinking, "Phil would find some of his central preoccupations addressed here."

[Phil]

I will order the Agamben. What became of the following hierarchy

High culture: highly educated in the liberals arts, good taste, good manners, good breeding; dedicated to the public good; a steward for nonprofits and the republic; disdain for lucre and hence for fraud, theft, and abuse of power for private gain?

That was an English and European ideal, drawn from their vision of Rome and Greece. It was even the ideal in the age of Empire. It did find a home here in the WASP hegemony. Yale 1975 or so was its twilight.

What happened to it? Postmodern incursion, the 60's ferment, Jewish emigre intellectuals, displaced intellectuals from Germany and France, who drew on Heidegger, rather than Locke or Hume, and who ultimately were drawing on Machiavelli and Plato, rather than our republican Anglo-American tradtion. What else happened? Tons of new money. The decline of the liberal arts into deconstructing the hegemonic texts and systems. Feminism. Civil Rights. And above all the rise of market logic displacing class and taste as the arbiter. Wealth and the "lifestyles of the wealthy," however barbaric and crass. What else happened? The hegemonic WASP elite was brittle, it did not flex, nor did it fight. "We cross unguarded thresholds," wrote Hartman mocking Wimsatt. What else happened? I want most deeply to suggest, as I reflect on Wimsatt, imbued with the Augustants, and on my own mentor, Martin Price, author of a fine book on Swift, that what happened is that the high culture of that tradition forgot satire - they became Dick Minim figures who retreated into nicesnes and compromise, whose motto was, "The moderator always wins." They thought that to their dying day, marginalized as they became. They did not realize that the new moderator was hired, a hired head, for a business plan, not a cultural movement. Also what happened is what Catherine Austin Fitts details so well her work at Solari, drawing on her experiences as a Director of Dillon Reid and the head of HUD under Bush I - what happened is that our generation and our children found ways to make a ton of money, in high places, by means fair and foul, and the ideal of the steward, the aristo who disdains lucre, as detailed by Jane Jacobs, in her Systems of Survival, was lost in a sewer of cash, some apparently from money laundering in the highest of circles. The steward became the sucker, Dick Minim, and the new hero is Trump or Candidia, the big winners.

Another element in this crisis came with the backlash against the 60s in reactionary right wing circles and the funding of the think tanks producing the most vile propaganda for commercialism, and developing the myth of a free market that serves to screen what Fitts calls a criminal conspiracy in the highest circles of Wall Street, regulatory agencies, lobbying, Congress etc.

My background is Irish, Italian, Catholic, no money in the family, but educated in the aristocratic ideals of service. Tracy Gary too. I still fight for those. I would like to think that the tradition of Giamatti, the steward, the classicist, lives in us both Tom, a set of genes expressing itself differently, but of one tribe, a tribe not yet extinct. The Happy Tutor says, "Yea, only this time, we fight dirty. Extinct? No just loitering with intent outside Wealth Bondage with a surgeon's scalpal and a working knowledge of human anatomy, such as butcher or vetrinarian might have. Swift was an Anglican Divine, and I am thinking of taking Holy Orders myself, if only to provide Last Rites on the cheap for those who need them."

[tom]

I'm sure many would find consolation in having their last breaths attended via ministrations of the Tutor in his Holy Dumpster, and they'll surely hope he'll don the cassock. Surplus Shriving with a Surplice. And a Slurpie. $.05 a pop.

Phil, you know as well as anybody that there never was a Great White Anglo Hope. Price and Giammatti were fine academics, best of breed. But what in USia is academia but a place for intelligent types to hide? They don't call 'em groves for nothing. It's the pastoral world - less substantial than sports or sitcoms - and it serves primarily as refuge from the shitstorm manufactured from bought judgments issued by Dunces.

And your own comic sensibility belies any belief in the mythos of a golden age of WASPitude. The evocation of ethnicity plays to a leering fear of the carnivalesque which is diametrically opposed to one of your central, crucial values. (You might wish to examine how WASPs are portrayed in The Good Shepherd). It can be convenient for ethical exhortation to have a shining hive of WASPs on a hill, but humans have been having the Hume-Locke vs. Nietzsche-Marx discussion since before any of these gentlemen blubbered in their soup.

Since the 60s, if anyone has operated under cover of "aristocratic ideals of service," it's the generations of young republicans who have given their all for a series of seriously deficient dudes in the white house whose autocratic notions of democratic leadership say more about the roots of USian aristocratic pretension than anything you or I could add by way of historical commentary.

[Phil]

Bravo, Tom, yes. But I do think there is, as Jane Jacobs, beautifully showed an ethos of the aristrocrat who is born with land and wealth and privilege who disdains cash, since he has it, despises those who strive for it, and instead pursues service and honor, even down to duelling to protect it.

You can certainly see that in the history of lit - Mammons cave for example in Spenser, or Pound Contra Usura, or the attitude towards rising wealth in Henry James, or reflected in the upper crust depicted by Dickens.

Against that is the ethos of the market, of shopkeepers, of those who measure success by their "results." Machiavelli and Calvin and Ayn Rand and Hayek and
Defoe might be in this camp. "What is of value evolves from self-seeking" is the universal belief and alibi o this group, God is in the market and whatever succeeds, by fair means or foul, is his will, so "don't fight the tape."

I am holding out for a version of the first belief system, based on some benighted view of honor, and I see Price, Wimsatt, Giamatti (not just in the classroom but contra Pete Rose too) as exemplars, though in the end they were too weak to hold the fort. What they used, well enough, was reason, and moderation, but what they used not quite well enough was satire - if you look for this in Wimsatt you will find it aimed at the Prometheans (Bloom in particular) and others. It was just not very good satire, and didn't advance the cause.

I see that "line" of genetic development as ending in that era - ostensibly so. But I see WB and The Tutor as its continuation, the Last of the Cucumber Sandwich Eating Elizabethan Club Members, only Tutor eats his sandwich in the Dumpster where he was cast by the consensus of all concerned.

"A usable history" - a genetic myth, origins and ends. I know it is a myth. But it is one that helps me find my way, and helps account for my friendship with you and Tracy Gary. Also it accounts for my impatience with Hughes.

He has the moderation part down, the Castiglione Book of the Courtier, preppy, part down. He has the servie to wealth and power as the highest obligation of the good servant part down. And he has the part down about a self-perpetuating educated aristocracy. But I said to Tracy Gary - who knows Jay well from her family connection with him - "for what purpose a dynasty?" She looked at me and smiled, her eyes focused on the distance repeated back, "yes, for what purpose."

That is where philanthropy, and public service, and the arts, the liberal arts, are supposed to come in, as in Aristotle's Ethics, but I don't see that in Hughes. I see too much emphasis on "results" - that of keeping the family of dunces and weasles and machiavels together, as if it were an aging Dynasty like the Hapsburgs, and not enough emphasis on how the family can meet its larger responsibilities, and what should happen - as with the Bush family, perhaps - when self-seeking trumps public service.

You can see how deep this dialectic is, Tom. I appreciate your isolating it for attention. It is very deep.