Nepotism Is Merely a Boogeyman

I am the son of a famous writer. I work in the publishing business and got my first job through a friend of my father’s. Next month I will publish a book of my own -- a book whose value was undoubtedly enhanced by my famous last name. Most people would probably call this a pattern of nepotism.

Ten years ago this kind of thing might have been considered remarkable, but today it is a common occurrence. Martin Amis, Susan and Ben Cheever, David Updike, Brian Herbert, Jeff Shaara, Gautama Chopra, Carol Higgins Clark, Rebecca Walker and several dozen others I could name are children of successful writers who have launched their own writing careers.

And it’s not just happening in publishing. The same holds true in the entertainment industry -- popular music, film and television -- as well as in politics, business and even professional sports. (The catalog of names illustrating this at the end of my forthcoming book takes up 23 pages.) This boom in generational succession has left observers puzzled. Many in the press have treated the subject lightheartedly, dubbing it “the new nepotism,” even though the direct intervention of parents often doesn’t seem to be responsible. The new successors are more like opportunists trading on their famous names and family connections than passive beneficiaries of family largess. But others see a worrisome return to inherited status and a threat to democratic equality.

Is nepotism really making a comeback? And if so, how does the new nepotism differ from the old? Should I feel guilty or inadequate because I’m in my father’s profession? Should you feel jealous or worried?

The first thing to be said about nepotism is that it is as old as human society and has deep biological roots. Indeed, according to evolutionary biologists, nepotism is the source of all cooperation in nature and the basis of all societies, human or animal. The pilot whales that beached themselves last summer in Cape Cod, and kept returning despite efforts to save them, died because they were unwilling to abandon their relatives, according to many scientists. The supercolonies of Argentine ants that stretch from San Diego to Baja or wrap the Mediterranean coast are also products of nepotism. When ants from one end are introduced to a nest at the other, hundreds of miles away, they are not torn apart but accepted as kin.

Primates base their small societies on biological kinship, and humans aren’t that different. The family itself is a product of nepotism, based on the mother’s genetic inclination to protect and nurture her offspring.

Animals favor their kin through blind instinctual compulsion, but humans learned early to extend these nepotistic instincts to unrelated individuals through the invention of marriage and kinship. Over the next 10,000 years, roughly from the date of the Neolithic revolution, all societies -- from hunter-gatherer bands to ethnic states to multiethnic empires -- were based on kinship and its cultural extensions: the clan, the tribe, the caste, the ethnic group.

Today in non-Western societies, nepotism runs rampant, growing over everything like an unstoppable weed. The problem is so deeply entrenched that Southeast Asians have developed their own acronym for it -- KKN -- short for corruption, collusion and nepotism. But it will never be entirely extirpated because in Asian, Latin American and African cultures, it is still a man’s first and highest duty to support and aid his relatives.

The West -- and America in particular -- is an exception to this rule. Our society has reduced the effect of nepotism because, for us, kinship and nepotism are seen as important obstacles to economic development and political health. This is the fruit of a lengthy historical process that began nearly 2,000 years ago, with the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of the Catholic Church and feudal monarchies. These agencies conspired to undermine the power of extended kinship groups with new restrictions on traditional practices of marriage, reproduction and inheritance. The rise of the free-market system and the resulting middle-class revolution greatly accelerated this trend. But it is really in America that the struggle between family and state has reached its peak.

The American war against nepotism began with the Revolution, couched as a rebellion of sons against a tyrannical royal father. This was followed by the abolition of aristocratic inheritance practices like primogeniture and entail, which sought to preserve the family estate by passing it intact to the eldest male heir, and by laws against polygamy and cousin marriage, which also kept property in the family.

A movement for civil service reform arose to drive family and ethnic interests out of government, and the Great Depression sharpened the resentment of immigrant masses for the nepotistic WASP establishment. The postwar economic boom produced a new emphasis on managerial efficiency, and anti-nepotism rules were passed in most public and many private institutions. Finally, the civil rights legislation of the 1960s uprooted the last legal barriers to equal opportunity and seemed to augur the fulfillment of Thomas Jefferson’s dream of an aristocracy of talent, not of birth.

A generation later, the pendulum seems to be swinging the other way. Americans have rediscovered the joys of family enterprise, and after a century and a half of public insistence on youthful independence and autonomy, more and more the sons and daughters of established parents are choosing to follow in their footsteps. Today’s model father is not the affable, well-meaning but fundamentally detached Franklin D. Roosevelt but the intensely involved Richard Williams, who set out to create a pair of world-class tennis players and has built their success into a commercial empire. Meanwhile, many anti-nepotism rules established in the 20th century are being rolled back to accommodate an influx of women and a rising tide of professional marriages in journalism, law and other areas.

Some observers warn that the return of dynastic families is a dangerous trend, but such critics underestimate the degree to which the values of meritocracy have been absorbed in American culture. Today’s successors generally hold themselves to higher standards than anyone else would ever set for them. Far from having a big ego, what they have is an inflated super-ego. This is our best protection against the darker side of nepotism and makes the return of dynastic families something to celebrate rather than fear.

Adam Bellow, son of writer Saul Bellow, is the author of “In Praise of Nepotism,” which will be published this month by Doubleday.