David Brooks On Elite Dysfunction[I don't find David Brooks particularly interesting on the subject of politics, but he remains a valuable analyst of cultural dynamics.
His column today, about how American elites think and behave, is an example. He talks in the piece about various ways that the elites become progressives, and how this produces dynamics that screw up society. Excerpt:
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The first is false consciousness. To be progressive is to be against privilege. But today progressives dominate elite institutions like the exclusive universities, the big foundations and the top cultural institutions. American adults who identify as very progressive skew white, well educated and urban and hail from relatively advantaged backgrounds.
This is the contradiction of the educated class. Virtue is defined by being anti-elite. But today's educated class constitutes the elite, or at least a big part of it. Many of the curiosities of our culture flow as highly educated people try to resolve the contradiction between their identity as an enemy of privilege, and the fact that, at least educationally and culturally, and often economically, they are privileged.
Imagine you're a social justice-oriented student or a radical sociologist, but you attend or work at a university with a $50 billion endowment, immense social power and the ability to reject about 95 percent of the people who apply. For years or decades, you worked your tail off to get into the most exclusive aeries in American life, but now you've got to prove, to yourself and others, that you're on the side of the oppressed.
Imagine you graduated from a prestigious liberal arts college with a degree in history and you get a job as a teacher at an elite Manhattan private school. You're a sincere progressive down to your bones. Unfortunately, your job is to take the children of rich financiers and polish them up so they can get into Stanford. In other words, your literal job is to reinforce privilege.
This sort of cognitive dissonance often has a radicalizing effect. When your identity is based on siding with the marginalized, but you work at Horace Mann or Princeton, you have to work really hard to make yourself and others believe you are really progressive. You're bound to drift further and further to the left to prove you are standing up to the man.
This is really true. I've seen this in my own professional experience. I discerned many years ago that so many whites not only progressives embrace progressive policies as a way of resolving their intense guilt over their own privilege. Within institutions I'm thinking about newspapers and magazines, but I believe this is general they are willing to objectively harm their organizations and its function, all for the sake of instituting these moralistic therapeutic policies. In journalism, I have seen with my own eyes how managerial elites almost all whites hire racial minorities who are clearly not capable of doing their jobs. These elites either deny it, and when it becomes undeniable, the elites claim that "diversity" is a component of quality. This is how they make the injustice and illogic of their racist decisions unfalsifiable.
As Brooks goes on to say:
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This, I think, explains the following phenomenon: Society pours hundreds of thousands of dollars into elite students, gives them the most prestigious launching pads fathomable, and they are often the ones talking most loudly about burning the system down.
Yes. Look around you. The ideological elites have marched through the institutions, and changing them radically. I write about this often here. Even science and medicine have fallen. It's not necessary to elaborate on this for readers of this newsletter.
Look at this. Keep in mind that seven percent of the US population identify as LGBT. It's heavily concentrated among Generation Z. But at the Ivy League, where the Ruling Class is concentrated:
What do you think the future is going to look like? We will see companies, government agencies, elite journalism, and so forth, fighting even harder on normality in the years to come.
The writer Mary Harrington talks about the
"War On Normal". She writes:
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The modern belief in "progress" emanates from this interrogative and as it soon became exploitative relationship to nature. This relationship has been worked out through the commercial and technological dissolution, enclosure, and mastery of every unchosen structure or limit, all in the name of freedom. This working-out has, in turn, been justified morally by the belief that we are entitled to use any and every means to transcend our givens. And since the mid-twentieth century, the drive for transcendence has turned inward to human bodies, cultures, and relationships, a turn that has elicited a further explosion of innovation and commerce.
With this explosion has come a sense that the old givens of our bodies and relationships need no longer bind us. Orin its still more radical formthat there are no such givens at all, just a matrix of contingent and culturally constructed patterns that appear given. This moral narrative treats the resulting release of energy (understood as resources, freedom, innovation, etc.) as always better than whatever came before (understood as scarcity, authoritarianism, or the primitive). It thereby legitimizes the sacrifices "progress" always entails. To argue that we have a nature at all, notwithstanding these efforts, is to oppose progressto be "on the wrong side of history."
This worldview is endemic in Anglophone culture today, on both sides of the political aisle, which makes it a difficult phenomenon to see clearly, let alone critique. But the core structures of "family," for millennia the site of the creation and formation of children, are predicated on unchosenness. And as such, to the extent that we wage war on unchosenness, we wage war on our ability even to think about family.
What does this have to do with Brooks's column?
Elites are the most "normophobic" demographic in our society. They use their immense power political, economic, institutional to undermine or even destroy norms, for the sake of progress, of their idea of justice. Bottom line: elites cannot accept traditional norms, based in human nature and long human experience, and work to refute and replace them.
Harrington has said that you simply cannot abolish human nature. But that does not restrain the radicalism of elites, who generally believe that we should not be bound by anything unchosen, and, that through a revolution in law, language, and custom, as well as through the application of technology, we can create utopia.
This insight doesn't come up in Brooks's column, but I think his analysis would benefit from considering how elites are both the most powerful and the most normophobic segments in society.
A side note: I heard a conference presentation recently in which the speaker demonstrated how the supreme court in a small Third World country reasoned in its decision on same-sex marriage. The speaker, a lawyer, said that in this globalized world, courts draw on the decisions of courts in other countries to justify their own rulings. This is a
radical move. (I seem to recall a US Supreme Court justice raising this issue some years ago, warning about this trend, and calling it out as a serious threat.) Think about it: if the supreme court of your country does not limit itself to the legal tradition of your own country in making its decisions, but also includes rulings from other nations, then you are ruled in part by the views of foreign legal elites.
This is how a globalist elite establish and strengthen their power, without the consent of the governed. It also works domestically when graduates of these elite colleges inhabit bureaucracies, where they implement their agendas without observation or accountability. They convince themselves that what they do is justified for the sake of Justice. So very much of this is about the elites working out their internal psychological conflicts, at the expense of others.]
