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đŸȘ” The Threshold

Oxford's public-service ethos fused privilege into patronizing noblesse oblige.

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tagsja-picks, causal_relationships, singleton, xref, deepthinking, definitional_content, trade, category/causal-relationships
aliases@caro_power_1974, loc. 210

2 min read

Oxford’s public-service ethos fused privilege into patronizing noblesse oblige.

Evidence

As strong as Oxford’s conservatism was its emphasis on public service. Its tone in 1909 had been set for the preceding three centuries by rich young men who were sent to the university as a preliminary to public life and who, from positions in Parliament or the civil service or the learned professions, actually did, after graduation, govern Britain and its vast territories overseas. But the leavening of devotion to public service with an unabashed insistence on the rights and privileges of aristocracy could not help but make that devotion somewhat patronizing, infusing it with a strong air of condescension and noblesse oblige in its most obnoxious form. It was a refined, more subtle but also more deeply rooted version of the attitude of the German Jews of New York toward the Russian and Polish latecomers, of Bella toward the children whose parents didn’t even know how to bring them up so they would be able properly to clean the cabins Madison House had been kind enough to build for them. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 212

Categorization

  • XREF: The author’s explicit analogy to German-Jewish condescension toward Russian-Polish immigrants ties this to elites-of-one-oppressed-group-reproducing-hierarchy (mirrors earlier readings on caste and class reproduction). — connects to: Oxford transformed hereditary arrogance into upper-class ideology of noblesse oblige — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the
, 210; Elite Oxford education bred contempt for ordinary and colonized people — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the
, 224
  • DEEPTHINKING: The mechanism here — institutions that fuse a genuine service ideal with entitlement, producing patronizing benevolence — is the exact DNA of the ‘helping people’ philanthropy that later defines Moses’s career.

Broader Connections

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