Ease, Cultural Capital, And How The World Stays The Same

In a classroom discussion at St Paul’s, an elite boarding school in the US, a student “almost erupts out of his seat, blurting, “Kinda like Dostoyevsky!””, a comparison that is clearly unfounded and irrelevant to the text under study. Both the teacher and researcher find the interjection awkward, but none of the students seem to notice. Later, when asked why Dostoyevsky was brought up, the student confesses, ““I don’t know. Sometimes I just say things. I’ve heard of him [Dostoyevsky] before. Maybe I saw a movie?”” (Khan 2012). Shamus Khan’s account of ‘the new adolescent elite’ observes St Paul’s to argue that through curricular and social design, contemporary dominant classes assert their superiority by being “at ease everywhere in the world” [italics added]. He describes ‘ease’ as a self-assured, peripatetic sensibility of the young scions, who move through culture high and low, known and unknown, with an aloof yet charmed familiarity. The intriguing, albeit under-theorised concept of ‘ease’ requires several points of clarification. Within the ethnography, it is the culmination of three related axes of adolescent elitism: insistence that society is meritocratic; the figure of the cultural omnivore (Peterson 1996); and finally, the pedagogy of wealthy liberal arts departments at the school and university level. ‘Ease’ intuitively succeeds in describing the intangible airs hanging around the young elites of today’s classrooms and other spaces of learning (notably, social media platforms of TikTok and YouTube). However, Khan does not attempt to seriously locate the concept in the literature of elite studies. The next three sections take up each skein of ‘ease’ to reconstruct and assess its theoretical stakes for new sociologies of elite culture. I argue that ‘ease’ is the predominant cultural capital of today’s youth emerging out of elite educational institutions. Its relevance is likely only to grow stronger in light of an increasingly digitised and politically polarised world. 

Cream Rising to The Top

Michael Young’s original formulation of the meritocracy as a dystopia riddled with inequality and delusion has been erased as a connotation of the word (Young 1958). In its lexical death, now the meritocratic society implies a distilled American dream, where garage-born businesses can reach Wall Street, and bootstraps can be pulled to elevate people to high society. In America, the ideological scaffoldings of the meritocracy arose against the backdrop of the failure of the collectivist movements of the 1960s (Khan 2012). Marginalized groups such as women, the LGBTQ, and people of colour lobbied for equal treatment based on their individual ability as opposed to their ascribed group identities. Talent, capacity, and hard work ought to be the metric for evaluating people, they asserted. This rhetoric, which aimed for social justice, was quickly appropriated and decontextualized into a sacralisation of the individual. The neoliberal logic of such mobilisation dissolved discourses that accounted for complex group dynamics influenced by systems of power. Disaggregated individuals were not to be encountered as the essentialising caricatures of their disadvantaged identities. Instead, they were the sum total of their skills, actions, and choices, rendered raw and arable. The distinctively American movements of the 1960s are not exportable elsewhere, but the descent into neoliberalism in several wealthy Western countries has been extensively documented, and has naturalised individualism as a social and economic doctrine (Campbell 2001).

Khan charts the migration of this ideology to the class of the rich. He notes that they have reconfigured their group identity into a non-identity: ahistorical, fluidly defined, and devoid of ascribed traits or congenital differences. They identify, deracinated from inheritances, as a changeable set of diverse individuals who have worked their way to the top. As there has indeed been increased diversity in the composition of elites towards the end of the 20^th century and more prominently in the 21^st century, the rich are recast as the meritorious winners of the rat race. Concurrently, the rhetoric surrounding education has become about cultivating human capital – the way employers onboard new hires – in order to produce efficient, well-equipped individuals (Becker 1964). Education is construed as a process of imparting professionally utile attributes in the neoliberal order.

Here, two interventions are necessary. ‘Knowledge’ is certainly not value neutral, nor does it inhere efficiency. On the contrary, in the tradition of Gramsci, the transmission of knowledge often produces functionaries of hegemony, or in Althusserian terms, the institution of education is an ideological apparatus crafted to interpellate people as acquiescent subjects of the status quo (1971; 1965). In other words, there is no reason to regard knowledge-attainment through educational institutions as an objective or universal rubric for capability or hard work.

Moreover, and crucially, what educational institutions impart is not strictly ‘knowledge,’ rather, it is cultural capital. Pierre Bourdieu’s term marries the instrumental, profit-minded dimensions of ‘capital’ with the aesthetic – even sublime – dimensions of ‘culture’ (1997). Like conventional economic capital, cultural capital requires investment, ritual, and commitment from whoever wishes to benefit from its possession. The toil of its procurement is what confers the prestige of its ownership. Along with economic and cultural capital, Bourdieu describes social capital borne out of the cultivation of networks and connections with other people that enable and disable certain opportunities or privileges. These types of capital exist in objectified (physical), institutional (transmitted through family, school), or embodied forms that circulate within variegated, relatively autonomous cultural fields. Embodied capital straddles the subject-object dichotomy through the concept of habitus. Certainly, structures introduce and produce individuals’ realities and perceptual frame. Yet Bourdieu’s habitus also retains the individual’s agential relationship with these realities, arguing that there is volitional work underscoring how we engage with, resist, and reproduce a culture, even though much of these dispositional choices are moulded by the formative years of socialisation. 

While the economy of economic capital is largely straightforward and overt, cultural capital’s transference is subtler, and thus primed to function as symbolic capital. Symbolic capital relies on the valorisation of particular imaginaries in order to be valuable, that is, in order to be capital. For Bourdieu, it is how the public consciousnesses hierarchised ‘highbrow’ sensibilities as worthwhile, and ‘lowbrow’ ones as unworthy (1979; Gans 1974). Since the strategies of attaining symbolic capital are less recognisable, cultural capital is susceptible to (mis)recognition by society at large. Misrecognition allows the ‘highbrow’ preferences of the dominant to be naturalised as ideals of efficiency, intelligence, and art (Bourdieu 1984). It is not that there is something inherently better about bourgeoisie work ethics or cultural tastes, it is just that the dominant class has the power to glorify and legitimise their ethics and tastes as best practice or canon. The formula for success at the workplace, at the party, or in the studio, is taught and cultivated in the elite right from the cradle and the primary school classroom – based on what the agents of elite socialisation had the capacity to teach.

This logic of legitimation trounces the aforementioned rationales of meritocracy and human capital. There is no meritocratic, aleatory game where capability is measured by objective structures or the throw of a dice, nor is the icy calculus of economic production a transhistorical metric of human worth. Elites of their respective fields design and dictate the rules of a game they are predestined to win, allowing for the reproduction of and maintenance of their own power. Misrecognition is a kind of consequence of interpellation in the world, of embodied habitus. It is actively constructed in the plane of the symbolic, which then allows the dominant to perpetrate symbolic violence against the dominated. Symbolic violence implicates the dominated in their oppression, because it is a form of control made enabled by the acceptance of elites as paragons of culture.

The edulcorating story of the meritocratic elite is an exemplar of symbolic violence, which allows the rich to present the benefits conferred onto them through institutional and embodied cultural capital as just. Thus, in Khan’s ethnography, the students ostensibly sacralise ‘what they do’ over ‘who they are,’ without acknowledging the systems of privilege that inscribe life opportunities and define the cultural arbitrary (2012). ‘Ease’ finds its moral grounding in this self-congratulatory, cyclical argument. Increasingly fluent in the language of social justice – a legacy from the collectivist movements – the new elite is comfortable in their power because they are able to justify it using borrowed vocabulary.

Enlightened Elites

While Bourdieu’s concept of misrecognition avowed the arbitrary nature of what is considered capital, it also affirmed that this was, at the time, ‘highbrow’ art such as operas, classical music, French philosophy, and so on. Like Veblen, he believed that cultural consumption adhered to classes’ ascribed position within a hierarchised society (1899). However, Veblen’s emulation theory encountered ‘highbrow’ with a more fixed, pedestalising gaze, further claiming that the construction and maintenance of cultural distinction was conscious. To attain mobility, one had to emulate elite consumption and behaviour, to sustain distinction, one had to comport with predetermined patterns of taste and behaviour. Contrarily, Bourdieu did not envision these strategies as necessarily conscious, nor, as some scholars have argued, does his theory preclude scope for change in the substantive composition of elite culture (Lizardo and Skiles 2012; Friedman et al 2015).

In a critical departure from Veblen, Gans, and to an extent Bourdieu, Richard Peterson’s ‘omnivore hypothesis’ announced that new cultural elites repudiated the exclusive, snobbish consumption of highbrow art, having developed a voracious appetite for all forms of culture (Peterson and Kern 1996). As it became harder for upper classes to fortify their cultural capital by keeping highbrow art out of reach for the working class, acquiring an eclectic taste ‘democratised’ the oeuvre of elite cultural consumption (Peterson 1997; DiMaggio 1997). Societies were forced to open up, and more traditional forms of gatekeeping had to be abandoned in favour of accessibility – in part due to policies of cultural democratisation as seen in France, or the dream of a cultural democracy as in the United States (Dubois 2011). Researchers have variously associated the diminishing boundaries between popular and high art with the advent of ‘postmodernism,’ cosmopolitanism, tolerance, and openness (Lena 2019; Chan 2019).

Others have been more sceptical. Khan’s work is part of a camp who sees omnivorous consumption as a response to the moral anxieties of the elite, whose rhetoric of meritocracy and democratic openness had to be reflected in their tastes (2011; 2012). The cultural omnivore enjoys all kinds of art, and does not (cannot) restrict access to particular forms of culture – but, as Khan writes, “access is not the same as equality” (2011). Indeed, this is true. Yet there is more. A crude smorgasbord of cultural consumption bleeding through the bounds of mass and high art is not constitutive of an egalitarian revolution. Positioning omnvivorousness as random or anti-aesthetic does not take into consideration that the method of consuming culture is also critical in understanding the cultural capital it represents. As Coulangeon paraphrases Bourdieu, “distinction strategies do not pertain solely to objects consumed but also how they are consumed” [italics added] (2005). In other words, the performance and the attitude involved in consumption is integral to understanding how class privilege is asserted. In their study of British elite through Who’s Who, Freidman et al note: “people in Who’s Who choose to report their recreations in ways that go beyond simply listing types of recreations: they actively “play with the form” of their entry, describing their interests in a knowing, humorous, or slightly ironic way. Salient examples include “sailing, opera, gardening, perfecting espresso coffee” (Professor Azriel Zuckerman, academic), “applying Wittgenstein” (Anthony Ash, senior civil servant), “tennis, guitar, cycling, skipping, herb-surfing, dendron-leaping, portacenare” (Richard Addis, journalist), “loud music, strong cider” (2015). With respect to changing music tastes in France, Coulangeon theories that we may call the new aesthetic and social palette a form of “enlightened eclecticism” (2005). There is wry knowingness to these answers, unserious irony draped around serious answers, and almost a kind of cultural wit. These are not the answers of people out of touch with popular culture, they cannot be accused of residing in an ivory tower. However, this research also shows us that the pantheon of hobbies and culture that it is acceptable to ‘play’ with is, in and of itself, not an infinite, indiscriminate category (Friedman et al. 2015; Friedman 2020; Coulangeon 2005). Even beyond this, however, developing the correct affect with which to approach and regard cultural artefacts gains primacy over where the artefact falls on the high-low spectrum. This modality of selection and maintenance of a particular demeanour during consumption gives elites the air of omnvivorousness while maintaining the frigid distance and distinction of symbolic violence.

These studies of taste and hobbies are germane in understanding what Khan’s conceptualisation of ‘ease’ might look like in surveys. They illuminate how Bourdieu’s framework of distinction very much persists and is imbricated in eclecticism. By unpacking elite educational institutions, we can unspool how this ‘enlightened eclecticism’ is inculcated in young students, and what intellectual effects such a schooling has on a class’ curricular and holistic development. As Haquinet shows, “the apparent rise of eclecticism should not be seen as the end of cultural hierarchy, but rather as the consequence of multiplication of aesthetic principles as symbolic boundaries” (2014). It is in schools like St. Paul’s that the cognitive instruments required to broach and master the art of tinkering with these weltering aesthetic principles is taught.

We’re All Lateral Thinkers Here

Khan devotes much time to explain how one required high school course, Humanities I and II at St. Paul’s, was delivering to students the cultural reserves they would turn to again and again in life. In this course, assignments demanded things like comparing Beowulf to Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, reckoning with reasonable questions for seventeen-year olds such as what is otherness, how does one love, what is history, and so on. These questions are addressed through covering history, literature, and philosophy from the Western canon’s most prolific periods. Khan suggests, “[p]erhaps the point is not really to know anything” (2011). Instead, the point is to develop schemas for thinking about things, to feel as though any cultural artefact – or business plan, or voting issue – could be placed before a student and irrespective of their familiarity with the nuances and meat of the matter, they would be capable and felicitous in their manner of speaking about it. A kind of distinction-through-dilettantism, Khan argues that elite institutions train students to make wild intertextual references, sweeping statements to questions that have no wrong answers, and demonstrate ‘ease’ at every step of the conversation. Outside of the classroom, students are required to sit at tables with adults once a week, and by the end of their time at St. Paul’s, they are voluble with adults and insubordinates, regarding each with respect, magnanimity, but most of all – cool, charmed, ‘ease.’ Thus, by institutional design, both inside the classroom and outside, young children learn self-presentation and self-assuredness, and arguably a sense of entitlement to be included in big conversations irrespective of their expertise in it. Certainly, this is not knowledge. It is the obviation of knowledge as a criterion, in favour of the reproduction of class systems. Khan writes: “these privileged students are made into elites by the interactions that consecrate them, by the consistent, generous feedings they receive of their own capacity and promise.”

The highly stylised diction that is ‘ease’ has been elsewhere theorised in different terms, perhaps most polemically by Basil Bernstein (1996). He sets forth the typology of ‘elaborated’ and ‘restricted’ codes to describe the differential nature of language based on class position. Language, by this account, becomes a metonym for class, where upper class individuals are trained to speak with elaborated codes at home, and schools prioritise and reward such speech. Conversely, restricted codes in school and in society set up lower class groups to remain there, because the language of restricted codes predisposes a person cognitively, socially, and in terms of capacity, to be employed in menial or working-class roles. This theory has been widely criticised as arguing that working class mothers are ‘deficient’ or that the language of the working class is inherently less valuable than that of middle or upper classes (Collins 2001). However, while overtly crude or reductionist, it is worth noting that this typology has empirical support, and anticipates claim’s like those of Khan’s (Collins 2001; Khan 2011; Hasan 1991).

For Bourdieu, institutions are breeding grounds for the featherbedded to self-congratulate their children by constructing a system that rewards the kind of knowledge, ethic, and disposition they are raised to embody (1977). The covert messaging of pedagogy validates the skills and capacities of the wealthy. While there are significant – and heated – differences between Bourdieu and Bernstein’s work, both methodologically and theoretically, what is germane to this discussion is their rendering of language as a site of violence, and a mighty sword in the reproduction of class relations. Particularly within the classroom, developing ‘ease’ sets up elite students for a lifetime of surety in their capacity to contribute, and draw links between abstruse ideas and mass culture. Institutions bestow social and cultural capital onto their members, yet what is concerning about ‘ease’ is not only that this capital is inaccessible, but also that it is, in a sense, vacuous. Superficial ‘enlightened eclecticism’ is inspiring education focussed on creating soundbytes of knowledge the way students might choose caption for their social media content. Both are forms of signalling their class superiority, and both involve a calculus of ‘ease,’ without a rubric for substantive value. However, as Bourdieu has shown, such a rubric of substantive value has likely never existed.

The Art of Ease

            In the new economy of cultural capital, ‘ease’ seeped into most fields. From conventional liberal arts campuses where professors increasingly encourage students to link popular culture with high art, to video essays that have titles like “Cultural Disintegration, Capitalism, and Buzzfeed,” to the rise of short-form TikToks that combine an array of cultural artefacts, ‘ease’ has an undeniable currency (Morton 2019; Ceika 2019). To further unpack the empirical validity of the claim that ‘ease’ promotes superficial and fluid forms of knowledge, content analysis of education output from elite institutions would be a fertile methodological framework. For the purposes of this essay, however, we can see ‘ease’ translate into digital cultural capital (colloquially termed ‘clout’) adhere to Bourdieu’s theory, and Khan’s characterisation of increasing diversity and the language of meritocracy. The idea that ‘anyone can go viral’ or that social media has democratised the possibility for fame and success are just new iterations of neoliberal logic, and a cursory scroll through TikTok or Instagram testified to the symbolic violence still prevalent. Even if elite institutions are forced to be more diverse and accessible, if pedagogy transforms students into elites, then diverse enrolment will not necessarily promise diverse graduates. It is imperative to continue interrogating whether our educational systems are providing fair, in-depth knowledge, or if they are teaching us the art of ease to impress interviewers.

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