My Years With Proust - Day 486

Snobbery is a grave disease, but it is localised and so does not utterly corrupt the soul.

Marcel Proust, The Captive, p. 6

Yes, just as Proust actually sometimes wrote short sentences, I sometimes actually choose short sections. So much of Remembrance of Things Past is defined by snobbery, and Proust's often subtle critique of it, it's a bit jarring to see him add this disclaimer.  If the seven deadly sins of pride, envy, lust, greed, gluttony, wrath and sloth, and it could be argued that snobbery contains at least a couple of these sins, then snobbery should at least be within walking distance of corrupting the soul.  I think I've talked before about the moment when I realized that I was a snob, or at least a propagandist for my family's self-promoted aspirations.  Whenever I would have new visitors to our house in Lawrenceburg I was expected to give them a tour of the "big house" and it wasn't until years later that I realized what I was doing and it sickened me.  Now, that was pride and envy and greed and gluttony, etc.  Having said that, and quoting Tracy Samantha Lord from The Philadelphia Story, I'm the worst kind of snob, an intellectual snob. And I'm an unrepentant snob on that front.  I was just tweeting this morning about my very sincere belief that a big part of the long game played by the 1% in its takeover of the US has been the discrediting of intellectuals.  Granted, it's not solely an American phenomenon, as one of the famous idiotic statements from the Brexit debate in the UK was that they had heard enough from experts.  Still, we've raised it to an art form, and the roots go way back as Richard Hofstadter argued in his brilliant Anti-Intellectualism in American Life.  It's clearly why I have my students read works like the Ramayana or the Shahnameh or Journey to the West or the Quran while so many of my colleagues are assigning graphic novels. So, yes, I recognize my snobbery on that front. Now, going back to Proust's comment, I guess I need to ask myself if it's corrupting my soul.  It certainly keeps me from listening to some folks as readily as I should, although I'm better than many of my peers.  On Twitter I avoid the temptation to disparage Trump's followers as illiterate or in-bred, which many folks, I think foolishly, do (and not simply because it enflames their sense of marginalization and victimhood).