Our New Philosopher Kings

I confess that I was intrigued by the latest David Brooks column. It does not happen very often, but this time Brooks seems to have identified an interesting socio-cultural phenomenon. 

Brooks does not call the new class of elite intellectuals, philosopher kings, but surely he is mining an idealistic Platonic tradition, where great minds, those who see the great Ideas most clearly, are rightfully in charge of society and even politics.

In today’s America the philosopher kings are not going to take over right away. They propose an intermediate step. They want first to colonize your mind. If they rule the world of ideas, the only way they can assert their hegemony is through mind control.

They are not rich and perhaps not even famous, but they think the right thoughts, feel the right feelings and believe the right beliefs. And you had best concur, lest you be canceled.

Brooks points out, correctly, that our elite universities are producing a band of radical leftists, who call themselves progressives. As it happens, students at universities that are not elite are far less likely to band together to support the Palestinian cause-- and to hate Jews.

Our elite intellectuals come from privileged backgrounds. They do not come from the working class, or even from the class that builds things:

Today, we’re used to the fact that students at elite universities have different interests and concerns from students at less privileged places. Marc Novicoff and Robert Kelchen in May published an investigative report in The Washington Monthly titled “Are Gaza Protests Happening Mostly at Elite Colleges?” They surveyed 1,421 public and private colleges and concluded, “The answer is a resounding yes.”

A few schools with a large number of lower-income students, they found, had Gaza protests, “but in the vast majority of cases, campuses that educate students mostly from working-class backgrounds have not had any protest activity.” Among private schools, encampments and protests “have taken place almost exclusively at schools where poorer students are scarce and the listed tuitions and fees are exorbitantly high.”

Now Brooks makes an interesting point about these junior progressives, who are led by a pathetic little twerp from Queens. If they had any sense of shame they would be embarrassed, but they do not and are not.

Strangely, these philosopher kings are against privilege, but they come from privileged:

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.

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.

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.

It would be more useful to say that these elitists are living a drama, even a dialectic. 

They are involved in a constant struggle between their big ideas and reality. It resembles a dialectic.

And yet, our philosopher kings have declared themselves to be the ultimate arbiters of what is or is not objective fact. They have latched on to the notion of misinformation or disinformation to discredit any facts that would disprove their beliefs. 

The alternative to the tradition of Platonic idealism is Aristotelian empiricism. The latter gave us science. The former gave us fanaticism. One is happy to recommend Arthur Herman’s intellectual history, The Cave and the Light.

In any event, if we recall the great German philosopher, Hegel, the godfather of Marxism himself, we know that the struggle between thesis and antithesis, between idea and reality, will eventually resolve itself in favor of ideas-- and the minds that think them. The triumph of the mind… and of the philosopher kings.

For now, these philosopher kings are reduced to jobs like teaching. So explains Brooks, and it makes good sense that people who believe that their purpose in life is to indoctrinate children would teach.

Obviously, they might also become consultants or marketing executives-- recall those who destroyed the Bud Light brand by choosing the wrong spokesman.

So, the goal of this intellectual elite is quite simple to transform reality, to overcome empirical science, to reject experimentation, and to defy pragmatism. They want to do so by imposing groupthink. If you do not believe that a boy who thinks he is a girl is really a girl, you will be canceled. If said boy is discontented, that can only mean that some souls do not accept him for what he really believes that he is.

Over the years the share of progressive students and professors has steadily risen, and the share of conservatives has approached zero. Progressives have created places where they never have to encounter beliefs other than their own. At Harvard, 82 percent of progressives say that all or almost all of their close friends share their political beliefs.

Now, these incipient philosopher kings, products of the most august educational establishments, are not ruling the world. They are often underemployed. Brooks is correct to emphasize the point, and the attendant bitterness. They feel alienated and hate society for failing to reward them and, even worse, for failing to implement their ideas.

Over the past few decades, elite universities have been churning out very smart graduates who are ready to use their minds and sensibilities to climb to the top of society and change the world. Unfortunately, the marketplace isn’t producing enough of the kinds of jobs these graduates think they deserve.

The elite college grads who go into finance, consulting and tech do smashingly well, but the grads who choose less commercial sectors often struggle. Social activists in Washington and other centers of influence have to cope with sky-high rents. 

Newspapers and other news websites are laying off journalists. Academics who had expected to hold a prestigious chair find themselves slaving away as adjunct professors.

One understands that the dominant ideology, dealing as it does with minds and ideas, has no use for community membership, family structure, sex roles and social cohesion. It assumes that any reference to group identity and the rules that determine it would undermine its claim to shuck off the coil of physicality. 

They do not care about whether people speak the same language or follow the same social customs. Everyone, by their calculus, is human and all humans are basically the same. The philosopher kings see us as embodied minds seeking to become disembodied minds.

Brooks explains that our wanna-be philosopher kings insist that they are the arbiters of correct opinion, now called luxury beliefs.

He describes this intellectual elite well:

The third dynamic is the inflammation of the discourse. The information age has produced a vast cohort of people (including me) who live by trafficking in ideas — academics, journalists, activists, foundation employees, consultants and the various other shapers of public opinion. People in other sectors measure themselves according to whether they can build houses or care for seniors in a nursing home, but people in our crowd often measure ourselves by our beliefs — having the right beliefs, pioneering new beliefs, staying up-to-date on the latest beliefs, vanquishing the beliefs we have decided are the wrong beliefs.

These people do not build. They do not produce goods or provide services. They do not manufacture. They are not captains of industry. They remain ensconced in their ivory towers where they dictate correct and incorrect opinions. God help you if you disagree.

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