Skewering ‘luxury beliefs,’ with a past informed by foster-care chaos
Having lived as a baby in his drugaddicted mother’s car, and having been shuttled between nine families before his eighth birthday, Rob Henderson, now 34, was a troubled boy who could have become a troubled adult. Instead, he became a Yale graduate earning a PHD from the University of Cambridge.
His autobiography, “Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class,” is drawing fresh attention to a familiar phenomenon that he calls “luxury beliefs.” The book also reveals that the deprivations of his childhood somehow gave him an acute, unenthralled understanding of what economists call “positional goods.”
Henderson is an outlier. Social science is conclusive about the importance of family structure — optimally, with two parents — in predicting a young life’s trajectory. After a youth of substance abuse, violence and neglect of education (reading his report card: “Cs and Ds. I was pleasantly surprised that I wasn’t failing anything”), his remarkable resilience is a tribute to the U.S. military.
“Boys raised by single mothers or caregivers other than their parents,” Henderson writes, “are five times more likely to be incarcerated than boys raised by both of their parents. The majority of jail inmates report being raised by single parents or non-parental guardians. … For every male foster kid like me who obtains a college degree, twenty are locked up.”
Civilizing adolescent males is civilization’s constant challenge. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the most accomplished social scientist ever to serve in Congress, liked to say that the social sciences do not tell us what to do, they tell us the results of what we are doing. The armed services are getting good results.
The challenge of Henderson’s childhood was not poverty but chaos, the opposite of military discipline.
(He notes: “A poor kid in the U.S. is nearly four times more likely to graduate from college than a foster kid.”) He believes he was saved from prison by his almost impulsive enlistment in the Air Force.
He took the enlistment test “hungover, exhausted, and hungry.” Enlisting enabled this ruinously present-minded 17-year-old to envision, for the first time, a future. The military unlocked his potential by providing “a structured environment, a sharp contrast to the drama and disorder of my youth.” The military, like a firm father Henderson never had, is uniquely “aware of the latent impulsivity and stupidity in young people, especially young men.” It “presses the ‘fast forward’ button on the worst, most aggressive, and impulsive years of a young man’s life.”
He went from the Air Force to Yale. And into a campus milieu of prolonged adolescence that bemused, when it did not disgust, his matured self.
What he calls “luxury beliefs” are upper-class ideas — e.g., the nuclear family is an anachronism, monogamy is outdated, polyamory is cool, drugs should be legalized — that confer cachet on that class, which espouses the beliefs without acting on them. Sociologist Charles Murray wishes the stable classes would preach what they practice. Henderson says, “We now live in a culture where affluent, educated, and well-connected people validate and affirm the behaviors, decisions, and attitudes of marginalized and deprived kids that they would never accept for themselves or their own children.”
Nowadays, the upper crust is rhetorically committed to equality. But the affluent, whose material appetites have been sated, are preoccupied with status-conferring credentials (e.g., superfluous master’s degrees). In the social ecosystem of snobbery, “positional goods” — e.g., a “choice” home, an “exclusive” vacation spot, a degree from an “elite” college, a “superior” job — are definitionally scarce: The pleasure of possessing them partly comes from flaunting the exclusion of others.
Many students at prestigious colleges are sullen, bored and, to relieve their boredom, politically rabid because for them college is less an exciting opportunity than a grim necessity. It is a means of escaping the social congestion of the masses who are excluded from the upper reaches of the positional economy. Using a vocabulary unintelligible to the uninitiated — “heteronormative,” “cisgender,” “cultural appropriation” — becomes a way of waving one’s diploma. Talking about one’s wealth is tacky, but advertising one’s luxury beliefs (e.g., regretting one’s White privilege) is not.
Henderson wryly notes that, in 2015, a person acquired status by seeing “Hamilton.” By 2020, however, when the masses had made the musical contemptibly popular, former enthusiasts turned against it, saying it insufficiently reflected America’s failings. Its creator, Lin-manuel Miranda, performed the expected grovel: “All the criticisms are valid.”
Henderson had a youth with too little laughter. He is making up for lost time.