IV: The Clergy and Its Diseases
If you, dear friend, truly belong to the dying breed of open-minded liberals, and have been following our tale so far, you must have made some fairly staggering deductions. Over and over, "Progressive" ideology proves destructive, not only to society at large, but to the very minorities it ostensibly seeks to empower.
So, how did it become established in the cultural elites? |
Instead of conceptualizing the US “culture wars” as a divide between a Christian/authoritarian tribe and a secular/freethinking one, think of it as a conflict between two religious sects. Sect 1 follows, mostly, the Christian faith. It makes no sense to ask oneself why any particular Christian would believe in the doctrine of, e.g., the immaculate conception. Many of them are not even cognizant of the finer doctrinal shades of Christianity. Instead the pertinent level of analysis about the individual is why he carries the meme of Christianity as a "package" (the reason usually is that he was raised in the faith by his parents). Sect 2 follows the Progressive faith. Again, it makes no sense to speculate on why any individual progressive would believe in the doctrine of, e.g., systemic racism. They are not free thinkers who came up with the idea. Exactly like Christians with "immaculate conception", most of them do not even know what "systemic racism" actually means. Instead, the pertinent question about the individual is why she carries the progressive faith as a meme. And the answer is that she was converted in college or by organs (such as the New York Times) ideologically controlled by people who caught the bug in universities. Academia is the key. Of course, today many Christians realize that they subscribe to one of many possible religions, and that their conviction is based on faith. Credo quia absurdum. A certain tentativeness creeps into their attitude as a consequence. No such self-awareness or self-doubt mars the Progressive's enthusiasm, hence her most striking characteristic: Her bigotry. Bigotry. n Closed-mindedness and intolerance due to an inflexible attachment to a system of belief. This author had the bittersweet pleasure of debating many a fundamentalist Catholic in his home country, but nothing in his previous life ever matched, or could prepare him for, the downright sinister experiences he's had with American progressives.
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Then, we can move up the level of analysis and ask ourselves why the two faiths carry the specific features, or doctrines, that they have. The answer is that these doctrines exist because of their fitness in their formative environments. What does this mean?
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"We can think of ideas (or memes) as units of cultural transmission, spreading from brain to brain. If a person hears or reads about a "good" idea, he will pass it on to colleagues and friends; he may share it online, and so on. |
So, ideas, just like genes, spread in a given environment based on their fitness: how appealing they are, how useful to their carriers, how they interact with alternative memes and competing ideas. Whether an idea is true or socially beneficial may or may not be relevant to its fitness, depending on its environment.
Ideas that achieve high fitness in a socially-dominant class are then actively propagated through society (via colleges, schools, churches, mass media, etc.): |
"Give us a child until the age of 7 and we will have her for life" |
So, while it doesn’t make sense to ask why an individual Christian in America today would come up with the dogma of the immaculate conception, it makes a lot of sense to examine why that idea would be appealing to the Christian polemicists who introduced it into Christianity in the late Roman Empire.
What is Progressivism’s formative environment? American universities. Progressivism evolves in the environment of American universities. So to understand why it is the way it is, the how and why of its quirky tenets, it is helpful to think in evolutionary terms. Progressivism is the way it is because its features are adaptations to spread in the peculiar environment of American universities. If you start thinking of it this way, inexplicable oddities suddenly start making perfect sense. This is a powerful but unfamiliar idea that we will return to in a jiffy. |
But first, a short digression is in order. Why should you care at all about universities?
Because what happens inside universities is a matter, literally, of life and death to everyone, and we need to understand why ideas evolving in such an environment should not be expected to cleave to reality in any meaningful degree. Have you noticed, dear reader, that our system of government, our cherished Republic of old, has morphed into something distinctly anti-democratic? Two elite minorities seem to have acquired feudal rights: 1 . a Nobility, comprising the economic top 0.1%: corporate executives, investment bankers, hedge-fund managers, etc. Fathomless riches translate seamlessly into power. The Nobles are motivated, as a group, by class interests: get tax cuts, squeeze labor (e.g. by importing cheap workers), neuter anti-trust enforcement, and so on. 2. a Clergy, made up of academics at elite universities. The cultural top 0.1%, if you will (they certainly think of themselves that way). While seemingly inoffensive, they are the éminences grises of our story, the key figures for understanding what has gone wrong with our societies, and so deserving of our keenest interest. The Clergy wield awesome power over people's lives, and the fact that their influence is indirect and opaque doesn't make it any less real. In fact, in the long run, the Clergy outstrips the Nobility. The Clergy's role begins with shaping the worldview of the professional-managerial class: Managers, administrators, teachers, social workers, attain their social status thanks to a college degree, and they simply tend not to question the tenets of their "education". This is no aspersion on their intellect, as the Jesuits well knew: Questioning one's teachers and peers is a rare virtue, often emotionally trying, and always isolating. Now, it simply happens that the professional-managerial class has exploded in numbers and influence in the West over the past 100 years. Only a few percent strong in the early 20th century, it now hovers around 40% of all employment. Direct college indoctrination, however, is only one of the Clergy's channels of influence. "Education schools" produce school teachers, college-educated bureaucrats set school curricula and long-term state policies. And all of them, along with journalists, freshly hired from Humanities departments, go on, over years and decades, to manufacture the broader public opinion. I know, dear reader, it pains you to discover that most of our fellow citizens regurgitate their opinions from the morons at the Washington Post or Fox News. I share your pain. But we must face up gamely to reality. Second, the Clergy have come up with a political epistemology to justify their own right to rule. You see, they believe that modern societies have exceeded, because of their complexity, the cognitive capacity of voters; in other words, voters are alleged to be too stupid to discern their own self-interest. At the same time, the Clergy, with its brave scholarship, is coming up with Certain Knowledge about more and more formerly obscure matters related to statecraft. In the days of yore, disagreement about these issues was legitimate, and the democratic process a valid means of settling such differences of opinion. Not anymore. Nowadays, the Clergy brings you The Truth. Democratic majorities have no business questioning it. There is One Correct Stance on an ever expanding list of issues: Trade, Immigration, Monetary Policy, Education, Epidemic management, and so on. Therefore, democracy, like a quaint relic from the benighted past, must be corralled and neutralized, given the impossibility of abolishing it altogether due to the emotional, childlike attachment of the public to the concept. But the ideal, the dream, is to replace rule by majorities as much as possible with rule by trained experts (i.e. by the Clergy). They call this concept "technocracy" but it is in fact a modern form of theocracy. Sovereignty lies not with the People, but with the Word of God. Holy Writ is the infallible scholarly literature produced by the Clergy (which we had the pleasure of sampling in the last Chapter). Faithful to this theory, which strangely enough holds great appeal for all elites, the Clergy has established a direct nexus with the state, by means of public-policy liaisons and of the college-educated officials who staff non-elective state organs (the civil service and the judiciary). A whole undergrowth of think-tanks, NGOs, and foundations, some of them university-affiliated, some others independent, exists to provide "neutral expertise" (Lol) for drafting public policies.
Now, there is only one small hitch (actually several, but let's start with one). Have you ever asked yourself what would happen if this "neutral expertise" started to be corrupted by internal dynamics within the ruling class? Well, for example, we may start seeing Nobility-funded "experts" sifting all day through the mass of "research papers" published by neoclassical economists in academia, and distilling from them a justification for policies that the Nobility desired all along. And this is precisely how the Cato Institute, for example, extrudes the "white papers" proving that mass immigration is just swell for national workers: it increases wages, you see! Worse, we may even start seeing funny business in academic Economics departments and scholarly journals (more on this later). The Clergy in general is not immune from this corruption, because it is vulnerable to being taken over by cliques. We will reveal their dirty secret in Chapter VI. But the bottom line for now is that this social class has a lot of influence on the government, no matter who squats in the White House at any given moment. So, the inner workings of the Clergy have very great repercussions indeed, dear reader, on your life and on society at large! |
We have come to understand how the Progressive faith is a social externality of the Clergy ("Progressives are a college club"). We have some notion that academia can be corrupted by factions inside it. How is an academic made? How does he or she get appointed and win tenure? Truth-seeking has nothing to do with it. From the callow springtime of our graduate-student-hood all the way to the hoary winter of emeritus retirement, our precarious and hyper-competitive careers are at the mercy of other academics. They are our vigilant department colleagues, tenure boards, study sections, peer reviewers. So there is in academia an irresistible incentive towards conformity. For faculty members, universities have become, in an important sense, like an anarcho-collectivist commune in which no formal laws exist to protect you from the unspoken rule of your neighbor, so you'd better be seen as acting and thinking like everybody else. Ideological uniformity is but one aspect of this general tendency toward groupthink. The Clergy claims to bring you the truth, "expertise", "scholarship". What it actually does nowadays is manufacture constructs that spread and become hegemonic in universities only if they win you the approval of your colleagues in ideologically-compromised fields. The theoretical constructs can be pure bullshit . All that matters is whether the votaries can take over a university department or the editorial boards of scholarly journals. Example. Why is all academic economics neoclassical? Neoclassical economics has implausible axioms and is unfalsifiable. It could not predict events of world-historical magnitude (e.g. Great Recession). So why is it hegemonic in academia? Because of conformity and grant extraction (the money comes mostly from the Nobility in this case). Neoclassical economists form a clique that controls the editorial boards of the top journals in Economics, and they simply don't allow non-neoclassical papers to be published. So when tenure decisions are made on the basis of your publication record, only neoclassicals get tenure. If you are a young economist starting out and want an academic career, you'd better stick to neoclassical theory. Why can only the neoclassicals do this? Because the Nobility gives them and only them the money to run the journals and the departments (also lucrative jobs at the IMF). Academic self-government means that no reality check of any kind is possible, particularly in the Humanities, where the leeway for methodological skullduggery is also greater: Motivated reasoning, confirmation bias, question begging, explicit and proud rejection of political neutrality, outright fabrication... This is how whole bodies of meaningless, corrupted "scholarship" have been produced, and are now trumpeted about as "established facts". And this, dear reader, very briefly, is how "institutions of higher learning" have become a breeding ground for pathological doctrines. Most of the individuals involved are not consciously perpetrating a fraud. The corruption is systemic: the wrong ideas are rewarded for the wrong reasons. Neoclassical economists really do believe that they are producing valuable knowledge (most of them anyway). The "social scientists" that keep getting people killed think of themselves as philanthropists, though they may be very spiteful individuals motivated by a deep resentment of the larger society or of its core population. This is not limited to a handful of specific fields. Even academic science is not immune to the general rot (and remember this whenever you hear a bureaucrat blabber of "science-based policies")(not to mention that science yields, in the long run, and in the best of environments, facts, but never policies). Today's Progressive faith, with its dogmas of group victimhood, "systemic racism", "white fragility", etc. is the popular appendage of the pathological doctrines produced over decades by radical leftists (the so-called "New Left" that came to be in the 1960s), who infiltrated academia and the media in what is known as "the long march through the institutions". Their aim was to pursue their anti-civilizational crusade, social revolution, by means other than the class struggle of Marxism 1.0, when the latter proved unable to mobilize the Western (white) working class against the social order. The Frankfurt School authors of "The Authoritarian Personality" (which we reviewed in the last chapter) are members of this larger intellectual current. "Ethnic Studies", Social Psychology, and Sociology are today the most corrupted fields . In the next Chapter we shall expose this intellectual disease to public scorn. The uninitiated who encounter it for the first time should be forewarned of disturbing content ahead. |