Reading Joel Stein in Beijing

We live in a morally superior era. Not that, as the morally superior history teacher in me would like to remind you, the present is a priori morally superior to the past. Just that we live in an age of tribalism where the all-too-human desire to assert our individual and group superiority has been amped up to become the defining zeitgeist.

(An example of this desire might be dropping a priori into the last paragraph even though I’m only 85% sure I used the term correctly.)

I just finished reading Joel Stein’s In Defense of Elitism: Why I’m Better Than You and You are Better Than Someone Who Didn’t Buy This BookI bought it because the title makes Stein seem like my kind of morally superior dick.