THE INTELLECTUALS IN CHARGE: Navigating the fixations of the overthinking class. “One professor there, an eminent authority in what is probably my major interest — south Texas and Mexican-Americans — told me outright that he wouldn’t take on a Republican student. (This is, at it happens, illegal — set aside immoral — but how would I prove it happened?) . . . What I am gathering is that the history department at Major State U is extremely politicized, and dominated by neurotics.”
Plus: “The question is why. Why has the whole of society adopted the aesthetic and proclivities of the history department at Major State U, obsessed and obsessive to the point that those failing to obsess themselves are cast out? It’s a strange eruption of the style and mindset of what used to be an inconsequentially small cohort of Americans, now gripping the whole of society. . . . In fixation, in anxiety, in mania for control, in encompassing neuroses, the past is present again. The intellectuals are in charge. We allow them, we emulate them, and we suffer for it.”
Bullying and media power. Related: Can too many brainy people be a dangerous thing? Some academics argue that unhappy elites lead to political instability.
Ten years ago Peter Turchin, a scientist at the University of Connecticut, made a startling prediction in Nature. “The next decade is likely to be a period of growing instability in the United States and western Europe,” he asserted, pointing in part to the “overproduction of young graduates with advanced degrees”. The subsequent surge in populism in Europe, the unexpected votes in 2016 for Brexit and then for President Donald Trump in America, and a wave of protests from the gilets jaunes to Black Lives Matter, has made Mr Turchin something of a celebrity in certain circles, and has piqued economists’ interest in the discipline of “cliodynamics”, which uses maths to model historical change. Mr Turchin’s emphasis on the “overproduction of elites” raises uncomfortable questions, but also offers useful policy lessons.
Related: To quote Neal Stephenson, from In The Beginning Was The Command Line, “During this century, intellectualism failed, and everyone knows it. In places like Russia and Germany, the common people agreed to loosen their grip on traditional folkways, mores, and religion, and let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abbatoir. Those wordy intellectuals used to be merely tedious; now they seem kind of dangerous as well. We Americans are the only ones who didn’t get creamed at some point during all of this. We are free and prosperous because we have inherited political and values systems fabricated by a particular set of eighteenth-century intellectuals who happened to get it right. But we have lost touch with those intellectuals.”
That was last century. This century the intellectuals are trying to bring to America what they did to Europe in the 20th.