In defense of privilege

Talking about Ted Kennedy's death, M. LeBlanc and I had an interesting chat this morning about the benefit of being privileged. "Privilege" is a dirty word in the lefty blogosphere, especially the parts of it that focus on personal stories as much as, or more than, what's happening in DC. So much so that I have secretly gotten completely sick of it and try never to use it: using it here in this piece is making me cringe. It's up there with "calling out" (usually "someone's privilege"), which usually means "denouncing," in the small collection of supposedly liberal buzzwords that are way overused as blunt instruments of one's own moral superiority.

Because the thing about being privileged is that hopefully it gives one *security*. It's actually a *good* thing to have privilege. Ideally--and it seems to me that, as social thinking animals, this should be the goal--privilege gives one not just personal advantages but also the security to be gracious, to empathize, to be kind.

Here's an example of what I'm talking about, from Ted Kennedy's eulogy for his brother Bobby. He's quoting Bobby here:

"What it really all adds up to is love -- not love as it is described with such facility in popular magazines, but the kind of love that is affection and respect, order and encouragement, and support. Our awareness of this was an incalculable source of strength, and because real love is something unselfish and involves sacrifice and giving, we could not help but profit from it." And he continued, "Beneath it all, he [their father] has tried to engender a social conscience. There were wrongs which needed attention. There were people who were poor and needed help. And we have a responsibility to them and to this country. Through no virtues and accomplishments of our own, we have been fortunate enough to be born in the United States under the most comfortable conditions. We, therefore, have a responsibility to others who are less well off."

Bobby's mentioning two things here: love and a social conscience. It's not clear to me if he realizes that these two things are connected; that the latter comes from the former, that the child who has the privilege of being fully loved grows into the adult who is self-assured enough to love others.

And I do think that for me, at least--and I suspect for Ted Kennedy--it is specifically love of children that underlies that social conscience. As the cliche goes, "everyone is somebody's baby," and when you see people that way, it's damned hard to hate or even be indifferent to them. (If not, then you are yourself kind of fucked up, and I pity you your own childhood.)

I'm thinking this in part after reading Pierce's discussion of Kennedy (liked here) this morning. Two anecdotes that got me going:

The private dinner the night before the Boston ceremony conflicted with the 11th birthday of McCain's son, Jimmy.

"[Kennedy] said to me, `I'll make sure he has a good time,' " McCain recalls. "So we brought him up here, and he got a ride on a Coast Guard cutter around the bay, and he had two different birthday cakes, and people sang `Happy Birthday' to him twice, and he had an unforgettable time.

"To me, in so many ways, that epitomized Ted Kennedy - this incredible outreach to a little boy who, I mean, what is he to Ted Kennedy? It was remarkable to me."

What is Jimmy McCain to Ted Kennedy? A child. Who as such deserves to be treated with kindness and love. (I think it speaks kind of badly of McCain that he seems surprised by this.) Here's the other story:

On April 27, 2001, a bus carrying band members from the Oak Hill Middle School in Newton overturned on a highway in the Canadian Maritimes. Four children were killed. In Washington, a man whose child went to Oak Hill boarded an airplane in order to hurry home. He saw Edward Kennedy on the plane. The man told him what had happened. That's where he was going, the senator had replied.

At the school, volunteers gathered from all over Newton to help out. Along one wall, they'd hung broad swatches of blank white paper so that the children could express their sorrow and say their goodbyes. On the second afternoon of the melancholy vigil, a volunteer looked out and saw Kennedy, alone in the hallway, no aides around him and no cameras in sight. He was slowly, carefully, reading every single message left by every grieving child.

That strikes me as the gesture of a man whose own losses--and failings; Pierce reminds us not to forget Kopechne--have made him kinder, not more selfish; who looks outward rather than inward; whose pain has made him generous rather than self-pitying.

That last, I think, is why one "forgives" him Kopechne's death; he seems never to have tried to say anything but that he was entirely at fault there. Yes, he benefitted enormously from the privilege of Who He Was; as Pierce says, if he'd been someone else, he'd have been in jail. But he seems not to have prided himself on that, or to have felt that it was a privilege he deserved but others didn't. He didn't turn awareness of his own guilt into the moralizing-others of the evangelical. He wasn't a hypocrite.

Therein lies the strength of true liberalism, I think. And the defense, if defense is needed, of "liberal elites" as such. The privilege of the elite can and should be the privilege of working to lift others. This used to be what "condescension" meant; now, of course, it means pretending to be polite while subtly asserting one's own superiority. That's not what I'm talking about, and I think that genuine liberalism absolutely abhors that kind of patronizing bullshit. Which is clear, I think, in the anecodes above: it's important that Pierce notes that Kennedy is reading the children's messages while alone in the hallway, that he took care of Jimmy McCain by making him feel important rather than shuttling him off to the kids' table in the corner.

Interestingly, though, the other thing I took from the Pierce article was the lovely job it did of showing the importance and value of the old boys' network; another phrase that's become a tiresome cliche, though I confess I don't disdain it the way I do the word "privilege." But Pierce shows, through Kennedy's work, that part of what underlies any functioning network, whether made up of old boys or young women, is the ability to recognize the humanity in others: to be fierce opponents but also friends. Again, as with "condescension," the network that functions that way can also be used to exclude outsiders--but again, doing so isn't truly liberal, inasmuch as "liberalism" connotes generosity of spirit as well as a political affiliation.