Elitism

Dear friends,

When our two boys are particularly full of beans of a weeknight, Amanda and I enjoy muttering that we are surrounded by idiots, a catch phrase I picked up from a beloved teacher of mine, who often muttered it with a certain bemused joy when overrun by adolescent stupidities. But most of the time I am charmed by the boys’ peculiar intelligences, the things they notice that I might not, their quirky insights. This cheesy parental awe isn’t new, but I’ve been thinking about odd pockets of intelligence more and more since leaving metropolitan America for small-town Maine eight years ago, and coincidentally spending more and more time among scientists all over the world.

In my newest film, Observer, which is still in its rough cut stage, one of my goals is to portray scientists as human beings. You’d think this would be straightforward, and in some sense it is: scientists are humans who do science.

But our tendency in years past has been to portray scientists as elevated experts with special powers and insights — people who are not like you and me. The assumption was that people would trust them more. Surely these wise experts know the truth! If we commoners grew skeptical of their claims about the safety of genetical modified foods or the surety of climate change, the science communicators could simply double down on how special and wise scientists are, and by extension their research. Trust scientists, or you are an uneducated fool! That sort of thing. Humans who followed a scientific process somehow became endowed with a superhuman status. Boil all this down, sprinkle in some cynicism and you get a basic conceit of mainstream science communication: trust the expert elites.

Witness the hand-wringing when so-called ordinary humans continue to be skeptical of scientific claims, or don’t follow the prescriptions laid out by the experts. What the heck are people thinking, not trusting science?! Dare I say it’s like the hand-wringing after a recent election?

Elitism is entangled in my own upbringing. My parents taught for decades at an elite private boarding school outside of Boston, and my siblings and I got to go there tuition-free, rubbing elbow patches with the scions of many well-heeled American families. Some of my classmates had houses that were so big you could literally get lost in them. Their families owned islands and jets. As a faculty kid, I occupied an odd niche on campus, and there were days when I felt more aligned with the kids down the street who went to the public high school. The faculty kids were given a little extra scrutiny, and in kindergarten the principal thought I should get the boot because I was extraordinarily shy, a sure sign of low intelligence. Buffy Colt, kindergarten teacher (whose daughter, incidentally, is a documentary filmmaker) came to my rescue and suggested that it was not unpleasant to have a kid who wasn’t a chatterbox.

I survived the scrutiny, found my voice and eventually graduated high school at the top of my class. In the 1990s, if you did well in prep school you could get into pretty much any college you wanted, even if applying for financial aid, so I was accepted at Harvard, Yale, Brown, Dartmouth, U-Chicago, and Williams. (Ha, that should get the unsubscribe rate up! Decent New Englanders do not speak of such things, but my unfettered and undeserved access to the ivory tower is part of the story here.) Twenty-five or so of my classmates went off to Harvard, just a quick hop on the MBTA red line, but I followed my older brother’s best friend, an artist and human I much admired, to Yale.

I liked Yale, but it did little to dissipate my evolving elitism. Fortressed dormitory castles and pervasive white privilege bred an aura of entitlement, which in turn yielded ever more selective and elitist subcultures, including a secret society that I joined with a sort of bemused and flattered curiosity my senior year. It was Yale’s wealthiest secret society, replete with code names, codewords, lavish headquarters and amenities I’d done little to deserve. I’d spent the summer researching food markets in northern Senegal, and the contrast between these worlds was bewildering. When a fellow society man, who was locking in his fellowships at Oxford for the next year, lambasted some of the local dining staff as “incredibly unintelligent,” his highest expression of disregard, something in me quietly snapped.

On the one hand, I liked being in a selective secret society at one of the most selective universities in the world. On the other hand, I felt like an imposter, and that I was somehow betraying my kind. Being an imposter in the ivory tower is probably akin to being an imposter anywhere: 50% of you wants to keep up the ruse, just look at the benefits, and 50% of you is torn to pieces inside. The rub for me was not only a gut sense that I wasn’t aristocratic material, but also my increasing exposure to different types of wisdom and worth. Woodsmen, farmers, carpenters, my barber — you couldn’t learn their trades at Yale College, but I’d come to envy their intelligences and seek out what they had to say.

Put another way, I guess I’m one of those saps who believe that everyone is good at something and has something to offer the world. It’s a basic premise of my haphazard approach to documentary filmmaking, which is mostly a practice - as I’ve said before - of wandering around the world listening to people. In this light, there are myriad facets to intelligence. The wild spatial intelligence of a great shortstop on the baseball field, the local knowledge of the neighbor who knows where the deer sleep, the spry wisdom of she who has raised a dozen grandchildren — there are remarkable intelligences at work in the world. But it takes work to seek them out.

Scientists, of course, are a wonderful source of intelligent insights. But perversely, maybe by elevating their status we’ve diminished their voices.

A friend commented recently that documentary filmmakers face a lot of the same PR problems that scientists do; in a nutshell, we think we’re the greatest. I do think that if I were writing a novel and wanted an unlikeable character, like somebody’s annoying boyfriend, I would make them a documentary filmmaker. I think it has something to do with the practice of observation, of commenting at the world from a distance, which imparts the pretension that we’re not in the fray, we’re above it. The laurels on our posters and the film fest lanyards around our necks are the pathetic badges of our supposed status.

Maybe that’s why a lot of my recent films have attempted to find a voice that feels more authentic to my experience, a voice shot through with insecurity, humility, and an admiration for the wisdom of others. (Then again, adding my narrator voice to a film is probably an elitist choice: I’m entitled to have my voice heard. Alas, I’m sure I haven’t shed the pretensions of my pedigree.) But think of all the voices that don’t get heard, all the quiet wisdoms that don’t rise above the noise of the oligarchs, the influencers and the trappers setting their click bait. We are not surrounded by idiots, we are surrounded by intelligence, but we don’t always know how to see it.