I went through DEI training in a very large, prestigious American corporation founded by mega dead white men. One training slide said that telling someone they spoke English well was a microaggression.....think how that landed with someone such as myself who didn't start speaking English until about 13 or 14 and whose parents never knew English with anything resembling slight proficiency.
I also remember a vignette with a young woman from a conservative, third-world country declaring that she would become a single-mother and how she had met with opprobrium in her country but acceptance within the corporation. It never must have struck the people putting together that training vignette totally undermined the notion of the white male world as racist, sexist, homophobic, misogynist....and instead showed that it was the formerly colonized third-word of the young woman of color where those things really reigned.
And at no point did any of the training in any way question any business model...which of course is why things like BLM, unlike Occupy Wall Street, were welcomed with open arms and showered with $$$$ by business.
My question is this: Time and again I've noticed that the advent of wokeness has meant, well, an inevitable dumbing down. In fact, Are there instances in which DEI/wokeness has meant an increase in rigor?
Given that, How is a hyper-first world country like the US to continue being first-world-like if its elite, and not just elite, is progressively dumbed-down?
also, i had to laugh at the picture you posted. that looks like my sichuan dinner crew. we go and sample authentic chinese in and around austin every few weeks.
Holy cow this Woodhouse fellow writes so very very well. He reminds me of Andrew Sullivan in his ability to communicate complexities with simple clear argumentation. Brilliant.
I think I buy the overall argument -- that elite moral authority has replaced elite meritocracy -- but the overall framing seems questionable. The framing of early US "vision" of classless society: I'm not sure how much more disingenuous and / or mistaken things get. It feels like an old-fashioned conservative "back then, we were purer, more innocent, better." No, there were very distinct classes back at that time. While the vision may have been for a more egalitarian society, you will note that plenty of people at the time were happy to draw that line at "white pseudo-aristocracy." Even aside from slavery, it's easy to see a landowner class vs. a working class, and the landowner class got an education, got to participate in governance and influence governance disproportionately. I don't think that the framing should be "once we didn't have class ideas" -- it should be "we have always had elites and class, but what constitutes an elite, and the specific mechanisms through which they assert their power have changed."
Lasch's argument is not that there were no social classes in the U.S. prior to industrialization — obviously, there were slaves, and prior to that (in the colonial era), there were white indentured servants who in many cases were treated not much better than slaves. Lasch's argument is that there was a broad consensus that America's *future* should be a nation of small proprietors. That wasn't so hard to imagine back then, when most farmers owned and tilled their own land, with the obviously giant exception of Southern plantations. What you're describing — a landowner class and a working class — I believe was largely a post-Civil War phenomenon. Prior to the Civil War, of course, there was a Southern landowner class, but there wasn't a rural "working class," since that labor was carried out by slaves. It was *after* emancipation that an agricultural working class emerged, in the form of white tenant farmers and black sharecroppers. And the industrial working class, of course, was a product of post-Civil War industrialization.
Your statement: Prior to the Civil War, of course, there was a Southern landowner class, but there wasn't a rural "working class,"
Your understanding of social strata in the South, both antebellum and postbellum, is deeply deficient. During both periods there was a middle-class of yeoman farmers. The pre-Civil War period was documented by Frank Owsley in "Plain Folk of the Old South." As a thought experiment, reflect upon how the South could have fielded competent armies of hundreds of thousands of white men if, in fact, the South was inhabited largely by plantation owners and slaves. Your mental model would have led to a Southern defeat in months not years due to lack of white manpower. Furthermore, substantial parts of the South had no plantations at all (NW Alabama, mountainous areas of the Appalachians, the Wire Grass areas of Longleaf Pine savanna on the Gulf and Atlantic coastal plains), and others had a mix of non-slave-owning yeoman farmers and farmers or craftsmen who owned a few slaves alongside whom they themselves worked.
Quoting from your comment: "Prior to the Civil War, of course, there was a Southern landowner class, but there wasn't a rural "working class,"
None of the socio-economic dynamics of the antebellum South were as simple as you seem to think. Most of the work was done by whites, landowners of small or medium-sized farms, or those working on rented farms. This was the case because the white population was roughly double that of the black. A renter typically, and some sharecroppers after the War, owned their own tools and draft animals. In the Longleaf Pine savannas, white herders grazed their cattle on land that was still owned by the government. The dichotomy between manager and worker was much fuzzier than generally recognized.
To your first point, I understand the prevalence of white smallholders in the antebellum South, which is comparable to the white yeoman farmers in the North that I mentioned. My defense of Lasch's argument is that these did not constitute a working class (in the classic, Marxist sense). The existence of slavery forestalled the emergence of tenant farmers, sharecroppers and wage laborers until after the war.
If you argument is that I'm factually mistaken and that there was in fact a sizable population of white tenant farmers or agricultural wage laborers working for larger landowners prior to the Civil War, then I'm mistaken in my generalization and stand corrected. I haven't understood that to be the case but am open to being shown otherwise.
"The existence of slavery forestalled the emergence of tenant farmers, sharecroppers and wage laborers until after the war."
I have no numbers from economic historians to pin this down, but from reading and family lore it is clear to me that there were both renters and wage laborers. After inter-state immigration, a man might rent a farm for a year to give time to assess the opportunities for purchasing one. Or, lacking a pension, an aging freeholder might sell his farm to have a nest egg and move to a rented farm with the youngest of his children as workers. My grandfather (1858-1924) did this in 1915.
As to paid labor, the tradition was that a son owed his parents unpaid labor until he reached 21. My father (1902-1988) met that duty whereas his younger brother took off early for a salaried industrial job at 19. So a young man works for his parents until he is 21, and then he is free but without resources to allow for marriage and a family. He needed to accumulate cash to buy animals, tools, and land (unless homesteading was an option). So he might hire out his labor for several years to accumulate his stake. I have a photo of said grandfather sitting with his wife and two children in front of a canvas tent. I believe that was probably after he bought a 160-acre valley farm and while he was building a log house (about 1888). He looks to be about 30. A handsome fellow, if I do say so myself. So I infer that he worked for nearly a decade as a laborer before he became a landowner. This period of youthful paid labor surely existed in the more settled parts of the antebellum South where homesteading was a thing of the past. Go West, or work and save among friends and family, those were the options. And surely there were more improvident men who never managed to save enough, and so married and raised their children on rented farms.
A typical example would be Jack Daniels in Tennessee, who learned his trade from Dan Call (moonshiner) and his "Master Distiller" slave Nathan Green, later emancipated and an employee.
Okay but I think you agree it doesn’t undermine the argument: a cultural superiority was supplanted by an ethical superiority and the ethical ethos is gnosticism of the most dangerous sort. We have exchanged Shakespeare for Robyn D’Angelo.
Great piece. I had one issue though. You write: "It [the university] does so by glorifying the cultural tastes and moral virtues of the upper middle class and celebrating them as the universal, transcendent values of civilization rather than as the arbitrary, parochial preferences they objectively are."
This is the post modern relativism that is allowing the Western canon to be replaced by the likes of Kandi and DiAngelo. Would you really argue that the Western canon only survived as long as it did because of arbitrary, parochial preferences of the elite? Or that it can only be viewed as superior to a "woke" reading list because of those same preferences?
I would actually argue precisely that about much of the canon, but I don't think that's an especially controversial point of view: "the canon," as we all know, is constantly changing with the times, which is natural and appropriate. As Lasch writes:
"But canons are always in dispute, always in the process of revision. Think how the canon of American literature looked a hundred years ago: lots of Longfellow and Whittier, no Whitman or Melville or Thoreau. The trouble with the humanities today is not that people want to revise the canon but that too many of them can't be bothered to argue for the exclusion or inclusion of particular works. They engage not in argument but in blanket dismissal, often on the grounds that aesthetic judgments are irretrievably arbitrary and subjective. The practical effect of this kind of criticism is to instill parallel curricula — one for women, one for blacks, one for Hispianics, one for white males — or to patch up the curriculum (as at Stanford) on the principle of equal time."
Sure, changes at the margin. But the classic Greek texts that we still read, or Shakespeare, stand the test of time because they speak to something universal across hundreds if not thousands of years. Universalness across time - timelessness, standing the test of time - is evidence of quality, and I would argue it is objective evidence. The whim of the elite does not stand the test of time because elite tastes (whims) are ever changing.
The ever changing nature of elite taste is illustrated by the ever changing frontier of expensive modern art that most regular people do not get or enjoy. Owning such art is evidence of sophisticated taste simply because regular people don't get it. The classics don't serve that same differentiating function, since they are accessible and appreciable by regular folks.
I don't want to over-argue my point, because I agree that it's not as if every classic work is only classic because it serves a function of social distinction. I'm not a pomo relativist like that. But you could also make the argument that the class function of the canon is demonstrated by the very fact that Aristotle and Shakespeare are no longer so front and center in the canon today (you could easily get a four year college education without ever reading a word of either). Because as moral capital has become the ascendant form of upper middle class cultural capital, quoting Shakespeare no longer marks you as enlightened anymore — quoting Kendi does.
That we have inherited a social hierarchy established in the structuring of the industrial revolution is not difficult to believe. Nor is it difficult to believe that we do not have a coherent collective memory from days before this major reshuffling of society. Leaving many of us here wanting to view that distant era through a modern racial lens. Ultimately lending credence to Leighton’s argument, and the success of the new PMC moral order. I can’t know that America strived to be a classless society pre-industrial revolution, but it’s nice to think about, and somewhat perfectly captures human hypocrisy: to try and maintain slavery and indentured servitude while aspiring to equality at the same time.
Leighton can you speak to what you see the role of ever increasing prices of a university education being? How does this affect the PMCs ability to replicate it’s moral ethic in society if a majority of society is priced out?
your sign in requirements for paying subscribers are getting annoying...content is usually great...cumbersome security measures not so much...this essay seems to point that you are moving away from that elitist community that has weened you...have you found shelter somewhere outside of a campus town?
Just now...you have provided me with a one-time 24 hour sign in token...that is my issue...I live in Italy and my workflow...reading time...is not convenient to the US west coast...PST...if I now have to be limited to a 24 hour sign in link...based on PST...that is not responsive to my European... CET...time zone...please cancel my subscription...many thanks Bill
Weird — I didn't even know there was such a thing as a 24 hr sign in token. That certainly wasn't me who set that up. I went ahead and canceled your subscription though — you won't be renewed after this billing period.
I went through DEI training in a very large, prestigious American corporation founded by mega dead white men. One training slide said that telling someone they spoke English well was a microaggression.....think how that landed with someone such as myself who didn't start speaking English until about 13 or 14 and whose parents never knew English with anything resembling slight proficiency.
I also remember a vignette with a young woman from a conservative, third-world country declaring that she would become a single-mother and how she had met with opprobrium in her country but acceptance within the corporation. It never must have struck the people putting together that training vignette totally undermined the notion of the white male world as racist, sexist, homophobic, misogynist....and instead showed that it was the formerly colonized third-word of the young woman of color where those things really reigned.
And at no point did any of the training in any way question any business model...which of course is why things like BLM, unlike Occupy Wall Street, were welcomed with open arms and showered with $$$$ by business.
My question is this: Time and again I've noticed that the advent of wokeness has meant, well, an inevitable dumbing down. In fact, Are there instances in which DEI/wokeness has meant an increase in rigor?
Given that, How is a hyper-first world country like the US to continue being first-world-like if its elite, and not just elite, is progressively dumbed-down?
Solid post.
this is the sort of stuff where you shine bro.
also, i had to laugh at the picture you posted. that looks like my sichuan dinner crew. we go and sample authentic chinese in and around austin every few weeks.
Thanks, Razib!
It probably looks not unlike my own social circle, too. I've never denied it: I'm definitely myself a member of the PMC.
Reminded me of the photo accompanying Bard College's being named the nation's Number One DInner Party School
https://www.theonion.com/bard-college-named-nations-no-1-dinner-party-school-1819572198
Curtis Yarvin has a piece out wherein he likens the PMC to elves and the lower echelon as hobbits, “who just want to grill.”
He suggests that people like you - bona fida PMC - are “dark elves”; people who bother to think through what it all means.
Curtis and you make a perfect compendium: he’s brilliant but confusing as shit and you are the best communicator of complex ideas I’ve come across. 
Wonderful and insightful, thanks.
OK I’m a subscriber.
Holy cow this Woodhouse fellow writes so very very well. He reminds me of Andrew Sullivan in his ability to communicate complexities with simple clear argumentation. Brilliant.
I think I buy the overall argument -- that elite moral authority has replaced elite meritocracy -- but the overall framing seems questionable. The framing of early US "vision" of classless society: I'm not sure how much more disingenuous and / or mistaken things get. It feels like an old-fashioned conservative "back then, we were purer, more innocent, better." No, there were very distinct classes back at that time. While the vision may have been for a more egalitarian society, you will note that plenty of people at the time were happy to draw that line at "white pseudo-aristocracy." Even aside from slavery, it's easy to see a landowner class vs. a working class, and the landowner class got an education, got to participate in governance and influence governance disproportionately. I don't think that the framing should be "once we didn't have class ideas" -- it should be "we have always had elites and class, but what constitutes an elite, and the specific mechanisms through which they assert their power have changed."
Lasch's argument is not that there were no social classes in the U.S. prior to industrialization — obviously, there were slaves, and prior to that (in the colonial era), there were white indentured servants who in many cases were treated not much better than slaves. Lasch's argument is that there was a broad consensus that America's *future* should be a nation of small proprietors. That wasn't so hard to imagine back then, when most farmers owned and tilled their own land, with the obviously giant exception of Southern plantations. What you're describing — a landowner class and a working class — I believe was largely a post-Civil War phenomenon. Prior to the Civil War, of course, there was a Southern landowner class, but there wasn't a rural "working class," since that labor was carried out by slaves. It was *after* emancipation that an agricultural working class emerged, in the form of white tenant farmers and black sharecroppers. And the industrial working class, of course, was a product of post-Civil War industrialization.
Your statement: Prior to the Civil War, of course, there was a Southern landowner class, but there wasn't a rural "working class,"
Your understanding of social strata in the South, both antebellum and postbellum, is deeply deficient. During both periods there was a middle-class of yeoman farmers. The pre-Civil War period was documented by Frank Owsley in "Plain Folk of the Old South." As a thought experiment, reflect upon how the South could have fielded competent armies of hundreds of thousands of white men if, in fact, the South was inhabited largely by plantation owners and slaves. Your mental model would have led to a Southern defeat in months not years due to lack of white manpower. Furthermore, substantial parts of the South had no plantations at all (NW Alabama, mountainous areas of the Appalachians, the Wire Grass areas of Longleaf Pine savanna on the Gulf and Atlantic coastal plains), and others had a mix of non-slave-owning yeoman farmers and farmers or craftsmen who owned a few slaves alongside whom they themselves worked.
I said there wasn’t an agricultural *working class.* Self-sufficient farmers who owned their own land are by definition not a working class.
Quoting from your comment: "Prior to the Civil War, of course, there was a Southern landowner class, but there wasn't a rural "working class,"
None of the socio-economic dynamics of the antebellum South were as simple as you seem to think. Most of the work was done by whites, landowners of small or medium-sized farms, or those working on rented farms. This was the case because the white population was roughly double that of the black. A renter typically, and some sharecroppers after the War, owned their own tools and draft animals. In the Longleaf Pine savannas, white herders grazed their cattle on land that was still owned by the government. The dichotomy between manager and worker was much fuzzier than generally recognized.
To your first point, I understand the prevalence of white smallholders in the antebellum South, which is comparable to the white yeoman farmers in the North that I mentioned. My defense of Lasch's argument is that these did not constitute a working class (in the classic, Marxist sense). The existence of slavery forestalled the emergence of tenant farmers, sharecroppers and wage laborers until after the war.
If you argument is that I'm factually mistaken and that there was in fact a sizable population of white tenant farmers or agricultural wage laborers working for larger landowners prior to the Civil War, then I'm mistaken in my generalization and stand corrected. I haven't understood that to be the case but am open to being shown otherwise.
"The existence of slavery forestalled the emergence of tenant farmers, sharecroppers and wage laborers until after the war."
I have no numbers from economic historians to pin this down, but from reading and family lore it is clear to me that there were both renters and wage laborers. After inter-state immigration, a man might rent a farm for a year to give time to assess the opportunities for purchasing one. Or, lacking a pension, an aging freeholder might sell his farm to have a nest egg and move to a rented farm with the youngest of his children as workers. My grandfather (1858-1924) did this in 1915.
As to paid labor, the tradition was that a son owed his parents unpaid labor until he reached 21. My father (1902-1988) met that duty whereas his younger brother took off early for a salaried industrial job at 19. So a young man works for his parents until he is 21, and then he is free but without resources to allow for marriage and a family. He needed to accumulate cash to buy animals, tools, and land (unless homesteading was an option). So he might hire out his labor for several years to accumulate his stake. I have a photo of said grandfather sitting with his wife and two children in front of a canvas tent. I believe that was probably after he bought a 160-acre valley farm and while he was building a log house (about 1888). He looks to be about 30. A handsome fellow, if I do say so myself. So I infer that he worked for nearly a decade as a laborer before he became a landowner. This period of youthful paid labor surely existed in the more settled parts of the antebellum South where homesteading was a thing of the past. Go West, or work and save among friends and family, those were the options. And surely there were more improvident men who never managed to save enough, and so married and raised their children on rented farms.
A typical example would be Jack Daniels in Tennessee, who learned his trade from Dan Call (moonshiner) and his "Master Distiller" slave Nathan Green, later emancipated and an employee.
Okay but I think you agree it doesn’t undermine the argument: a cultural superiority was supplanted by an ethical superiority and the ethical ethos is gnosticism of the most dangerous sort. We have exchanged Shakespeare for Robyn D’Angelo.
Great piece. I had one issue though. You write: "It [the university] does so by glorifying the cultural tastes and moral virtues of the upper middle class and celebrating them as the universal, transcendent values of civilization rather than as the arbitrary, parochial preferences they objectively are."
This is the post modern relativism that is allowing the Western canon to be replaced by the likes of Kandi and DiAngelo. Would you really argue that the Western canon only survived as long as it did because of arbitrary, parochial preferences of the elite? Or that it can only be viewed as superior to a "woke" reading list because of those same preferences?
I would actually argue precisely that about much of the canon, but I don't think that's an especially controversial point of view: "the canon," as we all know, is constantly changing with the times, which is natural and appropriate. As Lasch writes:
"But canons are always in dispute, always in the process of revision. Think how the canon of American literature looked a hundred years ago: lots of Longfellow and Whittier, no Whitman or Melville or Thoreau. The trouble with the humanities today is not that people want to revise the canon but that too many of them can't be bothered to argue for the exclusion or inclusion of particular works. They engage not in argument but in blanket dismissal, often on the grounds that aesthetic judgments are irretrievably arbitrary and subjective. The practical effect of this kind of criticism is to instill parallel curricula — one for women, one for blacks, one for Hispianics, one for white males — or to patch up the curriculum (as at Stanford) on the principle of equal time."
Sure, changes at the margin. But the classic Greek texts that we still read, or Shakespeare, stand the test of time because they speak to something universal across hundreds if not thousands of years. Universalness across time - timelessness, standing the test of time - is evidence of quality, and I would argue it is objective evidence. The whim of the elite does not stand the test of time because elite tastes (whims) are ever changing.
The ever changing nature of elite taste is illustrated by the ever changing frontier of expensive modern art that most regular people do not get or enjoy. Owning such art is evidence of sophisticated taste simply because regular people don't get it. The classics don't serve that same differentiating function, since they are accessible and appreciable by regular folks.
I think this WSWS article makes a similar point to the point I'm trying to make: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/05/06/howa-m06.html
I don't want to over-argue my point, because I agree that it's not as if every classic work is only classic because it serves a function of social distinction. I'm not a pomo relativist like that. But you could also make the argument that the class function of the canon is demonstrated by the very fact that Aristotle and Shakespeare are no longer so front and center in the canon today (you could easily get a four year college education without ever reading a word of either). Because as moral capital has become the ascendant form of upper middle class cultural capital, quoting Shakespeare no longer marks you as enlightened anymore — quoting Kendi does.
That we have inherited a social hierarchy established in the structuring of the industrial revolution is not difficult to believe. Nor is it difficult to believe that we do not have a coherent collective memory from days before this major reshuffling of society. Leaving many of us here wanting to view that distant era through a modern racial lens. Ultimately lending credence to Leighton’s argument, and the success of the new PMC moral order. I can’t know that America strived to be a classless society pre-industrial revolution, but it’s nice to think about, and somewhat perfectly captures human hypocrisy: to try and maintain slavery and indentured servitude while aspiring to equality at the same time.
Leighton can you speak to what you see the role of ever increasing prices of a university education being? How does this affect the PMCs ability to replicate it’s moral ethic in society if a majority of society is priced out?
your sign in requirements for paying subscribers are getting annoying...content is usually great...cumbersome security measures not so much...this essay seems to point that you are moving away from that elitist community that has weened you...have you found shelter somewhere outside of a campus town?
your sign in requirements for paying subscribers are getting annoying...content is usually great...cumbersome security measures not so much
Hmm...are you a full paying subscriber? If so then there shouldn't be any sign-in process. You just get the full piece in your inbox.
Just now...you have provided me with a one-time 24 hour sign in token...that is my issue...I live in Italy and my workflow...reading time...is not convenient to the US west coast...PST...if I now have to be limited to a 24 hour sign in link...based on PST...that is not responsive to my European... CET...time zone...please cancel my subscription...many thanks Bill
Weird — I didn't even know there was such a thing as a 24 hr sign in token. That certainly wasn't me who set that up. I went ahead and canceled your subscription though — you won't be renewed after this billing period.
I guess it must be this: two factor authentication security
https://zetter.substack.com/p/substack-rolls-out-two-factor-authentication
I believe this was not an issue in the past 12 months
Since July '21