Eric Hobsbawm and Roger Scruton could not have been more different in terms of ideology. Hobsbawm was a communist who never lost his faith: when many of his contemporaries abandoned the Communist Party after the 1956 Hungarian Revolution was crushed by Russian tanks, Hobsbawm stuck it out until the end of the Soviet Union. Scruton, by contrast, helped underground movements in the 1970s and 1980s against communist regimes behind the Iron Curtain. Boris Johnson called him “the greatest modern conservative thinker”.
They had some things in common, though. Both of them studied at Cambridge and taught at Birkbeck. They both belonged to elite clubs — and loved it.
Hobsbawm once described himself as a “Tory communist”. The British-American historian Tony Judt called him a “communist mandarin” with “all the confidence and prejudice of his caste”. Hobsbawm became a member of the Apostles, the exclusive Cambridge society, in 1939 and claimed that “even revolutionaries like to be in a suitable tradition”.
Scruton rhapsodised about the importance of clubs in his 2000 book England: an Elegy. “From the guilds to the trade unions, from the cathedral chapters to the colliery brass bands, from the public schools to the Boy Scouts and Women’s Institute,” he argued, “you will find the same ‘clubbable’ instinct … which prefers custom, formality and ritualised membership to the hullabaloo of crowds, and which imposes a quiet and genial discipline in place of spontaneous social emotion.”
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We are indeed a clubbable nation. But we also like to condemn many of the qualities that define us. And there is an anti-elitist and anti-club element in the air right now.
It is there in attitudes to our cultural institutions. Antonio Pappano, the musical director of the Royal Opera House, said last week that too many people are “embarrassed” by opera: “I think opera in many quarters is seen as something elitist.” It is there among the group of former diplomats and officials who want to “modernise” the Foreign Office, taking down colonial-era pictures and making it more forward-looking. And, of course, it surrounds the Garrick Club and the campaign to force it to extend its membership to women.
But if the Foreign Office “modernised” its premises and the Garrick admitted the most successful women in society, they would still be elitist clubs. And that is not a bad thing. Opera is elitist, and that is a good thing.
The word elitist does not deserve the stigma attached to it: there is nothing wrong with being the best. We don’t complain about being treated by doctors who had to go through a selective process to attain their professional status. Our favourite sports teams screen the most talented players. To have good taste in music and film implies a willingness to prefer something to another on the basis of quality.
Elitism is also inevitable. Some people will always rise to the top in whatever given field. They will be funnier, or more intelligent, or more charismatic, or better-looking. This does not, it should be stressed, make them morally superior.
Everyone is entitled to equal rights under the law. But not everyone is as talented as the other. And no piece of art is of the same value as the next. The ability to judge the worth of art in the first place depends on judging it against something else; if everything is of equal value nothing is of any value.
Clubs are inevitable too. We are social animals. We relate by observing explicit and implicit etiquette. We love the order provided by ritual. Our instinct to belong is overwhelming.
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Throughout history, elite cliques have culturally benefited the world. The Bloomsbury Group provided an outstanding novelist (Virginia Woolf), an exceptional economist (John Maynard Keynes) and an original historian (Lytton Strachey). Interwar Paris was full of buzzing sets. So too was postwar New York.
Many of those opposed to elitism are themselves part of one group or another. The more anti-elitist they are, the more stridently they often try to enforce division. Wokeness, with its opaque jargon and alienating code of conduct, is a sect that distinguishes its virtuous members from those they deem bigoted. Gustave Flaubert once said: “Inside every revolutionary there is a policeman.”
Being part of an elite group is not inconsistent with a reforming agenda for the rest of society. Clement Attlee, the greatest leader of the Labour Party, had a deep affinity with his public school (Haileybury) and the regiment in which he served during the First World War (the South Lancashire). His cabinet contained Old Etonians and Old Wykehamists but created the modern welfare state and the NHS.
Attlee was leader of the Labour Party for 20 years. To serve that club in parliament is to go through a byzantine process that makes getting into a Pall Mall club look like a walk in the park. It is also historically affiliated with that most tribal of groups, trade unions.
Our nation is constituted by a rich tapestry of clubs: sports clubs, political clubs, social clubs, religious clubs, literary clubs. Some are wonderful, others less so. All are, to one extent or other, elitist. If they didn’t exclude at all, the price of membership would not be worth it.
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Rather than succumbing to the temptations of an impossible world in which distinctions of taste and status are abolished, let us face the one we live in: elite clubs are part of life, and we should not like it any other way.
