David Brooks On Elite Dysfunction

And: Stabby Islamists; Soros Family Values; Infertility Gods; More...

Yale 2015: Some of the planet’s most privileged young people construing themselves as the Wretched Of The Earth to shout down Prof. N. Christakis (Source)

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:

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:

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:

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. Or—in its still more radical form—that 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 progress—to 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.

Medical Expert: Dissent Is Pathological

Richard Horton, editor in chief of the leading British medical journal The Lancet, says in this essay that dissidents from the elite consensus are inhuman. Excerpt:

You will recall, of course, that the Soviets pathologized dissent too.

Soros Family Values

Robert Fico, the Slovak prime minister who survived an assassination attempt recently, has made his first public statement since emerging from the hospital. In a 14-minute video (watch here; it has English subtitles), the left-wing populist blames George Soros operatives for downplaying the attack.

Viktor Orban has been smeared as an anti-Semite for many years because of his harsh criticism of Soros. It’s not true, of course; playing the anti-Semite card is a way to blunt criticism of an oligarch who spends his billions to change the politics of a country. Plus, the fact that this particular oligarch advocates for progressive causes neutralizes media criticism.

In her must-read Friday news roundup, the very funny Nellie Bowles writes:

Anybody Notice The Stabby Islamists? Anybody?

While we are on The Free Press, Peter Savodnik has a punchy piece cataloguing recent stabbings by Islamists, and asking, “What the hell? Why does Europe just sit back and take it?” Excerpts:

There is a pattern to the way these things tend to unfold: first, most media outlets and senior elected officials urge everyone to withhold judgment before we jump to any conclusions about what has happened. Then—when we discover that Islamists are responsible—the focus of the conversation immediately shifts to the “far right,” the xenophobes, the angry, racist mob. 

The danger is not the people who did the killing, but the people who might be provoked by the killing—their specter of violence a bigger threat than the violence itself. 

Or the victims themselves are transformed into the instigators of the violence perpetrated against them: Wasn’t Michael Stürzenberger, the blogger who was stabbed in Mannheim, an “extremist”? Weren’t the 12 staffers of Charlie Hebdo who were murdered in their Paris office in 2015 racist? 

The reluctance to call the attackers what they are, or the jump to shift the blame for the attack to their victims, is how right-thinkers insert some cognitive space between themselves and those with unpopular opinions.

And so the right-thinkers let it pass, shrug it off, scroll to the next headline. Privately, perhaps in bed next to their spouses, they wonder: What are we going to do? 

It doesn’t involve stabbing, but the mentality behind the “don’t notice the stabbings” behavior can be seen in the decision of the Canadian authorities to cancel a presentation by a Yazidi woman who was kidnapped and forced into sexual slavery by ISIS. The stated reason? It might inspire “Islamophobia”? No kidding: this woman was abducted and turned into a sexual slave by Islamist fanatics, but right-thinking Canadian liberals don’t want people to think about it, because they might have a negative thought about Muslims. Insane.

This can’t go on forever. Once again, I remind you: the inability, or refusal, of the European elites (and North American ones) to deal with the actual facts of Islamist violence in their own societies is going to produce leaders so radical that they make Viktor Orban look like a liberal.

Worshiping Infertility Gods

Brutal, brilliant observation:

Why Are You A Conservative? (Or A Liberal, Or A ___?)

I was searching through my old American Conservative archive looking for a quote, and came across a pretty good entry from 2012, in which I answered the question, “Why Am I A Conservative?” Below is what I wrote. I’m not going to update it, though things have changed a lot politically in the US over the twelve years since I wrote this. I won’t update it because it still describes what I believe. I offer this here as a springboard to discussion in the comment section. If you do not consider yourself to be a conservative, then please explain why you are a liberal, a progressive, a reactionary, or whatever you are.

In 2012, I wrote:

I am a conservative because I believe that the conservative political and cultural tradition offers the most accurate way of understanding how the world works, and helping people organize their affairs, personally and in community, in a morally sound and rational way. I am a conservative because I am convinced of the reality of the Christian doctrine of Original Sin, and believe that conservatism, broadly understood, proceeds from the understanding that humankind is imperfectible and tragic. I am a conservative because I am skeptical of utopia, and the ability of human reason to comprehend the deepest nature of things. Tradition — however flawed — is the surest guide to the affairs of men, because it has been tested. I am a conservative because I am a Christian, and find that in this time, and in this place, my religious convictions place me, however uneasily, on the side of those who call themselves conservative. I am a conservative because I believe Russell Kirk was right when he said that “the institution that it’s most important to conserve is the family” — and because I believe conservatism offers the best means of resistance against the cultural forces tearing the family apart. I believe that society is better understood as an organic entity, not as a collection of rights-bearing individuals who relate to each other contractually.

I am a conservative in spite of what contemporary American conservatism stands for in some cases. I am more skeptical of the free market than many (most?) of my fellow conservatives, because I believe the market, the most powerful anti-conservative force that ever was, is a good, but a conditional good. I am more in favor of environmental regulations than many (most?) conservatives because I believe that we have a moral and religious responsibility to treat Creation with respect, and to be good stewards of the land, not clever exploiters. I have become far, far more skeptical of the foreign policy views of leading conservatives, because I recognize the Right has given itself over to the crusading abstractions of Nationalism and American Exceptionalism — this, in contradiction to what conservative philosophy and conservative instincts tell us about human nature.

Yet I remain a conservative not only because my philosophical and moral views are conservative, but because I cannot find a home among liberals. I am generalizing here, but I do not share the liberal view that the world can be remade as we desire. I do not have the liberal faith in the inherent goodness of mankind, and in big-r Reason. I believe liberals (and many conservatives) place far too much confidence in science and technology, and in a technological “solution” to our problems. Most fundamentally, I am not a liberal — and I am a dissenter from mainstream American conservatism — for the reason Ross Douthat identified a few years back in a TAC symposium:

The picture is further complicated by the fact that because conservatism only really exists to say “no” to whatever liberalism asks for next, it fights nearly all its battles on its enemy’s terrain and rarely comes close to articulating a coherent set of values of its own. Liberalism has science and progress to pursue—and ultimately immortality, the real goal but also the one that rarely dares to speak its name—whereas conservatives have … well, a host of goals, most of them in tension with one another. … Liberals, on the other hand, dream the same dream and envision the same destination, even if they disagree on exactly how to get there. It’s the dream of Thomas Friedman as well as Karl Marx, as old as Babel and as young as the South Korean cloners. It whispered to us in Eden, and it whispers to us now: ye shall be as gods. And no conservative dream, in the 400 years from Francis Bacon until now, has proven strong enough to stand in its way.

I am a conservative because I do not believe in Progress — or rather, I believe progress is possible, but is always fragile, and usually brings with it a new set of problems. I am a conservative because I believe the only people who question Progress these days are those who call themselves conservatives (and even then they are a minority within conservatism; as Douthat wrote:

[T]he reason for a great deal of recent conservative confusion: the Right actually won a victory in the latter half of the 20th century, after centuries of defeat, and turned modernity away from a particularly pernicious path. This unexpected triumph has meant that many people who became accustomed to calling themselves “conservatives” when the conquest of nature seemed to require socialism or Communism are back on board the Baconian train, racing happily down a different track into the brave new future. These are the people who insist that conservatism ought to mean “freedom from government interference” and nothing more—the Grover Norquists of the world, for instance, or the Arnold Schwarzeneggers. In fact, they are ex-conservatives, because they are no longer sufficiently uncomfortable with the trajectory of modernity to be counted among its critics. They were unwilling to give up freedom for the sake of progress, but they’re happy to give up virtue.

I would say, then, that an open-minded person should consider conservatism because it is realistic, and likelier to come closer to the truth of things than its rivals. Conservatism recognizes the existence of limits, and it alone is informed by the tragic sense of life. This sense causes conservatives to at times be insensitive to wrongs that can be righted, or ought to be more forcefully addressed — segregation is the prime example here — but this is a more reliable instinct than the liberal one that led to the Great Society. It all goes back to how one views human nature, and the nature of truth. I would say to this person to think about history, and what history tells us humankind is, and what Progressive, Modernist ideas about the malleability of human nature and the nature of reality led us to in the 20th century. To reckon with this fairly, I think, is to make one a conservative.

It may not make one a Republican. I would say also to this person that he should not expect that the so-called conservative party in this country is conservative in a real philosophical sense; in most ways, the GOP is the party of conservative liberals. I would say, though, that you can find a home on the Right, however far to the margins you will have to pitch your tent, while among the Left, people who hold the religious views and philosophical convictions that I do will always be in hostile territory.

Finally, I think conservatism, as I’ve described it here, runs counter to the American mind and the American spirit, which is classically liberal (in both its right-wing and left-wing iterations), individualistic, optimistic, and crusading. Liberalism in power gave us Vietnam. Conservatism in power gave us Iraq. Americanism gave us both. The only philosophical ground I can find to make a stand against that sort of thing is on the Right, however alien this kind of conservatism is in this land.

I think I am probably more reactionary today than conservative, simply because there is so little left to conserve.

Anyway, what’s your story? Remember to keep this at a philosophical level. Don’t say something like, “I’m a conservative because I believe in free markets.” Go deeper. It doesn’t tell us much to say you are a conservative (or a liberal) because you agree with policies and laws that are associated with the Right or the Left. I’m interested in why politics of the Right or the Left strike you are preferable.

I encourage you to write as dispassionately as possible. I’m not trying to stir up a culture war here. I just want to explore ideas.

That’s all from this week. I’m at an ADF summit in Vienna talking about parental rights and religious liberty. I met the great Billboard Chris this morning, and interviewed him for this newsletter. It’ll be up on Monday. Have a great weekend. And don’t forget to pre-order your signed copy of my next book EXCLUSIVELY from Eighth Day Books in Wichita, the only place where autographed books will be available. I’ll be in the US just before pub date, and will sign all those pre-ordered. Afterward, I’ll have to sign book plates if there’s any demand for signed copies. If you want to get yours with my signature directly onto the page, pre-order now.

By the way, I had a lunchtime conversation here with a Dutch Christian journalist from the Reformed tradition in that country. He said that the long, steep collapse of Christianity in the Netherlands might have bottomed out. He said that they’re now seeing young people searching for meaning. But they tend to convert to Catholicism, he said, not to Calvinism. What draws them is liturgy and a deep sense of tradition.