Kicking. Squealing.
From Robert Nozick whose work merits discussion amid all of this talk of makers and takers and rights and redistribution. I hope to have more on that later, but for right now:
The intellectual wants the whole society to be a school writ large, to be like the environment where he did so well and was so well appreciated. By incorporating standards of reward that are different from the wider society, the schools guarantee that some will experience downward mobility later. Those at the top of the school’s hierarchy will feel entitled to a top position, not only in that micro-society but in the wider one, a society whose system they will resent when it fails to treat them according to their self-prescribed wants and entitlements. The school system thereby produces anti-capitalist feeling among intellectuals. Rather, it produces anti-capitalist feeling among verbal intellectuals. Why do the numbersmiths not develop the same attitudes as these wordsmiths? I conjecture that these quantitatively bright children, although they get good grades on the relevant examinations, do not receive the same face-to-face attention and approval from the teachers as do the verbally bright children. It is the verbal skills that bring these personal rewards from the teacher, and apparently it is these rewards that especially shape the sense of entitlement.
The wordsmiths who populate media, the social sciences, and government are well-heeled to centralized bureaucracy through their interaction with the top-down reward system of the classroom. Reminds us of the criticism of the modern school which resembles an Industrial Revolution-style factory system:
There is a further point to be added. The (future) wordsmith intellectuals are successful within the formal, official social system of the schools, wherein the relevant rewards are distributed by the central authority of the teacher. The schools contain another informal social system within classrooms, hallways, and schoolyards, wherein rewards are distributed not by central direction but spontaneously at the pleasure and whim of schoolmates. Here the intellectuals do less well.
It is not surprising, therefore, that distribution of goods and rewards via a centrally organized distributional mechanism later strikes intellectuals as more appropriate than the “anarchy and chaos” of the marketplace. For distribution in a centrally planned socialist society stands to distribution in a capitalist society as distribution by the teacher stands to distribution by the schoolyard and hallway.
That’s an interesting thought. Usually it is argued that students are indoctrinated by the content spouted off by teachers. Here, Nozick argues that the structure of the system has more impact, at least on “wordsmiths”.
Moldbug said something like the unifying (tacit) premise of left-wing thought is that society should be run by scholars.
I think I should integrate this into my understanding of how media groups work. The commercial ones are very much like the hallways and playgrounds; the publicly-owned ones are precisely like the teacher classroom: arbitrary, centralized, extremely bureaucratic, oppressive.
This seems to scan across the entire media world.
Related (sorta):
Chuck, have you ever read Lee Harris’ “The Intellectual Origins of America-Bashing?” A very good essay I think.
http://www.hoover.org/publications/policy-review/article/6615
Imagine the notion of “intellectuals’ opposition” to Capitalism?
You literally have to be an idiot to believe that you can argue for destruction of that which is weaved into the very nature of reality.
Another way of stating that man strives towards Supremacy or he is in descent is to state that man seeks credibility or he is simple has no desire to be credible.
And what is man’s credibility other than his intangible capital? Of course, intangible capital IS THE FOUNDATION of tangible capital.
Way back when, the value of land was predicated on VIOLENCE. Meaning, the tangible piece of capital was valued based on the credibility of the man holding it and prepared TO KILL YOU if you attempted to take it.
Value = man’s credibility.
Coming full circle, the “intellectuals’ opposition” to Capitalism is really just the pathetic and deceptive attempt to “capitalize” on the ignorance of masses by gaining credibility for their deceptively erroneous and degenerate “insights.”
The irony is that any pronounced opposition to intellectuals will probably be met with derision even by non-intellectuals. See Rick Santorum’s recent flub: http://politix.topix.com/homepage/2144-santorum-we-will-never-have-the-smart-people-on-our-side
Also, this post by Mark Ames – who absolutely loathes libertarians – comes to mind with your reference to schooling. An Occupy guy gets burned badly by him for daring to talk about releasing kids from the clutches of schools (or what he calls “prisons”).
oops, Ames link: http://nsfwcorp.co/oflln3
I’m not sure I really agree with at least the second excerpt. It’s promoting the idea of the nerdy unpopular, unattractive kid and the handsome dumb jock. The only place this exists are John Hughes films and ‘urban’ schools.
Back in the rest of America at least, when it rains it pours. Those ‘wordsmiths’ are likely to do well in the playground and hallway as well, because their glibness is an important factor in the popularity contest. Not to mention that you often see the reality of the tall, good looking, high SES students also being the ones that have a high IQ, including high verbal capacity and get good if not great grades.
Also I’d like to see actual stats showing that the ‘numbersmith’ students tend towards not being liberal because all I’ve ever seen is the opposite. You can say that engineers and the like tend to be more conservative than their liberal arts peers, but that is a far cry from saying that they are not liberal at all. For that matter, if we had a metric that differentiated between good-looking/fast-talking smart and number-crunching smart I’d bet my life that the former are much more successful in the free market including the social market as they are in public institutions including school.
I think there is an element of truth to what is being said, but I think the chicken and egg have been switched. “Liberals” don’t want society to be like school; they have made school into a microcosm of what they want society to be, which isn’t really the same thing. ‘School’ as it exists now is itself a very recent creation, and was more or less dreamed up by early socialists in the 19th century, so I’m not sure how novel Nozick’s idea is supposed to be here.
I don’t think a lot of libertarians/classical liberals are any different either though, with their cries of ‘meritocracy’. The idea implicit to the ideology is that you succeed by ‘merit’, which isn’t any different than the way things work inside the schoolhouse. They ipso facto define economic success as merit, and the only difference between them and liberals on at least this point is that definition.
The idea of ‘meritocracy’ is schoolhouse nonsense. I think that bartering, the existence of ‘markets’ is basically a force of nature. You’ll never be able to stop people from leveraging whatever it is they have that other people want for personal gain. I don’t think there is much ‘merit’ involved in the process though.
This sounds like a just-so story to me. The English Lit hipsters are burning with resentment at the bottom of the status heap, but the Math Club are happy-go-lucky rebels? That’s not how I remember high school or college.
I think a more plausible explanation is that people with high verbal IQ are more susceptible than the average person to elaborate rhetorical arguments, but they’re less likely to test those arguments against the evidence than a math prodigy who’s comfortable with logical proofs and statistical reasoning.
Like Marxism and Freudianism, modern left-liberalism is an all-encompassing closed system that seems logically airtight as long as you don’t question its basic assumptions, and systems of this type always have a rich arsenal of explanations for why you can’t test those assumptions against empirical evidence. (“Of course those charts show a performance gap between men and women — the scientists who took the measurements were biased by their internalized patriarchy!”)
If you’re a smart literary type who’s not in the habit of testing your intuitions empirically, it’s easy to get caught up in plausible-sounding nonsense. And left-wing ideas have an undeniable moral appeal (everyone will be rich! no one will ever have to suffer!), which makes them hard to shake.
For that matter, is it always true that verbal intellectuals tend to be more anti-capitalist? That’s true in the specific case of American academia since the Sixties (and arguably since the New Deal), but not of all times and places. The 1890s Ivy League was solidly behind the Gilded Age robber barons — back then, socialism was for hicks and immigrants. Adam Smith himself was a philosophy professor, the ultimate verbalist profession, not a mathematician or scientist. And on the other hand, try to slog through Das Kapital and you’ll find that Karl Marx looooooved equations. (Whether those equations refer to anything in the real world is another question.)
the most successful people are good at both verbal and math
think about financial planners, advisers, investment bankers, analysts, and such
great social skills, good looking, can do math at warp speed, awesome research skills, the whole kit and kaboodle
anti-racist, all industries heavily populated by blacks, i noticed.
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not.
Anti-Racist is the most intelligent Man on this blog. And physically too he is almost as beautiful as a Black Man. We Brothers agree on this as we read his Righteous comments
those industroes would be heavily populated by People of cOLLR is not for white privilege and white racial nepotism
what?
You guys are missing the point because “capital” in your minds only means something tangible.
The is no such thing as “intellectual” opposition to Capitalism. There is only outright deception, self-deception or pure ignorance as it concerns the nature of Capitalism.
The very purpose of being intellectual is to capitalize off your intellect. The very label is manifest evidence of one who has sought or is seeking to capitalize, i.e., sought or seeking to be more credible than the rest through superior intellect.
A REAL intellectual works and studies to be intellectually superior to others and the truer to reality is his intellect the more credible he becomes. He gains capital. Intangible capital. Far more enduring than tangible capital.
These clown are deceivers. They “teach” anti-capitalism as “intellectuals” for the very purpose of not having to be real intellectuals in any other manner than simply wearing the label.
Radical autonomists is what these clowns are and the “intellectual” label is just a cloak they wear to maximize their autonomy in relation to others.
They “teach” others to NO BE MORE credible (to be anti-capitalist) so that they are then “credible” by default. Intellectuals in name only.
But it works like a charm.
Anti-Racist keeps night Vigil to exterminate racism. white boys fail to equate to his superior intellect. We The Brothers and Soldiers of Justice watch Anti-Racist eagerly and applaud this Outstanding Man of physical and spiritual Beauty.
Anti-Racist have you provided you contact information to white boy chuck to facilitate your date with our Soldiers of Justice?
Both its subject matter and its smarmy, defensive tone (not to mention its uncharacteristically poor argumentation) have always made me wonder what this essay reveals about Nozick’s own school experience. If I had to guess, I’d say that he, undoubtedly a bright student who excelled in all subjects, nonetheless found himself shunned by the budding intellectual/artsy-fartsy crowd: too earnest, too awkward, too interested in fields they considered boring—who knows. Fast-forward a few decades to see Bob all grown up and teaching philosophy at Harvard, unable to resist taking a swipe at the people who rejected him. Irrelevant but fun to speculate about.
As to the substance, I agree with the person above who said that essay’s premise is a little off: in a variety of times and places, “intellectuals” have been among capitalism’s loudest cheerleaders. There probably is something to the idea that the amount of butthurt among creative types increases in proportion to the extent of their exclusion from capitalism’s riches, but for every English prof who resents the fact that his dumb roommate-turned-investment-banker makes more in one year than he will in ten, there is another artist or thinker who simply finds the pursuit of riches distasteful—a perfectly valid point of view.
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