The Philistines versus the Pharisees

Two tribes battle for dominance. One, warlike and uncultured lays rowdy siege to the other, locked up in their holy sanctum, self-righteously sneering at the barbarians at the gate. These are not Bronze Age clans of priests and warriors, but modern day social groups, caught up in a latter day blood feud. 

The contemporary partisan rift is based squarely on education

Increasingly there is one vital divide in political life. It is based not on class or race, age or gender, geography or ideology, though it often heightens these divides. Rather, the contemporary partisan rift is based squarely on education. The largest single predictor of voting intentions in most Western countries is whether you have been to university, with the untutored tending strongly to the populist right, and graduates voting for parties of the left. Strikingly, there is evidence that older patterns, such as voters leaning rightwards with age, are not being replicated in younger generations, with higher education status “locking in” political affiliation. 

This has been much commented upon, from Steve Bannon’s rhetoric of populists versus elites, to David Goodhart’s account of “somewheres” and “anywheres”. But neither the charged language of elite power, nor divergent tendencies towards nativism or cosmopolitanism fully describe the phenomenon. Clearly something fundamental is being signalled by this education-based pattern, but the rightwing response has largely been hysterical and reactive. Jordan Peterson typifies this conservative panic, with denunciations of the academy as having been subverted by “postmodern cultural Marxists”. If only, goes the thinking, universities could be liberated from lefty gender studies lecturers, the kids would not be indoctrinated, and conservative values would roll on like a river, and common sense like an ever-flowing stream.

The intellectual confines of the culture war are all too tight and claustrophobic, with forests missed for the sake of trees. The educational pattern of voting might be accounted for in one country, or many, by an ideological academic orthodoxy, but it is repeated across too many countries and cultures to be the result of political capture alone. We stand at the end point of a process that began 80 years ago, with the end of Old World elite culture. 

The end of aristocracy

After WW2, aristocracy was systematically dismantled. Whilst the post-WW1 world had carved out a role for constitutional monarchs and inherited power, a victorious America and a suddenly empowered European Left took the opportunity to displace the European nobility forever. The Soviets simply liquidated this class in Eastern and Central Europe, whilst Italy, Germany, Greece and Austria created new republican constitutions which abolished aristocratic titles and privileges. Britain’s own aristocracy, though preserved on paper, lost its position in real terms under severe social and economic pressure. By 1955, a country house was being demolished every 5 days, including buildings of incredible history and grandeur, a crisis that led to the formation and expansion of the National Trust to save these buildings for the nation. 

Initially this process was balanced by tremendous economic and social progress. Massive social mobility saw tens of millions of working class people enter the middle classes, and hundreds of millions gained access to large, modern homes, automobiles, consumer electronics, healthcare and high quality education. A new elite was formed, aided in Britain by the grammar school and direct grant system, that extended the ethos and culture of elite public schools to the brightest working and middle class pupils. 

But the foundations of our modern woes were already being laid. Whatever the failings of Europe’s old elites, there was a clear religious and ethical idea behind their role in society. Stemming from the classical republican idea of magnaminty and the Christian feudal ideas of chivalry, there was a clear sense that the aristocracy’s privileges were at least notionally contingent on their serving the public and the common good. There is no shortage of evidence of this ethic being taken seriously well into the 20th century. In the First World War, 24 members of the House of Lords died on the battlefield. In 1915 alone, 9 peers and 95 sons of peers died. Across Europe, members of the aristocracy were killed at twice the rate of the general population. However paternalistic, the aristocratic ethic was aspirationally selfless, and its energies were channeled into political and cultural life, patronising artistic creation and craftsmanship, modelling the good life, and providing a pool of committed, patriotic military and political leaders. 

No doubt in the face of new economic, political and technological realities Europe’s elites were always destined for radical change. But the early hopeful signs of a more egalitarian West went horribly wrong. Having attained unprecedented economic equality in the 1970s, all that progress went into reverse. Today, we are moving towards imbalances of wealth last seen in the 1920s. Since 2008, assets have increased in value, but wages have stagnated — an aristocratic economic model of wealthy landowners, but without the aristocratic values. 

The rise of the meritocrats

What happened? There are proximate causes, like deindustrialisation, deregulation, globalisation and the collapse of labour unions. But lurking behind them is change in our shared ideals, and the rise of a new elite. Both horizontal and vertical modes of charitable help were marginalised and made redundant by massive new welfare states. Private religious hospitals, social insurance, friendly societies, and philanthropic all engaged people socially and ethically with the problems of poverty. Solidarity and paternalism both — trust in your neighbour and trust in your leader — were left with little to sustain them. Not only did this subtly unmoor people from social and political participation, but it accelerated a process that was profoundly linked to education: the rise of the meritocrats.

It wasn’t just aristocracy that was gradually swept away, but also the strong social identities of the middle and working classes, and such institutions as self-help organisations and family firms. In Britain, deindustrialisation has happened at a faster rate than in many European countries. It’s no coincidence. It’s not just that we don’t value manufacturing at the level of public policy, but shareholders themselves are more willing to sell, because they are more likely to lack any emotional investment in their firms, or feeling of responsibility for workers. According to a 2001 report, at that time, the proportion of majority “blocks” of shareholders that were constituted by families made up “45 percent of blocks in Austria, 32 percent in Germany, and 30 percent in Italy. The average size of the blocks is 26 percent in Austria, 27 percent in Germany, and 20 percent in Italy. In the United Kingdom, on average the largest voting block will usually cast under 10 percent of votes, while less than 5 percent of blocks are attributable to families, and the average size of their blocks is only 5 percent.” 

All of this reflects a governing philosophy and culture that inducts its members into the belief that their successes and failures are the product of their effort, talent and will. The purpose of all political reform in this system is “equality of opportunity”. Though the idea of an equal shot at success is a noble goal, as a sole ruling ethic, it is as dangerous a delusion as the Communistic equality of outcome. The problem is obvious, and only becoming more so. The more that opportunity is equalised, the more that unequal outcomes are merited. A new elite is formed, committed to its own privileges, and believing itself free of social obligation. 

The secular statist egalitarianism of the 60s and 70s produced a materialism and individualism which created a generation increasingly unconcerned with questions of economic justice. The Yuppies of the 1980s formed the model for our modern day elites — disillusioned radicals, bourgeois bohemians out for themselves. Little wonder that compared to the patriotic generation that fought in the World Wars, today’s young are shown to be utterly unwilling to fight for their country, even compared to ten years ago. 

The seemingly paradoxical fact that equality of opportunity heightens inequality of outcome creates contradictions that gave us the Left-Right split of the 80s-00s. The libertarian Right, long since liberated from its paternalistic aristocratic values, saw the growing ranks of the poor as life’s losers, responsible for their own failures. The liberal Left, increasingly leaving behind its solidaristic working class values, and building a multiethnic urban coalition of voters, could only suggest that real equality of opportunity had never been tried. Racial, sexual and educational inequality were blamed. Prejudice was imagined to be lurking everywhere and had to be rooted out with the force of law. Hiring processes were subject to ever more regulation. Private and selective education were demonised, reformers dreamed of nationalising childhood to create a level playing field. And university places were to be radically expanded. 

The new Pharisees

One of the strange features of the meritocratic class is that, as a consciously egalitarian elite, it cannot embrace its own exceptionalism, at least not in conventionally aristocratic terms. Celebrating, or even acknowledging its political, cultural and social power is anathema. Not only do such assertions of status undermine equality, it also strikes against individualism, as the traditional aristocratic ethic locates value in the class and the embodied tradition, rather than giving preeminence to the individual. Earning money holds more promise as a sign of status, but the inequality of outcome is a source of huge moral shame and complication for this elite. Instead, the way to assert status within this system was to trumpet one’s lack of privilege. 

The victim culture we have become so used to is an elegantly double-edged weapon. On the one hand, left meritocrats believe that unfair disadvantages should be compensated for with additional help, resources and lowered expectations. At the same time, the more loudly one’s disadvantage is trumpeted, the more one’s mere presence in an elite space appears as a superhuman achievement. For those unable to plausibly claim victim status, moral and social capital can still be earned by posing as a rebel, an activist and an ally. 

Elite institutional contexts once strongly marked by an aristocratic ethos — universities, the arts, law, religion, politics — have an inherent bias towards teleology. Artists, scholars, judges, priests and political leaders are unlikely to be long content with the idea they have no moral purpose beyond self-advancement or technocratic “innovation” and “optimisation”. This is the bad conscience of the meritocrat, the nagging feeling that something is wrong. This expresses itself in what we now call “woke” or progressive politics, a flamboyant performance with thick lashings of ritual self-flagellation. The meritocrat is the “villain” in this secular Passion Play, but he remains the protagonist, and by the end of the performance he is redeemed by confessing his inherited sins. 

So much for penitence. But what about the giving of alms? This is where the final odd feature of meritocratic elitism falls into place. Paternalism is off the table for egalitarians, so “help” invariably takes the form of recruitment. For all the apparent self-abasement, the meritocrat is always secretly self-glorifying. Salvation for the masses takes the form of the disadvantaged youth gaining admittance to the elite meritocratic space, and through the expansion of bourgeois bohemian disruptions of settled tradition to the lives of ordinary people. Instead of increased wages, racial quotas and sexual liberation are the gifts thrown to the ungrateful people. 

All of these strange moral tangles are their most intractable in the academy itself. Universities are where intellectual life should be at its most sustained. Historically, the liberal arts tradition is a poor fit for meritocracy. Whilst its tendency towards moral universalism and toleration are welcome enough, it is ultimately directed towards an account of the good life that is both anti-materialistic, hostile to commercial activity, and impossible to realise fully for the majority of people. Likewise, as medieval institutions, universities favoured the solidarity of the guild and the hieratic paternalism of an educational aristocracy. Universities had to be “tamed” by subjecting them to managerial control, students artificially “empowered” as customers, and academics “reeducated” as moralistic liberals. 

Ironically, in the very name of fairness and privileging merit, the guild of academia became more heavily gatekept. Instead of ideas being sovereign, process was privileged. Universities existed no longer to train the souls of future elites, but instead to offer academic “qualifications” which would allow students to get ahead in the “job market”. Instead of seeking the patronage of senior scholars, graduates now had to construct box-ticking CVs that showed off their number of publications, conference papers given and teaching awards secured. As numbers flooding into this glorified jobs fair exploded, academics carved out ever narrowing specialisms, jealously guarded from rivals and critics through the peer review system.

Inside universities intellectual life has become a monoculture, managerialism predominates, and pseudo-scientific sociology has replaced serious history, philosophy and the arts, even in traditional disciplines. This pattern is replicated to varying degrees across related institutions like law, publishing and the civil service, and stamps its mark on every student who graduates. 

The reduction of intellectual life to a managerial moralism … has decimated public trust

If the aristocrats of old were proud Temple Sadducees, guarding their privileges, then today’s liberal meritocrats are hypocritical Pharisees, promising universal membership of their priesthood, but cynically exploiting their positions, trumpeting their virtue and subjecting the masses to a stultifying secular orthodoxy. They have built their ivory tower, and pulled up the drawbridge.

The ivory tower besieged

But this total dominance of elite institutions has come at a terrible cost. The reduction of intellectual life to a managerial moralism, ruthlessly controlled by a self-perpetuating liberal elite, has decimated public trust. The old centre right-centre left binary has disappeared. On the one hand the left meritocrats have triumphed, and conservative elites have been driven out of institutional power in droves. Views once seen as wildly progressive are now more or less mandatory for everyone from high court judges, police chiefs to headteachers. Those who dissent are marginalised within the elite, and the mass of people are as disengaged from elite politics and values as they ever have been. 

The result is populism, a politics mistrustful of experts, hostile to institutional norms and gleefully committed to disruption. This rising political tendency represents a new trip of raucous Philistines, contemptuous of the learning of an intellectual elite they perceive as decadent and deluded. Scepticism of nearly every aspect of expertise is held by at least some part of this new movement. The humanities are derided by dissident tech bros and figures like Dominic Cummings who champion the need for the rigour of science against the pink ocean of gender study majors. Yet scepticism for science and medicine are also popular, with the rise of conspiracy movements like QAnon, and figures like US secretary of health Robert Kennedy with their hostility to Big Pharma, vaccines and agribusiness. Culture in general is suspect, due to the ideological dominance of progressivism in the arts. The visual and performing arts are especially loathed, but scarcely less contempt is found for Hollywood and contemporary TV, with their commitment to heavy-handed liberal messaging and paint by the numbers diversity quotas. 

A judicious skepticism towards an ideologically captured elite culture, and a taste for auto-didacticism has blossomed into something far darker on the populist right. Scepticism reaches levels so extreme that it is its own form of credulity. Anything that can’t be understood is sneered at. The leaders of the movement online are modern day barbarians. For the low brow, Andrew Tate promises to put porn stars in your bed, a luxury car in your driveway and a Rolex on your wrist, just so long as you pay the fees of Hustlers University. Being a man is about dominance and selfishness. But the high brow offers are not necessarily any better. “Bronze Age Pervert” may have some verse from Mishima in his hand, and his eye homoerotically trained on naked Greek statues, but it’s the same message with a classical spin. 

This cartoonish politics may be absurd, but it is amusing, adventurous and arrogant, where progressive academic discourse is prudish, priggish and pretentious. Faced with the choice between wisecracking weightlifters and joyless schoolmarms, the average socially awkward teenage boy makes a predictable choice and throws in with these contemporary Conans without a backwards glance.

It’s easy to be too focused on the lurid gloss populism puts on its politics. Hostile to ideas, ignorant of culture, and sceptical of experts, the Philistines are all too easily manipulated by those who know how to pull their strings. Without any real ideas or institutions of their own, the zombie politics of the meritocratic right keep asserting themselves. Although right wing podcasters flipping through their copies of Revolt Against the Modern World like to imagine themselves as vanguards of a new aristocracy, the values of the right remain thoroughly bourgeois. Obsessed with “self-improvement”, the manosphere tries to maximise its odds in what it sees as a sexual marketplace, and become “high value males”. 

Far from some glorious Nietzschean revolution, we’re seeing the resurgence of Spencerian social darwinism and the banal individualism of Ayn Rand. In this sterile ideological universe culture is just a matter of consumerist pleasure, intellect useful only for driving economic growth through technological innovation. Biological reductionism is seized on in reaction to transgenderism or mass migration, and human dignity is an afterthought. Western Civilisation is praised, but there is no curiosity as to what it contains — it’s a canvas upon which a narrow materialistic politics can be projected, and little else. 

Caught between populism and progressivism, our culture is having the intellectual life beaten out of it. Tribalism increasingly substitutes for independent thought, and partisan politics seeps like poison into more and more areas of life. Even if you switch off your phone, turn aside from the news and try to ignore it, the world will change under you and you won’t know how or why. 

There is one imperative project in this time of chaos and technological barbarism: the construction of a new elite, and the revival of our intellectual and spiritual life. Tradition, history and culture must be restored as an indispensable shared inheritance. But even more crucially, they must be lived out and practiced, by living in community, building new institutions and returning to religious faith. The best elements of the old aristocratic order must be revived and adapted to a new democratic age. There must be an aristocratic ethic of service, and a meritocracy of virtue rather than one that rewards only prowess in acquiring power and wealth. In short? The residents of the ivory tower must throw open the doors to a plurality of thought, and the barbarians at the gate need to go back to school.