24 May 2018

Older signals of cultural eliteness have begun to fail

I greatly enjoyed Scott Alexander’s latest post about popular things being silenced.

It reminded me of his (really great) post about James Damore.

Also of Danusha Goska’s post about some lives mattering more than others.

There’s an obvious thread running through them about red state/blue state mentalities and power relationships.

Tom Wolfe, in The Painted Word (pdf) wrote a very short, very precise account of how cultural elites come to dominate a cultural domain:

elites who had been signaling their eliteness by supporting the Church needed a new way to signal
they more or less consciously chose art
in order to maintain their eliteness, they constantly and consciously pushed the definition of good art beyond what could be appreciated by normal people
the harder the art was to appreciate the more it showed how elite you were when you appreciated it

Wolfe writes better than I do, and also he is very funny (and the book is short, did I mention short?).

In reading the above posts, the question I keep having is: why are people pushing progressive narratives so strongly?

My proposition is that with the internet and increased importance of pop culture, older signals of cultural eliteness have begun to fail (Art is just one of many).

Cultural elites have switched to progressivism, and applied the same techniques that they applied to art:

constantly moving the goalposts to exclude non-elites. It’s, by design, impossible for red America to “catch up” to blue America (how long did it take to switch from gay marriage to trans-gender rights?)
demeaning and debasing attitudes towards non-elites (they’re not capable of appreciating the importance of X)
the harder it is to appreciate a victim, the more the victim works as an example of eliteness (Stephon Clark)
the self-evident hollowness of progressive arguments to anyone outside of the elite/hick battle

My point is: instead of pointing out the hollowness of the arguments, can we talk about why it is that hollow arguments have gained such power?

tags #culture #elites #progressivism