Memoirs of a Microaggressor: Will Collins traces the aristocratic roots of the social justice warriors’ search for purity

To understand our current moment, start with public apologies. Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, surely thought he was on safe ground when he came out in favour of delaying a Philip Guston exhibition because it included depictions of the Ku Klux Klan. Walker’s language, however, was unforgivably retrograde: he said that showing the paintings would be “tone deaf” during a moment of racial unrest. To the uninitiated, the argument was debatable, but Walker’s language was inoffensive. To those steeped in the culture of social justice, on the other hand, the case for delaying the show was self-evident, but the real issue was Walker’s use of ableist language.

The entire ritual — a slight so minor that most missed it, “outrage” seeming only to exist on social media, an elaborate public apology that always ends with a promise to “do better” — has become tiresomely familiar. Critics, including many on the left, argue that the social justice movement’s esoteric language is self-defeating. But the jargon’s very impenetrability explains its appeal. Rituals and language have long been used to distinguish insiders from hoi polloi. That the terminology of a putatively egalitarian movement tends to exclude suggests elitism lurks beneath its surface. Indeed, the best way to understand the cycle of offence, outrage and tortured apology is to look to the aristocratic customs of yesteryear. The habits and rituals of the minor European nobility in its final days, wittily chronicled by Gregor von Rezzori in Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, are a useful starting point.

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But as with many goods formerly reserved for the elite, hyper-sensitivity has become a mass-market commodity.

Friedrich Nietszche anticipated our predicament: “Sensitivity increases with affluence; the most minor symptoms cause us to suffer; our body is better protected, our soul sicker. Equality, a comfortable life, freedom of thought, but at the same time, hatred and envy, the infuriation of needing to succeed, the impatience of the present, the need for luxury, the instability of the government, the suffering from doubt and having to search.”

Towards the end of Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, the unnamed protagonist, now a university student in Vienna, asks some pointed questions about his place in the world. How does one reconcile grandiose aristocratic pretensions with the grubby realities of modern life? Where does one’s loyalty lie when the dynasty your family served for generations has disappeared in the cataclysmic aftermath of the Great War? Perhaps most importantly, what does one do when the money runs out?

As the ground shifts under the narrator’s feet, his snobbery is best understood as a coping mechanism. Something similar has happened in the United States, where the leftward lurch on racial and cultural issues has taken place mainly among the white, the educated and the affluent.