I thought of the 2016 election as Bobo vs. anti-Bobo.
David Brooks himself writes,
over the past two decades, the rapidly growing economic, cultural, and social power of the bobos has generated a global backlash that is growing more and more vicious, deranged, and apocalyptic. And yet this backlash is not without basis. The bobos—or X people, or the creative class, or whatever you want to call them—have coalesced into an insular, intermarrying Brahmin elite that dominates culture, media, education, and tech. Worse, those of us in this class have had a hard time admitting our power, much less using it responsibly.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen.
Brooks concludes,
The bobos didn’t set out to be an elite, dominating class. We just fit ourselves into a system that rewarded a certain type of achievement, and then gave our children the resources that would allow them to prosper in that system too. But, blind to our own power, we have created enormous inequalities—financial inequalities and more painful inequalities of respect. The task before us is to dismantle the system that raised us.
The essay struck me as somewhat off base. Sometimes he describes bobos as 1960s liberals. At other times he describes them as wokists. They cannot be both simultaneously (many may have been both sequentially).
Brooks writes,
The creative class has converted cultural attainment into economic privilege and vice versa. It controls what Jonathan Rauch describes in his new book, The Constitution of Knowledge, as the epistemic regime—the massive network of academics and analysts who determine what is true. Most of all, it possesses the power of consecration; it determines what gets recognized and esteemed, and what gets disdained and dismissed. The web, of course, has democratized tastemaking, giving more people access to megaphones. But the setters of elite taste still tend to be graduates of selective universities living in creative-class enclaves. If you feel seen in society, that’s because the creative class sees you; if you feel unseen, that’s because this class does not.
But the wokists do not really believe in truth. They tell you what is ok to believe, and they do not care so much about empirical truth in the old-fashioned sense.
“Wokists do not really believe in truth. They tell you what is ok to believe, and they do not care so much about empirical truth in the old-fashioned sense.”
That is a candidate for a classic Klingism.
Perhaps the quote needs to be truncated or restruck for concision, but it’s got potential.
It also has an issue worth exploring–what is empirical truth in the new sense, as opposed to “empirical truth in the old sense” ?? Empirical truth that you can state without losing your friends or your job or your social life?
Paul Graham’s essay “what you can’t say” is still a good read on the topic
The trouble is that this is not how woke progressives perceive themselves. They would not accept that as an accurate characterization nor describe themselves that way unironically. It is the “outside view analysis”, and so is at least a candidate for ‘asymmetric insight’. The fact that it’s an accurate analysis shows the limitations of a general presumption against asymmetric insight.
But the point is, whenever you try to dive into the weeds and pin a woke progressive down on the basis on any of their claims, they are absolutely insistent that their views have the backing of expert authority and reflect Scientific Truth.
While it would be accurate to describe it this way, they will never understand or say that they adhere to and enforce tenets of a dogmatic faith *regardless* of what ‘Science’ may say about it. If contrary views are expressed with scholarly rigor, that is all just denigrated as ‘pseudoscience’ like flat earth arguments, since ‘Science’ maintains its positions as their trans-magisterium in their self-understanding.
Indeed, they attribute a lot of their claimed ‘injustice’ in the world to the stubborn or corrupt perpetuation of error and untruth, and justify cancel culture on the basis that the only way to really establish a solid foundation for a just society would be to eradicate these false beliefs, so they stop having pernicious influence.
If the erroneous empirical claims that woke progressives make were actually true, it would indeed be morally reasonable to try to counter contrary views, given the scale and persistence of the injustices they decry.
Where they stop caring about ‘truth’ and intellectual rigor is revealed in the unwillingness to explain what feasibly-obtainable evidence they would accept to change their beliefs. This is one of the serious shortcomings of Rauch’s “The Constitution of Knowledge”. You can recognize that people should do this, but the temptations and needs of power are such that you can’t actually get them to do it “on the honor system”, as it were.
The old epistemic security system has vulnerabilities in it in the form of social failure modes, and the reliability of that system cannot be restored because these vulnerabilities cannot be patched by tweaks. Instead, we need new, different, and more fundamentally secure epistemic institutions like prediction markets which can, among other things, structurally and impersonally expose how much skin in the game claimants have placed in their own claims.
Aren’t prediction markets vulnerable to the same charges of racism and bias as everything else?
Saw a Twitter thread yesterday about some researcher absolutely panicking that AI software can distinguish X-ray scans by self reported race. It’s hilarious yet terrifying given that people like this are responsible for health care.
Brooks includes himself in the class he’s criticizing. But he seems unaware that he echoes that class’s arrogance when he writes, “The task before us is to dismantle the system that raised us.” That sounds like, “Now that we have piled up our wealth and power, it’s time to destroy the ladder on which we climbed.” And when he proclaims that Joe Biden is the only politician who can save us, Brooks loses all credibility, confirming Mr. Kling’s summary: he does not care so much about empirical truth.
Biden: “If we increase the availability of quality, affordable childcare, elder care, paid leave more people will enter the workforce. These steps will enhance our productivity, raising wages without raising prices. That won’t increase inflation. It will take the pressure off of inflation, give a boost to our workforce, which leads to lower prices in the years ahead. So, if your primary concern right now is inflation, you should be even more enthusiastic about this plan.”
Biden: “Our experts believe and the data show that most of the price increases we’ve seen were expected and are expected to be temporary. The reality is you can’t flip the global economics light back and not expect this to happen.”
Biden: “There’s nobody suggesting there’s unchecked inflation on the way. No serious economist. That’s totally different. I mean, look, the stock market is higher than it has been in all of history.”
Brooks’s critique of the ruling class’s selfishness and irresponsibility is telling. However, he has to accompany it with disdainful treatment of the many disguised as patronizing concern and with some absurd praise of Biden. I suppose this is the price of being able to utter any critique of the gentry in the pages of the NY Times and still hang on the gig.
The thing is, bourgeois personal values *are* better, by any empirical metric, and people who succeed by them probably should be more successful, and everyone else should emulate them. That part of bourgeois elitism and paternalism is frankly completely justified, and their economic success shouldn’t be apologized for. The issue with ‘bobos’ is their political elitism. If Protestant values get Protestants ahead in society, they shouldn’t apologize and certainly shouldn’t dismantle themselves; rather, Catholics should strive to emulate their habits. It only becomes a concern if they start requiring customers and employees to denounce the pope.
But bourgeois self-flagellation like the kind Brooks engages in seems to be saying almost the opposite: ‘we’ve got the politics right, the problem is just that we’re too rich and successful.’ Maybe he’s a bit apologetic about excessive woke pretentiousness, but mainly he seems to fault his class for its success, rather than its efforts to leverage its success to proselytize its religion. But I think on the right, the main targets of this class’s disdain, opinion is likely closer to the opposite. Google and Facebook would probably still enjoy the same respect private companies traditionally enjoyed among conservatives – regardless of how profitable or ‘inequitable’ they are – if they accepted being politically neutral institutions.
from Brooks: “Most of all, it possesses the power of consecration; it determines what gets recognized and esteemed, and what gets disdained and dismissed.”
They just won’t call it a religion. Yet.
We fit ourselves into a system that rewarded a certain type of achievement. Or if we flip that around, like Darwin and Dawkins and Dennett, it’s the system that did this to us. We didn’t act. The system acted on us.
We didn’t shape ourselves. It’s the sea that shapes the boats. The ecosystem shapes the species.
Brooks didn’t set out to believe his beliefs. His beliefs depend on the system he’s in. Same as everyone else. If Paul Fussell has beliefs separate to the system of rewards and punishments he’s always been swimming in, then Fussell’s a mutant fish. (That’s how he saw himself.)
But the system doesn’t care if some belief is true or false. The system and the people in it are blind. We carry out actions but we’re being acted upon.
If you want to get ahead then you would set out, consciously, to just align yourself at all times with the massive network of academics and analysts who determine what is true. And you would deliberately lie. But in fact you don’t lie knowingly. Not even the enforcers at Google who require their employees to believe that a million years of evolution have shaped women and men to be identical. Not even the enforcers at the New York Times: “Someday we will stop talking about the lab leak theory and maybe even admit its racist roots. But alas, that day is not here yet.”
That was their science reporter Apoorva Mandavilli. (Because there’s no reason to single out David Brooks. It’s everyone.) Does Apoorva Mandavilli really believe what she says? In the sense of having a belief that she came to consciously? In the sense of having a belief outside of and unaffected by this ecosystem?
There is no woke side of progressivism. As a matter of fact, it’s all woke.
Brooks is being careless when he talks about “higher educated elites being showered with cash.” Tenured professors, yes, they are showered. Doctors, yes. University administrators, yes. High-level federal employees, yes.
But many thousands of adjunct professors and failed journalists and lab workers would be wryly unamused to examine their showers of non-existent cash.