Wed, Aug 30, 2023 page9

• A post-privilege era is possible, but who will be first?

  A mordant new memoir about growing up in the 1 percent raises questions about what the powerful can do about inequality

  • By Howard Chua-Eoan / Bloomberg Opinion
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  Privilege is often carved into walls and etched into the landscape.

  Villiers Street is the pedestrian passage from the Thames embankment up to the Strand in London. It takes its name from George Villiers, the Second Duke of Buckingham who owned a large mansion there until 1672. The first duke, his father, was famously fictionalized in Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers and infamous in history as the court favorite and alleged lover of King James I of England (VI of Scotland).

  The dukes amassed great wealth and their direct heirs were hugely influential in Britain until 1800 when that specific branch of the family died out.

  However, there were other influential Villiers, including the progeny of a half-brother of the first duke. They, too, would be honored with titles and wield power. Most recently, Theresa Villiers was British secretary of state for Northern Ireland and secretary of state for environment, food and rural affairs for former British prime ministers David Cameron and Boris Johnson respectively.

  On the other side of the Atlantic is the 9.7km-long, 4.8km-wide Gardiner Island, just off East Hampton, New York. It has been in the hands of the same clan since Lion Gardiner, an English settler, bought it in 1639 from the native Montaukett people. Among his extended line of descendants: Gilbert Hovey Grosvenor, the first editor of the National Geographic Society; David Thomson, chairman of the giant Thomson Reuters media corporation and the richest man in Canada; and Benjamin Bradlee, the editor of the Washington Post during the Watergate scandal.

  “We have always married into wealth. We covered all our bets. We were on both sides of the Revolution, and both sides of the Civil War. The Gardiner family always came out on top,” Robert Gardiner, who co-owned the island until his death in 2004, told a reporter.

  That quote is cited in Quiet Street: On American Privilege, a mordant memoir about growing up in the 1 percent (there are many measures and affluence is relative to local economies but, in the US, it usually refers to households with upwards of US$600,000 in annual income) by the journalist and novelist Nick McDonell.

  The author — whom I worked with at Time magazine and count as a friend — belongs to what have been dubbed the incipient post-privilege movement. McDonell is like many in the 45-and-younger cohort of his social class: apologetic for their advantages and contrite about rectifying life on the cushy side of inequality. They are the ones who find a way of inserting “I know I’m speaking from a position of privilege” into discussions, or “I’ve had many advantages that have come because of my family.”

  The self-awareness can be awkward, but it is welcome.

  The book is an elegant confessional of the excesses of the ruling classes — told in a kind of travelogue through sybaritic circles of hell. Litanies of sin can have salubrious moral effects, but the lessons are as familiar as Croesus and Gatsby.

  However, McDonell does provide a catalog of anxiety that is the reverse image of Gardiner’s confidence in thriving no matter what. Gleaned from interactions with fellow 1-percenters, he lists the sometimes ludicrously petty, but very present fears of what life would be like in the event of “losing it all.”

  The fear they shared was loss of wealth. Without ever saying so, they were very much afraid of losing their country houses, the barn converted for their childrens’ sleepovers, the space for the grand piano, the greenhouses, the pied-a-terre where their mother-in-law stayed without being in everyone’s business, the airport lounge that allowed them to enjoy pleasures among their own, in quiet. They were afraid of processed supermarket cheese, much preferred the organic stuff, which, they emphasized would keep them alive longer.

  The same could not be said of their clothes, but they were afraid of losing the Prada bags anyway, the heavy zippers, the cashmere. They did not want to wear polyester windbreakers, or sit on IKEA sofas, or drive a Hyundai.

  In the book, the rich and powerful were well aware that the quality of their lives exacts a broader social and economic toll.

  “One percenters knew the MDMA and the Veuve, the weekends in the George V, the trilingual prostitutes, the time to craft stories of social mobility into election campaigns, the companies valuing profit over lives, the Dubai hotels built by indentured Bangladeshis — they knew all of it cost more than what they read on their credit card statements,” the book reads.

  One day, it could all suddenly come due: “History taught that mass movements, gradually then all at once, toppled governments.”

  McDonell offers no philosophic or sociological solutions to the anxieties of the affluent. What he does is make himself part of an object lesson. The key is the book’s title. That would be 124th Street in East Harlem in Manhattan.

  When the school bus taking him and his classmates to Buckley — a top-tier prep school for boys in the city — made the turn into the area, one of the coaches accompanying the children would caution: “Quiet street.” It was a warning to stop horsing around to avoid attention from the much less well-off and predominantly black neighborhood. No one broke the rule.

  As one classmate tried to explain years later: “If we’re not quiet on this street, then the horrible people who live here are going to jump us.”

  That strategic silence extended beyond the school bus; it became a wall separating the classes. Few crossed from one side to the other and communications were strained or perfunctory.

  However, the trajectory of McDonell’s narrative has him ripping off the muzzle and reaching out to the feared Other — by reporting out of Middle Eastern war zones, working in a COVID-19 morgue at the height of New York’s agony, and starting conversations with residents on 124th Street.

  He faces the fear that obsesses his class, knowing that without doing so, nothing can change. He does not really say it, but he offers himself as an exemplar of getting beyond privilege.

  Yet do we all not want to be privileged? And if we have lost status, do we not seek restoration? When I was starting out at Time, I worked with a countess — or so she would have been if her family had remained powerbrokers in the Mitteleuropa of her ancestors. An immigrant in the US, she spent her life trying to regain a semblance of the old nobility.

  Every now and then, frustrated by office politics and other obstacles, she would look at me and say: “You know what it’s like.”

  She considered me a fellow traveler — and I guess I was. My mother had moved our family to the US from the Philippines after her father’s publishing empire crumbled. People had derided his misfortune, punning on his name with the Hokkien for “Not one penny.”

  Yet, until her death 20 years ago this month, she worked hard to make a new and prosperous life for all of her children. She propelled me to where I am, always trying to get a leg-up even now in my 60s.

  So, I asked Nick by e-mail about this cycle of privilege lost and regained. Is it a wheel of fortune that will not ever stop turning?

  “We can — and many of us do every day — try to make society more humane, which requires that resources be more equally distributed. Will privilege always assert itself? Always is too big a word for me, and there’s no utopia on the horizon. But a society in which lives are less determined by privilege, or the lack of it — even allowing that we are apes, often mysterious to ourselves — such a society seems possible,” he replied.

  While much privilege is inherited, it can be earned. It must also be shared. It is not a quiet street. It is not an island.

  Howard Chua-Eoan is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion covering culture and business. He previously served as Bloomberg Opinion’s international editor and is a former news director at Time magazine. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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