A group of colleges in New England and the Middle Atlantic states dating back to colonial times call themselves the Ivy League.  As a symbol, ivy represents something that is old, perhaps even venerable, and that has a great deal of prestige that cannot be matched.  From a strict biological perspective, though, ivy is a parasite.  Although ivy has long been associated with positive matters, whether its superstitious use in driving out evil spirits in heathen European cultures, or in the way that wreaths of ivy were used to crown athletes in various competitions, ivy clearly has a negative side as well in causing damage to trees or being an invasive species in North America or even being attractive to wasps and thus causing an increase in unwanted stinging insects.  This tension between parasitism and beautifying is something that I would like to argue is not only with regards to the ivy plant itself, but what the ivy plant represents in terms of elite culture.  That which beautifies is also a parasite.

There is little doubt that elite culture has many of the same negative aspects that ivy does on plants.  Contemporary trends in Western music, film, art, and literature are certainly invasive in that they seek to spread throughout the entire world and tend to be viewed as problematic by those who think of them like kudzu.  A great deal of contemporary elite culture (and elite culture since at least the Enlightenment for that matter) has been stinging and critical, not the sort of thing that we approve of when we are being stung by it.  And elite culture can tend to crowd out traditional culture and seek to actively harm it in the way that ivy can harm the trees on which it depends but which it sucks the life from and competes with for sunlight and resources.  Yet for all this both elite culture and ivy are viewed as crowning laurels for victors, and people who succeed in elite culture are viewed as victorious heroes and sometimes even as cultural icons, if sometimes only for a little while before someone new is chosen.

It is not only in our own language where ivy has distinctly ambivalent meaning.  In Judges 9:7-15, the parable of the trees as is it often called, it is the bramble that seeks to rule over the rest of the trees because the other plants asked have productive purposes that they do not want to turn from.  And so it is in life.  Those who are productive people have too many things to do to want to preen and deal with the ridiculousness of focusing on image or in trying to throw their weight around to dominate other people.  They are too busy making things and doing things, just as an olive tree is too busy making olives for olive oil to want to rule over the rest of plants, but a bramble has no other benign purpose and so seeks the honors of office as a way of gaining honor that it would otherwise not receive at all.  The Ivy League is truer than it knows in educating brambles that seek elite positions as a substitute for doing something positive for society as a whole.

How is this to be overcome?  It is not as if everyone involved in being like ivy is deliberately seeking to cause harm.  There are a great many people who see their gifts as tending towards those things that beautify and who have little interest in what may be termed as productive pursuits.  Not everyone feels that they would be best off being a farmer or working in a shop or factory.  To be sure, a great deal of snobbery limits the amount of people who serve in such lucrative trades, to the greater loss of society as a whole, but some people are genuinely not as well suited to some fields as others, and there is no shame in seeking to maximize those gifts that God has given so long as one does not malign those whose gifts are different from one’s own.  Those whose gifts depend for their proper flowering on having a society that is at peace and is economically prosperous should not badmouth those pursuits that keep society safe and well-off, but should be very thankful that they live in a place where they are free to exercise their gifts for their own benefit rather than being in places where need would require them to spend their lives doing that which was hateful and soul-draining to them.  But that would require people to get off of their high horse and learn to be grateful for the gifts that others provide who are not always the most cultured and articulate of people to begin with.  And that is a hard thing to do when people desire to acquire culture so that they may look down on others.