America Has Too Much of the Wrong Elitism

I read with great interest my friend Alex Priou’s “How to Be an Elitist” — an invigorating call to escape our growing mental torpor and spiritual malaise by returning to the great books. He discusses a one-day seminar, sharing the title of the essay, in which students discuss writings by Winston Churchill and Leo Strauss that address “how modern mass democracies tend to degrade political and educational institutions.”

Priou is certainly right that our best universities foster lazy complacency and regard intellectual boldness with suspicion. I commend Alex’s efforts, and the efforts of his school, the University of Austin, to provide an alternative. But I would like to suggest that there are some important considerations that the essay overlooks. This paragraph is what I take to be the central argument:

Herein lies the paradox of a regime such as ours. The best thing about freedom is that you can live any life you want. And the worst thing about freedom is that you can live any life you want. We have jettisoned the sclerotic hierarchies of old as arbitrary, but with them have gone the sensible, natural hierarchies to which they appealed. Baby and bathwater thus share the same fate. The cream still rises, to be sure, yet it is decidedly in spite of our collective tendencies, not because of them. We dare not say publicly to the children of others what we say privately to our own, that they are wasting their time, their talents, and their opportunities on idle pastimes and entertainment, the evil end that lays claim to our leisure. Vigilant opposition to the lowering of expectations, to the flattening of all heights, is required, if more is to be made of oneself than a cog in the commodification of one’s attention for likes, views, and clicks. To live well today, one must first stand athwart.

I am not so sure this easy-going lassitude is really the most concerning, or even the most characteristic, feature of our regime. Priou is certainly correct that democracy can devolve into indiscriminate, debased freedom. In the Republic, Socrates jokes about horses and asses parading down the street as if they were equal citizens. Yet, as Alex also knows, cosmopolitan Athens not only condemned Socrates to death for impiety, it engaged in a frenzy of religious violence when statues of Hermes were mysteriously mutilated on the eve of the Sicilian expedition in 415 B.C.

This inherent instability of democracy has been greatly exacerbated by the ideologies of modern philosophy, which have corrupted both the theory and practice of American republicanism. How the great promise of the early Enlightenment—the rational conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate—degenerated into the postmodern rejection of both reason and nature is a complicated story. Leo Strauss’s most famous book, Natural Right and History shows how man came to reject every authority for understanding the good life in order to make himself the source of his own freedom; and then found his baseless freedom unbearable. For the present purpose, let me quote one passage from that indispensable book:

Liberal relativism has its roots in the natural right tradition of tolerance or in the notion that everyone has a natural right to the pursuit of happiness as he understands happiness; but in itself it is a seminary of intolerance.

Once we realize that the principles of our actions have no other support than our blind choice, we really do not believe in them any more. We cannot wholeheartedly act upon them any more. We cannot live any more as responsible beings. In order to live, we have to silence the easily silenced voice of reason, which tells us that our principles are in themselves as good or as bad as any other principles. The more we cultivate reason, the more we cultivate nihilism: the less are we able to be loyal members of society. The inescapable practical consequence of nihilism is fanatical obscurantism.

Isn’t this theoretical speculation about freedom being replaced by fanaticism a painfully accurate description of our present situation? We’ve come a long way from the live-and-let-live hippies of the 1960s, who just wanted to let it all hang out. My complaint about Alex’s essay is that it downplays the deranged moral fervor animating America’s knowledge class, and basically ignores the ways in which our country has become not more lax, but more repressive in the decades since Strauss died. The ruling element of our regime enforces a stultifying orthodoxy as vindictive as any religious puritanism. It is not couch potatoes glued to their screens who are the most dangerous enemies of excellence, but the intellectual and cultural elites who dismiss merit as yet another codeword for racism, and slander the great achievements of our civilization as crimes of white supremacy.

Yet Priou says almost nothing about these developments. He follows a distinguished line of Straussian commentators who repeat the keen criticisms of democratic freedom made by Plato, Tocqueville, and Strauss himself. But shouldn’t we also notice the important ways in which America has become less free? Not only speech and association, but property rights, the right to self-defense, even the equal protection of the laws, are all in a far more parlous state now than they were fifty years ago. Just as the open-minded tolerance of the beatniks has become ancient history, complaints about the allegedly homogenizing effects of equality are also out of date. The ruling element of our regime stopped believing in political and legal equality some time ago, which is why they came up with a new word, equity, that means virtually the opposite: government enforced discrimination intended to privilege the victimized and victimize the privileged.

Priou links to a speech given by his university’s president, Carlos Carvalho, titled “In Defense of Inequality.” That speech, and Priou’s essay, may have been suitably provocative sentiments in the 1980s when Allan Bloom (promoting his best-selling book, The Closing the American Mind) began a speech at Harvard with the greeting, “Fellow elitists!” But populism and relativism are not our main problems today. On the contrary, a vast administrative state represents too much elitism and inequality, and not enough isonomia—the ancient Greek word for the idea that the same law should apply to everyone. (See Anthony Fauci’s recently released diaries for a revealing peek into the arrogance of our bureaucratic “experts.”)

While I certainly applaud Priou for assigning Strauss’s brilliant “What is Liberal Education,” we should not forget that in his “Epilogue” essay and elsewhere Strauss trenchantly criticized the doctrines of the modern academy, especially in the social sciences. Examining the problem of nihilism among young people disgusted by shallow liberalism (the same “dissatisfaction with the present and a longing for more” that Priou describes) Strauss recommends not progressive education, but “old-fashioned teachers, such old-fashioned teachers of course as would be undogmatic enough to understand the aspirations of their pupils.”

To be sure, the distinctive approach that Priou praises at UATX is meant to supply just this old-fashioned solution, by opposing the faddishness and dogmatism of the Ivy League. Even so, the whole tenor of “How to Be an Elitist” suggests that it is intellectuals and academics who will save our degenerate democracy. I’m more inclined to think that America needs to be saved from the intellectual corruption of the academy.

To be clear, I’m not at all suggesting Alex’s thoughtful observations are simply wrong. He makes many sound arguments with which all sensible people would agree. But as Strauss reminded us in his eulogy for Winston Churchill, students of politics are obliged not only to read great books but especially to see “things as they are, and this means above all in seeing their greatness and their misery, their excellence and their vileness.” In the present context, that means recognizing the many ways in which we are ruled by self-appointed experts who reject equality in the name of group rights and derive their intellectual and moral authority from the elite universities. “Only we living today can possibly find a solution to the problems of today,” Strauss observes in The City and Man. What we need is the right combination of book learning and clear-eyed common sense:

[An] adequate understanding of the principles as elaborated by the classics may be the indispensable starting point for an adequate analysis, to be achieved by us, of present day society in its peculiar character, and for the wise application, to be achieved by us, of these principles to our tasks.