In my favorite novel, The Red and the Black, the colors denote the only means of ascension of a native Frenchman. Finally, it is neither the red tunic of the army nor the black dress of the church as well as the white linen of the boudoir which raises our mad-hero. The wife of a mayor and the daughter of a marquess are among those who bring him closer to his coveted status. This titular “red”, I still think, is a sly joke: the color not of war but of sex, the age-old friend of the upstart.
Or at least an old friend. The last two centuries have opened more professional avenues outside his classroom than there are namable colors. At the same time, they put an end to the old method of hypergamous romance. “Mating by association” is a cold expression for mixed marriages of educated people, which exacerbate their material and cognitive advantages in the process.
In the middle of the last century, the following observations would have marked me as a curiosity. I hardly know a straight person my age with a degree who has a spouse without one. Among couples where one partner earns much more, the other tends to bring cultural weight, taller parents, a convenient passport, or some other equalizer. (Looks do not have insufficient strategic value to bridge the gap.) As for bachelor’s graduates, of the hundred or so dates that the most active spend each year, about 90 are with research university graduates. A transgressive evening is an evening spent with a former student of an art or drama school.
There is a notion that only female graduates are reluctant to marry below their degrees. I’m sure it’s all mixed up from cause and effect. When high status men regularly found themselves with less educated wives, this did not necessarily reflect a preference as much as a lack of alternatives. Once access to universities and work extended to women, both sexes were freed to be snobs. As we have generously used the license since. My conscience is not disturbed by almost all the habits of the metro-liberal class which have been so tarnished and feathered in recent years. Its romantic insularity is the exception. Even private education does not do the same to forge an impure caste.
That is why, with his unrepentant scholarship, I have been drawn away by The aristocracy of talent. In his new book, Adrian Wooldridge tries to save meritocracy from the sclerotic outclass Aldous Huxley foresaw. Like all the best works of argumentative non-fiction, it falls into the political corrective stage. Ideas of the ‘upgrading vocational education’ type can undoubtedly improve the chances of success. The tax code can reduce the legacy wealth racketeering much more than it does. But soon enough, a serious meritocrat runs up against the untouchable boundaries of the personal realm. Parents rig the lives of their children with a zeal that is no less antisocial than natural. And the most qualified of these auto-dealers will be the double qualified teams. It is not for society to “do” anything about such an intimate choice as marriage. It’s up to society to count the costs.
And these go far beyond the scrub of social mobility. What emerges from the modern alpha couple is not so much self-interest that drives up the scale as blandness of grinding. Hypergamy Returns In The Drama – Balzac, Kitchen Sink Movies, Cinderella – because he has a fascination that isn’t quite there when someone at UBS marries someone at Freshfields.
The supposed subversiveness of interclass sex is not the issue (after all, there are still plenty around). It is the contact and ultimately the synthesis of two distinct experiences of life. The children who result from it, insofar as they absorb a little each, are in turn all the more round and imaginative. Matching matings are perhaps the most disciplined, competitive, and successful ruling class the West has ever known, but also the least original. Wooldridge is never better than when he draws the distance between their bohemian self-image and the monoculture of their private life.
Email Janan at janan.ganesh@ft.com
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