Snub Snobbery?

An anxious woman was wandering near my house looking for her cat.

“It’s a Somali cat,” she said. “Very rare. Long ears.”

Never found the cat, but maybe I found something else: a new snobbery. Rare Somali cats.

Somalia? I’ve been there, but don’t recall ever seeing one of those fine cats. But those were difficult times, and maybe all the cats were eaten. That could be why they’re so rare.

Some people collect snobberies, make lists of them the way bird watchers do with birds. Aldous Huxley, the late English writer, was one such. Huxley identified the 19th century adolescent “Consumption Snobbery,” the desire “to fade away in the flower of youth” in romantic emulation of the glum poet John Keats.

The English, a creative people who invented soccer and other popular games, also invented snobbery, which is also a game, though some people live or die by it. George Bernard Shaw called snobbery the great strength of the English nation, but didn’t explain why. How Irish.

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The English are accomplished snobs. They know when to take up a snobbery and, more importantly, when to drop it. Americans aren’t entirely competent snobs. This infers no moral superiority so much as slowness to perceive when too many people have gotten into the “in group.” Moreover, some Americans still think golf separates them from the hoi polloi. Or cell phones.

There is no end to the snobberies. There are jazz snobs (they complain when the musician gets too close to the melody). There are radio snobs (NPR only) and television snobs (they never watch). There are even adoption snobs (is this the season for Chinese babies or Brazilian?).

Art snobbery endures. It’s usually an expression of culture snobbery, but sometimes of possession snobbery, if the snob in question is rich enough to buy the stuff.

Wine snobbery came to these shores from the Old World really only within the past three decades or so. Murray Milner, a sociologist at the University of Virginia who studies social status, regards it as an enduring snobbery: “People becoming obsessed with being a connoisseur as a way to signal their ‘in-ness,’ their sophistication. To be a wine snob you have to learn a whole set of norms about wines.” And a new language.

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Beer snobs try but don’t attract the same hateful respect wine snobs do.

People can be snobs about the oddest things. Ignorance, for instance. How many times have you heard educated people boast of their lack of knowledge of machines, especially computers? What else is that but ignorance snobbery?

None of this should be taken for disapproval of snobbery. Not at all.

Snobbery is evidence of social and economic vitality. Preoccupation with fashions in clothes, cars, mates, mannerisms, language or personal style may seem like lunatic obsessions, but they are not entirely negative. Money lavishly spent for the empty purpose of raising oneself above one’s neighbors helps all: It costs money to keep up; therefore, it creates jobs.

Primitive societies are bereft of snobberies and unappreciative of their advantages. You have your taboos on one side and your traditions on the other, and there isn’t much room for self-expression in between. For that’s what snobbery is, an effort by conformists to express individuality.

Small towns don’t like snobbery. They don’t like individuality either. Small towns will tolerate maybe one drunk and one eccentric, preferably within the same person.

In the end, Huxley got it right: “A society with plenty of snobs is like a dog with lots of fleas: It is not likely to become comatose.”