Hear Me Out: Has the swing against elitism gone too far?

Straits Times

15 hours ago

An art installation at the Padang. Vocal naysayers recently accused the Government's SG Culture Pass initiative of being the very thing it counteracted: elitism. PHOTO: ST FILE
Hear Me Out: Has the swing against elitism gone too far?
SINGAPORE – At a time when most people understand that the personal is political, individual views have become a battleground of virtue – equality, good; hierarchy, bad. Elitism? The worst possible kind of social evil.
Yet, take a step back from this instinctive repulsion and there might be benefits to muddying the waters. Elitism, the belief that an elite group, however defined, should be entitled to the reins of power has been the norm throughout much of history.
Whether it is the clergy, kings with their divine right, the Confucian scholar or today's fintech bros, there have been groups in each time period that societies tend to value and reward.
It was only with increasing democratisation, and a growing disenfranchisement at the chasm between the top and the rest, that elitism has become a byword for undeserved privilege and gross injustice.
This brief trip back in time is not to rehabilitate elitism, but to show that the current period against it – or at least one that pays lip service to not believing in an elite class – may be an aberrant one. In the West, this has been taken to extremes, manifesting in a debilitating disregard fo r e xperts and fatal results during the Covid-19 pandemic against the advice of doctors to vaccinate.
In Singapore, it is the elite schools that are targeted, in the idealistic slogan that every school is a good school. Though, for perplexing reasons, this scepticism has not yet been extended to the natural reverence the majority of Singaporeans harbour for lawyers and doctors. Their expertise is assumed to be universally applicable – a mentality that has narrowed parents and students' conception of what success looks like.
In any case, the ills of elitism have been thoroughly aired, including the type of entitled, discompassionate divas that it ends up producing. The very consensus of who deserves to be elite has also fractured.
I wonder, though, if this enmity has led to some unexpected side effects. This is a train of thought sparked by recent reactions to the Government's SG Culture Pass initiative set out during the Budget statement in 2025.
Self-sabotage
Under the scheme, $100 would be given t o Si ngaporeans aged 18 and above for the consumption of the local arts, redeemable from September. One would expect rejoicing, but there was uproar from a group of vocal naysayers.
They accused the credits of being the very thing it counteracted: elitism. Why? Because the money could be better spent on support for groceries.
This, I thought, was a case of anti-elitism as self-sabotage. Central to this worldview was that the arts is an elitist activity patronised only by the rich and the hyper-educated aesthete, when one type of activity for the elite and one for the others is exactly the sort of segregation and self-limiting mentality that perpetuates divides.
There was no sense that this $100 in credits was a way of making the perceived barrier more permeable. To put it in context, the Government also announced $800 in CDC vouchers. This was bread for all, and roses too.
Yet another potentially problematic by-product is that the word 'elite' has since been tainted by association. No one dares lay claim to the word 'elite', or acknowledge that someone else may be elite in his or her field. The rare exemption is perhaps in sports, where athletes accept the cut-throat nature of their competition, and where non-athletes are so tangibly outside their league that there is no point in pretending otherwise.
This is not in itself a problem – elite is after all just a word – though I find no easy replacement term that can immediately convey excellence to the same degree. But it incidentally comes at a time when there is a general reluctance to impose any kind of objective standard, supplemented by that compassionate but useless invention: the consolation prize.
This applies to things: Is no one taste now better than another? As well as people, where so many takes on social media are considered equally valid, measured just by virality.
It is the kind of ChatGPT mentality where how often something is repeated or the number of clicks on a website can influence results, with no regard to its truth value. The war against elitism may have come at the expense of standards and good sense.
Reclaiming elite
This impulse to drag discourse to the same level – usually downwards – has the right intentions, timely given that, for so long, highly selective elitist standards have been imposed as objective metrics. To right the ship so discourse is levelled upwards though, perhaps elite can be thought of as separate from elitism, rehabilitated without the corresponding concentration of resources and power.
This should be expanded so that who is elite becomes not just about education but also because of other qualities – role models people can aspire to in different contexts. What constitutes an elite has always been reliant on man-made barometers, negotiated by the community.
There should be no shame in aspiring to be elite.
Anti-elitism should not mean an absence of the elite, but that all who put their heart and minds to it should have a fair shot at claiming its pedigree, or getting closer to it. It is a lifelong dusting off of mediocrity, and it begins with first recognising what is good.
Hear Me Out is a new series where young journalists (over)share on topics ranging from navigating friendships to self-loathing, and the occasional intrusive thought.
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