Monday, December 15, 2008
Friday, December 12, 2008
In Defense of Elitism, Part II: Education vs. Ignorance
I may be misleading a bit by labeling the IDOE parts as if I have some kind of arc laid out. I don't. This is part an unfolding chain of thought that I am currently entertaining in my head almost 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It is as much informed by the things that people write in the comments as it is with conversations I have with friends about this, as it is by what I see in the popular media. To that end, I would like to continue my defense of elitism, and go back to the heart of what I had originally intended to talk about, stripped of the specifics of recent political and economic events. In the final analysis, what I'm talking about is only concerned with the most recent corporate bailout in the most tangential way possible.
So what exactly am I on about? In the last election, particularly after the selection of Miss Gidget Goes to the Reichstag as Juan Songbird's number two, there was a lot of talk about "elites." At the VP debate the moose-hunting cheerleader even made a reference that I thought was as politically outdated as nuclear freezes, desegregation busing, and the Equal Rights Amendment; a reference to "East coast politicians." For anyone under the age of 30, some historical background is probably necessary to even understand the turn of phrase, and for those old enough to remember when it was standard political boilerplate, no small amount of deja vu must have occured.
It is of course no mistake that the east coast- particularly the northeast- is home to not only the most elite (meaning most selective), and prestigious (mostly meaning best funded) universities in America (if not the world). There are also more Universities per capita than in a place like, say, Wasilla, Alaska. Having grown up in New England, I can tell you that "college town" takes on an all new meaning when nearly every town has some kind of college or university, even if it's just a satellite of the local community college. Nearly everyone that I know has gotten at least that level of intellectual attainment referred to euphamistically on forms too numerous to mention known as "some college." And no one that I know thinks that having more education somehow makes you less authentic, or less entitled to have an opinion about something. If anything, people tend to overestimate the degree to which their two semesters of 200-level psychology makes them an "expert."
Of course that's really dumb and limiting. But you know what's even more dumb and limiting? Acting like knowing something about the world is some kind of detriment. I don't think it's too much to ask that our world leaders have seen other parts of America, not to speak of other parts of the world. Thinking that shooting wolves from an airplane is gross isn't the mark of eastern elite pretention, but the mark of an intelligent mind revolted by practices more at home in the more barbaric parts of the Middle East than in a Western post-enlightenment culture. And when you marry a high school dropout, have two kids that don't finish high school, seem utterly unconcerned with your two school-aged children's education, and think it's just peach keen, yup, yup, also that your daughter is marrying a self-proclaimed "fucking redneck" who also couldn't be bothered to sit his warm little buns at a school desk for 13 years it says something about your values that all the speeches in the world won't. It says that you're a Grade A nimrod with no sense of shame who revels in stupidity and ignorance as marks of authenticity.
But is it just western politicians who engage in this kind of posturing? I think the jury is still out on whether or not 3rd Runner Up, Miss Alaska is engaged in demagoguery or speaking in earnest. Her own academic record of five schools in four years says more about that than anything else, barring perhaps the few pictures we have of her from those years. Anyone that went to college can probably place her firmly in the sociological spectrum of college. Again, though, I'm deviating from the point. The point is that politicians like this exist because of a resentful (in the Nietzschean sense) current in American life that not only questions the utility of education (perhaps, but only perhaps, a useful topic to consider) but is aggressively opposed to learning. This manifests not only in rhetoric which rails against those smarty-pants experts with their college degrees coming here to tell me and the other dirt farmers how the economy works, but also in very concrete examples like the teaching of creation science in public schools, or rabid opposition to the scientific consensus of anthropocentric climate change.
Again, we're back at the notion that not only is common sense remarkably uncommon, but it also leads one to believe that the Earth is flat. I'm not sure that I think there's much to be done about any of this except stocking up on guns and preparing for when the "Hills Have Eyes" masses begin to descend on the more educated folk in the country. And not give any fuel to the anti-intellectual ideological currents stinking up the joint.
So what exactly am I on about? In the last election, particularly after the selection of Miss Gidget Goes to the Reichstag as Juan Songbird's number two, there was a lot of talk about "elites." At the VP debate the moose-hunting cheerleader even made a reference that I thought was as politically outdated as nuclear freezes, desegregation busing, and the Equal Rights Amendment; a reference to "East coast politicians." For anyone under the age of 30, some historical background is probably necessary to even understand the turn of phrase, and for those old enough to remember when it was standard political boilerplate, no small amount of deja vu must have occured.
It is of course no mistake that the east coast- particularly the northeast- is home to not only the most elite (meaning most selective), and prestigious (mostly meaning best funded) universities in America (if not the world). There are also more Universities per capita than in a place like, say, Wasilla, Alaska. Having grown up in New England, I can tell you that "college town" takes on an all new meaning when nearly every town has some kind of college or university, even if it's just a satellite of the local community college. Nearly everyone that I know has gotten at least that level of intellectual attainment referred to euphamistically on forms too numerous to mention known as "some college." And no one that I know thinks that having more education somehow makes you less authentic, or less entitled to have an opinion about something. If anything, people tend to overestimate the degree to which their two semesters of 200-level psychology makes them an "expert."
Of course that's really dumb and limiting. But you know what's even more dumb and limiting? Acting like knowing something about the world is some kind of detriment. I don't think it's too much to ask that our world leaders have seen other parts of America, not to speak of other parts of the world. Thinking that shooting wolves from an airplane is gross isn't the mark of eastern elite pretention, but the mark of an intelligent mind revolted by practices more at home in the more barbaric parts of the Middle East than in a Western post-enlightenment culture. And when you marry a high school dropout, have two kids that don't finish high school, seem utterly unconcerned with your two school-aged children's education, and think it's just peach keen, yup, yup, also that your daughter is marrying a self-proclaimed "fucking redneck" who also couldn't be bothered to sit his warm little buns at a school desk for 13 years it says something about your values that all the speeches in the world won't. It says that you're a Grade A nimrod with no sense of shame who revels in stupidity and ignorance as marks of authenticity.
But is it just western politicians who engage in this kind of posturing? I think the jury is still out on whether or not 3rd Runner Up, Miss Alaska is engaged in demagoguery or speaking in earnest. Her own academic record of five schools in four years says more about that than anything else, barring perhaps the few pictures we have of her from those years. Anyone that went to college can probably place her firmly in the sociological spectrum of college. Again, though, I'm deviating from the point. The point is that politicians like this exist because of a resentful (in the Nietzschean sense) current in American life that not only questions the utility of education (perhaps, but only perhaps, a useful topic to consider) but is aggressively opposed to learning. This manifests not only in rhetoric which rails against those smarty-pants experts with their college degrees coming here to tell me and the other dirt farmers how the economy works, but also in very concrete examples like the teaching of creation science in public schools, or rabid opposition to the scientific consensus of anthropocentric climate change.
Again, we're back at the notion that not only is common sense remarkably uncommon, but it also leads one to believe that the Earth is flat. I'm not sure that I think there's much to be done about any of this except stocking up on guns and preparing for when the "Hills Have Eyes" masses begin to descend on the more educated folk in the country. And not give any fuel to the anti-intellectual ideological currents stinking up the joint.
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Androphilia Review
The following is a reprint from Just Out , a weekly queer newspaper serving the Greater Portland Area. This was my first "real" paid writing gig, so I figured I'd share it with the readers. More new stuff soon.
It might be hyperbole to say Jack Malebranche has written the manifesto queer men have been waiting for, but manifestos invite overstatement and require little justification. Rather than argue a position, they claim ideological turf.
The author of Androphilia: Rejecting the Gay Identity, Reclaiming Masculinity explicitly states, “I didn’t write this book for gays.” Rather, his target audience is “men who love men but who are sick to death of the gay community.” Gay culture, Malebranche claims, has less to do with sexual preference than it does subculture, slang and stereotypes. Far from being a harmless diversion, the gay subculture imposes a false separation between heterosexual and homosexual men. This sexual apartheid not only negatively affects homosexuals, but also heterosexuals who acquire homophobic ideas in reaction to what Malebranche considers a small, vocal minority of “queenie” gay men grabbing all the attention.
In a scant 120 pages, Malebranche savagely deconstructs the gay community from the intimate perspective that only an insider can offer. A former New York City club kid and go-go dancer who did time in post-Stonewall Greenwich Village, he is no stranger to gay culture.
Androphilia does not argue for reforming the gay community. Instead, Malebranche argues for secession, seeking to create a loose fraternity of men who love men, free from the constraints of recent history. Its proclamation that “Gay is dead” might be premature, but Androphilia certainly represents another nail in the coffin. While Malebranche grants that the gay rights movement was “a successful tool in liberating same-sex-inclined persons from very real oppression,” he posits a clear vision of how the gay rights movement degenerated. Organizations like the Human Rights Campaign and the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation inflame fear and paranoia while presenting an inaccurate and (above all) neutered version of homosexuality. “Having brought an end to police harassment and widespread discrimination, the gay rights movement has turned to nitpicking” and maintains “the illusion of oppression and victimization so that hundreds of thousands of checkbook revolutionaries can believe that they are fighting for their own freedom.”
Same-sex marriage, according to Malebranche, represents the ultimate in nitpicking. He uses the 500-pound gorilla of perennial gay infidelity as evidence for the absurdity of such a campaign. “I’ve spoken to many gays who, while angry about the fact that they can’t get married, have never really even had a successful long-term relationship,” he writes, championing the libertarian solution of “moderate domestic partnership and civil union laws that would be more flexible and more satisfactory for a broader range of people.”
However, he’s clearly interested in more than just thumbing his nose at gay liberals. “The stigma of effeminacy” forced Malebranche’s pen to paper. He begins his discussion of the stigma with Bishop Alexander of Diospolis, who was castrated and forced to walk the streets as a stark warning to homosexuals (and, apparently, an offering to Yahweh). While attempting to explain ancient and medieval stigmas against effeminacy—somewhat spuriously, as in antiquity “effeminate” referred, ipso facto, to weakness and a shirking of male responsibility—he also reminds the reader of history’s diverse homosexualities, paying special (if not obsessive) attention to the role of same-sex-attracted men in martial contexts both East and West.
While admitting a selective presentation of ancient history, his recent history is far less so. Malebranche crafts a brief history of the gay rights movement and its genesis in the “born gay” theories of German Enlightenment figures Ludwig Casper and Karl Heinreich Ulrichs. Their legacy in the gay rights movement “made a Faustian bargain…trading away the masculinity of all homosexual men.”
But what’s the alternative? Malebranche maintains: “There’s something to this ‘being a man’ business. It’s not just some completely constructed social identity.” His choice of words is important. He does not posit a hormonal overdeterminism to combat cultural overdeterminism. For Malebranche, masculinity represents a nuanced interplay among physical masculinity, essential masculinity and cultural masculinity. Men necessarily inhabit a specific phenomenological reality.
Malebranche further claims (without reference to either the hard or soft sciences) that physical masculinity causes men “to be more naturally aggressive or assertive.” Still, it’s hard to argue with his contention that “being manly essentially means being different from the majority of women.”
Cultural masculinity seems most problematic, though his most succinct statement of what cultural masculinity entails (“What a man will and won’t do is more often than not related to what he personally believes a man should or should not do”) is hard to dispute. While acknowledging masculinity “can be problematic,” he also claims, “It’s not a problem, it’s a solution.”
Ultimately, Malebranche argues for adult values within the gay community. Not mere philosophical abstraction, he outlines specific behaviors that express masculinist values. His values can be attacked as semi-arbitrary constructions. However, it seems harder to attack the substance of his argument. Responsibility, for Malebranche, means merely accepting responsibility for one’s actions. Achievement is the antidote to widespread superficiality that esteems appearance over action. Respect means treating other adult men—regardless of sexual identification—as brothers. Finally, masculine honor has nothing to do with blood feuding and grudges. Rather, homosexual men would do well to keep their mouths shut about who their sexual partners are and what goes on between them. After outlining the values of his nascent movement, Malebranche offers suggestions for reclaiming masculinity.
Androphilia is not without problems. Malebranche has a tendency to universalize his own experiences. He claims political neutrality, but a cursory glance at his influences betray this—as is often the case—as a code word for conservatism. His obsessive emphasis on martial homosexuality similarly belies an essentially conservative and traditionalist worldview. Further, his critique of homosexuals affiliated with the Democratic Party seems bizarre considering it is the only major party not using homophobic bigotry to win votes. Perhaps Malebranche’s shrewdest observation is that it is patently fallacious to suggest that all homosexual men can or should organize under one banner and that all who fall without are self-loathers, equivalent to Jewish Nazis.
Androphilia is relevant and timely, tapping into the same energy as Brokeback Mountain, That’s Revolting and the novels of Chuck Palahniuk. It is also a pleasure to read, as Malebranche writes with an easy, relaxed style that is informal but never amateur. I have no doubt that Androphilia will soon be required reading for young homosexual men looking for an alternative to disco balls, rainbow flags and celebrity gossip.
It might be hyperbole to say Jack Malebranche has written the manifesto queer men have been waiting for, but manifestos invite overstatement and require little justification. Rather than argue a position, they claim ideological turf.
The author of Androphilia: Rejecting the Gay Identity, Reclaiming Masculinity explicitly states, “I didn’t write this book for gays.” Rather, his target audience is “men who love men but who are sick to death of the gay community.” Gay culture, Malebranche claims, has less to do with sexual preference than it does subculture, slang and stereotypes. Far from being a harmless diversion, the gay subculture imposes a false separation between heterosexual and homosexual men. This sexual apartheid not only negatively affects homosexuals, but also heterosexuals who acquire homophobic ideas in reaction to what Malebranche considers a small, vocal minority of “queenie” gay men grabbing all the attention.
In a scant 120 pages, Malebranche savagely deconstructs the gay community from the intimate perspective that only an insider can offer. A former New York City club kid and go-go dancer who did time in post-Stonewall Greenwich Village, he is no stranger to gay culture.
Androphilia does not argue for reforming the gay community. Instead, Malebranche argues for secession, seeking to create a loose fraternity of men who love men, free from the constraints of recent history. Its proclamation that “Gay is dead” might be premature, but Androphilia certainly represents another nail in the coffin. While Malebranche grants that the gay rights movement was “a successful tool in liberating same-sex-inclined persons from very real oppression,” he posits a clear vision of how the gay rights movement degenerated. Organizations like the Human Rights Campaign and the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation inflame fear and paranoia while presenting an inaccurate and (above all) neutered version of homosexuality. “Having brought an end to police harassment and widespread discrimination, the gay rights movement has turned to nitpicking” and maintains “the illusion of oppression and victimization so that hundreds of thousands of checkbook revolutionaries can believe that they are fighting for their own freedom.”
Same-sex marriage, according to Malebranche, represents the ultimate in nitpicking. He uses the 500-pound gorilla of perennial gay infidelity as evidence for the absurdity of such a campaign. “I’ve spoken to many gays who, while angry about the fact that they can’t get married, have never really even had a successful long-term relationship,” he writes, championing the libertarian solution of “moderate domestic partnership and civil union laws that would be more flexible and more satisfactory for a broader range of people.”
However, he’s clearly interested in more than just thumbing his nose at gay liberals. “The stigma of effeminacy” forced Malebranche’s pen to paper. He begins his discussion of the stigma with Bishop Alexander of Diospolis, who was castrated and forced to walk the streets as a stark warning to homosexuals (and, apparently, an offering to Yahweh). While attempting to explain ancient and medieval stigmas against effeminacy—somewhat spuriously, as in antiquity “effeminate” referred, ipso facto, to weakness and a shirking of male responsibility—he also reminds the reader of history’s diverse homosexualities, paying special (if not obsessive) attention to the role of same-sex-attracted men in martial contexts both East and West.
While admitting a selective presentation of ancient history, his recent history is far less so. Malebranche crafts a brief history of the gay rights movement and its genesis in the “born gay” theories of German Enlightenment figures Ludwig Casper and Karl Heinreich Ulrichs. Their legacy in the gay rights movement “made a Faustian bargain…trading away the masculinity of all homosexual men.”
But what’s the alternative? Malebranche maintains: “There’s something to this ‘being a man’ business. It’s not just some completely constructed social identity.” His choice of words is important. He does not posit a hormonal overdeterminism to combat cultural overdeterminism. For Malebranche, masculinity represents a nuanced interplay among physical masculinity, essential masculinity and cultural masculinity. Men necessarily inhabit a specific phenomenological reality.
Malebranche further claims (without reference to either the hard or soft sciences) that physical masculinity causes men “to be more naturally aggressive or assertive.” Still, it’s hard to argue with his contention that “being manly essentially means being different from the majority of women.”
Cultural masculinity seems most problematic, though his most succinct statement of what cultural masculinity entails (“What a man will and won’t do is more often than not related to what he personally believes a man should or should not do”) is hard to dispute. While acknowledging masculinity “can be problematic,” he also claims, “It’s not a problem, it’s a solution.”
Ultimately, Malebranche argues for adult values within the gay community. Not mere philosophical abstraction, he outlines specific behaviors that express masculinist values. His values can be attacked as semi-arbitrary constructions. However, it seems harder to attack the substance of his argument. Responsibility, for Malebranche, means merely accepting responsibility for one’s actions. Achievement is the antidote to widespread superficiality that esteems appearance over action. Respect means treating other adult men—regardless of sexual identification—as brothers. Finally, masculine honor has nothing to do with blood feuding and grudges. Rather, homosexual men would do well to keep their mouths shut about who their sexual partners are and what goes on between them. After outlining the values of his nascent movement, Malebranche offers suggestions for reclaiming masculinity.
Androphilia is not without problems. Malebranche has a tendency to universalize his own experiences. He claims political neutrality, but a cursory glance at his influences betray this—as is often the case—as a code word for conservatism. His obsessive emphasis on martial homosexuality similarly belies an essentially conservative and traditionalist worldview. Further, his critique of homosexuals affiliated with the Democratic Party seems bizarre considering it is the only major party not using homophobic bigotry to win votes. Perhaps Malebranche’s shrewdest observation is that it is patently fallacious to suggest that all homosexual men can or should organize under one banner and that all who fall without are self-loathers, equivalent to Jewish Nazis.
Androphilia is relevant and timely, tapping into the same energy as Brokeback Mountain, That’s Revolting and the novels of Chuck Palahniuk. It is also a pleasure to read, as Malebranche writes with an easy, relaxed style that is informal but never amateur. I have no doubt that Androphilia will soon be required reading for young homosexual men looking for an alternative to disco balls, rainbow flags and celebrity gossip.
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
Some Of Your Friends Are Already This Fucked
I'd like to welcome everyone to what I hope will be a regular feature here at Black Sun Gazette. "Some of Your Friends Are Already This Fucked" is a public service announcement from Ulysses Lazarus to you where I identify which aspects of culture are acceptable for consumption and which are not. Often ahead of the cultural curve, I know the stuff that you will be into in six months and what stuff you're into now that will embarrass you in six months. To that end I have decided to, once a week inform you of something that has entered popular culture and fails so hard that it passes through failing so hard it wins territory right back into failing so hard it fails.
This week's entry...
Hula Hoops
You know at least one of these girls. The Hula Hoopers. How the fuck it became popular for girls in their mid-to-late-20s to take up the hobby of a fucking five year old is beyond me. I don't claim to have answers to those kinds of questions. All I can tell you is that it makes me rage at an almost uncontrollable level. Every girl that is into it seems to think they're so fucking brilliantly original for mining a part of their grandmother's childhood. I keep expecting to meet bitches who collect Lisa fucking Frank folders and think that's the latest in edgy, post-adolescent, alt consumerist behavior.
On the other hand, the evolutionary appeal of the activity can't be denied. What is going to land a man more than a hobby that says "I wish I were five, I like ribbons and bows, and I don't think too much about anything... that's like, BOY STUFF! Ew!" It's sure to land you a virile man with a raging hard-on and a total lack of respect for women.
It's also a further example of something referenced a couple weeks ago. The 20-something hipster is a spiritual eunuch. It has literally no connection to the creation of culture, preferring to latch onto things from previous eras with no substantive content. Where the 60s generation was shallow to be sure, they at least had the connection to their decadent and shallow "youth movement."
We've got... hula hoopers. Yes, you're a fucking cultural genius for rediscovering the hula hoop. No, you are not suffering from general cultural paralysis of the inane. No, your lack of adult hobbies is not indicative of stunted intellectual and personal development. No, you're definitely not part of the general buffoonery of your generation for having stupid, ironic passtimes- you're the trend setter.
Got it? Good. Now go bang some dude with dishevelled hair.
This week's entry...
Hula Hoops
You know at least one of these girls. The Hula Hoopers. How the fuck it became popular for girls in their mid-to-late-20s to take up the hobby of a fucking five year old is beyond me. I don't claim to have answers to those kinds of questions. All I can tell you is that it makes me rage at an almost uncontrollable level. Every girl that is into it seems to think they're so fucking brilliantly original for mining a part of their grandmother's childhood. I keep expecting to meet bitches who collect Lisa fucking Frank folders and think that's the latest in edgy, post-adolescent, alt consumerist behavior.
On the other hand, the evolutionary appeal of the activity can't be denied. What is going to land a man more than a hobby that says "I wish I were five, I like ribbons and bows, and I don't think too much about anything... that's like, BOY STUFF! Ew!" It's sure to land you a virile man with a raging hard-on and a total lack of respect for women.
It's also a further example of something referenced a couple weeks ago. The 20-something hipster is a spiritual eunuch. It has literally no connection to the creation of culture, preferring to latch onto things from previous eras with no substantive content. Where the 60s generation was shallow to be sure, they at least had the connection to their decadent and shallow "youth movement."
We've got... hula hoopers. Yes, you're a fucking cultural genius for rediscovering the hula hoop. No, you are not suffering from general cultural paralysis of the inane. No, your lack of adult hobbies is not indicative of stunted intellectual and personal development. No, you're definitely not part of the general buffoonery of your generation for having stupid, ironic passtimes- you're the trend setter.
Got it? Good. Now go bang some dude with dishevelled hair.
Monday, December 8, 2008
In Defense of Elitism, Part I
Another election cycle over, another fevered couple of weeks listening to claims of elitism and arguments against it. William F. Buckley, Jr. once famously quipped that he'd rather be ruled by 100 names randomly picked from the phone book than by the staff of Harvard University. When separated from the political context of the time, this seems incredibly imprudent, particularly when you know 100 people from the Greater Boston White Pages. Indeed, I'd like to argue that the entire anti-elitist sentiment in American political life is not only misguided, but indeed, anti-American.
As someone who spent the greater part of their youth shilling newspapers for what counts as "the Left" in modern day America, I am intimately acquainted with your typical four year radical. Straight out of a suburban, middle-class home, they are shocked (SHOCKED!) to find out that injustice still exists in the world after having it brought to their attention by a college professor. You can smell the stink of the middle class on them as they whinge about things they're never seen in action, let alone been victimized by. Often times their heart aches for a laundry list of "unfair" phenomenon in the world ranging from systemic urban poverty to coffee being an abundant crop. They typically radicalize and de-radicalize quickly, leaving their affilitations behind with beer bongs.
This is an excellent example of bad elitism. The type of elitism that most intelligent people, Americans in particular, recoil from. It's ill-informed, classist, big city chauvinist, anti-worker, anti-farmer, and anti-poor. It's rhetorical method is often billed as "consciousness raising," the watered-down, milquetoast liberal version of Lenin's revolutionary vanguard. The basic belief is that the problem with these fucking working class people is that they don't know what's good for them. That's why they're generally in favor of abortion restrictions and gun rights. If only they would listen to the faculty at Harvard / revolutionary socialists they would know what their best interests are.
On the other end of the socio-economic spectrum there is the populism of the working classes themselves. While raised in a blue collar household, my family never engaged in much of this and so I'm able to view the phenomenon with the lens of a fly on the wall observer. There are those who are immediately distrustful of experts of any kind, or any opinion which comes from alien class forces. Who are these economists / sociologists / evolutionary biologists to tell us what's true? We know our own interests and can form reality without their telling us, thank you very much. This is what passes for anti-elitism in America, and a number of my friends who are otherwise operational elitists fall prey to the snares laid by this type of rhetoric.
What it essentially comes down to is that not only is common sense not very common, but it also leads you to believe that the Earth is flat and that the sun literally "rises" in the east and "sets" in the west, turning a convenient verbal metaphor into a scientific truism. The fact is that an economist with a Ph.D. from Harvard whose dissertation was written on the steel industry in western Pennsylvania not only knows things about how the industry operates that a welder in Pittsburgh doesn't know, he probably knows more about it, regardless of the fact that he's never laid a single bead of weld. You wouldn't go to the welder to craft a corporate culture in the best interests of workers (though you might want to ask him what he needs) any more than you would sit the economist on the line to assemble I-beams. Such class drag is popular among up-and-coming bureaucrats in the People's Republic of China, but it's just that- class drag, adopted for expediency and dropped when inconvenient.
I don't want to make this more simplistic than it is. There is nothing about going to Yale that automatically makes one an expert. Nor is attending a top-notch university a necessary pre-requisite for being an intellectual elite. But it's not a bad start. And one would be hard-pressed to make a case that several years of close study don't give one an intellectual advantage that cannot be gained intuitively from quotidian work in a field. Succinctly stated, being an iron worker for 30 years may give you a firm grasp on the grosser and finer points of structural engineering and design, but it will teach you next to nothing about urban planning and a city's needs.
It's not just that you go to a doctor when you want to be healed. You also go to a hairdresser when you want to look nice, and you know where the extra $20 you spend at Bishop's over Supercuts goes when you look in the mirror. In a sense, all but the most ploddingly stupid of human beings are not operational elitists in the same way that nearly everyone is an operational materialist- they walk through doors without even attempting to "will" a hole in the wall to appear. But for some reason nearly everyone bristles at the idea of letting experts make decisions that effect them. I'm not talking Soviet-style micromanagement here. Talk to some of your coworkers and ask them what they think of Ivy League educated economists deciding how the latest government bailout gets spent. For the sake of argument, disregard cynicism and assume that they will spend the money in the most utilitarian fashion possible. Methinks there will be very little support for letting the experts make decisions about things that many of them have literally studied for decades. Are the experts sometimes wrong? Of course. But letting the masses make decisions about subjects they know little to nothing about is tantamount to throwing an AM radio steered dart a board and letting the chips fall where they may.
The ultimate irony, of course, is that the word "elitism" gets thrown around as a political epithet around every election. It gets lobbed like a fresh cow turd from one side of the political spectrum to the other, as if a first-class education and millions of dollars in corporate financing aren't prerequisites to obtaining office in the first place. Setting aside the issue of corporate financing of elections (something I'm opposed to) why is it imprudent to expect that the political leaders of the nation would come from a class of men who are (as were the royalty of old Europe) quite literally groomed for leadership from the time that they are born. Much as I would like to see education opportunities expanded such that the hereditary nature of such a class wanes over time, that does not provide an excuse for intellectual slack any more than the availability of cheap media manipulation tools provides an excuse for lax aesthetic standards. Everyone is more than welcome at the party, but that doesn't guarantee that everyone gets laid.
Reverse the question. Would you stick economists on an assembly line? Would you trust them to hand toss your pizza, cut your hair, deliver your food in a timely manner, take well frame photographs, or even pour a pint of Guinness properly? One of the most basic achievements of human civilization is the division of labor, letting people who know how to do something do it, freeing up the masses from having to make their own rugs or what have you. A society as complex as ours requires not just the production of goods and delivery of services, but also a massive bureaucracy which ensures that trains run on time, buildings are set up to code standard, and yes, that bailout billions are distributed properly.
But really, there's a bigger question here. Both sides of the political aisle have, probably since the days of Jackson, made a lot of political hay extolling the virtues of a mythical "common man." While I certainly appreciate the contribution made to society by people putting up buildings, cooking my food, and driving buses around in such a way that no one gets killed, I don't put a great deal of stock in their ability to make decisions about things. The common man seems fair to good at making decisions that affect themselves and their family, and dismal at making decisions in the greater interest of society.
Still, though, all of this misses the point. America's- and humanity's- greatness has never been in the unwashed masses who toil and toil keeping the ball rolling so that we can all eat and have roofs over our heads. Our greatness lies in... well, greatness. There will always be Joe Blows to make sure that the coffee gets made on time. What makes life interesting and what gives our greatest contributions are the Nikolai Teslas, the Paul Laffoleys, the J.G. Ballards. We should be striving towards that kind of achievement rather than engaging in idiotic platitudes about how great the average is.
As someone who spent the greater part of their youth shilling newspapers for what counts as "the Left" in modern day America, I am intimately acquainted with your typical four year radical. Straight out of a suburban, middle-class home, they are shocked (SHOCKED!) to find out that injustice still exists in the world after having it brought to their attention by a college professor. You can smell the stink of the middle class on them as they whinge about things they're never seen in action, let alone been victimized by. Often times their heart aches for a laundry list of "unfair" phenomenon in the world ranging from systemic urban poverty to coffee being an abundant crop. They typically radicalize and de-radicalize quickly, leaving their affilitations behind with beer bongs.
This is an excellent example of bad elitism. The type of elitism that most intelligent people, Americans in particular, recoil from. It's ill-informed, classist, big city chauvinist, anti-worker, anti-farmer, and anti-poor. It's rhetorical method is often billed as "consciousness raising," the watered-down, milquetoast liberal version of Lenin's revolutionary vanguard. The basic belief is that the problem with these fucking working class people is that they don't know what's good for them. That's why they're generally in favor of abortion restrictions and gun rights. If only they would listen to the faculty at Harvard / revolutionary socialists they would know what their best interests are.
On the other end of the socio-economic spectrum there is the populism of the working classes themselves. While raised in a blue collar household, my family never engaged in much of this and so I'm able to view the phenomenon with the lens of a fly on the wall observer. There are those who are immediately distrustful of experts of any kind, or any opinion which comes from alien class forces. Who are these economists / sociologists / evolutionary biologists to tell us what's true? We know our own interests and can form reality without their telling us, thank you very much. This is what passes for anti-elitism in America, and a number of my friends who are otherwise operational elitists fall prey to the snares laid by this type of rhetoric.
What it essentially comes down to is that not only is common sense not very common, but it also leads you to believe that the Earth is flat and that the sun literally "rises" in the east and "sets" in the west, turning a convenient verbal metaphor into a scientific truism. The fact is that an economist with a Ph.D. from Harvard whose dissertation was written on the steel industry in western Pennsylvania not only knows things about how the industry operates that a welder in Pittsburgh doesn't know, he probably knows more about it, regardless of the fact that he's never laid a single bead of weld. You wouldn't go to the welder to craft a corporate culture in the best interests of workers (though you might want to ask him what he needs) any more than you would sit the economist on the line to assemble I-beams. Such class drag is popular among up-and-coming bureaucrats in the People's Republic of China, but it's just that- class drag, adopted for expediency and dropped when inconvenient.
I don't want to make this more simplistic than it is. There is nothing about going to Yale that automatically makes one an expert. Nor is attending a top-notch university a necessary pre-requisite for being an intellectual elite. But it's not a bad start. And one would be hard-pressed to make a case that several years of close study don't give one an intellectual advantage that cannot be gained intuitively from quotidian work in a field. Succinctly stated, being an iron worker for 30 years may give you a firm grasp on the grosser and finer points of structural engineering and design, but it will teach you next to nothing about urban planning and a city's needs.
It's not just that you go to a doctor when you want to be healed. You also go to a hairdresser when you want to look nice, and you know where the extra $20 you spend at Bishop's over Supercuts goes when you look in the mirror. In a sense, all but the most ploddingly stupid of human beings are not operational elitists in the same way that nearly everyone is an operational materialist- they walk through doors without even attempting to "will" a hole in the wall to appear. But for some reason nearly everyone bristles at the idea of letting experts make decisions that effect them. I'm not talking Soviet-style micromanagement here. Talk to some of your coworkers and ask them what they think of Ivy League educated economists deciding how the latest government bailout gets spent. For the sake of argument, disregard cynicism and assume that they will spend the money in the most utilitarian fashion possible. Methinks there will be very little support for letting the experts make decisions about things that many of them have literally studied for decades. Are the experts sometimes wrong? Of course. But letting the masses make decisions about subjects they know little to nothing about is tantamount to throwing an AM radio steered dart a board and letting the chips fall where they may.
The ultimate irony, of course, is that the word "elitism" gets thrown around as a political epithet around every election. It gets lobbed like a fresh cow turd from one side of the political spectrum to the other, as if a first-class education and millions of dollars in corporate financing aren't prerequisites to obtaining office in the first place. Setting aside the issue of corporate financing of elections (something I'm opposed to) why is it imprudent to expect that the political leaders of the nation would come from a class of men who are (as were the royalty of old Europe) quite literally groomed for leadership from the time that they are born. Much as I would like to see education opportunities expanded such that the hereditary nature of such a class wanes over time, that does not provide an excuse for intellectual slack any more than the availability of cheap media manipulation tools provides an excuse for lax aesthetic standards. Everyone is more than welcome at the party, but that doesn't guarantee that everyone gets laid.
Reverse the question. Would you stick economists on an assembly line? Would you trust them to hand toss your pizza, cut your hair, deliver your food in a timely manner, take well frame photographs, or even pour a pint of Guinness properly? One of the most basic achievements of human civilization is the division of labor, letting people who know how to do something do it, freeing up the masses from having to make their own rugs or what have you. A society as complex as ours requires not just the production of goods and delivery of services, but also a massive bureaucracy which ensures that trains run on time, buildings are set up to code standard, and yes, that bailout billions are distributed properly.
But really, there's a bigger question here. Both sides of the political aisle have, probably since the days of Jackson, made a lot of political hay extolling the virtues of a mythical "common man." While I certainly appreciate the contribution made to society by people putting up buildings, cooking my food, and driving buses around in such a way that no one gets killed, I don't put a great deal of stock in their ability to make decisions about things. The common man seems fair to good at making decisions that affect themselves and their family, and dismal at making decisions in the greater interest of society.
Still, though, all of this misses the point. America's- and humanity's- greatness has never been in the unwashed masses who toil and toil keeping the ball rolling so that we can all eat and have roofs over our heads. Our greatness lies in... well, greatness. There will always be Joe Blows to make sure that the coffee gets made on time. What makes life interesting and what gives our greatest contributions are the Nikolai Teslas, the Paul Laffoleys, the J.G. Ballards. We should be striving towards that kind of achievement rather than engaging in idiotic platitudes about how great the average is.
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