Snobbery

The origins of fashion are in status, and in status, too, are to be discovered the mechanics of fashion. The kinds of status that one’s clothes can reveal are obvious: one’s wealth, one’s rank in society, one’s age or generation, one’s aspirations, and not least one’s interest in fashion itself.

Without a feeling of exclusiveness—the snobbish element—fashion isn’t successfully fashionable.

And of course Marcel Proust, himself half Jewish and fully homosexual, was the supreme portraitist of snobs, starting out in life a pure snob himself and ending as the greatest of all anatomists of snobbery

Rochefoucauld wrote that “our virtues are, most often, only our vices disguised,” thus formulating with perfection the character snobbery takes in politics.

subject is from the truth, the more snobbish he or she is likely to be. In this amusing scheme, mathematicians and physicists care least about clothes, wine, food, and other such potentially snobbish refinements, while people in English, history, and modern language departments, whose subjects put them so much further from the solid ground of unarguable truths, care a great deal, since their reputation for being cultivated is really all they have going for them. Quite nuts, or so it might seem, if lots of evidence didn’t support it.

In. her novel The Mind-Body Problem, Rebecca Goldstein posits the notion that the further an academic’s sub‍

Intellectuality is the quality of being able to talk about ideas—political, historical, artistic ideas—in a confident, coherent, or (best of all) dazzling way.

An intellectual is a man or woman for whom ideas have a reality that they do, not possess for most people, and these ideas are central to the existence of the intellectual. Because of this extraordinary investment in ideas, the intellectual is occasionally admired for a certain purity of motivation, but he or she

SNOBBERY has traditionally been founded on birth, access to power, fame, in some quarters wealth, and (on occasion) knowledge. But if knowledge doesn’t register on the snobbery scale for everyone, among people in what one might think of as the knowledge business—among people, that is, who fancy them

selves, in the loosest sense of the term, intellectuals—snobbery runs more rampant than bacteria through the kitchen of a Tijuana slow-food restaurant.