I'll let you folks argue about the WASPs; I want to say something more serious about this essay, which I snarked at briefly last night:
quillette.com/2018/12/04/und…
quillette.com/2018/12/04/und…
I understand, in an era of anxiety, the Pinker-ish desire to point out the ways we've never had it so good. What I don't understand is the tendency to act like improvement = transcendence, as if we've actually slipped free of our ancestors' ruled-by-nature condition entirely.
We have more mastery over nature than in the past, more comforts and more years of life, but the claim that "we no longer live by the caprice of God and nature" is just whistling past the graveyard.
I belong to a privileged class. I'm in my late 30s. My inner circle in the last 5-10 years has featured deaths from cancer, several debilitating and mysterious chronic illnesses, descents into alcoholism and addiction, a sudden death from the Powassan virus (google it), and more.
The claim that we are better off than people in the Maccabean era is true and important. But the claim that we have *escaped* a baseline where caprice and/or providence are ruling forces is both strange and tiresome.
We have carved out a greater measure of control, but we are still the ruled, not the rulers -- hostages to fortune, not masters of our fate. Which is why the old religions still seem relevant to a lot of people -- because the world is a little kinder, but we are not its gods.
This admonition applies to WASPs and meritocrats alike.
