I find myself reflected in this article. I am 26 years old, born in Spain, in what we can call a "middle class" family. I've went to school and highschool until 18, and from there to my 23 years I never read a single book.
Fortunately, I recognized at that moment (my 23) that I was becoming, literally, stupid. I was unable to remember what I learned on the school, and I was not satisfied with a life of consume and evasion. At that moment, I decided (ignoring, of course, determinism and flattering my vanity) to start an autodidact study, and I can say that, basically, I started from zero with a huge difficulty in attention and a tremendous lack of understanding. It took for me almost a year to understand how to learn and which was the purpose of learning; and with these I mean: think and reflect, more than simply read information for trying to own knowledge as a mean, but mainly as an end. I think also that without philosophy (Platon and Aristotle, logic and epistemology, humanism and ethics) I've never could do this.
That was the best decision of my life, and every day, I spent hours in lecture, thinking and writting; but always, for my own profit and pleasure. I will never put a foot on colleges or universities.
Knowledge, besides sociologicall aspects that determine it, contributes to a better quality of life. It seems to me that make emphasis on these is the only way for arrive to people like I used to be. Besides all the sociologicall aspects that are in the article, I think that has been a lost of the value of education as an end in the generations that preceded me. In other words, we can say that socially, the knowledge has lost his value as a reinforcer; and without that reinforcer effect, is very hard that people spent effort (because as worst is your state of knowledge in a moment, hardest and more aversive is to turn it around) in adquire it.
PD: Sorry for my english, I've never write since highschool.
If you wish to improve your written and verbal English abilities, read these essays aloud. Not by other writers, just Aurelien! I am a native English speaker, and find that I have lost verbal ability with age and lack of conversation (due to Covid). Aurelien's essays are smooth, clean English and I read them aloud as my personal speech therapy.
Thanks for the advice. It is not my goal to achieve a high level in english, because I used to read in spanish, and technology facilitate us a good and minimall translation. However, sometimes I like to make the effort, and I can apreciate the good writting of Aurelien (the last article is very well written). Mostly, what more care for me, is the transmission of clear and deep knowledge, combinated with the pleasure of reading and writting, and Aurelien achieves that.
It is curios, now that you mentioned, the huge difference between the own reflection or writting and the speech with others. The clarity and good expression that I find in some topics when I think or writte about them alone, is not the same the one that I find when I talk (unfortunately, this is anecdoticall and does not happen often) with others. That's why, the intellectual products are superior, in a sense, respect to the author.
I was based in Sana'a, the capital of Yemen, at the end of 98. One evening I was sitting in a cafe. A man who I had not met before took a seat opposite me and we conversed in English. After a while, he took out a work book and asked me if I would help him with his English, which I agreed to do. It quickly became apparent that we were communicating at cross purposes. He possessed a far more developed understanding of the building blocks of my native tongue. I found myself in the ridiculous position of being an English speaker from a very young age, with absolutely no formal understanding of the various tenses and clauses, or sentence construction. Nobody made an attempt to teach me anything like this at school. I think this was to my detriment when it came to learning other languages.
When I was percolating through the education system - a decent primary, followed by an extremely violent comprehensive school - the old guard of teachers were ageing out and being replaced by a more liberalised strain. Many of the outgoing teachers were frightening, often damaged individuals, but I learned a lot from them, things that I still remember. With the newer teachers it sometimes seemed like we were being taught bullet points - this fact when presented in the proper context will earn you one mark in an essay written on the subject in your final exam. It was a joyless way to learn; one that pandered to a system of metrics while devaluing education as something of worth that would enrich your life.
A wonderful story, artfully missing out the actual capitalist ruling class that actually instituted the schools (to train workers) and the universities (to train the salaried and the propagandists). The PMC are simply their servants, but t is a brilliant ruse for the capitalist ruling class to make themselves invisible behind the PMC. All culture and no political economy. With automation taking away much of the complications of working class jobs, and many of those jobs shipped abroad, the ownership class decided that it was much more important to dumb down and separate through "identity" etc. the working class than teach them higher skills. Educated minds get to thinking about how societies really work and how to change that, dumbed down ones don't.
Gabriel Rockhill very thoroughly covers the mind-worm which is the non-communist "critical" theory that the ruling class pushed, thoroughly ungrounded from materialism, that has also greatly infested the body educational. Perhaps a bit of blowback there.
I have been meaning to write exactly that. All this hate towards the PMC who in reality is not the class that rules us, it's indeed funny. The US used to have a mobile population that could go from rags to riches. That's all gone, the American dream is gone. We are now ruled by a global elite who controls pretty much everything through the employment of capital and the PMC actually works for that elite. The American elite right now is no different from the European aristocracy. Their children are trust fund babies, they will never need to work in their lives. The PMC has to work for a living. The PMC does not despise the blue collar worker as Aurelien so mistakenly announces. Actually, there's a great awakening and there's not a single day that passes that the PMC does not start to identify itself even more with the blue collars. We are no different from them, because we do not have the capital. We only have our work force. I may not do physical work, but I rent my brain to the company and they pay me wages in return. In Aurelien's texts there seems to be some resentment towards that higher middle class (maybe because he came from a blue collar background?) I don't know, but right now all I want to see is the revolution. Take down those self serving clowns in government that suck the life out of us. Agree that talking is easy as there's no identifiable leadership nor ideology to prop up the masses. But long is gone the time that I thought I had more in common with the elite than with the populace. We won't have jobs, we won't have an easy life, that time is gone, hang them high. Eat the rich.
That's facts. You can be PMC and feel yourself getting wet in the same precarious ocean as the rest. Some have savings or home equity or family to draw on between jobs but many don't and instead have health insurance from work, a mortgage and other debt, and kids so that a couple of months of unemployment and they'll start to lose it. If being prepared means realistically taking stock of that then you should be ready to eat the rich too.
Some of my professional-class relatives played that game in Russia over a hundred years ago. Leaving everyone else aside, the results for them as people were uneven; while some of them did get pretty good jobs out of it, quite a few of them later ended up being killed by the people they brought into power. The problem with "the revolution", if it happens, is that those supporting it might end up getting hanged or eaten themselves.
Such revolutions are last resorts when all the alternatives are worse. We can radically reform the system, i.e. discipline the capitalist class and remove the excessive power over society that concentrated wealth today has without revolution. It was done before in the USA. The alternatives to that are worse.
You mean the New Deal? I agree that it is a preferable solution (it has its limits, but so does a revolution, and our experience suggests a revolution can come with a lot of collateral damage; the rich aren't the ones who actually got eaten in Russia, and in this case I mean that literally). The problem is that the New Deal required the participation of intelligent, socially-minded people among the elite. It was like enlightened despotism for a representative democracy (or, as some call it, elective oligarchy). Without the right people at the top, it can't be done. Not saying it's impossible for the US today, but I'm not sure who could do it.
Agreed. But the fact that Trump was elected president against all the efforts of both parties and the deep state shows that voters still matter and do turn out when the have an alternative, not that he was a good one.
My response article to Aurelien's (linked already twice in these comments) ends as follows. I don't think reform is easy but we need to be realistic about the alternatives.
> "So what’s it going to be? We can either discipline international capital and reinvest in democracy, as FDR did, or we can allow authoritarians to exploit the coming nationalist moment, as various Europeans did mid 20th c.
> "Who won the Western neoliberal game 1979-2022? Not the PMC. The real enemy lies beyond them (see David Harvey in A Brief History of Neoliberalism) and our only chance now is broad-based popular class power that takes control back from the international oligarchs."
what if where we're heading(basically, some form of feudalism) is what's the normal? and what happened in the last 4-500 years was just a historical aberation?
Because from a historical PoV, it sure looks to be the case.
1. it's not very hard to have high social mobility if from a backwater(NW Europe was a backwater if you average the last 3-5k years) you luck out and basically x20 your land mass. Land is power, right? x20 land should be very inflationary ;)
2. SU is dead. And won't be resurrected anytime soon outside of MSM. In my opinion that was most important thing of the 20th century.
I'm talking about SU in the form that was imagined in the W Europe/US. Not about the actual real state; which was obviously completely different then how it was imagined in the West. Though even the actual state was important. As it had enough power to help usher a revolution in the West if things were boiling enough. It also had the desire to do that; and tried multiple times to do precisely that.
Would a New Deal happen without the fear of another URSS(ok, fear of "communists"/something like another "russian revolution"). Sure, probably it was a combo of the shock from '29/a good part of the old elite going broke + "communism"("happened there, why wouldn't it happen here too if we don't do something?")
same thing for the post ww2 reconstruction of Europe. When else in 3k+ years of written history do you have another instance of a great power rebuilding another great power it just went to war with? Because I know of zero such circumstances. But fear of "a communist take over"... did wonders ;)
Look what happened after the Cold War. Did anyone try to rebuild something in EE/Russia? No. It was the usual free for all. Vae victis.
Putin's Russia might be the successor state of SU on paper. But in reality it has nothing to do with SU. If it somehow has an ideology(doesn't seem to have one), it's deeply neoliberal.
So... why would be western elites scared of anything? Almost no revolutions succeeded without external support. And it doesn't seem to be any other great power sporting a different ideology than neoliberalism/"soft feudalism"/"tehno feudalism"(? - for a lack of a better word).
I'm not the one proposing literal revolution. Talking in those terms can be useful rhetorically but I don't think we are anywhere near conditions so bad that we need such a dangerous and chaotic succession process, although I quite admire the janissary revolution in 1974 Portugal.
National elites are always vulnerable. Western national elites today in particular aren't just vulnerable to the people withdrawing their consent to be governed by them, their devotion to the art of kissing the behinds of international oligarchs and the competition among nations to do the kissing means they can lose patronage from above too.
Well, yes! Revolutionaries are usually the first against the wall, because they are fundamentally unhappy and are guaranteed to agitate against actions of the Revolutionary Council. If you are in the streets and a revolution actually happens, it is time to disappear.
My definition of the PMC: the people who run things, but do not own things. The people who "own" large houses with large mortgages paid by large salaries. They don't actually own much. A subset of the PMC is the "Butler Class": accountants and lawyers for the rich.
Exactly right. My response which I put on my own Substack agrees. But there's another sleight of hand: conservatives are just as guilty. Their hands are all over the sell off on the Commons. It's easy to look at and repudiate the excess of the PMC since they are so florid but these are just symptoms.
'the PMC are simply their servants' - this makes it seem rather neutral this servant status - the PMC, if one is to equate them with the 'middle class' - the bureaucracy, the administration, the law, the police, the media, the army...
...If one is to judge this subclass or caste by their material role in society it is to facilitate and to police the working class on behalf of the dominant capitalist class - it would appear, historically, that such have aspirations to meld upwards, if possible, and at the lower end fear decline into the working class
As such generally speaking there are two classes which are judged to be autonomous and in permament competition, one does not accord a seperate class status to such a 'middle class' who carry out orders nada mas
Aurelian refuses to discuss in terms of class, which may be thought to limit and to overpersonalise his descriptions of the PMC
One thing that I always found puzzling about "education" is that it serves two purposes at odds with each other: first, it promotes "knowledge," independent of cultural-social context; second, it promotes and indoctrinates various social myths that, in principle, reinforce the cohesion of the society where it is located. (I always thought J H Newman had one of better expositions on the balance between the two goals--but while also pointing to its weakness without meaning to).
Social myths are built on shared beliefs about the world and the place of the "tribe" in that world (which presupposes that the "tribe" self-evidently exists in the first place, which everyone in that tribe recognizes). These are almost invariably and empirically false: profession of faith stuff--filioque clause or whatever. Understanding is not required: you believe because that is what you do to show your tribal solidarity. But if the educational institutions are to provide an understanding of "untethered" knowledge, whose epistemological basis is "empirical" in nature, you have to adjust the "official" myths (or, indoctrinate people in a different way) so that the two are not really in conflict--at least, not as far as the tribal members are concerned. (One of fascinating and oft replicated result in sociology of science is that US Evangelicals know and "accept" evolution as "science," especially those who are better educated--and Evangelicals in US are, on average, better educated than non-Evangelicals--but they simply do not "personally believe" it, whatever that really means. You can get at this by subtly rephrasing survey questions--Dan Kahan has done good bit of pioneering work on this. But is this all that different? I might "believe" that the Consecrated Host is literal body and blood of Christ, but also that that is independent of the chemistry and chalk it all up to mysterium fidei.) But, the catch, again, is that you need a shared "faith" to sustain that "miracle."
I guess this is what brings us back to the point that Aurelien is raising: the schizophrenic role of the university, of both promoting "empirically true" knowledge and social indoctrination of the "official truths" can be reconciled only if there's a shared faith about the collective "tribal identity." The first context, of promoting "empirical knowledge" is on the wane. The second context, of social indoctrination is still very much in place, but its paradoxical coexistence with "empirical knowledge" rests on a shaky grounds, because we lack a shared collective identity. Rather, the official indoctrination is more about how we don't have one and that we should just glorify ourselves and whatever we make up as our alleged identity, except when they offend the self-appointed masters of the universe.
I don't think the problem with this education system is not so much that we are "overproducing" elites. What we are doing is that we are producing "elites" who are not fit to be elites in terms of practical knowledge independent of professing the faith. Worse, of course, is that this profession of the faith is itself unmoored from any tribal basis: if you are professing faith in a tribal grouping that people at large feel a sense of belonging to, even that falls on deaf ears. Is it any wonder that those who grow tire of the official "profession of faith" are turning to more "extreme" faiths that at least appeal to their sense of where they fit in the universe better?
"These are almost invariably and empirically false: profession of faith stuff--filioque clause or whatever."
Even better than false - empirically unverifiable, but held to be true.
On what I think is a related note... Before the 1917 revolution, the biggest driver of education in the Russian Empire was the Orthodox Church, with some support and encouragement from the government. In theory, it was of course supposed to produce good Christians and loyal subjects, but it also provided a high quality secular education. It produced a lot of anticlerical or outright atheistic revolutionaries, most famously Stalin, but also fair number of well-educated priests and pious laymen. The indoctrination angle was certainly intended, but I guess this outcome made it more or less a wash.
Once in power, the Bolsheviks also proved very keen on indoctrination. Their early schools after the revolution were extremely simplified as far as "empirical" education goes (they did cover the basics, but they threw out specialist teachers, for example), but they had an even better reach than the Church. Between this approach and post-civil war chaos, this very early Soviet education was very haphazard, but their indoctrination was almost unavoidable and at least somewhat effective. (In fairness, they did improve substantially under Stalin as far as "empirical knowledge" went.)
I’ve thought a lot about the ‘dumbing down’ of the general populace in the West over the last few years or generations, and wondered why it’s happening and whether it’s intentional, but could never come to a conclusion. But I think you nail it here, it’s like an attempt by our elite to create a Neo-feudal society built upon a heap of stupid, distracted serfs. ‘Don’t worry about anything, we know best, just keep consuming, consuming, consuming, watching Netflix, porn and ordering food delivery’.
And while I’m a big fan of Turchin’s books and his elite overproduction theory, I think calling the PMC an elite is a misnomer. I would kill for an elite. These people are pathetic and stupid though. Their priorities are basically about making LGBT+ people feel good and extracting as much wealth as possible out of nations and companies, with the same people cycling between the 2.
The European elite and underclasses that went to war in 1914 were truly great people. Ernst Junger came from a modest middle class background but was the epitome of the warrior-philosopher. Say what you want about an aristocracy like in Britain or the Kaiserreich, but those men answered the call. They were first up and over the trenches and died at higher rates than the men they were leading. How many future geniuses, inventors, Great Men etc were slaughtered on the killing fields of France, Belgium and the Ostfront.
With few exceptions, most of the PMC haven’t done military service. The children of the Golden Generation during the Vietnam War were a bunch of draft dodgers for the most part. The idea of sacrificing for a higher goal is absurd to these people. And like Reagan’s trickle down economics BS, without a real elite as an example to follow, the rest of us are left with the same attitude, ‘why bother?’.
The West in general and its elites in particular, in and out of MSM, government and the military, live in a world increasingly consumed by symbol, spectacle and abstraction. Not only that, but they confuse wish-fulfillment with reality. Decide that you're going to identify as a different gender, race, ethnicity, hell, decide that you're a member of a different species and woe betide anyone who doesn't go along with the charade. They might even get themselves "cancelled".
Hell, even the consequences of their (symbolic) actions are themselves largely symbolic. Melvin didn't get to put on a TED talk because someone dug up an old Tweet of his and now he's "literal Hitler" for a while.
For that matter, the truly Great and Good rarely even face those kinds of consequences. They can cause institutions to fail everywhere they go - but as long as they parrot today's approved platitudes, they glide from internship to government sinecure to think tank to academia to financial services to corporate board to to consulting gig to MSM Talking Head, sometimes more than one simultaneously. Most probably never having had a 9-5 job, much less done farm or factory work, in their lives. These days, they may never even physically show up to work, ever, but their bank accounts rarely seem to reflect this.
They can even engage in outright fraud, but a big enough fish will only pay a fine, a portion of his ill-gotten gains. Meanwhile, he remains as free as a bird, and probably doesn't even face social ostracism. Last I checked, Jon Corzine is not on the naughty list of the people who matter.
Since results don't matter and there are few consequences for losing, even for catastrophe, everything becomes a matter of spin. All problems can be solved with better P.R., and there is no greater triumph than when some newscaster recites that glib talking point you just coined or when your FB post went viral, your instagram noticed by the right kind of influencer.
In other words, winning is a matter of successful symbol manipulation. Speaking of spin, virtue signaling is an obsession, even unto rank hypocrisy, and the Davos Set think nothing of flying a private jet to a conference where they can congratulate themselves on their commitment to stopping climate change. Again, if there are to be any consequences, then those are for the little people to deal with.
Even in their dwindling contact with the physical world, the elites live in a world of wish-fulfillment. Push a button and whatever food or whatever else you want is brought to your door by some peon, paid for seamlessly by some electrons exchanged between banks that may not even have a physical location within a thousand miles of your location, if they have locations at all. Hell, you can even get laid via internet, just swipe right on the lucky profile. Everything is taken care of in the background, your credit card billed and airline miles accumulated automatically and the food or the girl just show up. Somehow. By Uber, I guess. Mundane questions like "How do I feed the kittens this week and pay for school supplies and make the rent?" never come into the equation.
These are people who confuse their fantasies with reality to the point where they actually believe their own press releases. They give an order and it happens. They proclaim their puppets in Kabul to be wise and stable technocrats, their well-trained military striding from triumph to triumph and So Let It Be Done, So Let It Be Written. "So let it be written" - that's the word, that's all that need be done and the little people just somehow make it happen. For sheer lack of contact with the real world, these people make Louis XVI look like a medieval gong farmer or a pygmy tribesman by comparison.
Contrast the Taliban. Symbol, spectacle and abstraction mean very little to them. Doordash doesn't operate in their area and if a Talib wants a vegan option, he'll have to cater it himself. It has probably never occurred to a Talib that he could cancel his enemies simply by digging up their old tweets, sent under a long discarded Twitter ID, and he doesn't have time for that, anyway. He lives in the world of concrete and material things, he thinks nothing of killing and in his world, there are bullets waiting to kill him quite literally dead and transport him to a very earthly and very earthy sort of paradise.
You can't wish those things away, your credit cards are no good and probably rifa, anyway, and the bullet flying towards him isn't concerned with word games, his struggle session to root out unconscious racism and cannot be reasoned with or convinced to bother someone less important.
The world of American elites collided with the world of the Taliban and got its ass kicked. Biden and his crew cannot deal with this, because that kind of reality does not select for success in symbol manipulation, any more than skill at football selects for an ability to do math problems.
The clownish Western response to the COVID is similar. The virus can't be negotiated with, can't be bought off, can't be distracted, and is unimpressed with you and how highly you may think of yourself.
As you may know, I've seen quite a lot of both worlds, I've lived in barns and crouched under the table in the room where the decisions were made, so I think I understand both mindsets pretty well. I prefer freedom to regular meals.
Speaking of, I got some mice to catch, or otherwise, I will surely be going hungry.
If my understanding of the term is correct, the PMC themselves aren't an elite. They're literally managers, intermediaries between the elite and everyone else. The elite is some more or less nebulous group of high-level politicians, senior bureaucrats and the super-rich; in other words, people with the necessary political pull to make decisions on the national level. Whether they form a particularly cohesive group, and whether they have any sense of mutual interest besides pure self-aggrandisement, is harder to say from the outside (though I can make a guess).
It’s possible you’re correct and I misunderstand Aurelien. My understanding of the PMC was somewhat similar to what James Burnham’s set out in ‘The Managerial Revolution’ that our former elite has been replaced with a visionless managerial class, who bring nothing new to the table but are inheritors of a system that they have only a scant understanding of.
I talk of the PMC as a "caste" and not a class, because elements within them have different economic functions. The manager of a software consultancy, a university professor of politics, a senior partner in a commercial law firm and a freelance journalist all share the same broad political function with respect to the Inner Party, and probably share similar opinions on most issues, but their economic function is different in each case.
"Hybrid islamo-wokist party" has got to be one of the most goofy things I've read in a while. For all its faults, LFI is the only party that even tries to represent the values of the traditional left on the French political scene. The rest are Atlanticist pawns or dregs of the Vichy right.
What holds up the Earth? Markets. It's markets all the way down.
Western education now consists of consumers and stakeholders rather than the quaint concept of students and teachers.
I never conflated education with intelligence. School does not make you more intelligent. It should make you more knowledgeable. It should confer the ability to assess a problem and make better use of one's innate intelligence to strive for a solution.
When knowledge now defies the reality that exists what exactly is the purpose of education?
The modern idea that everything is subject to economics, as the driver of all things, is a myth. Economics exist, of course, but deny our humanity; it is a utilitarian idea that can only denigrate humanity in the long run. It's primacy in modern culture is a long-term negative, not a positive.
I would say the purpose of education is to enliven the human soul. Others may disagree.
The HBD crowd is right about education - it does not matter much. Gregory Cochran, Razib Khan, Joseph Bronski, Steve Sailer, Charles Murray, to name a few, provide tons of evidence. Smart people are like productive employees - they can do much more for a short period of time, and people who are interested in a subject have no issues finding information about it nowadays. Todd's right, the West is doomed. The fools at the top do not like meritocracy.
See, this is where I disagree. Oh, sure, if it's a discrete piece of information, then you can find it. Picking up a complex skill is a different matter entirely. Take the ability to, for example, conduct a science experiment and keep a lab notebook, or write a piece of code that doesn't merely "work" (in the sense that the computer does what it's supposed to) but that other people can understand and repurpose for different tasks, or speak a foreign language without sounding like Tarzan. Lots of legitimately smart people will fail at such tasks if they are not given proper guidance and feedback.
Oh, and then there are things that will quite literally kill people if you do them incorrectly. I don't know about you, but I'd rather not be operated on by a "self-taught" surgeon.
I'm admittedly leery about the HBD crowd these days, but they (along with, say, Russian reactionaries) do have point when it comes to education. I wouldn't say it's useless (literacy is useful and most people can be taught to read and write; some other things can be imparted that way too), but it is definitely limited in what it can do without students who are interested in learning. Higher education is naturally worse in this regard. Interested people can do well with it, or without it. People who just want a degree to meet formal requirements might obtain that and little else.
One thing I have heard about the Chinese school system is that they have completely dismissed (if they have ever used) the Soviet school "equal treatment regardless of individual ability" approach in favour of separating pupils based on their established capabilities and inclinations. That sounded like a promising approach to education; certainly better than the Western/Russian one, which seems too mired in abstract notions.
The Russian example is not true. I got to befriend two Russians at business school, a man and a woman. Once, talking to the woman she mentioned that the guy had gone to a very prestigious school for highly intelligent people, something that she didn't do. He was very good at math indeed, and abstract thinking etc. The Russians produce very good engineers, mathematicians, etc, (chess players?), they couldn't get to that in a mass approach like you mentioned. Quite the opposite, we get the stupid mass approach in the US.
There's definitely some nuance here. We do have some elite/specialist institutions, and some pipelines that help talented people get there, but the majority of the population goes to "stupid mass" schools in which the individual approach is usually lacking. Or so I'm told by people familiar with them; I haven't been in one for a while and only have second-hand information. Those schools might be good enough for people who don't have significant learning disabilities and are sufficiently motivated to study. Perhaps they are better than the American ones. They do seem to have shared pathologies, though.
I have often commented here about how I see a political economic motive behind the PMC, that I see its rise to power as a downstream consequence of international economic power. This time I put my response in an article on my own Substack. We agree on much, I think, Aurelien, including, I believe, contempt for PMC aesthetics, opportunism, vacuousness, and hypocrisy. I hope you'll read it.
I have read two Emmanuel Todd books. "The Explanation of Ideology: Family Structure & Social Systems" -as far as I can tell his bonkers theory that family structure predicts political structure doesn't work. "After the Empire" seemed designed to appeal to the "not in our name" types; it didn't work out the way he said at all, and is rather comical in hindsight. Calling out the Soviet system in the 70s was a good trick though.
The educational system is absurdly dumbed down; my boomer parents learned Latin, Anglo-Saxon and pre-calc in a very working class high school. How many PhDs in English Lit were required to read Beowulf? Probably none.
I attribute the madness of the PMC to the slow down of technological progress. If chip making lithography hadn't improved as it did, the world would look a lot like it did when I was a kid in the 70s. Since we no longer have technological progress we have to have "social progress" like euthenasia and letting kids who can't choose their bedtimes choose what kind of genitals they'd prefer. Most of fooling around in computers isn't actually very economically productive; it barely shows up in productivity stats (Solow's paradox). It does keep a lot of people busy though, and things would be a lot worse without it.
"as far as I can tell his bonkers theory that family structure predicts political structure doesn't work"
Just out of curiosity: why do you say that? I haven't read the book you refer to. Then only one of Todd's books that I have read is his latest one (the one that our host mentioned). And he talked a bit about family structure and political systems in it. He claims that there's a remarkable overlap between countries in which communism took hold, and those in which the traditional peasant family was "authoritarian and egalitarian" (authoritarian from father to son, but egalitarian between brothers). It sounds interesting. Do you have counterexamples? I mean, I suppose you could cite former East Germany, but that was an occupied country, which is a little different.
His idea is stuck in the 1980s; the people and family structures are still the same, the governmental system isn't. Alentejo for example voted for Chega (the trump party) a lot more than it did the commies. Russia is no longer communist, same family structure, etc.
I think you have to consider technological development alongside everything else. The trend line starts to dip as mass TV becomes available in the west. Distraction for the adults (it's easier to be happy with your station once you're sedated by TV and now internet all day) and simply less reading, thinking and intellectual challenge for the children.
And then there's another aspect of the TV and now social media, the dumbing down of discourse - the vox pop, one liner culture that goes against deep thinking and any effort at rational analysis. Mass media must denigrate real education and hold up a shrunken substitute in its place to maintain its legitimacy.
Coupled with permissive culture, the lack of interest with putting children through the grinder of a rigorous education (which is what has saved the east asians and also upper classes here), and the marketised move from education to credentialisation and you have a breakdown of standards.
It's an unintentional return to feudal times playing out. While state school teachers are subject to strict surveillance and frequently changing educational theories and methods, many of the elite private schools in the UK now either use the International Baccalaureate (quite literally a global elite education standard) or are creating their own examinations and curriculums which is a return to the 19th century.
My background is that of a high-school math teacher in the 1970s through 2010. My experience was, that my students had an increasingly shorter and shorter attention span. Pedagogical literature told teachers not to attempt to discuss a topic for more than 20 minutes. Finally, my colleagues advised one another to perform more like television performers.
A minor point or two, and not in disagreement: in late 19th and early twentieth century France, the purpose of education was, as you point out, explicitly ideological social engineering aimed at the destruction of the still majority (geographically-speaking) non-French communities (Breton, Occitan, German, Basque etc.) and anyone else who was in the way: aimed at the creation of a streamlined, standard population socialized into urban-oriented and Republican values and thus more efficiently administered and used for the purposes of the state. Intent and practice do bear comparison to later Bolshevik and Chinese Communist practice. People of course did become literate good citizens, but they were generally literate only in materials sanctioned by state Republican culture, which could include (like today) apparently daring material of certain types.
In the United States, late 19th century and early 20th century public education in urban areas was usually intended primarily to socialize children into efficient factory workers. One can argue that was necessary in order to process disparate immigrant populations into Americans, and of course literacy is useful and necessary for many purposes, but since American culture was at the same time being remade by the elites, and changing from democratic, morally-based one to something very different, education very often for most people functioned not as a liberating but as a restraining force, generally speaking.
Minor correction: re: the WWI era lacking any analogue mathematical calculators?
There have been many mechanical calculators used, some QUITE widely, from the time of the Antikythera mechanism right on through the pinwheel calculators still widely used in USSR through the 1970s called "iron feliks" after Feliks Dzerzehnsky who championed their distribution to the proletariat... There were several such devices in common use, particularly in factory settings- Labor saving devices. Google on these mathematicians & engineers for more: Leibniz, Pascal, Müller, Napier and of course, Charles Babbage.
Great article otherwise... And I'm an example of the late stage decay and senility/disruption of USA educational system in several ways myself. Two parents with PhDs, largely self taught when the officially authorized path didn't go well...
Thanks, I had run across the Curta before, as I've read everything William Gibson has written. I left it out because the author specifically commented on WWI era lacking calculators- The Curta was conceived of in the inter war period but only mass produced post WWII.
"Meanwhile, of course, and unlike the US, cultures such as Russia, China and India retain widespread support for education at all levels."
Does Todd or someone else offer information to that effect? I don't know about China and India, but all of your criticisms concerning modern Western education are identical to the complaints I often hear about modern Russian education. Perhaps our situation is less bad, but I think it is broadly similar. After all, our education system has almost always tried to copy that of the West for the last three hundred years, and I would argue our modern society and culture are strongly Westernised as well, rhetorical attempts to distance ourselves from the West notwithstanding.
Similar things have been said about Korean and Japanese education systems (and my Chinese contacts say the same thing about China). I suppose one thing that distracts people is that all these countries direct a lot more people into sciences and their science graduates are often very good. (I don't know about "how good." The very best Western science grads in the West are as good as any from these countries--but we are talking about really few people here. The above average to good science grads from the East are (maybe above 60th percentile up to 99th? Very rough guess.), I think better than their Western counterparts. But a lot of science grads from middle and below are just as bad--although there are a lot more science grads in the East, which complicates the picture somewhat.
At least during the cold war there was also a language barrier as the journals in the East were in Russian. On top of that much was classified as potentially of military use. Or as a professor in mathematics, in a Scandinavian country, once put it to me: "First we have an idea, then we check which Russian guy had it in the 70s."
Nature index of "research output" (link:https://www.nature.com/nature-index/institution-outputs/generate/all/global/all) suggests that Chinese institutions rank high in research output in sciences. How meaningful this is, I'm not sure. I don't know their methodology and I can tell you from firsthand experience that the modal academic research is basically a filler--something done for prestige, career, and grant applications, with only secondary considerations for advancing knowledge (actually useful and interesting research is in a fairly small minority.)
My dad graduated UC Berkeley as a Chemical Engineer in 1940. One of the graduation requirements was that he translate and summarize a technical paper written in one of French, German or Russian, his choice. Those were the societies dominating manufacturing at the time.
Not to mention Western soft power. Oligarchs want trophy properties in Paris or Milan and not Karachi. Culturati crave plaudits from western cultural institutions. Even a collector of Asian art is more gratified by a positive mention in London or NYC than a similar perk from Shanghai.
Yep - and while that remains the case, universities and even education bureaucrats are going to keep reproducing the same Western education system, with all of its listed flaws. Not even because of any conscious ideological reasons; just because "this is how it's done in advanced countries" (and is therefore prestigious).
Well, yes and no. For now, at least, those countries are still safer, but this advantage has taken a hit or two since 2022, as they have showed a greater willingness to play loose with their norms as far as Russia and Russian citizens are concerned. On the other hand, I don't think you should underestimate the enormous cultural prestige that the West (or more specifically, Western Europe) still has among many of the more affluent people in Russia. Much of our intellectual elite is still more Eurocentric than their European colleagues (if only because the latter are under more social pressure to at least pretend to dislike Eurocentrism). Those tastes are transmitted to other parts of respectable society, though with some more resistance now.
Ha, I read War and Peace in high school. In my defence, it was in the school program and I was ill at the time, so had nothing better to do. I was later told that pupils are informally expected to read just enough of it to come up with plausible answers to questions.
A lot of people here - including teachers, who would know - complain that our education system has degraded considerably. It certainly has been unmoored and became more incoherent in a lot of ways since the 1980s, due to ideological collapse and loss of financial support. Attempts to repair it have been pretty haphazard at best, though things did inevitably improve compared to the 1990s. Higher education in particular suffered from a sustained effort to make it profitable, quantifiable and Bologna Process-compatible (at least that last part is now mercifully ended).
On the other hand, what remains of the old system might still be better than the education system in many Western countries. I know from personal experience that even the 90s Russian school program was much more demanding than that of Israel, at least. People who have lived in other Western countries (like Australia) and returned here often report something similar.
To sum up, I think we have many of the same problems, though perhaps it's not as bad here.
How strange are the patterns of resemblance between The West, the Anglosphere in particular, in this point in History and the Qing Dynasty in her days of spiral downward in the midst of the 19th century.
Just as in the final decades of the Dynasty the Western countries also have serious drug problems. Problems that are even more severe than the ones that plague Qing China since in their case, not only both large chunks of the populations of the U.S. and Europe are now hook up on drugs of some kind, but the drug money itself has turned vital for the well-being of the financial system too. Now is the PMC that is echoing the late literati class of imperial China. Of course, the similarities are only superficial.
Nevertheless, in China's history the sentiment of discontentment within society and specially the feeling that the old traditional path of enrichment through merit in Education, by passing the imperial examinations and acquiring office, had become meaningless partly fed the fury of one of the greatest mass revolts of the period, the Taiping Rebellion. Later on, as the power slipped out of their hands the Qing ruling class and the literati that served them turned into an even more tight and smaller group, a group of highly educated people, totally corrupted, severely weaken and completely detached from reality until their very end.
I find myself reflected in this article. I am 26 years old, born in Spain, in what we can call a "middle class" family. I've went to school and highschool until 18, and from there to my 23 years I never read a single book.
Fortunately, I recognized at that moment (my 23) that I was becoming, literally, stupid. I was unable to remember what I learned on the school, and I was not satisfied with a life of consume and evasion. At that moment, I decided (ignoring, of course, determinism and flattering my vanity) to start an autodidact study, and I can say that, basically, I started from zero with a huge difficulty in attention and a tremendous lack of understanding. It took for me almost a year to understand how to learn and which was the purpose of learning; and with these I mean: think and reflect, more than simply read information for trying to own knowledge as a mean, but mainly as an end. I think also that without philosophy (Platon and Aristotle, logic and epistemology, humanism and ethics) I've never could do this.
That was the best decision of my life, and every day, I spent hours in lecture, thinking and writting; but always, for my own profit and pleasure. I will never put a foot on colleges or universities.
Knowledge, besides sociologicall aspects that determine it, contributes to a better quality of life. It seems to me that make emphasis on these is the only way for arrive to people like I used to be. Besides all the sociologicall aspects that are in the article, I think that has been a lost of the value of education as an end in the generations that preceded me. In other words, we can say that socially, the knowledge has lost his value as a reinforcer; and without that reinforcer effect, is very hard that people spent effort (because as worst is your state of knowledge in a moment, hardest and more aversive is to turn it around) in adquire it.
PD: Sorry for my english, I've never write since highschool.
This is an excellent comment.
If you wish to improve your written and verbal English abilities, read these essays aloud. Not by other writers, just Aurelien! I am a native English speaker, and find that I have lost verbal ability with age and lack of conversation (due to Covid). Aurelien's essays are smooth, clean English and I read them aloud as my personal speech therapy.
Thanks for the advice. It is not my goal to achieve a high level in english, because I used to read in spanish, and technology facilitate us a good and minimall translation. However, sometimes I like to make the effort, and I can apreciate the good writting of Aurelien (the last article is very well written). Mostly, what more care for me, is the transmission of clear and deep knowledge, combinated with the pleasure of reading and writting, and Aurelien achieves that.
It is curios, now that you mentioned, the huge difference between the own reflection or writting and the speech with others. The clarity and good expression that I find in some topics when I think or writte about them alone, is not the same the one that I find when I talk (unfortunately, this is anecdoticall and does not happen often) with others. That's why, the intellectual products are superior, in a sense, respect to the author.
Thanks for your comment, it make me write ;)
I was based in Sana'a, the capital of Yemen, at the end of 98. One evening I was sitting in a cafe. A man who I had not met before took a seat opposite me and we conversed in English. After a while, he took out a work book and asked me if I would help him with his English, which I agreed to do. It quickly became apparent that we were communicating at cross purposes. He possessed a far more developed understanding of the building blocks of my native tongue. I found myself in the ridiculous position of being an English speaker from a very young age, with absolutely no formal understanding of the various tenses and clauses, or sentence construction. Nobody made an attempt to teach me anything like this at school. I think this was to my detriment when it came to learning other languages.
When I was percolating through the education system - a decent primary, followed by an extremely violent comprehensive school - the old guard of teachers were ageing out and being replaced by a more liberalised strain. Many of the outgoing teachers were frightening, often damaged individuals, but I learned a lot from them, things that I still remember. With the newer teachers it sometimes seemed like we were being taught bullet points - this fact when presented in the proper context will earn you one mark in an essay written on the subject in your final exam. It was a joyless way to learn; one that pandered to a system of metrics while devaluing education as something of worth that would enrich your life.
A wonderful story, artfully missing out the actual capitalist ruling class that actually instituted the schools (to train workers) and the universities (to train the salaried and the propagandists). The PMC are simply their servants, but t is a brilliant ruse for the capitalist ruling class to make themselves invisible behind the PMC. All culture and no political economy. With automation taking away much of the complications of working class jobs, and many of those jobs shipped abroad, the ownership class decided that it was much more important to dumb down and separate through "identity" etc. the working class than teach them higher skills. Educated minds get to thinking about how societies really work and how to change that, dumbed down ones don't.
Gabriel Rockhill very thoroughly covers the mind-worm which is the non-communist "critical" theory that the ruling class pushed, thoroughly ungrounded from materialism, that has also greatly infested the body educational. Perhaps a bit of blowback there.
I have been meaning to write exactly that. All this hate towards the PMC who in reality is not the class that rules us, it's indeed funny. The US used to have a mobile population that could go from rags to riches. That's all gone, the American dream is gone. We are now ruled by a global elite who controls pretty much everything through the employment of capital and the PMC actually works for that elite. The American elite right now is no different from the European aristocracy. Their children are trust fund babies, they will never need to work in their lives. The PMC has to work for a living. The PMC does not despise the blue collar worker as Aurelien so mistakenly announces. Actually, there's a great awakening and there's not a single day that passes that the PMC does not start to identify itself even more with the blue collars. We are no different from them, because we do not have the capital. We only have our work force. I may not do physical work, but I rent my brain to the company and they pay me wages in return. In Aurelien's texts there seems to be some resentment towards that higher middle class (maybe because he came from a blue collar background?) I don't know, but right now all I want to see is the revolution. Take down those self serving clowns in government that suck the life out of us. Agree that talking is easy as there's no identifiable leadership nor ideology to prop up the masses. But long is gone the time that I thought I had more in common with the elite than with the populace. We won't have jobs, we won't have an easy life, that time is gone, hang them high. Eat the rich.
That's facts. You can be PMC and feel yourself getting wet in the same precarious ocean as the rest. Some have savings or home equity or family to draw on between jobs but many don't and instead have health insurance from work, a mortgage and other debt, and kids so that a couple of months of unemployment and they'll start to lose it. If being prepared means realistically taking stock of that then you should be ready to eat the rich too.
Some of my professional-class relatives played that game in Russia over a hundred years ago. Leaving everyone else aside, the results for them as people were uneven; while some of them did get pretty good jobs out of it, quite a few of them later ended up being killed by the people they brought into power. The problem with "the revolution", if it happens, is that those supporting it might end up getting hanged or eaten themselves.
Such revolutions are last resorts when all the alternatives are worse. We can radically reform the system, i.e. discipline the capitalist class and remove the excessive power over society that concentrated wealth today has without revolution. It was done before in the USA. The alternatives to that are worse.
You mean the New Deal? I agree that it is a preferable solution (it has its limits, but so does a revolution, and our experience suggests a revolution can come with a lot of collateral damage; the rich aren't the ones who actually got eaten in Russia, and in this case I mean that literally). The problem is that the New Deal required the participation of intelligent, socially-minded people among the elite. It was like enlightened despotism for a representative democracy (or, as some call it, elective oligarchy). Without the right people at the top, it can't be done. Not saying it's impossible for the US today, but I'm not sure who could do it.
Agreed. But the fact that Trump was elected president against all the efforts of both parties and the deep state shows that voters still matter and do turn out when the have an alternative, not that he was a good one.
My response article to Aurelien's (linked already twice in these comments) ends as follows. I don't think reform is easy but we need to be realistic about the alternatives.
> "So what’s it going to be? We can either discipline international capital and reinvest in democracy, as FDR did, or we can allow authoritarians to exploit the coming nationalist moment, as various Europeans did mid 20th c.
> "Who won the Western neoliberal game 1979-2022? Not the PMC. The real enemy lies beyond them (see David Harvey in A Brief History of Neoliberalism) and our only chance now is broad-based popular class power that takes control back from the international oligarchs."
what if where we're heading(basically, some form of feudalism) is what's the normal? and what happened in the last 4-500 years was just a historical aberation?
Because from a historical PoV, it sure looks to be the case.
1. it's not very hard to have high social mobility if from a backwater(NW Europe was a backwater if you average the last 3-5k years) you luck out and basically x20 your land mass. Land is power, right? x20 land should be very inflationary ;)
2. SU is dead. And won't be resurrected anytime soon outside of MSM. In my opinion that was most important thing of the 20th century.
I'm talking about SU in the form that was imagined in the W Europe/US. Not about the actual real state; which was obviously completely different then how it was imagined in the West. Though even the actual state was important. As it had enough power to help usher a revolution in the West if things were boiling enough. It also had the desire to do that; and tried multiple times to do precisely that.
Would a New Deal happen without the fear of another URSS(ok, fear of "communists"/something like another "russian revolution"). Sure, probably it was a combo of the shock from '29/a good part of the old elite going broke + "communism"("happened there, why wouldn't it happen here too if we don't do something?")
same thing for the post ww2 reconstruction of Europe. When else in 3k+ years of written history do you have another instance of a great power rebuilding another great power it just went to war with? Because I know of zero such circumstances. But fear of "a communist take over"... did wonders ;)
Look what happened after the Cold War. Did anyone try to rebuild something in EE/Russia? No. It was the usual free for all. Vae victis.
Putin's Russia might be the successor state of SU on paper. But in reality it has nothing to do with SU. If it somehow has an ideology(doesn't seem to have one), it's deeply neoliberal.
So... why would be western elites scared of anything? Almost no revolutions succeeded without external support. And it doesn't seem to be any other great power sporting a different ideology than neoliberalism/"soft feudalism"/"tehno feudalism"(? - for a lack of a better word).
p.s - https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2021/05/the-brazilianization-of-the-world/ - and probably another 10k articles harping on the same idea.
I'm not the one proposing literal revolution. Talking in those terms can be useful rhetorically but I don't think we are anywhere near conditions so bad that we need such a dangerous and chaotic succession process, although I quite admire the janissary revolution in 1974 Portugal.
National elites are always vulnerable. Western national elites today in particular aren't just vulnerable to the people withdrawing their consent to be governed by them, their devotion to the art of kissing the behinds of international oligarchs and the competition among nations to do the kissing means they can lose patronage from above too.
Well, yes! Revolutionaries are usually the first against the wall, because they are fundamentally unhappy and are guaranteed to agitate against actions of the Revolutionary Council. If you are in the streets and a revolution actually happens, it is time to disappear.
My definition of the PMC: the people who run things, but do not own things. The people who "own" large houses with large mortgages paid by large salaries. They don't actually own much. A subset of the PMC is the "Butler Class": accountants and lawyers for the rich.
Exactly right. My response which I put on my own Substack agrees. But there's another sleight of hand: conservatives are just as guilty. Their hands are all over the sell off on the Commons. It's easy to look at and repudiate the excess of the PMC since they are so florid but these are just symptoms.
https://thefsb.substack.com/p/response-to-aureliens-the-revolt
'the PMC are simply their servants' - this makes it seem rather neutral this servant status - the PMC, if one is to equate them with the 'middle class' - the bureaucracy, the administration, the law, the police, the media, the army...
...If one is to judge this subclass or caste by their material role in society it is to facilitate and to police the working class on behalf of the dominant capitalist class - it would appear, historically, that such have aspirations to meld upwards, if possible, and at the lower end fear decline into the working class
As such generally speaking there are two classes which are judged to be autonomous and in permament competition, one does not accord a seperate class status to such a 'middle class' who carry out orders nada mas
Aurelian refuses to discuss in terms of class, which may be thought to limit and to overpersonalise his descriptions of the PMC
One thing that I always found puzzling about "education" is that it serves two purposes at odds with each other: first, it promotes "knowledge," independent of cultural-social context; second, it promotes and indoctrinates various social myths that, in principle, reinforce the cohesion of the society where it is located. (I always thought J H Newman had one of better expositions on the balance between the two goals--but while also pointing to its weakness without meaning to).
Social myths are built on shared beliefs about the world and the place of the "tribe" in that world (which presupposes that the "tribe" self-evidently exists in the first place, which everyone in that tribe recognizes). These are almost invariably and empirically false: profession of faith stuff--filioque clause or whatever. Understanding is not required: you believe because that is what you do to show your tribal solidarity. But if the educational institutions are to provide an understanding of "untethered" knowledge, whose epistemological basis is "empirical" in nature, you have to adjust the "official" myths (or, indoctrinate people in a different way) so that the two are not really in conflict--at least, not as far as the tribal members are concerned. (One of fascinating and oft replicated result in sociology of science is that US Evangelicals know and "accept" evolution as "science," especially those who are better educated--and Evangelicals in US are, on average, better educated than non-Evangelicals--but they simply do not "personally believe" it, whatever that really means. You can get at this by subtly rephrasing survey questions--Dan Kahan has done good bit of pioneering work on this. But is this all that different? I might "believe" that the Consecrated Host is literal body and blood of Christ, but also that that is independent of the chemistry and chalk it all up to mysterium fidei.) But, the catch, again, is that you need a shared "faith" to sustain that "miracle."
I guess this is what brings us back to the point that Aurelien is raising: the schizophrenic role of the university, of both promoting "empirically true" knowledge and social indoctrination of the "official truths" can be reconciled only if there's a shared faith about the collective "tribal identity." The first context, of promoting "empirical knowledge" is on the wane. The second context, of social indoctrination is still very much in place, but its paradoxical coexistence with "empirical knowledge" rests on a shaky grounds, because we lack a shared collective identity. Rather, the official indoctrination is more about how we don't have one and that we should just glorify ourselves and whatever we make up as our alleged identity, except when they offend the self-appointed masters of the universe.
I don't think the problem with this education system is not so much that we are "overproducing" elites. What we are doing is that we are producing "elites" who are not fit to be elites in terms of practical knowledge independent of professing the faith. Worse, of course, is that this profession of the faith is itself unmoored from any tribal basis: if you are professing faith in a tribal grouping that people at large feel a sense of belonging to, even that falls on deaf ears. Is it any wonder that those who grow tire of the official "profession of faith" are turning to more "extreme" faiths that at least appeal to their sense of where they fit in the universe better?
"These are almost invariably and empirically false: profession of faith stuff--filioque clause or whatever."
Even better than false - empirically unverifiable, but held to be true.
On what I think is a related note... Before the 1917 revolution, the biggest driver of education in the Russian Empire was the Orthodox Church, with some support and encouragement from the government. In theory, it was of course supposed to produce good Christians and loyal subjects, but it also provided a high quality secular education. It produced a lot of anticlerical or outright atheistic revolutionaries, most famously Stalin, but also fair number of well-educated priests and pious laymen. The indoctrination angle was certainly intended, but I guess this outcome made it more or less a wash.
Once in power, the Bolsheviks also proved very keen on indoctrination. Their early schools after the revolution were extremely simplified as far as "empirical" education goes (they did cover the basics, but they threw out specialist teachers, for example), but they had an even better reach than the Church. Between this approach and post-civil war chaos, this very early Soviet education was very haphazard, but their indoctrination was almost unavoidable and at least somewhat effective. (In fairness, they did improve substantially under Stalin as far as "empirical knowledge" went.)
I’ve thought a lot about the ‘dumbing down’ of the general populace in the West over the last few years or generations, and wondered why it’s happening and whether it’s intentional, but could never come to a conclusion. But I think you nail it here, it’s like an attempt by our elite to create a Neo-feudal society built upon a heap of stupid, distracted serfs. ‘Don’t worry about anything, we know best, just keep consuming, consuming, consuming, watching Netflix, porn and ordering food delivery’.
And while I’m a big fan of Turchin’s books and his elite overproduction theory, I think calling the PMC an elite is a misnomer. I would kill for an elite. These people are pathetic and stupid though. Their priorities are basically about making LGBT+ people feel good and extracting as much wealth as possible out of nations and companies, with the same people cycling between the 2.
The European elite and underclasses that went to war in 1914 were truly great people. Ernst Junger came from a modest middle class background but was the epitome of the warrior-philosopher. Say what you want about an aristocracy like in Britain or the Kaiserreich, but those men answered the call. They were first up and over the trenches and died at higher rates than the men they were leading. How many future geniuses, inventors, Great Men etc were slaughtered on the killing fields of France, Belgium and the Ostfront.
With few exceptions, most of the PMC haven’t done military service. The children of the Golden Generation during the Vietnam War were a bunch of draft dodgers for the most part. The idea of sacrificing for a higher goal is absurd to these people. And like Reagan’s trickle down economics BS, without a real elite as an example to follow, the rest of us are left with the same attitude, ‘why bother?’.
The West in general and its elites in particular, in and out of MSM, government and the military, live in a world increasingly consumed by symbol, spectacle and abstraction. Not only that, but they confuse wish-fulfillment with reality. Decide that you're going to identify as a different gender, race, ethnicity, hell, decide that you're a member of a different species and woe betide anyone who doesn't go along with the charade. They might even get themselves "cancelled".
Hell, even the consequences of their (symbolic) actions are themselves largely symbolic. Melvin didn't get to put on a TED talk because someone dug up an old Tweet of his and now he's "literal Hitler" for a while.
For that matter, the truly Great and Good rarely even face those kinds of consequences. They can cause institutions to fail everywhere they go - but as long as they parrot today's approved platitudes, they glide from internship to government sinecure to think tank to academia to financial services to corporate board to to consulting gig to MSM Talking Head, sometimes more than one simultaneously. Most probably never having had a 9-5 job, much less done farm or factory work, in their lives. These days, they may never even physically show up to work, ever, but their bank accounts rarely seem to reflect this.
They can even engage in outright fraud, but a big enough fish will only pay a fine, a portion of his ill-gotten gains. Meanwhile, he remains as free as a bird, and probably doesn't even face social ostracism. Last I checked, Jon Corzine is not on the naughty list of the people who matter.
Since results don't matter and there are few consequences for losing, even for catastrophe, everything becomes a matter of spin. All problems can be solved with better P.R., and there is no greater triumph than when some newscaster recites that glib talking point you just coined or when your FB post went viral, your instagram noticed by the right kind of influencer.
In other words, winning is a matter of successful symbol manipulation. Speaking of spin, virtue signaling is an obsession, even unto rank hypocrisy, and the Davos Set think nothing of flying a private jet to a conference where they can congratulate themselves on their commitment to stopping climate change. Again, if there are to be any consequences, then those are for the little people to deal with.
Even in their dwindling contact with the physical world, the elites live in a world of wish-fulfillment. Push a button and whatever food or whatever else you want is brought to your door by some peon, paid for seamlessly by some electrons exchanged between banks that may not even have a physical location within a thousand miles of your location, if they have locations at all. Hell, you can even get laid via internet, just swipe right on the lucky profile. Everything is taken care of in the background, your credit card billed and airline miles accumulated automatically and the food or the girl just show up. Somehow. By Uber, I guess. Mundane questions like "How do I feed the kittens this week and pay for school supplies and make the rent?" never come into the equation.
These are people who confuse their fantasies with reality to the point where they actually believe their own press releases. They give an order and it happens. They proclaim their puppets in Kabul to be wise and stable technocrats, their well-trained military striding from triumph to triumph and So Let It Be Done, So Let It Be Written. "So let it be written" - that's the word, that's all that need be done and the little people just somehow make it happen. For sheer lack of contact with the real world, these people make Louis XVI look like a medieval gong farmer or a pygmy tribesman by comparison.
Contrast the Taliban. Symbol, spectacle and abstraction mean very little to them. Doordash doesn't operate in their area and if a Talib wants a vegan option, he'll have to cater it himself. It has probably never occurred to a Talib that he could cancel his enemies simply by digging up their old tweets, sent under a long discarded Twitter ID, and he doesn't have time for that, anyway. He lives in the world of concrete and material things, he thinks nothing of killing and in his world, there are bullets waiting to kill him quite literally dead and transport him to a very earthly and very earthy sort of paradise.
You can't wish those things away, your credit cards are no good and probably rifa, anyway, and the bullet flying towards him isn't concerned with word games, his struggle session to root out unconscious racism and cannot be reasoned with or convinced to bother someone less important.
The world of American elites collided with the world of the Taliban and got its ass kicked. Biden and his crew cannot deal with this, because that kind of reality does not select for success in symbol manipulation, any more than skill at football selects for an ability to do math problems.
The clownish Western response to the COVID is similar. The virus can't be negotiated with, can't be bought off, can't be distracted, and is unimpressed with you and how highly you may think of yourself.
As you may know, I've seen quite a lot of both worlds, I've lived in barns and crouched under the table in the room where the decisions were made, so I think I understand both mindsets pretty well. I prefer freedom to regular meals.
Speaking of, I got some mice to catch, or otherwise, I will surely be going hungry.
If my understanding of the term is correct, the PMC themselves aren't an elite. They're literally managers, intermediaries between the elite and everyone else. The elite is some more or less nebulous group of high-level politicians, senior bureaucrats and the super-rich; in other words, people with the necessary political pull to make decisions on the national level. Whether they form a particularly cohesive group, and whether they have any sense of mutual interest besides pure self-aggrandisement, is harder to say from the outside (though I can make a guess).
It’s possible you’re correct and I misunderstand Aurelien. My understanding of the PMC was somewhat similar to what James Burnham’s set out in ‘The Managerial Revolution’ that our former elite has been replaced with a visionless managerial class, who bring nothing new to the table but are inheritors of a system that they have only a scant understanding of.
I think the PMC are best understood as the kapos of capitalism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kapo
Simultaneously victims and oppressors, with the morality of their actions being deeply ambiguous as a result.
I talk of the PMC as a "caste" and not a class, because elements within them have different economic functions. The manager of a software consultancy, a university professor of politics, a senior partner in a commercial law firm and a freelance journalist all share the same broad political function with respect to the Inner Party, and probably share similar opinions on most issues, but their economic function is different in each case.
you know what all those 'truly great' european elite of 1914 managed to produce? 1914. I'd say their record ain't all that great.
"Hybrid islamo-wokist party" has got to be one of the most goofy things I've read in a while. For all its faults, LFI is the only party that even tries to represent the values of the traditional left on the French political scene. The rest are Atlanticist pawns or dregs of the Vichy right.
What holds up the Earth? Markets. It's markets all the way down.
Western education now consists of consumers and stakeholders rather than the quaint concept of students and teachers.
I never conflated education with intelligence. School does not make you more intelligent. It should make you more knowledgeable. It should confer the ability to assess a problem and make better use of one's innate intelligence to strive for a solution.
When knowledge now defies the reality that exists what exactly is the purpose of education?
The modern idea that everything is subject to economics, as the driver of all things, is a myth. Economics exist, of course, but deny our humanity; it is a utilitarian idea that can only denigrate humanity in the long run. It's primacy in modern culture is a long-term negative, not a positive.
I would say the purpose of education is to enliven the human soul. Others may disagree.
The HBD crowd is right about education - it does not matter much. Gregory Cochran, Razib Khan, Joseph Bronski, Steve Sailer, Charles Murray, to name a few, provide tons of evidence. Smart people are like productive employees - they can do much more for a short period of time, and people who are interested in a subject have no issues finding information about it nowadays. Todd's right, the West is doomed. The fools at the top do not like meritocracy.
See, this is where I disagree. Oh, sure, if it's a discrete piece of information, then you can find it. Picking up a complex skill is a different matter entirely. Take the ability to, for example, conduct a science experiment and keep a lab notebook, or write a piece of code that doesn't merely "work" (in the sense that the computer does what it's supposed to) but that other people can understand and repurpose for different tasks, or speak a foreign language without sounding like Tarzan. Lots of legitimately smart people will fail at such tasks if they are not given proper guidance and feedback.
Oh, and then there are things that will quite literally kill people if you do them incorrectly. I don't know about you, but I'd rather not be operated on by a "self-taught" surgeon.
I'm admittedly leery about the HBD crowd these days, but they (along with, say, Russian reactionaries) do have point when it comes to education. I wouldn't say it's useless (literacy is useful and most people can be taught to read and write; some other things can be imparted that way too), but it is definitely limited in what it can do without students who are interested in learning. Higher education is naturally worse in this regard. Interested people can do well with it, or without it. People who just want a degree to meet formal requirements might obtain that and little else.
One thing I have heard about the Chinese school system is that they have completely dismissed (if they have ever used) the Soviet school "equal treatment regardless of individual ability" approach in favour of separating pupils based on their established capabilities and inclinations. That sounded like a promising approach to education; certainly better than the Western/Russian one, which seems too mired in abstract notions.
The Russian example is not true. I got to befriend two Russians at business school, a man and a woman. Once, talking to the woman she mentioned that the guy had gone to a very prestigious school for highly intelligent people, something that she didn't do. He was very good at math indeed, and abstract thinking etc. The Russians produce very good engineers, mathematicians, etc, (chess players?), they couldn't get to that in a mass approach like you mentioned. Quite the opposite, we get the stupid mass approach in the US.
There's definitely some nuance here. We do have some elite/specialist institutions, and some pipelines that help talented people get there, but the majority of the population goes to "stupid mass" schools in which the individual approach is usually lacking. Or so I'm told by people familiar with them; I haven't been in one for a while and only have second-hand information. Those schools might be good enough for people who don't have significant learning disabilities and are sufficiently motivated to study. Perhaps they are better than the American ones. They do seem to have shared pathologies, though.
I have often commented here about how I see a political economic motive behind the PMC, that I see its rise to power as a downstream consequence of international economic power. This time I put my response in an article on my own Substack. We agree on much, I think, Aurelien, including, I believe, contempt for PMC aesthetics, opportunism, vacuousness, and hypocrisy. I hope you'll read it.
https://thefsb.substack.com/p/response-to-aureliens-the-revolt
I have read two Emmanuel Todd books. "The Explanation of Ideology: Family Structure & Social Systems" -as far as I can tell his bonkers theory that family structure predicts political structure doesn't work. "After the Empire" seemed designed to appeal to the "not in our name" types; it didn't work out the way he said at all, and is rather comical in hindsight. Calling out the Soviet system in the 70s was a good trick though.
The educational system is absurdly dumbed down; my boomer parents learned Latin, Anglo-Saxon and pre-calc in a very working class high school. How many PhDs in English Lit were required to read Beowulf? Probably none.
I attribute the madness of the PMC to the slow down of technological progress. If chip making lithography hadn't improved as it did, the world would look a lot like it did when I was a kid in the 70s. Since we no longer have technological progress we have to have "social progress" like euthenasia and letting kids who can't choose their bedtimes choose what kind of genitals they'd prefer. Most of fooling around in computers isn't actually very economically productive; it barely shows up in productivity stats (Solow's paradox). It does keep a lot of people busy though, and things would be a lot worse without it.
"as far as I can tell his bonkers theory that family structure predicts political structure doesn't work"
Just out of curiosity: why do you say that? I haven't read the book you refer to. Then only one of Todd's books that I have read is his latest one (the one that our host mentioned). And he talked a bit about family structure and political systems in it. He claims that there's a remarkable overlap between countries in which communism took hold, and those in which the traditional peasant family was "authoritarian and egalitarian" (authoritarian from father to son, but egalitarian between brothers). It sounds interesting. Do you have counterexamples? I mean, I suppose you could cite former East Germany, but that was an occupied country, which is a little different.
His idea is stuck in the 1980s; the people and family structures are still the same, the governmental system isn't. Alentejo for example voted for Chega (the trump party) a lot more than it did the commies. Russia is no longer communist, same family structure, etc.
I think you have to consider technological development alongside everything else. The trend line starts to dip as mass TV becomes available in the west. Distraction for the adults (it's easier to be happy with your station once you're sedated by TV and now internet all day) and simply less reading, thinking and intellectual challenge for the children.
And then there's another aspect of the TV and now social media, the dumbing down of discourse - the vox pop, one liner culture that goes against deep thinking and any effort at rational analysis. Mass media must denigrate real education and hold up a shrunken substitute in its place to maintain its legitimacy.
Coupled with permissive culture, the lack of interest with putting children through the grinder of a rigorous education (which is what has saved the east asians and also upper classes here), and the marketised move from education to credentialisation and you have a breakdown of standards.
It's an unintentional return to feudal times playing out. While state school teachers are subject to strict surveillance and frequently changing educational theories and methods, many of the elite private schools in the UK now either use the International Baccalaureate (quite literally a global elite education standard) or are creating their own examinations and curriculums which is a return to the 19th century.
My background is that of a high-school math teacher in the 1970s through 2010. My experience was, that my students had an increasingly shorter and shorter attention span. Pedagogical literature told teachers not to attempt to discuss a topic for more than 20 minutes. Finally, my colleagues advised one another to perform more like television performers.
Well said,
A minor point or two, and not in disagreement: in late 19th and early twentieth century France, the purpose of education was, as you point out, explicitly ideological social engineering aimed at the destruction of the still majority (geographically-speaking) non-French communities (Breton, Occitan, German, Basque etc.) and anyone else who was in the way: aimed at the creation of a streamlined, standard population socialized into urban-oriented and Republican values and thus more efficiently administered and used for the purposes of the state. Intent and practice do bear comparison to later Bolshevik and Chinese Communist practice. People of course did become literate good citizens, but they were generally literate only in materials sanctioned by state Republican culture, which could include (like today) apparently daring material of certain types.
In the United States, late 19th century and early 20th century public education in urban areas was usually intended primarily to socialize children into efficient factory workers. One can argue that was necessary in order to process disparate immigrant populations into Americans, and of course literacy is useful and necessary for many purposes, but since American culture was at the same time being remade by the elites, and changing from democratic, morally-based one to something very different, education very often for most people functioned not as a liberating but as a restraining force, generally speaking.
Minor correction: re: the WWI era lacking any analogue mathematical calculators?
There have been many mechanical calculators used, some QUITE widely, from the time of the Antikythera mechanism right on through the pinwheel calculators still widely used in USSR through the 1970s called "iron feliks" after Feliks Dzerzehnsky who championed their distribution to the proletariat... There were several such devices in common use, particularly in factory settings- Labor saving devices. Google on these mathematicians & engineers for more: Leibniz, Pascal, Müller, Napier and of course, Charles Babbage.
Great article otherwise... And I'm an example of the late stage decay and senility/disruption of USA educational system in several ways myself. Two parents with PhDs, largely self taught when the officially authorized path didn't go well...
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curta
for the iconic Curta calculator.
@Jams O'Donnell
Thanks, I had run across the Curta before, as I've read everything William Gibson has written. I left it out because the author specifically commented on WWI era lacking calculators- The Curta was conceived of in the inter war period but only mass produced post WWII.
"Meanwhile, of course, and unlike the US, cultures such as Russia, China and India retain widespread support for education at all levels."
Does Todd or someone else offer information to that effect? I don't know about China and India, but all of your criticisms concerning modern Western education are identical to the complaints I often hear about modern Russian education. Perhaps our situation is less bad, but I think it is broadly similar. After all, our education system has almost always tried to copy that of the West for the last three hundred years, and I would argue our modern society and culture are strongly Westernised as well, rhetorical attempts to distance ourselves from the West notwithstanding.
Similar things have been said about Korean and Japanese education systems (and my Chinese contacts say the same thing about China). I suppose one thing that distracts people is that all these countries direct a lot more people into sciences and their science graduates are often very good. (I don't know about "how good." The very best Western science grads in the West are as good as any from these countries--but we are talking about really few people here. The above average to good science grads from the East are (maybe above 60th percentile up to 99th? Very rough guess.), I think better than their Western counterparts. But a lot of science grads from middle and below are just as bad--although there are a lot more science grads in the East, which complicates the picture somewhat.
Wouldn’t this be reflected in scientific journals? I was under the impression that US universities dominate publication of research.
At least during the cold war there was also a language barrier as the journals in the East were in Russian. On top of that much was classified as potentially of military use. Or as a professor in mathematics, in a Scandinavian country, once put it to me: "First we have an idea, then we check which Russian guy had it in the 70s."
Nature index of "research output" (link:https://www.nature.com/nature-index/institution-outputs/generate/all/global/all) suggests that Chinese institutions rank high in research output in sciences. How meaningful this is, I'm not sure. I don't know their methodology and I can tell you from firsthand experience that the modal academic research is basically a filler--something done for prestige, career, and grant applications, with only secondary considerations for advancing knowledge (actually useful and interesting research is in a fairly small minority.)
My dad graduated UC Berkeley as a Chemical Engineer in 1940. One of the graduation requirements was that he translate and summarize a technical paper written in one of French, German or Russian, his choice. Those were the societies dominating manufacturing at the time.
Not to mention Western soft power. Oligarchs want trophy properties in Paris or Milan and not Karachi. Culturati crave plaudits from western cultural institutions. Even a collector of Asian art is more gratified by a positive mention in London or NYC than a similar perk from Shanghai.
Yep - and while that remains the case, universities and even education bureaucrats are going to keep reproducing the same Western education system, with all of its listed flaws. Not even because of any conscious ideological reasons; just because "this is how it's done in advanced countries" (and is therefore prestigious).
Well, yes and no. For now, at least, those countries are still safer, but this advantage has taken a hit or two since 2022, as they have showed a greater willingness to play loose with their norms as far as Russia and Russian citizens are concerned. On the other hand, I don't think you should underestimate the enormous cultural prestige that the West (or more specifically, Western Europe) still has among many of the more affluent people in Russia. Much of our intellectual elite is still more Eurocentric than their European colleagues (if only because the latter are under more social pressure to at least pretend to dislike Eurocentrism). Those tastes are transmitted to other parts of respectable society, though with some more resistance now.
I guess Abramovich though that too.
So all that Russian property wasn't appropriated without legal process?
From the point of view of the average frustrated non-western oligarch, it should matter.
Ha, I read War and Peace in high school. In my defence, it was in the school program and I was ill at the time, so had nothing better to do. I was later told that pupils are informally expected to read just enough of it to come up with plausible answers to questions.
A lot of people here - including teachers, who would know - complain that our education system has degraded considerably. It certainly has been unmoored and became more incoherent in a lot of ways since the 1980s, due to ideological collapse and loss of financial support. Attempts to repair it have been pretty haphazard at best, though things did inevitably improve compared to the 1990s. Higher education in particular suffered from a sustained effort to make it profitable, quantifiable and Bologna Process-compatible (at least that last part is now mercifully ended).
On the other hand, what remains of the old system might still be better than the education system in many Western countries. I know from personal experience that even the 90s Russian school program was much more demanding than that of Israel, at least. People who have lived in other Western countries (like Australia) and returned here often report something similar.
To sum up, I think we have many of the same problems, though perhaps it's not as bad here.
How strange are the patterns of resemblance between The West, the Anglosphere in particular, in this point in History and the Qing Dynasty in her days of spiral downward in the midst of the 19th century.
Just as in the final decades of the Dynasty the Western countries also have serious drug problems. Problems that are even more severe than the ones that plague Qing China since in their case, not only both large chunks of the populations of the U.S. and Europe are now hook up on drugs of some kind, but the drug money itself has turned vital for the well-being of the financial system too. Now is the PMC that is echoing the late literati class of imperial China. Of course, the similarities are only superficial.
Nevertheless, in China's history the sentiment of discontentment within society and specially the feeling that the old traditional path of enrichment through merit in Education, by passing the imperial examinations and acquiring office, had become meaningless partly fed the fury of one of the greatest mass revolts of the period, the Taiping Rebellion. Later on, as the power slipped out of their hands the Qing ruling class and the literati that served them turned into an even more tight and smaller group, a group of highly educated people, totally corrupted, severely weaken and completely detached from reality until their very end.
Apropos today's public education... https://bit.ly/3xnexz5
This points to something that says "URL signature expired". What is it?
Thanks! Seems it (the source) expired -- I fixed it.