The Luxury Beliefs of the Ruling Class

Rob Henderson completed his undergraduate studies at Yale University and earned a doctorate in psychology from St. Catherine’s College, Cambridge University, where he received a prestigious Gates Cambridge Scholarship. Such impressive brand-name entries on his curriculum vitae are among his points of departure in Troubled, a combination autobiography and poignant examination of what Henderson calls “luxury beliefs” among the Western global elite. Henderson’s phrase is an extension and new framing of Thorstein Veblen’s famous “leisure class” theory, which stated that the social standing of persons can be deduced from whether they have the means to waste money on goods and leisure. In Veblen’s day, activities such as golf, yachting, and big-game hunting, and restrictive clothing such as tuxedos, beaver-pelt top hats, and ladies’ evening gowns, marked those who had the means to occupy themselves with pursuits of no practical utility.

Nowadays, “luxury beliefs,” which Henderson defines as “ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class at very little cost, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes,” are new markers that separate the elite from the rest of us. Henderson agrees with Paul Fussel’s research that “manners, tastes, opinions, and conversational style are just as important for upper-class membership as money or credentials,” adding that these markers of affluence need to be held from birth. Henderson locates his critique of the American upper class as part of a global phenomenon, identifying French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s triad of “schooling, language, and taste” as necessary “to be accepted among the upper-class.” Henderson holds that material goods such as top hats and golf clubs have had their day, because in a world of mature industrialization, global transportation, and cheap labor, material luxury goods are more accessible to the masses than ever before. Henderson’s observation rings true in my classrooms. When I teach undergraduates the economics of luxury-good brands, I make the joke, “Louis Vuitton handbags are so exclusive, every Chinese, Japanese, American, European, and Middle Eastern girl has one.” This typically is followed by feet gently pushing handbags under chairs.

Henderson’s answer to this commonality of luxury goods is that “the affluent have decoupled social status from goods and reattached it to beliefs.” Once physical needs are met, “high-status people desire status more than anything else.” Henderson writes, “When an affluent person expresses support for defunding the police, drug legalization, open borders, looting, or permissive sexual norms, or uses terms like white privilege, they are engaging in a status display. They are trying to tell you, ‘I am a member of the upper class.’” Henderson says ordinary people cannot articulate or comprehend what heteronormative, cisgender, or cultural appropriation mean, but those who are capable of patronizingly explaining these jargon terms really are saying, “I was educated at a top college.” Veblen’s observation that gentility and good breeding required time, application of effort, and expense has now shifted to “only the affluent can afford to learn strange vocabulary, because ordinary people have real problems to worry about.”

Henderson’s conclusion no doubt strikes harmonious chords with NOR readers, but his twist is what precedes his conclusion. The majority of the 12 chapters of Troubled are taken up by Henderson’s autobiographical account of growing up absent the father who abandoned his family and with a court-ordered separation at the tender age of three from his drug-addicted mother, followed by an incomprehensible whirlwind of successive foster homes and temporary foster-sibling associations, all supervised by overworked California state officials and the electronic pulpit of television. Henderson poignantly observes that the media he consumed as a child depicted lifestyles and families that were nothing like his own experience and so far out of his comprehension or personal observation as to be beyond fable, myth, or fantasy. Eleven-year-old Henderson finally is adopted by a stable, churchgoing couple with a daughter, but a few years after this pause, his stability again is disrupted by a shattering, acrimonious divorce, a custody battle over him and his sister, and subsequent emotional rejection by and nonexistent contact with his adoptive father.

Henderson’s teenage years are marked by voracious reading (a consistent theme and something he cites as partially contributing to his later success) and diligence and ambition for part-time work that provides economic benefits. Henderson also recalls crabbed opportunities, boredom with school, underage smoking, juvenile delinquency, criminal friends, reckless driving, and encounters with alcohol and illegal drugs of a variety of strengths and health and legal consequences. He recounts breaking and entering, destruction of property, violence beyond mere fisticuffs, spilling blood, broken bones, and emotional and physical abuse, both given and received in a steady stream.

The majority of Henderson’s tale testifies to a tremendous amount of luck or divine providence that he is neither dead nor in prison. He recounts painfully the few points of light in testimony from stable adult males that he took to heart and eventually steered him toward a better path. The absence of his sexual history is a curious missing dimension in Troubled, for I expected unwanted pregnancy and abortion to be part of his grim landscape of experience. His story arc is “bad boy from doomed background manages to get a Cambridge Ph.D. through a few isolated pieces of good advice, the military, good standardized test scores, and alcohol rehab.” His tale of finding only temporary stability in military service — securing respect and promotions, which merely result in boredom and alcohol dependence — points to his underlying depression and emotional trauma from childhood as inadequate foundations upon which to build even this visible success. Without love and a nurturing environment in his early years, Henderson is damaged beyond repair. This testimony is solidified when one of his military colleagues with a similar background and success arc commits suicide for unknown reasons.

Henderson augments his own story with statistics and citations that show his own example is an impossible one, based on the social constructs elites have put in place to permanently and perniciously wall off those of his origins from their pristine world. Throughout the book, Henderson confronts peers at Yale and Cambridge who express that marriage is outmoded but then plan on a monogamous marriage for themselves, and plan to raise their own children with similar goals. He points to Yale classmates for whom cocaine consumption is a dalliance abandoned once adult roles and careers are adopted. But then from their own privileged experience with drug consumption, these Yalies promote the legalization of recreational drugs as a policy without regard for the devastation it produces among the poor with constrained economic opportunities and few enriching stimulants for relief from the pain of their circumscribed lives. Henderson’s critique is a damning examination of the hypocrisy of the upper class, and he offers examples on nearly every page. His own unlikely origins and career give added strength to his well-sourced sociological and psychological appraisal of the attitudes of the ruling class.

Reading Troubled is shocking, for throughout, a Catholic of another generation would have cried, “Where is the Catholic Church?” The Church’s incarnational mission to perform the corporal works of mercy (to feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, visit the imprisoned, shelter the homeless, visit the sick, and bury the dead) lurks behind a multitude of absurd examples in which the state apes these worthy acts but in a deficient and ultimately harmful way for the poor and hapless. The Church’s spiritual works of mercy (to counsel the doubtful, instruct the ignorant, admonish the sinner, comfort the sorrowful, forgive injuries, bear wrongs patiently, and pray for the living and the dead) are glaringly absent from Henderson’s experience. In nearly every selected anecdote from his rich and shocking life there is a need for and an answer from the Church, but absent laborers, his soul is left adrift.

Troubled recalls the vanished world in which well-staffed religious institutions bursting with vocations once adequately but imperfectly offered a ladder of economic opportunity to those in Henderson’s circumstances. Orphans and foundlings of the past could grow up to be public intellectuals and captains of industry, but such cases are ever rarer after most “charitable activity” has been expropriated by the state. Henderson repeatedly associates his unsatisfactory and inadequate care with his engagement with social workers; temporary caregivers at publicly screened foster homes; public school teachers, athletic coaches, and administrators; police officers; and the juvenile judicial system. He praises those public library staff who allowed him latitude in checking out the books he read voraciously; this probably constitutes his scarlet thread of redemption and lifeline from his constrained life of economic deprivation.

Henderson’s few encounters with religious piety come via his adoptive parents’ own parents’ faithful adherence to Seventh Day Adventism, prayer, and Scripture reading, but this witness, too, is shattered when his parents divorce. His mother further defies biblical norms by entering a lesbian relationship, though she and her female partner provide the longest period of family stability Henderson would know, from age 11 to 16. This relationship, too, disintegrates due to economic difficulties and addiction (gambling); consequently, at 17 Henderson picks military service as his best option for a better life, as he no longer has a home or family.

Henderson’s solution and conclusion, repeated throughout Troubled, is that there is no societal replacement for, no better model than, a stable, loving, nurturing family of a father and mother dedicated to the health and well-being of their offspring. The legal and cultural abandonment of supporting the goal of this traditional family structure is the missing element and consequence of all current societal ills. He bolsters this once obvious and commonplace idea with the observation that at both Yale and Cambridge, 18 out of 20 of his classmates came from affirming, stable, lifelong, married families who nurtured their children to success and happiness. And even while these elites espouse alternate utopian ideas for society, they hypocritically adhere to this model and goal as their own preference for themselves.

Troubled, therefore, is a valuable work on many fronts, one unintended by Henderson. His personal journey is fascinating and heartbreaking, his success improbable and admirable, his critique of “luxury beliefs” both timeless and timely. Henderson tells us he has stitched together a family with his mother and sister by adoption and now a girlfriend. But his unspoken and unintended critique is one for contemporary Catholics. Catholic culture and practice lost the battle of witness and service to the poor, the widowed, and the orphaned in our divine mandate of corporal and spiritual works of mercy. The state, through judicial and legal expropriation from private confessional institutions, replaced our once robust archipelago of convents, monasteries, missions, orphanages, schools, hospitals, and pastoral organizations that, frankly, built the material society we now enjoy as the fruit of that success.

In Henderson’s experience and critique, he arrived at Yale only to discover that those most privileged and insulated from the consequences of family destruction, sexual permissiveness, decriminalization of drugs, and elevation of material success are now the new mandarins who spout insane ideas as freedoms while shielding themselves from the trauma such ideas create. These bien pensants are crushing flesh, bone, spirit, and hope — all unseen from the echo chamber of a newly demarcated upper class. We may pray for Henderson’s conversion to Catholicism, for the truth of Christ and the rich intellectual history of the Church would add yet more power to his powerful critique.

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