There’s a tremendous amount I could say in response, but don’t have the time and tomorrow I plan to be working on my own projects, so I do want to at least give a few overall impressions.
First, you go heavily on intellectual life, but I think too heavily so; it’s a major point of difference between your story and the average member of the class I think you’re trying to describe. The place where it’s more similar is when you talk about understanding how the world’s governing machinery works better than outsiders like the white underclass.
I also agree about the difference between class habits and class moral reasoning, and that the latter is in chaos. Our diagnosis beyond that point will diverge sharply, but I think it would be idle to deny that there’s no real shared narrative of what the good life is or how we should make decisions about moral questions, and this means that the only people reliably learning from the good habits are the people already directly embedded in the class; the messages about how anyone not already in the class can pursue the same life practicum are not legible.
Thanks Nato. Yes, I see your point about intellectual life being overplayed as a theme if this is meant to be an account that typifies the educated elite. Most members of the class that has college degrees and works with their brains using computers aren't so intensely intellectual in their upbringing and propensities as me. And yet it is by their intellectual habits and attainments that they distinguish themselves.
It's common that the perfection of a thing deviates from the average, and yet defines the type. If 99 soldiers out of 100 would run away in the face of some extreme danger, the 100th soldier is nonetheless, in an important sense, typical of a soldier. So here: intellect is typical of the information class, even if not usually in such a high degree. That's the best defense I can make of including intellectual life that way in how I told my own story as a case study of the educated elite. Not sure it's convincing; to some extent, I had to work with what I had, and my eccentricities were an obstacle to my project.
One reason I think the difference between the high “academic” and the practical end of intellectual pursuits is so important is that the other does not necessarily confer the latter. I recall in one of our conversations (a long time ago now) you were theorizing about how asymmetries in how taxation handles profits and losses would influence firms’ appetites for risk and investment. Your analysis revealed to me that you either weren’t aware of, or had forgotten about, the ability of firms to carry losses. To me, the child of a man on the other end of the class spectrum, who at times mocked my academic intellectualism, things like carried losses and tax optimization was something I didn’t even recall learning because such things were sort of embedded in how my father (and my mother, to a lesser extent) talked about the world. Meanwhile, I had to explain to my mother-in-law what exactly a credit report was, how lenders and landlords use one, and how a person could improve theirs.
I think when there are class resentments, admirations, and ressentiments, they tend to be directed toward people like my father, who really knows the system well and was frankly a master of it. Folks in the ivory tower may have lately come in for a lot of resentment lately, but I don’t really think it’s because of their power over society except insofar as they (at least nominally) influence the tastes of the the system-masters.
But maybe my father is a bad example, being someone who, at least for a time, ascended into the (lower) ranks of the rich, was a CEO and founder of companies doing upper 7/low 8-figure annual revenues. He spent some time as a member of the professional class but kept going, part of a trajectory from a postman’s son through multiple classes. Certainly he retained multiple registers linguistically that are probably atypical of the class.
There’s probably a connection there to a pair of aspects of your story that resonated with me. First, the acquaintance with very moderate financial privation as a child that left you with some habits of thought and life that sat a little awkwardly with the more comfortable situation which your family achieved later. For me the whiplash of the first was pretty extreme, as my father’s income increased by probably 15x between my last year of elementary school and my last year of high school. The second was the expectation that you would in all likelihood not achieve was your father had in some respects. Unlike you, I don’t think I ever had any interest in doing the same sort of work he did (though it turns out I may have more of the same aptitudes than I thought), but I did have daydreams of lifestyle attainments that I thought I would never achieve. I just assumed that most of these were not realistic for me, given my proclivities and lack of credentials. But the things my father (and mother) taught me without really trying to meant that I was well positioned to take advantage of the opportunities that cropped up and sidestep most of the avertable dangers.
No doubt looking like responsible professional people in authority (white, male, etc) helped, but the ability to speak in professional registers, having moderate material tastes, understanding of some of the finer points of personal finance, and many other practical benefits of class membership probably helped even more. I don’t know how much college or academic training helps with that. In some aspects like professional registers I think it probably helps a lot. It probably used to help more in terms of material tastes back when more students lived on campus and those accommodations were more austere than they have become. I don’t know that it helps with respect to other aspects of system-navigation, though. Maybe it does; there’s a lot of paperwork involved, but maybe it doesn’t, because nature of the paperwork and the sorts of impacts it has are fairly different. It’s more about navigating a bureaucracy than navigating financial life, which is more chaotic and also allows one to choose whether to engage a whole domain. Not ready to manage the complexities of a mortgage, or a car loan, or self-employment taxes, etc? One can live so as to avoid it until it’s more manageable. Of course, having a lot of good advice on what complexity each of those introduce is really important, whereas it’s less likely that parents can advise on the precise complexities of a particular educational institution’s bureaucracy, so again class membership gives more financial-life than academic life advantages to a child of class-member parents.
I suspect this is a key reason why hard Leftism is so popular in academia: a single global (across domains, not geography) bureaucracy is the sort of context in which academics feel most comfortable.
That's very interesting. On loss carryforwards in corporate taxation, I'd say that's the kind of specialized knowledge that relatively few will pick up in college, but college-trained habits of curiosity and fact finding will make you pick it up and learn it when you come across it. Academia is naive and out of touch in a lot of ways, and in most fields you need to learn a lot in practice that your academic training missed. But nowadays a college degree tends to be a necessary quality signal to induce an employer to take the risk.
On the lack of a shared narrative and the way it renders the moral message illegible, good articulation of that takeaway. I think the key to the origins of knighthood is that the Church leaned in with the Peace of God movement, c. 1000 AD, and gave a new vocation to a class of men that were before that time basically thugs, drawing out the virtues that were inherent as tendencies or peculiar excellences in their way of life, and reining in the vices, and supplying new imaginative ideals. I'd like to see the same sort of thing happen today.
By the way, it might be fun to comment here on the larger concept of social class. A lot of modern thinking about social class comes from Karl Marx, who translated the factors of production from Ricardo into social classes. Thus, labor as a factor of production became the working class; capital as a factor of production, the capitalist class; and land as a factor of production, the feudal landlord class. That's an oversimplification because people own a mix of factors of production, and because factors of production are themselves an oversimplification, but the really silly thing is that Karl Marx conceived history as a series of class *struggles.* In fact, the classes need each other, and conflict is generally between members of the same class rather than between classes. Capitalists cooperate with workers and compete with each other, etc. Marxist thinking on class just needs to be thrown out the window, and the concept is so colored with Marxism that it may be doubted whether it's worth retaining at all without that.
But I think it is. The concept is older than Marxism, after all. There's tremendous danger of vagueness and arbitrariness when talking about class, and I think the way to escape that is to insist at least conceptually on *endogamy* as a defining feature of a class. Ultimately there has to be a statistical pattern of endogamy, of people marrying within their class, for class to exist. If we don't have the data to verify that a class has a statistically robust tendency to endogamy then we need to be agnostic about whether that class exists. Endogamy may be enforced by social norms-- it's *unfitting* to marry *below* you or whatever-- or simply driven by spontaneous preferences, or patterns of intermingling and who meets who, or economics, whatever.
But of course there are drivers of endogamy other than class. Religion. Ethnicity. Region. Language. So class needs to be distinguished from all of those. A class is a broad group of people with endogamous tendencies *on the basis of a shared ethos,* which predisposes the class to certain ways of earning a living, and certain habits in dress, entertainment, and education. It should span multiple occupations: the Indian *jati* is too narrow. If endogamy is enforced as narrowly as that, you have a mere caste rather than a class.
My hypothesis, then, is that an information class has emerged in American society, based on college education and mental work using computers. There's a literature on "assortative mating" which I haven't read thoroughly but I think it supports the hypothesis that such a class exists.
The type of hero that the information class idolizes can’t compete with other sources of vitality and charisma that serve as powerful attractors for admiration in a democracy. If this hero were more fully rounded maybe this wouldn’t be the case, but just being smart, brave and effective is not enough. The information class doesn’t seem to be able to project its aspirations outside of itself at a wide enough angle to be broadly appealing on an instinctive level. Forgive me for reverting to some high school level archetypes, but since the vast majority of the population still lives with and understands the world through them, they have a more direct connection to the average human brainstem’s interpretation of status.
Even though I am part of the information class and come from a similar pedigree, I find that being ruled by nerds and dorks, who have no naturally developed, deep sense of humor is an unstable configuration, and this is where the US finds itself after the great uplifting of nerd comedy in the early 2000s. While we were enjoying the relative peace and cultural dynamism of the 1990s in America, the alt comedy scene really got its footing (along with alternative music) in opposition to the broadly masculine, predictable mainstream culture that was finally peaking. Nerd comedy rose up and became the dominant supplier of catch phrases, commodified insults, and other forms of comedic redistribution and democratization through its reign into the mid 2010s. This is when phrases such as “man-crush,” originally coined by popular 9th grade girls mystified by receiving insufficient male attention, became reconstituted into an ironic, dehydrated form of gay bashing, and the targets of this insult are the actual homophobes. Get it, (you idiot)? A new cohort of smart people who did not develop social skills until college, where they were finally free to set rigid, yet constantly evolving standards of interaction between themselves, guarding entry into their ranks with college-level vocabulary, and later redefining common words away from the masses and into symbols academic stewardship (‘racism’, ‘violence’, ‘woman,’ ‘harm,’ ‘safety’) became the rightful inheritors of democratic rule.
This class of people does not mind being ruled by itself. It recirculates jokes that are approved by creative writing MAs in Late Show writing rooms who no longer need HR or standards and practice supervision because HR is the language of their day to day lives. They do not offend the barista or bartender at the brightly lit microbrewery because those service workers have creative writing BAs and understand the current rules, to which they subscribe through various ~$10/monthly subscriptions. The rules of the boardgames at the Book and Brew are printed on laminated sheets in case someone spills their cherry lambic. Everyone is safe and deserving of respect here and world order is ensured as long as our phds and masters students keep in close contact with their international counterparts and don’t get too high and mighty and continue to tip those bartenders with BAs well enough. And they will because they, we, are good, decent people. Every once in a while in the Book and Brew someone makes a joke, and we know the joke, by heart, we know the target is worthy of the insult. We don’t even have to look side to side to see if it’s okay to laugh because we did this last Friday.
As long as humor exists somewhere in the population naturally, spontaneously and crudely, it is an unstable configuration for the rulers of the country to be so divorced from it. At some point a “natural” will come along and definitionally (by the definers) have the wrong aesthetic, the wrong tone, the unimaginable ego especially to those who have trained each other in the art of sublimating their own egos through their work and through syncopated exultations of their own communally cultivated decency. And the 50% of the population that are a group of jocks, ex-jocks, losers, believers, criminals, dumb people, fun people, care-free people, and other people who are legally allowed to vote and can spot a natural when they see one, will gladly do what they can to tip the balance back away from nerd culture. Nerd humor has peaked. We will have another two decades of jock humor, the natural order shall prevail again. Until that gets stale. And when it does you can be happy for all the ambassadorships your nerd grandkids will enjoy once again.
Wow! I'm not a comedy connoisseur so that comment was a glimpse of an unfamiliar world for me. Thanks! Some of it's a little too deep for me to add value.
But your starting point, about how the type of hero the information class idolizes can't compete on vitality and charisma and a democracy... Yes, that seems to be closely related to the big point that I'm trying to convey. The white underclass needs heroes. The information class is failing to be the heroes that they need.
I want to see the information class relearn the lost tradition of the classical virtues, and thereby be transfigured into some kind of modern knights, who can entertain and edify by their character and their stories.
Very fair point - my comment is much more along the culture side than the virtue side. The point is that comedy is the pressure valve of a multicultural society as well as a class-based society. When the class that dominates cultural production strangles the parameters of mainstream comedy, a funny person happily lacking other virtues will win elections.
Deep, untempered humor is not viewed as a virtue by the information class. And this is one of their wider disconnections with the broader electorate. There is not knighthood that mend that division. The wrong people are in charge, or rather, the wrong people are the face of the party. Cultivate the type of politician that can throw a bacchanalia and have fun that isn’t structured and rules based, ie not Mayor Pete. Even the court jesters employed by the information class disposed of their main writ and don’t go after their own king, at least not until a couple weeks ago when it was unmistakably self-evident how senile he had become.
This theme of humor that you're opening up is very interesting. I hadn't really thought about it before, but thinking about it now, it seems like virtue and humor are bound together in a way. The ability to crack jokes in a foxhole exhibits courage, for example.
I’ll be honest, I’m projecting my own obsessions onto this divide and your excellent piece, but when I go out and mingle downtown, humor is one of the few ways to relate inter-class. That and sports which I don’t pay much attention to. It may be enough to just tell stories of virtue that can penetrate the working classes content consumption barrier, but you’d have to get into writing rooms for tv shows for that as well. There’s a very good reason Hulk Hogan was at the RNC this week.
Not that I think humor does much of anything besides help people deal with their station in life either. But I think it’s more appreciated than ruminating too much on who has been let down and how. Neither do I mean to absolve anyone of blame.
Well, the problem I'm diagnosing is that the information class has contributed to the crisis in the white underclass by failing to provide heroes by practicing, it even preaching, the virtues in ways that they can understand. If the information class relearned the art of living shining examples of breathtaking virtue, that would naturally filter over into TV shows and the arts generally. There's always a demand for art that portrays heroes, and if living examples are furnished, the arts will likely follow. The simplest place to start would be physical courage.
Imagine if "the nerdy software engineer who went off as a volunteer to fight the Russians in Ukraine" were such a common type that you could put that kind of character into a TV show and no one would find it odd or hard to understand because half the viewers would know one, at least secondhand. That would go a long way towards changing the image of the information class.
There’s a tremendous amount I could say in response, but don’t have the time and tomorrow I plan to be working on my own projects, so I do want to at least give a few overall impressions.
First, you go heavily on intellectual life, but I think too heavily so; it’s a major point of difference between your story and the average member of the class I think you’re trying to describe. The place where it’s more similar is when you talk about understanding how the world’s governing machinery works better than outsiders like the white underclass.
I also agree about the difference between class habits and class moral reasoning, and that the latter is in chaos. Our diagnosis beyond that point will diverge sharply, but I think it would be idle to deny that there’s no real shared narrative of what the good life is or how we should make decisions about moral questions, and this means that the only people reliably learning from the good habits are the people already directly embedded in the class; the messages about how anyone not already in the class can pursue the same life practicum are not legible.
Thanks Nato. Yes, I see your point about intellectual life being overplayed as a theme if this is meant to be an account that typifies the educated elite. Most members of the class that has college degrees and works with their brains using computers aren't so intensely intellectual in their upbringing and propensities as me. And yet it is by their intellectual habits and attainments that they distinguish themselves.
It's common that the perfection of a thing deviates from the average, and yet defines the type. If 99 soldiers out of 100 would run away in the face of some extreme danger, the 100th soldier is nonetheless, in an important sense, typical of a soldier. So here: intellect is typical of the information class, even if not usually in such a high degree. That's the best defense I can make of including intellectual life that way in how I told my own story as a case study of the educated elite. Not sure it's convincing; to some extent, I had to work with what I had, and my eccentricities were an obstacle to my project.
One reason I think the difference between the high “academic” and the practical end of intellectual pursuits is so important is that the other does not necessarily confer the latter. I recall in one of our conversations (a long time ago now) you were theorizing about how asymmetries in how taxation handles profits and losses would influence firms’ appetites for risk and investment. Your analysis revealed to me that you either weren’t aware of, or had forgotten about, the ability of firms to carry losses. To me, the child of a man on the other end of the class spectrum, who at times mocked my academic intellectualism, things like carried losses and tax optimization was something I didn’t even recall learning because such things were sort of embedded in how my father (and my mother, to a lesser extent) talked about the world. Meanwhile, I had to explain to my mother-in-law what exactly a credit report was, how lenders and landlords use one, and how a person could improve theirs.
I think when there are class resentments, admirations, and ressentiments, they tend to be directed toward people like my father, who really knows the system well and was frankly a master of it. Folks in the ivory tower may have lately come in for a lot of resentment lately, but I don’t really think it’s because of their power over society except insofar as they (at least nominally) influence the tastes of the the system-masters.
But maybe my father is a bad example, being someone who, at least for a time, ascended into the (lower) ranks of the rich, was a CEO and founder of companies doing upper 7/low 8-figure annual revenues. He spent some time as a member of the professional class but kept going, part of a trajectory from a postman’s son through multiple classes. Certainly he retained multiple registers linguistically that are probably atypical of the class.
There’s probably a connection there to a pair of aspects of your story that resonated with me. First, the acquaintance with very moderate financial privation as a child that left you with some habits of thought and life that sat a little awkwardly with the more comfortable situation which your family achieved later. For me the whiplash of the first was pretty extreme, as my father’s income increased by probably 15x between my last year of elementary school and my last year of high school. The second was the expectation that you would in all likelihood not achieve was your father had in some respects. Unlike you, I don’t think I ever had any interest in doing the same sort of work he did (though it turns out I may have more of the same aptitudes than I thought), but I did have daydreams of lifestyle attainments that I thought I would never achieve. I just assumed that most of these were not realistic for me, given my proclivities and lack of credentials. But the things my father (and mother) taught me without really trying to meant that I was well positioned to take advantage of the opportunities that cropped up and sidestep most of the avertable dangers.
No doubt looking like responsible professional people in authority (white, male, etc) helped, but the ability to speak in professional registers, having moderate material tastes, understanding of some of the finer points of personal finance, and many other practical benefits of class membership probably helped even more. I don’t know how much college or academic training helps with that. In some aspects like professional registers I think it probably helps a lot. It probably used to help more in terms of material tastes back when more students lived on campus and those accommodations were more austere than they have become. I don’t know that it helps with respect to other aspects of system-navigation, though. Maybe it does; there’s a lot of paperwork involved, but maybe it doesn’t, because nature of the paperwork and the sorts of impacts it has are fairly different. It’s more about navigating a bureaucracy than navigating financial life, which is more chaotic and also allows one to choose whether to engage a whole domain. Not ready to manage the complexities of a mortgage, or a car loan, or self-employment taxes, etc? One can live so as to avoid it until it’s more manageable. Of course, having a lot of good advice on what complexity each of those introduce is really important, whereas it’s less likely that parents can advise on the precise complexities of a particular educational institution’s bureaucracy, so again class membership gives more financial-life than academic life advantages to a child of class-member parents.
I suspect this is a key reason why hard Leftism is so popular in academia: a single global (across domains, not geography) bureaucracy is the sort of context in which academics feel most comfortable.
That's very interesting. On loss carryforwards in corporate taxation, I'd say that's the kind of specialized knowledge that relatively few will pick up in college, but college-trained habits of curiosity and fact finding will make you pick it up and learn it when you come across it. Academia is naive and out of touch in a lot of ways, and in most fields you need to learn a lot in practice that your academic training missed. But nowadays a college degree tends to be a necessary quality signal to induce an employer to take the risk.
On the lack of a shared narrative and the way it renders the moral message illegible, good articulation of that takeaway. I think the key to the origins of knighthood is that the Church leaned in with the Peace of God movement, c. 1000 AD, and gave a new vocation to a class of men that were before that time basically thugs, drawing out the virtues that were inherent as tendencies or peculiar excellences in their way of life, and reining in the vices, and supplying new imaginative ideals. I'd like to see the same sort of thing happen today.
By the way, it might be fun to comment here on the larger concept of social class. A lot of modern thinking about social class comes from Karl Marx, who translated the factors of production from Ricardo into social classes. Thus, labor as a factor of production became the working class; capital as a factor of production, the capitalist class; and land as a factor of production, the feudal landlord class. That's an oversimplification because people own a mix of factors of production, and because factors of production are themselves an oversimplification, but the really silly thing is that Karl Marx conceived history as a series of class *struggles.* In fact, the classes need each other, and conflict is generally between members of the same class rather than between classes. Capitalists cooperate with workers and compete with each other, etc. Marxist thinking on class just needs to be thrown out the window, and the concept is so colored with Marxism that it may be doubted whether it's worth retaining at all without that.
But I think it is. The concept is older than Marxism, after all. There's tremendous danger of vagueness and arbitrariness when talking about class, and I think the way to escape that is to insist at least conceptually on *endogamy* as a defining feature of a class. Ultimately there has to be a statistical pattern of endogamy, of people marrying within their class, for class to exist. If we don't have the data to verify that a class has a statistically robust tendency to endogamy then we need to be agnostic about whether that class exists. Endogamy may be enforced by social norms-- it's *unfitting* to marry *below* you or whatever-- or simply driven by spontaneous preferences, or patterns of intermingling and who meets who, or economics, whatever.
But of course there are drivers of endogamy other than class. Religion. Ethnicity. Region. Language. So class needs to be distinguished from all of those. A class is a broad group of people with endogamous tendencies *on the basis of a shared ethos,* which predisposes the class to certain ways of earning a living, and certain habits in dress, entertainment, and education. It should span multiple occupations: the Indian *jati* is too narrow. If endogamy is enforced as narrowly as that, you have a mere caste rather than a class.
My hypothesis, then, is that an information class has emerged in American society, based on college education and mental work using computers. There's a literature on "assortative mating" which I haven't read thoroughly but I think it supports the hypothesis that such a class exists.
This brought me tears, as I felt an expanse open inside me. Thank you, whoever you may be.
The type of hero that the information class idolizes can’t compete with other sources of vitality and charisma that serve as powerful attractors for admiration in a democracy. If this hero were more fully rounded maybe this wouldn’t be the case, but just being smart, brave and effective is not enough. The information class doesn’t seem to be able to project its aspirations outside of itself at a wide enough angle to be broadly appealing on an instinctive level. Forgive me for reverting to some high school level archetypes, but since the vast majority of the population still lives with and understands the world through them, they have a more direct connection to the average human brainstem’s interpretation of status.
Even though I am part of the information class and come from a similar pedigree, I find that being ruled by nerds and dorks, who have no naturally developed, deep sense of humor is an unstable configuration, and this is where the US finds itself after the great uplifting of nerd comedy in the early 2000s. While we were enjoying the relative peace and cultural dynamism of the 1990s in America, the alt comedy scene really got its footing (along with alternative music) in opposition to the broadly masculine, predictable mainstream culture that was finally peaking. Nerd comedy rose up and became the dominant supplier of catch phrases, commodified insults, and other forms of comedic redistribution and democratization through its reign into the mid 2010s. This is when phrases such as “man-crush,” originally coined by popular 9th grade girls mystified by receiving insufficient male attention, became reconstituted into an ironic, dehydrated form of gay bashing, and the targets of this insult are the actual homophobes. Get it, (you idiot)? A new cohort of smart people who did not develop social skills until college, where they were finally free to set rigid, yet constantly evolving standards of interaction between themselves, guarding entry into their ranks with college-level vocabulary, and later redefining common words away from the masses and into symbols academic stewardship (‘racism’, ‘violence’, ‘woman,’ ‘harm,’ ‘safety’) became the rightful inheritors of democratic rule.
This class of people does not mind being ruled by itself. It recirculates jokes that are approved by creative writing MAs in Late Show writing rooms who no longer need HR or standards and practice supervision because HR is the language of their day to day lives. They do not offend the barista or bartender at the brightly lit microbrewery because those service workers have creative writing BAs and understand the current rules, to which they subscribe through various ~$10/monthly subscriptions. The rules of the boardgames at the Book and Brew are printed on laminated sheets in case someone spills their cherry lambic. Everyone is safe and deserving of respect here and world order is ensured as long as our phds and masters students keep in close contact with their international counterparts and don’t get too high and mighty and continue to tip those bartenders with BAs well enough. And they will because they, we, are good, decent people. Every once in a while in the Book and Brew someone makes a joke, and we know the joke, by heart, we know the target is worthy of the insult. We don’t even have to look side to side to see if it’s okay to laugh because we did this last Friday.
As long as humor exists somewhere in the population naturally, spontaneously and crudely, it is an unstable configuration for the rulers of the country to be so divorced from it. At some point a “natural” will come along and definitionally (by the definers) have the wrong aesthetic, the wrong tone, the unimaginable ego especially to those who have trained each other in the art of sublimating their own egos through their work and through syncopated exultations of their own communally cultivated decency. And the 50% of the population that are a group of jocks, ex-jocks, losers, believers, criminals, dumb people, fun people, care-free people, and other people who are legally allowed to vote and can spot a natural when they see one, will gladly do what they can to tip the balance back away from nerd culture. Nerd humor has peaked. We will have another two decades of jock humor, the natural order shall prevail again. Until that gets stale. And when it does you can be happy for all the ambassadorships your nerd grandkids will enjoy once again.
Wow! I'm not a comedy connoisseur so that comment was a glimpse of an unfamiliar world for me. Thanks! Some of it's a little too deep for me to add value.
But your starting point, about how the type of hero the information class idolizes can't compete on vitality and charisma and a democracy... Yes, that seems to be closely related to the big point that I'm trying to convey. The white underclass needs heroes. The information class is failing to be the heroes that they need.
I want to see the information class relearn the lost tradition of the classical virtues, and thereby be transfigured into some kind of modern knights, who can entertain and edify by their character and their stories.
Very fair point - my comment is much more along the culture side than the virtue side. The point is that comedy is the pressure valve of a multicultural society as well as a class-based society. When the class that dominates cultural production strangles the parameters of mainstream comedy, a funny person happily lacking other virtues will win elections.
Deep, untempered humor is not viewed as a virtue by the information class. And this is one of their wider disconnections with the broader electorate. There is not knighthood that mend that division. The wrong people are in charge, or rather, the wrong people are the face of the party. Cultivate the type of politician that can throw a bacchanalia and have fun that isn’t structured and rules based, ie not Mayor Pete. Even the court jesters employed by the information class disposed of their main writ and don’t go after their own king, at least not until a couple weeks ago when it was unmistakably self-evident how senile he had become.
This theme of humor that you're opening up is very interesting. I hadn't really thought about it before, but thinking about it now, it seems like virtue and humor are bound together in a way. The ability to crack jokes in a foxhole exhibits courage, for example.
I’ll be honest, I’m projecting my own obsessions onto this divide and your excellent piece, but when I go out and mingle downtown, humor is one of the few ways to relate inter-class. That and sports which I don’t pay much attention to. It may be enough to just tell stories of virtue that can penetrate the working classes content consumption barrier, but you’d have to get into writing rooms for tv shows for that as well. There’s a very good reason Hulk Hogan was at the RNC this week.
Not that I think humor does much of anything besides help people deal with their station in life either. But I think it’s more appreciated than ruminating too much on who has been let down and how. Neither do I mean to absolve anyone of blame.
Well, the problem I'm diagnosing is that the information class has contributed to the crisis in the white underclass by failing to provide heroes by practicing, it even preaching, the virtues in ways that they can understand. If the information class relearned the art of living shining examples of breathtaking virtue, that would naturally filter over into TV shows and the arts generally. There's always a demand for art that portrays heroes, and if living examples are furnished, the arts will likely follow. The simplest place to start would be physical courage.
Imagine if "the nerdy software engineer who went off as a volunteer to fight the Russians in Ukraine" were such a common type that you could put that kind of character into a TV show and no one would find it odd or hard to understand because half the viewers would know one, at least secondhand. That would go a long way towards changing the image of the information class.