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In my favorite novel, Red and black, the colors indicate the only means of ascent of a low-level Frenchman. After all, neither the red robe of the army nor the black robe of the church as much as the white linen of the dressmaking elevates our foolish hero. The wife of a mayor and the daughter of a marquis are some of the people who carry him away from his longed-for condition. I think that headline “red” is a cunning joke: the color is not of war but of sex, the old friend of the parvenu.
Or at least an old friend. The last two centuries have opened up more career paths outside the classroom than the colors that can be called. At the same time, they have closed the oldest method of hypergam romance. “Assorted mating” is the phrase coldly suited for marriage between educated people, who in this process add their material and cognitive advantages.
By the middle of the last century, the following observations would have marked me as a curiosity. I barely know a heterosexual person my age who has a spouse without. Of the couples where one couple earns much more, the other tends to bring cultural influence, older relatives, a practical passport or some matching team. (Looks have insufficient strategic value to bridge the gap.) As for high schools, of the more or less one hundred dates that have the most active each year, about 90 are graduates from research universities. A transgressive evening is spent with a student from an art or theater school.
There is the idea that only graduate women are reluctant to marry under their credentials. I’m sure all of this mixes with cause and effect. When men of high routine status ended up having wives with less education, it did not necessarily reflect preference, but the lack of alternatives. Once access to universities and the workplace was extended to women, both sexes were freed to be snobs. How prodigiously we have used the license since then. My consciousness is not affected by almost all the habits of the metro-liberal class that have been so paved and plumbed in recent years. Its romantic insularity is the exception. Not even private education does so much to forge an impor caste.
That is why, along with their irreverent erudition, they have taken me The talent aristocracy. In his new book, Adrian Wooldridge attempts to save the meritocracy from the ossified excess of class that Aldous Huxley envisioned. Like all the best works of argumentative nonfiction, it falls into the stage of policy correction. Undoubtedly, ideas such as “updating vocational education” can improve life chances. The tax code can reduce inherited wealth far more than it does. But soon, a serious meritocrat faces the untouchable boundaries of the personal realm. Parents manipulate their children’s lives with a zeal that is no less antisocial for being natural. And the most qualified of these self-traders will be the graduated double teams. It is not up to society to “do” anything about a choice as intimate as marriage. It is only up to society to count the costs.
And these go far beyond the emergence of social mobility. What stands out about the modern alpha pair is not so much the self-increasing interest in scale as the annoying insensitivity. Hypergamy is repeated in the drama: Balzac, movies about kitchen sink, Cinderella – because she has a fascination that isn’t there at all when someone from UBS marries someone in Freshfields.
The alleged subversiveness of sex between classes is not the issue (after all, there is still a lot of it). It is the contact and, ultimately, the synthesis of two different life experiences. All the resulting children, to the extent that they absorb some of it, will be more rounded and imaginative in turn. The combined assortments constitute perhaps the most disciplined, competitive and high-functioning ruling class the West has ever known, but also the least original. Wooldridge is never better than when she draws the distance between her bohemian self-image and the monoculture of her private life.
Send Janan a janan.ganesh@ft.com
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