and plan to dominate the world by controlling the central cloud that all humanity is plugged into. The novel’s subtitle calls the story “soon to be true,” and it may not be awfully far from the mark.
What we must ask ourselves is whether we want the hierarchical, socially stagnant, centrally programmed future that the oligarchs have in mind for us. Given what their vision appears to be, and what we already see in California, resisting them represents the great imperative of our time.
PART III
The Clerisy
A thoroughly scientific dictatorship will never be overthrown.
—Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
CHAPTER 7
The New Legitimizers
With populist movements and parties gaining influence not only in North America but in Europe and Latin America as well, many have been predicting a new era of authoritarianism, such as portrayed by George Orwell in 1984 or by Margaret Atwood in The Handmaid’s Tale.1 But the more likely model for future tyranny is Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, where the masters are not hoary Stalinoids or fanatical fundamentalists, but gentle, rational executives known as World Controllers.
The Controllers preside over a World State composed of five biologically engineered social castes, from Alphas at the top to Epsilons at the bottom. Alphas take for granted their preeminence and their right to the labor of lower castes. People no longer have children, since humans are developed in vats. Families have been abolished, except in a few distant “savage reservations.” Citizens of the World State live in amenity-rich dormitories and enjoy pleasurable pharmaceuticals and unconstrained sex without commitment or consequences. This family-free life is similar to how Mark Zuckerberg described his ideal Facebook employees: “We may not own a car. We may not have a family. Simplicity in life is what allows you to focus on what’s important.”2
Huxley’s scenario eerily resembles what today’s oligarchs favor: a society conditioned by technology and ruled by an elite with superior intelligence. The power of the Controllers in Brave New World resides mostly in their ability to mold cultural values: like those at the top of today’s clerisy they suppress unacceptable ideas not by brute force but by characterizing them as deplorable, risible, absurd, or even pornographic. Because their pronouncements are accepted as authoritative, they can run a thought-dictatorship far more subtle, and efficient, than that of Mussolini, Hitler, or Stalin.3
In the Middle Ages, the teachings of the Catholic Church on social and cultural values were generally seen as having great moral authority. The medieval clergy preached a value system heavily influenced by St. Augustine, who had sought to replace the values of classical society—materialism, egotism, beauty, ambition—with chastity, self-sacrifice, and otherworldliness.4 As Pitirim Sorokin wrote, the clerical class turned the “sensate culture” of classical civilization into an “ideational” one centered on spiritual concerns.5
When the cultural role of the clergy diminished in the modern era, their part was gradually taken up by what Samuel Taylor Coleridge termed a “clerisy” of intellectuals. Religious clerics would remain part of this class, though on the whole it grew more secular over time. Today’s clerisy includes university professors, scientists, public intellectuals, and heads of charitable foundations.6 Such people have more or less replaced the clergy as what the great German sociologist Max Weber called “the new legitimizers.”7
The Ideal of a Cognitive Elite
The concept of a governing class whose superior cognitive ability makes them rightful leaders goes back at least to ancient Greece, when Plato proposed a society run by the brightest and most talented—a vision that Marx described as “an Athenian idealization of the Egyptian caste system.” Later utopian literature, such as Thomas More’s Utopia in the sixteenth century, depicts enlightened people constructing a just and prosperous society, but with strict limits on freedom for the masses.8
At the beginning of the twentieth century, H. G. Wells envisioned an “emergent class of capable men” who could take upon themselves the responsibility of “controlling and restricting very greatly” the “non-functional masses.” Wells predicted that this new elite would replace democracy with “a higher organism,” which he called “the New Republic.”9
The New Deal era brought considerable support for placing more decision-making power in the hands of university professors and other specialists, and even some well-credentialed journalists. During the Second World War and the Cold War, the idea of relying more on scientists, engineers, and other intellectuals in matters of public policy gained strength.10 The sociologist C. Wright Mills advocated the creation of a ruling cognitive elite, asking, “Who else but intellectuals are capable of discerning the role in history of explicit history-making decisions?”11
As economic competition from Germany, Japan, and other countries grew in the 1970s, some American policy intellectuals argued for establishing a powerful cadre of planners to bring rational order to the “untidy competitive marketplace,” which they saw as weakening the American economy.12 Today, people such as the journalist Thomas Friedman and the former Obama budget adviser Peter Orszag have called for granting more power to credentialed “experts” in Washington, Brussels, or Geneva, in the belief that our societal problems are too complex for elected representatives to address.13
Today’s “Knowledge Class”
Half a century ago, Daniel Bell recognized an emerging “knowledge class,” composed of people whose status rested on educational attainment and access to knowledge in a postindustrial society.14 Theoretically it represented a meritocracy, but this class has become mostly hereditary, as well-educated people, particularly from elite colleges, marry each other and aim to perpetuate their status. Between 1960 and 2005, the share of men with university degrees who married women with university degrees nearly doubled, from 25 percent to 48 percent.15 As Bell observed, parents of high status in a meritocracy will use their advantages to improve their children’s prospects, and in this way, “after one generation a meritocracy simply becomes an enclaved class.”16
Michael Lind uses “professional and graduate degrees” as a way of measuring what he calls the “managerial overclass,” which includes “private and public bureaucrats who run large national and global corporations” as well as directors of nonprofits and university professors. He estimates the “overclass” to be some 15 percent of the American population.17 Charles Murray defines a “new upper class” more narrowly, as the most successful 5 percent in managerial positions, the professions, and the media, and he estimates it at roughly 2.4 million people out of a country of over 320 million.18 (By comparison, the First Estate in France was around 1 percent of the population on the eve of the revolution.)19 In France today, Christophe Guilluy identifies a “privileged stratum” of people who gain from globalization, or at least are not harmed by it, and who operate from an assumption of “moral superiority” that justifies their privilege.20
What I designate as the clerisy is a group far larger and broader than the oligarchy.
