A Few Obervations on Elite Monoculture
A trio of articles on elite monoculture dropped recently; a few observations
Three articles appeared in the past few weeks on elite monoculture. I live in coastal California, where the infrastructure collapses on the receipt of anything but the gentlest of rains, so it's taken me some time to pull this together.
I'll begin with the Instapundit, Professor Glenn Reynolds, who seems to have started a Substack in which he discusses the perils of monoculture, whether in agriculture or in human affairs. I don't have much to add to his article, but I'd like to repeat his quotation of the historian Angelo Codevilla:
"Never has there been so little diversity within America's upper crust. Always, in America as elsewhere, some people have been wealthier and more powerful than others. But until our own time America’s upper crust was a mixture of people who had gained prominence in a variety of ways, who drew their money and status from different sources and were not predictably of one mind on any given matter. The Boston Brahmins, the New York financiers, the land barons of California, Texas, and Florida, the industrialists of Pittsburgh, the Southern aristocracy, and the hardscrabble politicians who made it big in Chicago or Memphis had little contact with one another. Few had much contact with government, and 'bureaucrat' was a dirty word for all. So was 'social engineering'. Nor had the schools and universities that formed yesterday's upper crust imposed a single orthodoxy about the origins of man, about American history, and about how America should be governed. All that has changed.
Today's ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters — speaking the 'in' language — serves as a badge of identity. Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct. Many began their careers in government and leveraged their way into the private sector. Some, e.g., [former] Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, never held a non-government job. Hence whether formally in government, out of it, or halfway, America's ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats. It rules uneasily over the majority of Americans not oriented to government."
Indeed; much of our current dilemma stems from the fact that our institutions, from finance to tech to academia to the public sector are run by a group of people remarkably uniform in their outlook & cultural priors. In fact, they are so alike that they can be described as their own social class: Codevilla called them the "ruling class", but I've never liked that because many of their members hold no formal power, but rather are found in the bureaucracy or positions of cultural influence. Of late, I've heard Leighton Woodhouse use the term "the center" (as opposed to the periphery) to describe this group which I prefer. Regardless, the idea is well-known & I have only a few, small observations to add.
The first is that one of those cultural priors that doesn't get enough attention is the belief, almost universal among elites, that they are locked in a Manichean struggle on the side of the wise, the englightened, and the annointed against the forces of oppression, ignorance & intolerance. Indeed, among such people of my own acquaintence, their very identity is tightly bound-up in this belief to the point that they must imbue every policy disagreement, no matter how dry, with moral implications. I can't help but notice that the the people most prone to this have eschewed more traditional sources of meaning in their lives, but that's a topic for another day.
This brings us to a new Substack, The Ivy Exile. He captures this far better than I could in his wonderful post "The View From The Top":
"Again and again I'd hear how we– the global meritocracy– would've solved poverty and inequality and climate change long before if not for evil saboteurs. We were enlightened administrators of the rational future, civilizing braying savages for their own good. Feelings in our collective gut amounted to the sum of human wisdom: we'd read the New York Times and realize of course we'd always known.
Amongst an increasingly international crowd, Americans tended to be intensely jealous of peers from the European Union and especially China, where elite experts had more latitude to dispense with troublemakers. Due to stupid separation of powers in our obsolete constitution we in the U.S. were prevented from fixing things by neo-Nazis out in flyover country.
But thankfully loads of old white racists were dying off each day, and righteous new immigrants arriving, so it wouldn't be long before global citizens like us would take charge– and woe to the wicked! Vengeance would be sweet: oh, how the pigs would squeal as we finally forced social and historical and cosmic justice. The louder they bitched and moaned, the better a job we'd know we were doing."
I'm reminded of one evening during which a Berkeley PhD friend of mine, after several glasses of wine, admitted to me that "Yes! I think those dummies in flyover states should do what I tell them to do because I'm smarter than they are, better educated than they are, and more successful than they are!"
I suspect that that sense of mission, paired with a barely-below-the-surface glee at the thought of forcing the rest of us to comply, can help explain a lot of what we see today. The recent push to ban gas stoves, abandoned in the face of overwhelming laughter, for instace: it may have been silly on the merits, but if you're someone who needs to believe you're an "enlightened administrator of the rational future", someone who's searching for a mission, and you delight in "making the pigs squeal", it was irresistible.
Another example of how this prior is truly the organizing principle for our elites caught my eye this week as part of the "Covid came from a lab" theory's newfound respectability. MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan explained that they couldn't possibly discuss it earlier, because… the deplorables believed it, or something:
"The simple reason why so many people weren't keen to discuss the 'lab leak' theory is because it was originally conflated by the right with 'Chinese bio weapon' conspiracies and continues to be conflated by the right with anti-Fauci conspiracies. Blame the conspiracy theorists."
This brings me to the third article "It's Time for the Scientific Community to Admit We Were Wrong About COVID and It Cost Lives" in Newsweek by Kevin Bass (a good follow on Twitter by the way). It's easy to laugh about the "ban gas stoves" kerfuffle, but elite monoculture can have real consequences: "the scientific community from the CDC to the WHO to the FDA and their representatives, repeatedly overstated the evidence and misled the public about its own views and policies, including on natural vs. artificial immunity, school closures and disease transmission, aerosol spread, mask mandates, and vaccine effectiveness and safety, especially among the young."
The manifold & manifest problems with our response to Covid have been extensively catalogued elsewhere, but this bit caught my eye (bear in mind that the author of this article is an MD/PhD student and so has an inside view): "We created policy based on our preferences, then justified it using data. And then we portrayed those opposing our efforts as misguided, ignorant, selfish, and evil. We made science a team sport, and in so doing, we made it no longer science. It became us versus them, and 'they' responded the only way anyone might expect them to: by resisting."
Making the pigs squeal, indeed.
03/04/23 16:08