A Chat with Rob Henderson
We discuss his new memoir and his old, powerful idea of Luxury Beliefs and how it should be assessed from a historical perspective
Rob Henderson is, at the age of 34, one of the most important intellectuals in the world today.
He’s also a man who grew up without never quite knowing who his father was, the son of a drug-addicted mother who spent his childhood in a series of foster homes.
That childhood is the main subject of his book “Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class,” coming out later this month.
Henderson’s unique upbringing certainly is remarkable, but he owes his fame to a concept that has earned its own Wikipedia page: “luxury beliefs,” a remarkably pithy phrase that does much to explain the spread of apparently non-sensical ideas. These ideas, Henderson explains, are promoted by ruling classes who can afford to signal their status by promoting stuff they don’t care for, in the certainty that the consequences can never affect them.
As a historian, this concept has always fascinated me, because of its historical implications. Has it always existed, even if with a different shape? Is it a modern invention? And, if so, why?
It’s a sobering thought to consider that, if Henderson would have listened to me three years ago, the phrase “luxury beliefs” would have never existed. We met in Twitter, where we bonded over our shared admiration for Slavoj Zizek’s take on the movie Titanic.
Goddamit, I even designed a fake book cover for his hypothetical book explaining the concept:
He was right, though: “misdirectional elite advice” would have never caught on. I’m glad he didn’t listen.
You can pre-order Rob’s book, out on Feb. 20, now. In fact, you should. If you want tangible evidence of his intelligence, he actually provides a reason to pre-order, one that I certainly never heard before; it’s one that I should have heard, since I just published a book last year and my editorial never bothered to raise the issue:
I know pre-ordering isn’t exactly popular. Nobody wants to buy something and then wait months to receive it. But pre-orders can make or break a book.
By pre-ordering, you signal that there is interest in the book and bookstores are more likely to take notice. And to get the attention of the people who shape culture and policy, a book typically needs to sell well its first week. All pre-order sales prior to the publication date count toward the sales numbers of that first week. You aren't charged anything until the book actually ships, so pre-ordering essentially is an act of support.
Yup.
We talked over Teams in early January. As Henderson explained, the idea for his book came to him years ago, as something that he might do, one day, in the far future. Strangely enough, as I’ve written before, that’s how the idea for a History of Mankind came to me: as something that I planned to do one day, in the distant future, and I just ended up doing earlier than I expected.
“In the end, I think the whole coronavirus thing had a huge impact on my decision to write the book now. We were all stuck at home with nothing to do, no distractions, so I said to myself I might as well take the time to write the book,” Henderson said.
The memoir details Henderson’s struggles in early life, his experiences as an out-of-place boy and later a troublesome teenager, bouncing from one place to another, growing up as a deracinated member of the lower social classes in the worst parts of Northern California.
It was the US military, the Air Force in particular, that became a lifeboat for Henderson. As he explains in the book, he joined at the age of 17, having secured a form of parental consent from his mother, and stayed in the ranks until the age of 25, mostly working as an aircraft technician.
This was, as he put it, “just before the whole woke thing arose in the military,” at the very end of a long period in which the US army worked as a social elevator, perhaps the most important in the country: an era that started with the GI Bill that put a lot of veterans through college (although not as many as one would think: Henderson checked it out and was surprised by the high dropout rate) and helped many lower-class people overcome difficult upbringings and obtain life and professional skills that otherwise they would have lacked.
In a historical context, this is not surprising: Peter Turchin has famously written about the civilizational effect of militaries, in particular regarding early European states where the military functioned as a creator of social cohesion and, in effect, the main element helping to craft nations out of disparate members of closely related ethnicities: a citizen-making factory that turned Vikings into civilized Danes, Norwegians and Swedes, for example.
This is not quite as evident in ancient history. Standing armies with any sort of permanent organization, as opposed to royal bodyguards and temporary warbands that mustered out-of-work peasants to go on campaign during fallow seasons, only appeared in the first millennium BC. Perhaps the first such army was the Assyrian military, a group of cold-blooded killers and rapists, yes, and the forefather of other, slightly less bloodthirsty and rapey organizations that came later.
FROM THE ARCHIVES:
All armies are designed to kill, and yet that’s not all they do. Modern armies, in particular, have evolved to the point that most service members are in supporting roles, never seeing any combat or using any weapons against enemies. And, even then, only the militaries of countries at war — of which the US has had a lot of experience since the Cold War — are involved in actual warfighting. Most militaries in the 21st century are large state-run organizations with various social functions, none of which is combat.
Societies have evolved in funny ways, indeed. As Henderson stressed, Thorstein Veblen famously described the "leisure class," the idle rich of the 19th century, something that is now for all intent and purposes gone, since it has now morphed into the "luxury belief class."
“Luxury beliefs are ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class, while inflicting costs on the lower classes,” Henderson explained. “In the past, people signaled membership of the elite by spending in their leisure, by wasting money on goods and pleasure. As the middle classes have gained more access to goods and services, and they can use many of the same products that the elite uses, the competition has moved to the ideological sphere. It’s all about being able to afford a set of beliefs that is just costly, unless you belong to the elite.”
Part of this idea, Henderson added, is reflected in the concept of “cultural capital” coined in the 1970s by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, to refer to accumulated cultural knowledge that confers social status and power. The concept of luxury beliefs, however, goes further, since it adds an element of negative value: like a holiday in an exclusive resort, is something that has a significant cost (money, in the case of the holiday) but that upper-class people can afford; lower-class people, meanwhile, can’t even dream of it.
Veblen, an American economist and sociologist, compiled his observations in his classic work “The Theory of the Leisure Class.” Veblen’s theory would have been readily accepted for example in China, where various kings built alcohol-filled pools for themselves. These kings surrounded themselves with courtesans who signaled membership of the elite by spending extravagantly in life, as in death — since they buried themselves with dozens, sometimes hundreds of valuable objects at a time.
FROM THE ARCHIVES:
In the modern West, in particular, such excesses are now seeing as ineffective. Nobody is going to win social respect by building a large pyramid for himself in the middle of Florida, and yet people like Jeff Bezos most definitely have the means to do just that.
The modern way to win social admiration — or, at least, to not lose one’s job, position or reputation — is to partake of luxury beliefs that are widely accepted as markers of upper-class membership, Henderson argues in the book.
Henderson cited a fascinating study on the collapse of the Soviet Union (“Work Ethics and the Collapse of the Soviet System,” by N.G.O. Pereira and Linda H. Pereira, Canadian Slavonic Papers, 2003). The researchers found that university-educated people were 2 to 3 times more likely than high school graduates to say they supported the Communist Party.
White-collar professional workers were similarly two to three times more supportive of communist ideology, relative to farm laborers and semi-skilled workers.
“This is exactly what we see in America these days. There’s this great divide between the opinions of blue-collar and white-collar workers,” Henderson said. “There you see luxury beliefs at work, in the need to express correct opinions and ideas. Sometimes I joke that, if there was a physical way to tell upper-class people from lower-class people, a fashion for powdered wigs or something that could be used as a reliable marker, luxury beliefs would go away.”
In addition, Henderson pointed out that the US is a land of excesses, and those excesses are not always replicated in modern Europe, which is much more egalitarian and less given to mass swings of opinion. America is “fat-tailed country, with higher variance in everything, the fattest people, the most creative scientists, the craziest activists.”
Europe is not quite like that, and that is also evident in the fact that luxury beliefs here (we both currently live in Europe) are also widely expressed, but don’t get quite the same resonance as in the US.
While Henderson avoided, just barely, the rise of woke luxury beliefs in the army, he has since encountered them in academia: first in Yale and later at Cambridge, where he still resides. On the question of whether we are witnessing an unavoidable tide or just a cultural moment (what some have described as a western “Cultural Revolution” that will eventually go away, like China’s did), Henderson is agnostic.
“Times change, and things don’t always get worse,” he said. “Just the other day I was talking to an older academic, a friend, who said that yes students these days are such and such, but still likes to look at things with some perspective: I mean, after all, in Cambridge in the 14th and 15th centuries students would murder each other because of different interpretations of theology or the Bible. Things are not quite as bad nowadays. That makes me be optimistic about the future.”
Just remember that you can pre-order “Troubled” here. And you can sign up to Rob’s own Substack here.
"luxury beliefs"
Are they beliefs or just rituals as a fashion accessory? Is there any discussion of "belief/believing" and its history as an intentional state? How do these luxury beliefs relate to analytical philosophers' beliefs as 'propositions that x'? Are these beliefs …are they things held dear to prove one's mental obedience and thus loyalty ( for example to the Catholic Church in England way back when the word belief was invented in marketing Imperial dreams to Germanic warlords).
I mean Veblen's great and all..
Is there any discussion of the worlding we do when we world but do not have the words to see what we do, and so end up using the words we have, like belief etc. I mean there are some useful criticism here, but, from Tasmania, it just look like another smear in your culture war that we will have to put up with soon enough. We get anti-woke rhetoric imported before we had any woke-woke here, we had anti-political correctness before we had any political correctness.
Isn't real woke restricted to some anti-racist but ultimately racialist definition of everything. I mean from this distance it all seems insane.
Or are we just rebranding what Marx called ideology, false consciouness etc, without discussing all that communist malarky?
The human interest story is great though. Reminds me of Jesus as a orphan or some monomyth where he nods to lawful good not chaotic evil.
https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/fideism-the-heresy-and-obedience
I find the idea of luxury beliefs is fascinating, but I don’t think there’s a collective conscious effort on the part of the upper class to embrace it for status signalling. I think it’s more of those who are capable of believing in and propagating it simply trying their best to spread the beliefs. Then, like throwing eggs at a wall, some stick (eg other upper class people) and some don’t stick (eg the less privileged who cannot afford to keep such beliefs). Nevertheless, an intriguing idea