The Author as a Case Study of the Educated Elite

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There's been a kind of groundswell of anger on the new right, or alt-right, in the past few years against the establishment and elites. It dovetails with a large literature describing and detailing growing inequality and class stratification in America and throughout the West. What is this establishment? Who are these elites?

My life story may shed some light on that.  

In telling it, I'm inspired partly by Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance's autobiography, in which he uses himself and his family as a kind of case study of the dysfunctions of what I can't help but want to call the new white underclass. It's the same class that Charles Murray detailed statistically, with many illustrative stories, in Coming Apart, as does Robert Putnam in Our Kids. But my story is the opposite of Vance's, and it's of the educated elite, or what I like to call "the information class," the people who have college degrees and work with their minds using computers, that I want to present myself to the public as a case study.

It goes somewhat against the grain to represent myself as typifying anything. I feel too unique for that. But probably everyone feels unique, and yet people can be categorized. In general, when people tell their stories, pride is not the only reason to emphasize the ways in which we're different rather than the ways in which we are mediocre, typical, generic. What's distinctive about us is probably what seems most surprising, interesting, and useful. But here I aim to do the opposite, to tell my story while leaving out what's distinctive and telling what's typical. 

Of course, I might typify many things, for there are many categories of which I am a member. My focus here is not on how I might typify a human being, a man, an American, an economist, a Christian, a writer, a musician, etc. No doubt I could tell a story for each of those. But here I attempt to tell my story as a typical member of the educated elite. A fair amount of social science and broader awareness is in the background motivating my choice of which facts about my life to include or leave out. I don't have time to explain it all, but occasional digressions will help the reader generalize from my story.

If you're reading this, you probably have at least one foot in the educated elite, since we educated elites seem to do most of the serious reading in American society. So you can compare notes. What is familiar in my story? What rings a bell? What should I have left out as too idiosyncratic? What typical experiences or traits of the educated elite are missing?

Family Values

Like so many others, I come from a good home, full of comfort and security and fun and love, quite free of violence and substance abuse and divorce and all such horrors. Those were things that happened to other people, not us. Like so many others, I enjoyed birthdays, and the 4th of July with its fireworks, and Halloween with its trick-or-treating, and Thanksgiving with its turkey dinner, and Christmas with its carols and tree and presents, and family vacations to national parks, and to family reunions with grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins, and once to Disneyworld, and once to Europe. I got along well with my brothers and sisters and parents. Like so many others, only more so, I got ample encouragement at home for learning and intellectual interests and hobbies. I learned about Plato’s realm of ideas, and Hume’s critique of induction, and the medieval struggles of pope and emperor, and the Bill of Rights, and general relativity, and the exceptions to the Law of Demand in economics, in long conversations with my father over the dinner table, or around the campfire, or on road trips or hikes. Ever since, part of me has always yearned for such intellectually challenging and adventurous conversations as I had at home, and they have been hard to find. I much prefer them to anything money can buy.

Like so many others, I was kept busy by my parents, achieving, achieving, achieving. I was pressured to do sports until it was clear I had no abilities in that direction. There were music lessons galore, and chess club, and Boy Scouts, and so on, till I had more talents than I could hope to make adequate use of in a lifetime. The logistics of delivering kids to extracurricular activities could get complicated for my family. 

Like so many others, I ate lots of healthy home cooked meals, eaten around a dinner table where manners were enforced. Pass the butter. No elbows on the table. I did my share of the household chores, more or less, though not always willingly or well, causing friction with Mom. Frictions with Dad were of a different character. He let my excessive credence in Arnold Toynbee’s theory of history run its course without intervention, but was worried and resorted to strong argument when, at 17, I became a convert to the pacifist-anarchist ideology of Leo Tolstoy. Quarrels were like that, either inessential or impersonal, and usually rather sporting, a school of debate, never existential threats to the family. We lived in a quiet, safe, strictly residential neighborhood, with a backyard to play in. There was a park nearby, where we played with kids from the neighborhood. It was a pleasant and productive childhood and youth, but in a sense uneventful. There were no crises, no tragedies, no big dates to remember. 

Like many others among the educated elite, I have had some exposure to scarcity, to money being short, to not being able to afford things. We were middle-class, not rich. Indeed, in my early childhood, when I was around seven, we were borderline poor, renting half a house, driving used cars, always on the lookout for sales and deals that might stretch scarce dollars. There were a lot of anxious conversations about money in our home then. Later, my dad's income rose, and I never quite got used to my family's new prosperity, but still, luxuries like eating out at fancy sit-down restaurants or the latest fashions in clothing weren't for us. Of the families we knew, some had more money than we did, some had less. We had a dim idea who was who, even though it was taboo to talk about it openly. Certain external signs, like house size and new cars vs. used cars, gave us some basis for guessing, and the outright charity cases couldn't be concealed if one was involved in the charity. And one knew a bit about what grownups did for a living, and which jobs were more prestigious, difficult and/or lucrative than others. But mostly we didn't talk about it, and the word “middle class” occasionally inserted itself to put everyone on a level and insulate the people we knew from the agonizing problems of rich and poor that have haunted history. That's another reason why it goes against the grain to tell my story as that of a typical elite meritocrat. I didn't grow up thinking of us as elite, but as middle class. I've been awakened to my elite status by recent bestselling books and trends in political discourse.

That said, we never, of course, feared real privation, of the kind that we knew people suffered in places like Africa or times like the Great Depression, so we knew that we were lucky and ought to be grateful. My family also had one bit of economic privilege that set us apart even from many of our immediate friends and neighbors: we could live on one income, and Mom didn't have to work. Having Mom to look after us all the time was at once a necessity and a luxury. I couldn't imagine life without it, yet I knew many kids didn't have their mothers at home during the day. “Day care” was a phrase full of fear. The idea of being still in exile, still among strangers, when the long hours of school were done, made the blood run cold. 

But I never wished that my parents made more money, only, sometimes, that they would spend less. I felt like our house was full of superfluous, troublesome stuff, irrationally accumulated through compulsive shopping. Long afterwards, when at last I had a family of my own, I finally learned the real reasons for all the stuff. It turns out to make sense to have drawers and closets of things used once or twice and then stored against a contingency that may never come, half forgotten and hard to find. Space is less scarce than time to sort things, and ten things stored and never used may be a price worth paying for one thing not repurchased. But I was a lover of Matthew 19:24 then, and I thought my family was at risk of being the camel that couldn't fit through the eye of a needle to enter the kingdom of heaven. I thought that we were richer than we needed to be or ought to be, and than most of the world, but not actually rich by American standards. It was not so bad as that.

I have given a glimpse of what my thoughts were back then. It’s also worth mentioning three things that I didn’t think about.

First, though my family gave me nothing to be ashamed of, I felt little or no family pride. That is odd from a grand historical perspective, because family pride has been a very widespread feature of human experience. Why didn’t I feel it, or think about it? I wasn’t taught to feel it, not my humble, self-deprecating father, still less by my mother, who always downplayed our accomplishments in the annual newsletters to aunts, uncles and cousins, and not by the culture, which was individualist and egalitarian. If an old-fashioned aristocrat had confronted me at the time with my lack of family pride, I think I would have said that family pride is irrational, because one doesn’t choose one’s mother, father, or other relatives and ancestors, or deserve any credit for their character, talents, or accomplishments. But that objection applies a fortiori to national pride, and I felt plenty of that in my youth. 

Since then, my national pride has had its ups and downs, but has generally waned, as America has taken one wrong turn after another, as her politics, culture, and economy have been gradually if fitfully degraded, and as the things about America that I once took pride in have been attenuated, eclipsed, or lost. But I’ve been fascinated to watch the lives of my brothers and sisters unfold, continuing different aspects of my parents’ stories, values and dreams, and I’ve increasingly felt family pride sneaking up on me like a fun little secret that wants to be discovered. Between us, we’ve racked up a remarkable array of accomplishments, talents, and adventures, yet on average, we’ve come down in the world, but for the best of reasons. We’ve dabbled a lot in scholarship, foreign aid, social work, freelance writing, art, music, and religious faith (well, more than dabbled in that), focusing on changing the world for the better rather than personal advancement. It’s a kind of downward intergenerational income mobility that one can contemplate with moral satisfaction. There’s something distinctive about us that I like, a kind of intellectual conservative idealism which, however, no label can capture, that not one in a thousand people possesses in quite the way we do. It’s not surprising that it took me long worldly experience to know who we are, and to clarify the content of proper family pride in my own case. How should a child know what is special about his own home? But it is strange that the discovery should have been so little foreshadowed. I didn't just not know what our family could justly feel proud of; I didn't know family pride was a thing, outside of old novels.

Family pride can be a school of personal humility. It involves recognizing that whatever one accomplishes or excels at, one owes in large part to inheritance and upbringing, while taking responsibility for one’s faults, vices and sins. Moreover, the Bible commands it. It’s strange, in retrospect, that for most of my life I interpreted “honor thy father and mother” to mean merely obey thy father and mother. That’s more or less valid as far as it goes. But to honor means more than just to obey. It means to respect, esteem, admire and praise. A world full of children praising parents is pleasant to contemplate, because sincere praise is pleasant to give as well as to hear, and who can honor people more fitly than their children, who know them so well and owe them so much? Being honored in one’s old age by one’s children is surely more valuable than anything that money can buy, and unlike those things, it need not be a scarce pleasure. In principle, everyone could have children and be honored by them. Honor naturally spills over into emulation, so by that means the good examples of each generation may be passed down and preserved. The more I think about it, the more I suspect that in lacking family pride, I both did injustice to my parents and missed out on a great source of innocent pleasure. Yet I was not exactly at fault, for I was merely following the customs of my time and place.

Second, I never thought about succeeding my father, taking his job, and just carrying on his work. I didn't think about it for a good reason: it was impossible. Professorships can’t be passed down from father to son like that. That's normal in modern America. Some people have family businesses they hope their children will carry on, but most people just have jobs, and hiring processes avoid nepotism. Historically, though, most men have had the option or the duty of doing more or less what their fathers did. That's a nice arrangement in many ways. Children can learn the trade from a young age, and avoid the effort and expense of learning a lot of things they'll turn out not to need. Children are likely to inherit, perhaps through nature, certainly through nurture, the aptitudes and preferences that suited their parents to the job. They can choose habits and pastimes and friends and spouses who are compatible with the way they'll earn a living. It creates a nice kind of equality within the household: parents do what children will do; they're at different stages of the life cycle but their lives will be similar overall.

Of course, to be born into a hereditary occupation might be somewhat confining and narrow, so it's prima facie a good thing if people can leave it and choose their own job. But I would have been delighted to be a college professor, and few who have known me seem to have doubted that I had the aptitude for it, though many have probably doubted whether I had the aptitude for anything else. But there are always more qualified candidates than academic jobs. Worse, I'd heard enough about academic hiring processes from my father's insider accounts to know that politicization could swamp any sort of merit. Often, white males weren't so much disadvantaged as ruled out, as schools subordinated every other consideration to the pursuit of faculty diversity. Academia nonetheless remained one of my top career options for many years, for all its difficulty and chanciness, but it almost certainly meant leaving my hometown, and all the hometowns I later acquired in my travels, and living wherever the accidents of job openings took me. So tentative academic ambitions, inspired by a natural desire to emulate my father, helped make me, in the pithy phrase of Henry Olsen, an “anywhere” person, rootless and opportunistic, instead of a “somewhere” person, embedded in an enduring community. But I might hardly have been less rootless had I abandoned the pursuit of intellectual excellence to settle for any old local job, forsaking the family customs. I would have been unable to participate in the festivals of inquiry that burst out whenever we meet.

It's also interesting that since it seemed unlikely that I would actually achieve an academic career, there was a kind of inequality in our household, with Dad's life representing a life I wanted but probably wouldn't get. There's been a lot of angst recently that today's younger generation is likely to be the first that does not live better than its parents did. I always expected that in my own case. I didn't even want to make as much money as Dad did. I did desire very much to get an equally intellectual job, and intended to try, but success was an unlikely best case scenario. I think it troubled Dad a lot that he could do so little to get his children, especially me, the sort of professional situation that he had, and to which I was so evidently suited. 

Third, it's odd from a historical perspective that, although I felt patriotic and believed (as I still do for the most part) that American power is a force for good in the world in general, yet I never even considered joining the military. My convictions about war and peace fluctuated over the years – I mentioned my Tolstoyan pacifist phase– but I think soldiering struck me with horror first and foremost because Vietnam loomed in my mind as an unjust war fought by America, and there could be another, and I thought of soldiers as having no freedom of conscience and having to just obey orders, no matter how wicked the cause. But it was also a class thing. Military service wasn't expected or valued among people I knew. Now I regret that.

From Public School Bondage to the Promised Land of College

Like so many others, I was ostracized, persecuted, and sometimes mocked by the cool kids at school. I don't know if it got as bad as what's called “bullying.” Only once or twice was I knocked down, and oddly enough, I hardly minded it on those occasions. Much worse were dirty jokes, and being laughed at for not understanding them. But I really have no idea how bad the kids at school were. Shy and lost, I might have believed on very inadequate evidence that everyone despised me and had fun at my expense. There was just nothing good about me having to spend so much time in their company, with few grownups to supervise and leaven the atmosphere. 

I felt entitled to have the teachers on my side, since I was alienated from peers on the side of being more studious, and valuing the life of the mind more, which was what school was supposed to be about. Usually they were, more or less, but not always. I remember once asking quietly to stay inside during recess reading, and being told no in a speech by a popular young teacher, in a way that made my request public, so that everyone laughed at me. I think in his mind he was publicly humiliating me for my own good, trying to turn me into a normal kid who liked recess. And I remember feeling bitter when teachers said they liked group work as a way to get the brighter students to teach the struggling ones. Great, I thought. I'm forced to be here, when I could be learning a lot more studying on my own, and now you're not even pretending to teach me anything, but instead you're using me as forced labor to teach others, who don't want to learn, and who certainly won't be grateful, but will despise me as a nerd more than they already do. And while teachers had some power to help, closeness to them could make you a “teacher's pet,” scorned by the kids for being allied with the grownups.

It got somewhat better in high school because there was a larger student body and I found a few kids like me, and I enjoyed the last couple of years of high school in spite of all the things I disliked about being in public school. But I was still a nerd, still bored in class, and after puberty hit, it was impossible not to envy the cool kids, even if I believed my own interests and talents to be objectively superior, when they were dating and flirting and kissing, pastimes which seemed to me infinitely appealing and magical, but out of reach because of my nerdy reputation. But I had heard the grownups tell beautiful tales of a place where good grades and intellectual interests didn't lower one's social status. Down the road, college gleamed like the Promised Land. I yearned with longing for the day when the cool kids and the dirty jokes and the high school social dramas in which I was the loser would suddenly cease to matter forever. And I was not disappointed. 

“Populist” readers may see my alienation from the social milieu of my school, and my eagerness to leave behind those I rubbed shoulders with in my childhood and teenage years, as deeply reprehensible, the original sin of the elite, the root cause of the whole national tragedy of class stratification and segregation against which they are rebelling. They'll agree with the teacher who tried to make me ashamed of preferring reading to recess. I ought to have tried harder to fit in. I ought to have had more sympathy and friendliness towards the fellow students public school threw me in with, and learned to like their company. I ought to have taken their mockery to heart, and learned to be the sort of person ordinary school kids got along with and considered normal, instead of running away from it all and trying to rise above it.

But I didn't know how to talk without big words. And I really hate dirty jokes.

Like so many others, I found college an exhilarating, liberating, fulfilling experience, and wished that it would last forever. I had no difficulty adjusting to being master of my time, and made good use of it. Great green quads and fine architectural edifices teeming with bright young people, friendships and flirtations blossoming everywhere, Plato and Renaissance Italy and calculus and linguistics and a hundred other fascinating subjects filling the air, was so clearly the way things ought to be. What were houses for, anyway? Half a dorm room was all one needed. How desolate the world outside college seemed, how deficient in good company and the life of the mind! It was a pity one had to go back to it. It was as if the world had so arranged things that one had to eat life's dessert first. One tried not to think about what would come after. The good times were now.

Like so many others, I had to face the tragic love-or-money choice of what to major in. History was my passion, but it didn't promise me a job. I remember a meeting for undergrads considering grad school in history, where I heard that the ratio of each year's national PhD cohort in history to academic job openings in history was about five to one. I thought hard, sadly abandoned a dream, and added a second major in economics as a compromise. But at least that was still a legitimate subject, with a place in the history of thought. Linguistics, philosophy, classics, English, physics and economics, etc. were the intellectual majors, full of inherent fascination. 

Meanwhile, some of my fellow students chose majors like business and accounting, the non-intellectual, vocationally-oriented majors. I didn't consider them real college students then. Perhaps I've softened on that point since. It's vulgar to aim at the corner office at the expense of missing out on Plato, but I didn't fully appreciate then that to be eager to earn some money to start a family, or pay off the student debts that I didn't have then but many others did, is wholesome and respectable. And even then, I don't think I disdained young people who, lacking my advantages, just didn't know that they ought to prefer philosophical enlightenment to money and power. I pitied them for being unable to appreciate the loftiest pleasures college had to offer, and regretted that one couldn't take conversations with them in really interesting directions. They were the prisoners in Plato's cave, who had never been out, who had never dwelt in the realm of ideas, never thought hard and rigorously about the things that really last, and matter. Of course, it wasn't their fault that society had wrongly directed them to go to college and thereby debased the noble vocation of the university. Now I acknowledge them as peers, though still with a touch of pity for what they missed out on. When I can, especially if they show an interest, I try, through my conversation, to give them a glimpse of higher things. Noblesse oblige.

For my part, I feared the real world, and the day when the bell of graduation would toll and I would be cast out into the grubby, philistine, cash-chasing economy to sink or swim. But I didn't fear it enough to miss the one chance life was likely to offer me to pursue truth wholeheartedly. I didn't really believe one needed money. I thought I could live on next to nothing, and poverty was better than ignorance. And I had no plans to start a family until I had chased truth down every corridor of the labyrinth of life, and found the meaning of everything, and had a thousand adventures. Ever since, a certain part of me feels most at home with people who chose an intellectual major at the risk of joblessness, and for whom life after college is a kind of exile.

Aside from its transience, there were two serpents in this Eden.

First, sex, or to use a gentler term, romance. My parents had met and married in college. So had many of the grownups I knew as a kid. The college campus of my dreams was first of all a bastion of learning and truth, but matchmaking was an important secondary function. The sheer concentration of young people made it the best opportunity life was likely to offer to meet someone. Youth meant life courses were malleable and could be shaped together. It was such a nice plan. But when intellectual honesty forced me out of the Mormon religion, I had no church home to build a nest in, so I wasn't ready to get married, not then, not in any foreseeable future. Doubtless, therefore, I ought to have abstained from dating and flirting, to avoid the risk of breaking the hearts of innocent maidens. But the sacrifice of the best opportunity life seemed likely to afford for romantic adventure seemed like too great a demand for conscience to make. And so I created labyrinths of flirtation and romantic intrigue. I was still somewhat affected by the old strictures of chastity, and I did try, a little bit, not to break hearts, but still, may God protect young women from such ruthless young men as I was! 

What harm I did to them in the long run, I don't know. I haven't kept in touch. For myself, I wasted time that could have been better spent. Worse, I infected my mental habits with an addiction to a certain kind of thrill. The thrills were transient, as I well knew they would be, but I thought then that I was storing up sweet memories that I could savor for years to come. In general, that's a wise motive, and a good reason to pursue a life of adventure and knight-errantry. Many adventures I've had have enriched me forever as food for reminiscence and reflection, and for entertaining others. But not college romances. They fade, or if they return, they're more likely to torment or annoy than to please. Of course, it would be a sin for me now, as a married man, to relish in reminiscence a romantic flame of yesteryear, but I don't think I could do it even if I tried. Perhaps I learned in that school a capacity for dapper self-confidence that is worth something. Who knows? At any rate, though I was bolder than most and more scrupulous than many, I suspect my experiences are more typical than the lurid campus hookup cultures one reads about. It's less wicked than it might be, but a sad waste of time, effort, and innocence, and of the natural, instinctive capacities for affection, attachment, and wonder. It’s poor training for real love. 

The reputation college campuses have acquired, and to some extent deserve, for being not only beehives of mental toil, but also somehow playgrounds of free love and seedbeds of happy marriages, may do the greatest damage through the envy and/or emulation they inspire in the non-college-going classes. College campuses were key to the Sexual Revolution, serving as home for its thought leaders, and scenes of rock-n-roll concerts and protests that spread a message mingling social justice with sexual promiscuity. “Make love not war.” Student defiance against the relative puritanism of the 1950s establishment helped make promiscuity respectable, and it spread. Since then, though, the college-educated classes have re-embraced marriage, if not chastity. They generally neither are nor aspire to be virgins at marriage, but they usually do get and stay married eventually, and postpone childbearing till marriage. Their success at marriage doubtless springs from the same forethought, resourcefulness and discipline that made them succeed in getting college degrees. In my case, it took much skill and intelligence to fit so many romantic escapades into my college years without doing more damage to my psyche and/or career. Not everyone manages things so skilfully. Nothing has wrought more ruin among the non-college-going classes than promiscuity, which among them especially leads to illegitimacy and the breakdown of family culture, and the bad examples set on college campuses by society's leading class must bear some of the blame. The college educated class has learned to play with fire while rarely getting severely burned, while others try to imitate its ways and end up wrecking their lives. And I was part of the problem.

Second, there was corruption in what was taught. I have since come to believe that almost all Western thought since the 18th century, outside of math and natural science, is vitiated by certain deep errors. That's a topic for another post. But then my foe was campus leftism, and that's enough of a dragon to slay for the moment. University faculties have long been infiltrated by people for whom scholarship is not a search for truth but an instrument in class struggle, in one of the many ptolemaic variations on that theme. 

Once upon a time, Marx seasoned his grievances with promises of utopia, wholly irresponsible and unsubstantiated of course, but giving his thought a slight flavor of hope. Today's campus leftists generally lack that, reducing everything to complaint and grievance. Their complaints aren't mainly about actual physical privation and pain. That would make it too hard to move the goalposts when capitalist progress delivers still more peace and prosperity to the masses. Instead, their complaints take the form of secretive jargon or opportunistic rhetoric. They regard supporters of the traditional order with supercilious scorn, as stupid, corrupt or both. In the old fable of the emperor's new clothes, the crowd is disillusioned at once when a child cries out that the emperor has nothing on. But Marxists and neo-Marxists are far more resistant to exposes of the emptiness of their ideologies. My principles, then as now, require me to meet all comers on the field of argument, but radical campus leftists don't fight fair, but duck into a labyrinth of sophistries and laugh at you from within. 

Still, I learned to get the better of them. I remember one triumph. A professor of a class supposedly about East Asia turned out to be a disciple of the radical multiculturalist ideologue Edward Said, for whom all Western thought about other cultures is nefarious imperialism. In the first two classes, I was the professor's chief antagonist in stormy debates. In the third class, it was my turn to give a presentation. This time, I very calmly discussed the scope and context of Said’s thought in a way that gently disintegrated his aura and reach, and made the universal prophetic pomp she would give him irrevocably implausible. Distressed, she asked me to meet with her outside class, then requested that I drop the class. I obliged, thinking smugly, So you can't handle the truth? I heard later that she left the university before the end of the semester. 

Most undergraduates, I think, buy into campus leftism more than I did, without clearly understanding it, and come away with an impression that the truest wisdom lies in an unappeasable alienation from and condemnation of the society in which they live. They then follow the money into jobs where they more or less uphold and sustain the status quo, and feel a little guilty and oppressed. Of course, campus leftism is only part of the ecology of ideas in universities, but even non-leftist ideas tend to embody strands of thought that emerged from the 18th-century Enlightenment. Trained in universities that are steeped in Enlightenment ideas, we are the mature fruits of the Enlightenment, organizing a society of which the 18th-century philosophers would, on the whole, be proud. That is our glory and our weakness.  

Fortunately, my fears that post-college life would starve my intellect proved unfounded. There was a time when I felt stifled and stultified by a daily grind of commuting, working and household chores that left me no time for serious reading. Then I discovered audiobooks, and my mind breathed a vast sigh of relief. Every minute of the day outside of work time, from getting dressed to doing dishes to commuting to bathing, could now be filled with wonderful books. It was like being in college again, with audiobooks replacing the lecture hall. And it was not in the universities, ossified by bureaucracy and credentialism, but in the comment threads of a thousand blog posts and Facebook feeds, that I have most closely approached the garden of Socrates. There, if one can dodge the trolls, inquiry is most honest and free. I'm no longer sure whether it's even worth going to college. If I had only learned the right manual trade, I might listen to audiobooks all day, and then pursue truth further in online discussions, without student loan payments to worry about. But maybe without the training college provided, I wouldn't be able to enjoy such a wide range of books. And of course, I wouldn't have become part of the educated elite, no matter how much I learned that way. College is the elite’s gatekeeper.

The Organization Man

Like so many others, I transitioned, with a bit of back-and-forth in my case, from the college campus to the large organization, learning new lingos along the way and often feeling very unprepared, always needing to be alert and adaptable, like a traveler in a foreign land, to learn the customs, to figure out how things were done, what worked and what didn't, in organizations generally, and this or that organization in particular. 

That my cognitive powers came in handy is certain. Sometimes, an experienced insider had inarticulate knowledge based on long experience, and I had to treat it as a new problem to be solved, think through it, and learn through theory what he or she had learned through practice. After that, sometimes I could offer new ideas or better ways of doing things. 

The mere rhythms and schedules of college, though not very similar to those of large corporate or governmental organizations, were in many ways a good preparation for them. I was used to being tasked with preparing a document for a deadline. Business meetings were a little like academic seminars. There was a topic, people took turns speaking, there was brainstorming and ideation, and one struck a balance between critical rigor and mutual respect. Talking about college was an easy ice-breaker with a new colleague, and provided a nice starting point for professional relationships, just personal enough to be really interesting and inspire good will, without bringing in divisive and uncomfortably private matters like faith, family or ethnicity. One was articulate enough to fill awkward silences. 

One tended to recognize one's fellow college grads without introduction, and trust them in certain ways. It was natural to assume that college grads needed less close supervision, for if nothing else, a college degree proves that a person can sustain effort in pursuit of complex, multifaceted tasks without close supervision. More than that, one had learned in college how to adjust effort levels and reprioritize constantly. If one had eight hours to prepare for tomorrow's meeting and tomorrow's presentation, one might discern, for example, that one needs just an hour for the presentation but seven for the meeting, as one had once discerned the need to study just an hour for the biology test but seven hours for calculus. It's good to find one's college-trained habits are useful, but the purposes of many organizations are less lofty than the pursuit of truth, and one can end up feeling like an exiled knight, using as a mercenary soldier the skills he learned long ago in the service of a just, but now fallen, king.

As l mentioned, I am trying to emphasize experiences that are typical of my class. My conversion to Orthodox Christianity at 28, though much more important to my life and identity than any of the above, is atypical for the educated elite, so I omit it from the story. Likewise, a sad marriage to a Russian girl who left me, the major event of my mid-20s, was atypical for my class, so I omit that too. By contrast, this experience of being an intellectual mercenary, of working fairly effectively, thanks to one's college-trained habits, for causes that, if anything, college has taught you not to believe in, is more typical of my class than of me, though I've had enough of it to know what it feels like. 

I was somewhat, but only somewhat, unusual in being determined to find mission-oriented jobs in organizations dedicated in some fashion to the public interest. I never worked merely to maximize shareholder value. I'm not alone. It seems common among my class to prefer working for non-profits and social entrepreneurs and civil society organizations, sometimes at a substantial sacrifice in salary and professional advancement. Living in Washington, DC, it seemed that, among professionals, hardly anyone's job was just a job. It was a cause. Everyone was trying to change the world. One's convictions were an important labor market currency. One was expected to believe in what one did. But one couldn't just pick one's job, so one's convictions had to be somewhat complex, or flexible, and there was a good deal of cognitive dissonance, for me at least, and I have to assume for many others as well. Probably a lot of this applies to the educated elite in classic corporate jobs as well. 

I think blue collar workers generally don't need to pretend to like or believe in their jobs, but my class, the educated elite, is often expected to persuade and inspire, so we need to believe in what we're doing, or seem to. The trouble is that one never quite does, not without reservation. And yet there are plenty of causes and enterprises to work for that are basically worthwhile, if imperfect. Too exact scruples can impede collaboration and prevent one from doing any good. So one's conscience works overtime discerning right and wrong in complex, ever evolving situations. It gets taxing, and when I did nonprofessional work during a spell of unemployment a couple of years ago, it felt good to be free in my thoughts, free to think about whatever I liked as long as I smiled at customers and made the right change, free to keep my opinions to myself.

Over my last few jobs, a few have reported directly to me, many more have reported to management structures of which I have been a part, and the future prosperity or decline of quite a few companies, towns, students and workers have depended on decisions that I made or influenced from day to day. Some have had reason to fear me or flatter me, and I have enjoyed the trust of some powerful, well known people, and depended on it to perform my jobs. In meetings, I'm usually one of the leading voices, thanks to my rank, my reputation, and/or my ability to develop and articulate ideas. My reputation has been a warrant for bold ideation; it has not been a mere source of security. I feel the need to live up to it constantly.

In most of the jobs I've had in the past decade, I have had talents that my immediate superiors lacked and could not easily even assess. Hiring managers relied on credentials and degrees, recommendations and references to prove these skills to the point of being willing to hire me. The hiring investment was substantial and risky because a high level hire that goes awry can do a lot of damage. I have more than once had the odd experience of being hired partly on the strength of an academic publication that the hiring managers would almost certainly have disapproved of, had they read it. Just having written a book is often taken as proof of superior intelligence. In that sense, while writing has never accounted for more than 5-10% of my income directly, it seems to have contributed, at times, far more to my earning power indirectly, while at other times it has jeopardized it. That something I wrote long ago might be found via Google, offend someone powerful, and get me fired is one of life's little risks. 

My hourly wage at my regular job, as well as various earning opportunities on the side, make it economically rational to engage in some personal outsourcing. Many of my meals over the years have been cooked by strangers. We sometimes get groceries delivered. We've done a lot of business with contractors. Sometimes I Uber to work. It would probably make sense to outsource more, but I have middle class habits. 

I have many contacts, accumulated over the years on Facebook and LinkedIn, who are influencers nationally, and whose hard-won respect I hoard as a long-term professional asset, though I have no clear idea how it will ever be of use. More than once such contacts have opened doors of opportunity whose existence I wouldn’t have guessed. Maybe they are a bit like Frodo’s mithril coat in The Lord of the Rings, things with unknown, secret powers of protection that might be revealed in a crisis. Or maybe they are more like the key to the Lonely Mountain, which Bilbo’s company carries through many strange, desperate adventures, so that they can open the door to one last, even more perilous adventure, culminating in a moment of unimaginable wealth. Or maybe they don’t matter at all. Time will tell. These people feel no definite ties of loyalty or obligation to me. I’ve made an impression at one time or another and they might happen to remember me, that is all. But it is partly to maintain these mysterious networks by living up to the unarticulated expectations of people I hardly ever see that I occasionally try to influence the national conversation on politics, policy, technology, culture, religion and/or social science. This authorial persona has generally had little or nothing to do with my day jobs directly, and would surprise most of the people that I interact with on a day-to-day basis. 

There is a wonderful HR person who looks after my paycheck and my health insurance, and can answer questions about my pension and whatnot. Paychecks show up once every two weeks in my bank account, and millions of poor scramblers in food services or sales who get paid for irregular shift work or on commission might envy their regularity as much as their size. But of a different kind of job security I have much less than they do. My situation is not at all well described by the classic model of a competitive labor market in which supply and demand set an equilibrium price. I am not one of many interchangeable workers in a trade who could quickly find another similar job if this one fell through somehow. My job and I are rather customized to one another. If I lost it, no similar job exists within hundreds of miles. Any job that would use my talents would probably need to be similarly customized and rare. My unique skill sets make me at once protected and vulnerable: protected, because I would be hard to replace, but vulnerable, because my job would be hard for me to replace. If my current situation fell through, I might end up losing my house and living with my parents or in-laws, or I might, so to speak, fall upwards, if there are people I don’t know about waiting to make me job offers when I’m free to accept them, but whatever happened, it would be a new adventure, a new life, not just another job. 

Not long ago, I had moved many times and knew that my surroundings were transient. If I fixed a board on the deck, or planted a tree, I was thinking about real estate markets as much as about my family’s daily comfort. Since then, my life has taken a sharp turn, and I have become a special kind of "somewhere person," borrowing Henry Olsen's language again, but in a way that is not at all typical for my class, so I'll leave that out of this story. College-educated professionals are more mobile than others, and more drawn to major metro areas.

Across many roles, industries, and organizations, public and private, I have shaped flows of money totaling many tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars, many orders of magnitude more than my compensation for this involvement. Generally I'm not "the decision maker." The one entrusted with solving the hard problems generally isn't the one whose face the powers that be want to stamp on the decision outcome. That's fine by me. I wouldn't want to say I'm "the power behind the throne" either. The decisions are more collaborative than that, with thought leadership working through multi-faceted stakeholder consent. But without me, a lot of that money would have flowed less effectively, or not at all. If you're part of the information class, you probably have some idea of what I mean. If not, your mind may be spinning conspiracy theories, which are a common way people cope when they encounter forms of cooperation and common purpose that they cannot understand. But I've never thought of diverting any of that money to my personal bank account, or favoring my personal friends.

We are the Backbone of Civilization

By now, I think I’ve provided a glimpse of who we are, the educated elite. We are formidable, yet vulnerable; confident, yet shy; principled, yet uncertain; well-connected networkers, yet prone to feel lonely and isolated in mainstream society. We have a lot of disappointments and defeated dreams, so our success doesn’t feel like success. We look like rulers on our business cards, with our weighty job titles and the letters after our names, or from what we’re doing or saying when we get mentioned in the newspapers, but we feel a bit like refugees. We act like pawns of a system that we understand better than others do, which is one of the main things that distinguishes us. But we do not understand the system well enough to frame effective fundamental critiques of it. We sometimes cast about for alternatives, but we also sometimes become impatient with the naive critiques of the system brought against it by outsiders. But together, we, more than anyone else, comprise and sustain that system. 

We are, in other words, the backbone of civilization. Modern people enjoy peace and safety and freedom and limitlessly abundant information and high living standards largely thanks to the beneficence of a wide variety of organizations, from state agencies to corporations to non-profits and so on. The organizations are full of people like me, educated elites, college degree holders who work with their minds using computers. The organizations function well, and achieve efficiency and progress, because of the way the information class can communicate and cooperate to research and reason and plan and execute.

Indeed, there's a larger point to be made here, to which democratic pieties long blinded me until the crisis of 2016 forced me to reexamine my old political faith, but which should really have been clear all along, since it's more or less a truth of logic. In an important sense, every society is an aristocracy or oligarchy. One person can't rule, because they can't be everywhere and make all the decisions. Everyone can't rule, because they can't understand and discuss everything, and voting is radically indeterminate in complex issue spaces. The actual administration and management of things has to be in the hands of a disproportionately empowered few, with some common culture and values to facilitate communication, coordination, and cooperation. Those few determine the character of a society out of all proportion to their numbers. And in the contemporary West, that's the information class. You need us in order to staff organizations and get things done, and the way things get done reflects our ethos.

Throughout this account, I’ve had to write like a fortune cookie writer, crafting words at once intimate and generic, trying to make everyone in my class feel the story is magically personalized, and echoes their own experiences. The extent to which it’s possible to do this is the extent to which the educated elite comprises a class, a group bound together by shared experiences, in which a person can feel at home. 

Norms of professionalism limit the amount of solidarity there can be among my class. My job gives me considerable power, but I’m not allowed to use it to help a friend in need as such. The same professionalism would limit the ability of my colleagues and professional contacts to help me if I were in trouble. But I think there is a certain solidarity of sympathies among us nonetheless. A few years ago, current events brought this home to me in a dramatic way.

When I first began jotting down these notes, a certain unworthy individual held the office of president of the United States, and had illegally withheld hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid from Ukraine, as a way to pressure Ukraine’s president to launch, and especially to announce that he was launching, an anticorruption investigation of Hunter Biden, son of Joe Biden, then former vice president and a frontrunner for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, who of course went on to defeat Trump and succeed him in office. The former president also has a notorious man-crush on Vladimir Putin, seemingly because he would like to rule America with the same kind of gangster dictatorship with which Putin rules Russia, but whether that was part of his motive in this case is unclear. He might just have been bending US foreign policy to retain his hold on power by manipulating a US election, and helping Putin was only a side-effect.

One of the key witnesses against the president was Bill Taylor, who had recently been appointed as ambassador to Ukraine, and in that role heard all about this pressure being exerted. After a whistleblower broke the story, Taylor told Congressional investigators all about it. From the alt-right press there were howls about a “coup d’etat,” which sometimes reverberated even in what had seemed to be respectable parts of the conservative commentariat. 

I take it that these howlers have a base of support. I take it there are people who feel a deep indignation that there are people working for the government whose loyalty to the Dear Leader is eclipsed by some mysterious penchant for treachery that they don't understand. Its name, in this case, is the rule of law. In other cases, it's the facts, but either way, my class is often put in the uncomfortable position of correcting its masters by the authority of expertise. 

For my class, facts and laws trump hierarchies and personalities. One doesn't know, when forced to confront one's superiors with unwelcome laws or facts, what will happen to oneself. One isn't allowed to take it into account, any more than one could cheat on a test in college. Wise leaders will welcome the correction and reward you with greater trust and responsibility. Fools will get mad and fire you, and who knows what horrors might have been in store for Bill Taylor at the hands of alt-right madmen, if he had really brought the boss down. But again, one isn't allowed to take such things into account. Call it integrity, call it professionalism, or whatever, but that's just who we are. The alt-right flash mobs who rage against a “coup d’etat” by the “deep state,” who foam with rage at the president’s command, are as alien to me as the Huns marching against Rome, though doubtless I've unknowingly rubbed shoulders with many of them over the years. But Bill Taylor, I know. 

Not personally, though I might claim to know him at second hand, for we have at least one common acquaintance. And I'm proud that we are alumni of one of the same schools. But that's not the point. I know his type. In the alien jungle that US politics has become, full of the utmost strangers, of people without principles flattering people demon-possessed by inscrutable grievances, of the craven bowing to the crazy, suddenly I see Bill Taylor and the familiarity takes my breath away. I am Bill Taylor. We, the educated elite, are all Bill Taylor now. The assault on his integrity, when the president tried to use him to hijack US foreign policy for his own corrupt political interests, was an assault on all of us. All my colleagues, all at least of my real colleagues, those I regard as peers, are Bill Taylor. We all have our unique skills sets and networks, but at a deeper level, he and I and a million other college-educated professionals are the interchangeable parts of the institutional machinery of democratic capitalism, guardians of a beneficent liberal world order, whose foundations seem to be eroding under the pressure of a tide of moral relativism and online grievance-mongering, but whose ramparts, for the moment, are still holding together. I think of Bill Taylor, and I feel proud of my class, and its principles, and all that it stands for, and all that it has accomplished.

For it is under our leadership, under the leadership of college-educated meritocrats like me, that the post-Cold War world has taken shape, as the most peaceful arrangement of human affairs in all of history. Violent death has never been, on a per capita basis, less common than it was in the three decades of the post-Cold War era. Under our leadership, economic globalization has been a powerful engine of poverty reduction worldwide. Fewer people go hungry. More children are in school. Life expectancies in the developing world are longer than ever. People are moving to cities for better jobs and opportunities. Cell phones and the internet are transforming lives in the poor villages of Africa and South Asia. There was more political freedom and more democracy in the three decades after the Cold War than ever before. In the US, too, the crime wave of the late 1960s, 1970s and 1980s gave way to a very nonviolent era, with crime rates down by over half (despite a recent uptick). There is no military conscription. Before Covid, city centers had gentrified, becoming varied, fun and interesting, meccas of safe adventure and of economic and personal opportunity. The internet has blossomed into an unimaginable variety of innovative little spaces, where every hobby and niche interest is represented, even as it revolutionizes the transactional heart of capitalism in the direction of convenience and efficiency. Vast amounts of information are at everyone's fingertips. Never has the oyster of knowledge been easier to open.

But we had better not be complacent, for on our watch, too, a gnawing civilizational crisis has begun, or accelerated. That crisis has been described by many writers in different ways, including Chris Arnade, Rod Dreher, Robert Putnam, Charles Murray, Jane Jacobs, Tyler Cowen, Mark Regnerus, Ross Douthat, Yuval Levin and Ben Sasse. It involves sluggish economic growth and widespread downward mobility in economic security and living standards; decay of political institutions and the rule of law; widespread cynicism, disillusionment and alienation; intense partisanship; a spasm of paranoid, bitter nationalism in some quarters, which of course is not and has nothing to do with that humble, generous and edifying love of country properly called patriotism; a deterioration in public health, with growing rates of obesity and opioid addiction; rising inequality and class stratification; falling marriage and birth rates; an epidemic of isolation and loneliness; growing irreligion; pornography addiction; a general loss of dignity and purpose; and growing “populist” anger against a vaguely defined yet real “elite.” It's a strange crisis, unfolding somehow amidst peace and plenty, a riddle even, eluding traditional categories, but it's quite real, and almost everyone, by now, feels the pressure of it, and the shadow that it casts over the future. When a society has a hole in its soul like this, the leading class in that society probably bears part of the blame, even if it’s difficult to trace the chain of causation. Something about us is amiss. Somehow we are failing to inspire, to uplift, to lead, to provide a moral framework to give meaning to people's lives. 

Self-improvement for the Information Class… and the Dream of Chivalry 

As you may have guessed by now, I'm haunted by the fear that the white underclass will reelect the sore loser of 2020, vindicating his war on constitutional government in the US. Then he'll go on to mobilize Proud Boys stormtroopers to eviscerate the institutions and rough up or worse the people that stand in his way, get all the textbooks rewritten to glorify him, crush "fake" (i.e. real) news with an iron fist, and the American republic will be no more. Fear of MAGA is to the 2020s as fear of al-Qaeda was to the 2000s.

But there are things that matter more than that.

Regimes and nations come and go, but souls are forever. What has happened to the white underclass in recent decades is very, very sad. We must never care more about saving the republic from them then we care about saving them. Jesus said: "Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you" (Matthew 5:44). Yes, that means we should even love the Proud Boys. We should desire their good, that they learn a better way of thinking and living, that they be saved from sin and disgrace and find the way you real happiness. 

By now, most white people are used to the idea that we share a sort of collective guilt towards black Americans, and we have a duty to try to repair things, and make amends somehow. Of course, we never personally held slaves. Hardly anyone still alive bore much personal responsibility for segregation, either. But we are part of a culture that did those things. We need to look out for traits in ourselves that made those terrible sins possible, and for traits that merely cause pain by reminding the victims and their descendants of past wrongs, and strive against them. And we should try to repair the damage. The main way that white America does that is by being very intentional about including and welcoming blacks into white-majority spaces.

I think America's college-educated elite ought to feel a somewhat similar sense of collective guilt towards the white underclass, and look for ways to go above and beyond normal duty in order to offset past wrongs. It wasn't me, yet it was people rather like me, who spearheaded the Sexual Revolution that wrecked the working-class family. Who argued for abortion on demand at the Supreme Court. Who passed no-fault divorce. It was people rather like me who opened the doors of public culture to books and movies and songs that take promiscuity for granted, who still tend to act as if no moral doubts about it could ever exist, and who preached and practiced enough free love to overturn beneficent, ancient taboos that protected so many people from terrible mistakes. It was people rather like me who changed capitalism to be more efficient and shareholder value oriented, and less paternalistic, to the detriment of many who have less propensity for forethought and self-control. It was people rather like me who launched the global internet, which has achieved so many wonders, but has also trapped millions in soul-destroying, shameful, miserable porn addiction.

In general, starting around the 1960s, we educated elites opened a thousand doors of tolerance onto a thousand new paths of self-realization, of which many led up, while others led down, down, down. We drank enough from the cup of cultural liberation to have some fun, then put it down, leaving it to others to drink it to the poisoned dregs, and the wreckage of their ravaged or ruined lives is all around us. Now the Humpty Dumpty of a more cohesive, prescriptive, moralistic culture can't be put together again. Or not by us.

I believe there is One Who came to seek and save the lost, and Who, if enough of us resolutely turn to Him, can restore a better culture. Nothing could redeem the information class like mass conversion to Christianity. Nothing can build trust or bridge class divides like a good church. But that's another topic that would take too much space here.

But I also think we can find more impactful ways to set good examples. 

And that casts my thought back to another ruling class that lived long ago, empowered not so much by birth and legitimacy as by skills and virtues that met the needs of the time. The knights of the Middle Ages, like the information class of today, were the necessary means by which power was wielded, with enough freedom of action to shape the way that power was wielded. They came on the European stage at the end of a thousand years of decline and decay and turned it around. They set European civilization on an upward journey that carried it, in due course, to hitherto unimaginable heights of genius and freedom and knowledge, besting all other civilizations by far in every field of human endeavor. On their watch, the cathedrals were built, the cities grew, new lands were settled and new frontiers explored, slavery vanished from mainstream European life once and for all, and parliaments and universities and nations and science and the rule of law were born, and Europe gained a magic cultural unity that was compatible with political division and enabled a transactional republic of letters to outflank and outlive countless transient tyrants. In a word, they founded Europe. And the momentum of that first chivalric impetus carried Europe forward long after knighthood per se had been eclipsed. All the time, the fascination of tales of knighthood filtered down to entertain and edify people of all classes. It was the last time in history that a ruling class was also a moral ideal.

Could we be like that? Could we of the information class become heroes, like the knights of old, and uplift the common people by our great deeds and fascinating stories?

The white underclass is still, for the most part, materially privileged by global or historical standards. Their lives are still flooded with fantastic luxuries, from the perspective of many in this world, such as electricity, cars, smartphones, refrigerators, washing machines, and indoor plumbing. They are more likely to be obese than hungry. If they work at all, their jobs usually involve limited physical exertion or danger, and moderate hours and treatment. But they are victims of a vast moral and cultural impoverishment. Man does not live by bread alone. People need food, shelter, clothing… and heroes. One of the saddest moments in Hillbilly Elegy is when he describes the people he grew up among as "a culture without heroes." He didn't prove that in the book, and it's probably an overstatement, but it rings somewhat true. 

I think we of the information class need to find a way to be the heroes that the underclass needs. And alas, I think I may be able to pinpoint the moment when I missed my chance.

When the terrorist attacks of 9/11 took place, I don't think I ever considered joining the military to defend my country against al-Qaeda. Perhaps it crossed my mind. My pacifism of a few years before had been disintegrating under the pressure of rational scrutiny, but perhaps there was enough of it left at that time to be a barrier. That at least would be an honest mistake. But probably class prejudice was a factor, too, in my failure to follow what should have been the obvious path of virtue for an able-bodied young man whose country was under attack. I was just beginning graduate school at Harvard, and hadn't yet incurred the vast student debt that would soon shackle me. It would have been the perfect pretext to suddenly break the mold and step onto a different path. But I didn't.

Five years later, I definitely had no pacifist scruples left. I was a lucid advocate of the forward strategy of freedom, burning with patriotic pride that we had liberated Iraq from totalitarianism, a dramatic and highly effectual repentance for our past guilt in supporting Saddam and then tormenting the Iraqi people through sanctions. I foresaw that the road ahead would be hard, but thought Iraq had a good chance of arriving at an imperfect democracy, such as they have now, a vast improvement over their hellish past. Meanwhile, I saw dimly the grand strategy of the thing. Al Qaeda was forced to fight us on Arab soil, where their terrorist methods killed Arabs, shattering their mystique as the champion of Arabs against the West. As a result, when bin Laden was killed in 2011, he didn't become a new, inspiring martyr for the cause. His death was a mere postlogue to a cause already discredited. We beat al-Qaeda because we didn't let them choose the battleground, and the inevitable slow defeat in Afghanistan was eclipsed by a difficult but decisive success in Iraq. Meanwhile, the credible threat of American power had been vastly enhanced. It is thanks to the courage, idealism and geopolitical sagacity of the Bush administration that the euphoric, complacent liberal peace of the 1990s proved so much more durable than the euphoric, complacent liberal peace of the 1920s.

But in 2006, that all hung in the balance, and the chief issue seemed to be: were there enough men? Did America have enough willing soldiers of quality to stabilize the country enough for democracy to take root?

And so, sometime in 2006 or maybe early 2007, I walked into a military recruiting office.

But I didn't acquit myself very well there. I didn't want to go in full time and just be active duty military. I liked my career. I wanted to have my cake and eat it too, somehow. So I asked if I could join the reserves. But that didn't make a lot of sense to them, because the reserves were being actively called up at the time. And I asked about student loans. Did they have student loan forgiveness? The most creditable reason for this inquiry was that I might have been afraid I would be unable to pay them on a soldier's salary, and would default. Even then, I shouldn't have cared. But that was unlikely anyway. And it gave the whole business a mercenary flavor, as if my only reason for serving my country was hoping for an easy escape from my student debt. Alas, that probably was among my mix of motives. I can't remember for sure, but I probably probed whether I could be let in on different terms on account of my education. Combat training?! What?! Doesn't the military, as a large organization, have better things to do for a guy who can manipulate spreadsheets? I walked away non-committal. I think maybe I vaguely said I'd do more research on whether it was financially feasible, or something. I never went back.

Here's what I should have said:

"I heard you need men to fight in Iraq. Where do I sign?"

I think guys like Tom Cotton and JD Vance are bad influences on US politics, yet I can't help but respect them, because they proved they were willing to risk their lives for their country. So did Bill Taylor, not only when he might have provoked an alt-right assassin by testifying against the president, but many years before, fighting in Vietnam. But I've never risked my life for anything. 

When I walked away from that recruiting office, I felt vaguely guilty for letting down the Iraqi people, and the forward strategy of freedom, and my hero George W. Bush. But I didn't have the slightest notion of the damage I was doing to the people I had been so relieved to leave behind when I went to college, by making my own sad, all too predictable contribution to the lack of heroes that leaves the moral universe of the white underclass so drab and uninspiring. I may have missed the one chance life will offer me to display virtue in a way that they can understand, and thereby to set an example that might elevate them, using the war stories of a veteran to reach across the gulf. I may have missed my one chance to be a modern knight.

Compared to most ruling classes in history, the information class is remarkably innocent, but also dangerously uninspiring and dull. We are the joint heirs of two great historic classes: the bourgeoisie, living by the market, and the clerical intelligentsia, concentrated in the universities. We have inherited many good habits from both sources, and we can accomplish quite a bit on the strength of those legacy virtues without trying all that hard, but in deeds of heroic self-sacrifice, we have yielded very little fruit. We can't change that just by deciding to, for opportunities for heroism don't pop up as a matter of daily routine, but we need to be on the lookout for ways to make up the gap. Think of it as the one subject that we're flunking, so we need to work extra hard to redeem ourselves.

Now to simplify somewhat, a hero is (a) famous and (b) virtuous. On virtue, the information class is the victim of Alasdair MacIntyre's problem: we don't know what it is. We have a fair amount of it, thanks to our hereditary advantages, but we don't know what it is. Our moral practice is pretty decent, but our moral theory is worthless. Our habits are all right, but our aspirations are rubbish. But that's a larger problem than I want to tackle here. Let me close, however, with a remark on fame.

It pains me to admit that there might be anything to learn from the great defiler of our public life. And yet perhaps there is something after all. I think one of the chief reasons why the white underclass is offended by us is not so much that we don't respect them as that we don't care whether they respect us. We are too fond of privacy, and not greedy enough for fame, especially not for fame among the hoi polloi, the people we left behind by going to college and prefer to forget. By contrast, though he shows bottomless contempt for them in a thousand ways, and especially by his continual lying, yet at least he clearly cares, intensely, obsessively, whether he's being talked about among them. He doesn't seem to care if what is said about him is good or bad. In fact, he shows no sign of having any concept of good and bad or right and wrong, other than to identify good with what serves his megalomania and bad with whatever stands in his way. But he is as fanatically greedy for every little drop of fame that he can suck out of the world as a dog licking the corners of a cook pot. That is a kind of compliment to them, and contrasts with our indifference. He cares about his image in their eyes. He lives for it. "I love the poorly educated," he once said, and even if it only meant he was glad he could con them into voting for him, still, love like that is better than nothing. I think we ought to emulate him in loving the poorly educated, though now disinterestedly than he does, and seeking their good opinion, for their good not ours. After all, fame is a force multiplier. It turns a good life into a good example, and extends that good example's reach.

Somewhere I read in a letter by CS Lewis to his friend Malcolm (or perhaps by Malcolm to Lewis, I'm not sure, but never mind) a quote by Sir Lancelot in Thomas Mallory's Death of Arthur. I didn't catch the quote when I read Death of Arthur myself, so possibly it could be a misquotation, but probably it's in there somewhere. At any rate, Malcolm or Lewis claimed that Mallory's Sir Lancelot was once asked why he had done some heroic and apparently selfless deed, and answered that he had done it "to win worship." That is, for the sake of fame. And Lewis, or Malcolm, felt a terrible disillusionment drop on them like a stone, as if Lancelot had by those words taken all the virtue out of his deeds, and robbed them of an ideal.

But I think that's wrong. After all, man does not live by bread alone. People need heroes. Sir Lancelot has entertained and edified people down the generations by making them admire him. He surely gave less by all the gallant rescues than he gives by the gift of himself when he wins the worship of the lonely crowd. Let us follow his example as we may. Let us make them admire us whenever any opportunity comes along. It may be their best chance.

Please note that the above account of my younger days and career path is based almost entirely on memory. And I know memory can be unreliable. I've done my best to be accurate, but if you think I've gotten something wrong, let me know and I'll make a correction. 

I've told more truth about myself here, almost, than I can bear. The exertion of these confessions has left me full of regret, penitent feelings, and downright self-contempt. So often I have been the seed sown among thorns, choked by the cares of this world and the deceitfulness of riches. So often I have been the lazy servant who buried his talent. So often I have been the foolish man who built his house on sand. Yet at the same time, I feel very, very blessed, overwhelmed by love for so many people that I have known. 

The Lord has truly been my Shepherd, and never let me want. He has made me lie down in green pastures, and led me beside still waters. He has restored my soul. He has led me on paths of righteousness for His name's sake. It's remarkable what a wholesome and innocent niche I've landed in when so much of my youth wasn't. What a mercy! I've been given so many more sunrises and cherry blossoms and mountain views, peaceful cricket-haunted nights and golden aspen leaves and laughing children and baby smiles, good friends and words of love, and so much more loyalty and kindness, than I deserve. In the years that remain, may God grant me wisdom and humility to choose the right better than I have hitherto done! May He make me an instrument for His good purposes, in a world so full of alienation and decay, but also of beauty, wonder, and love!

UPDATE (July 20, 2024): There’s been a rise in traffic for this post lately, and I wanted to alert new readers to some similar content that they might be interested in. I think of this as post 1 in an “Ethos of Chivalry” series, which is followed by:

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