The most powerful clerisy on earth today is in China. Intellectuals and scholars long played an influential role in Chinese politics and administration—similar to the role once played in the West by clerics when they were by far the most literate element of the population.46 Traditionally, the Mandarinate followed Confucianism, which celebrates learning not “for the sake of the self” but as a way to cultivate “the communal quality” that could help shape the society, as the Chinese scholar Tu Wei-ming writes.47
While Mao Tse-tung was hostile to the old Mandarinate, he placed a high value on technical expertise, with a typically Marxist faith in science. “We shall teach the sun and moon to change places,” he predicted, and he needed the brainpower of his nation to do so.48 Yet the scientific and technical experts either respected or feared the ruling authorities so much that they did not openly confront the insane policies of the Great Leap Forward that led to a famine and killed as many as 36 million people.49 One witness, the journalist and author Yang Jisheng, writes that the Party cadres viewed the peasants as “expendable.” The cadres “became overbearing and vicious in imposing one campaign after another, subjecting disobedient people to beatings, detention and torture.”50
After Mao, the Chinese government opened itself up to more grassroots input, particularly in the economy, and welcomed some diversity of viewpoints.51 But as the horrors of the Maoist period receded into the past, entrepreneurial skill became less valued and a higher importance was given to academic credentials. In contemporary China, and indeed throughout East Asia, an elite college degree often determines social status, the ability to earn enough for a decent apartment, and whom one can marry or even date.52
Academic credentials are the ticket into the “professional and managerial class” that staffs the most powerful bureaucracies of the Chinese state.53 According to a recent survey, this highly educated class does not constitute a potential opposition to the Party state, but instead serves as a bulwark of the authoritarian regime. David Goodman suggests that highly educated Chinese would likely oppose any democratizing reform that could allow the less-educated masses to assert their voices. Even the Chinese students who study in the United States and elsewhere in the West support the regime, as it will benefit them when they return.54
The modern Mandarinate is helping to direct society and regulate the lives of citizens with the aid of intrusive technology. As we have seen, for example, a “social credit” system is used to award various rights or privileges, such as the right of travel, to those who show proper behavior.55
Who Watches the Watchers?
Members of the contemporary clerisy who hold positions of power like to be seen as disinterested actors, making rational choices for the good of society. But they are people with their own prejudices and self-interest. Japan’s much-lionized public bureaucracy has been portrayed as a model of selfless, patriotic bureaucracy, dedicated to the public good, but in reality many top bureaucrats move on to high-paying jobs in the very industries they once monitored, under a system known as amakudari or “descent from heaven.”56
In the United States and Europe, elite bureaucrats tend to deny any ideological bias or class interest. But as James Burnham noted, they generally share an ideology of “managerialism,” centered on efficiency in producing the results desired by managers themselves. As the managerial class grows in power, it becomes more self-referential. Its members are responsible not to the citizenry, but only to other managers and to those regarded as part of a qualified peer group.57
The complexity of problems facing our society—climate change, mass migration, or the effects of technology, for example—may often seem beyond the competency of elected representatives. If higher education made for better people with wiser judgment, it might be tolerable to hand great powers for controlling society to highly educated experts. But as Aldous Huxley observed, scientists and other experts do not own a monopoly on either virtue or political wisdom.58
There are clear dangers in ceding too much power to unelected and unaccountable elites who claim moral authority or expertise backed by higher education. Rule by the most educated and highly credentialed people is profoundly illiberal, observes Yascha Mounk, a Harvard progressive.59 Many elite progressives—the core of the clerisy—might prefer such a model for society, but it would endanger political pluralism, especially when the credentialed elites are overly sure of their own correctness. A survey commissioned by the Atlantic notes that the highly educated are now arguably the least politically tolerant group in America.60
In coming decades, the clerisy could employ “new intellectual technology” as a means of “‘ordering’ the mass society,” as Daniel Bell predicted.61 Technology might be employed to reprogram attitudes on everything from the environment to the notion of “unconscious bias” against racial and sexual minorities. Companies like Google as well as college campuses already use technology to monitor and “correct” the thinking of employees.62 The Chinese government’s efforts to monitor thoughts and regulate opinion, sometimes assisted by U.S. tech firms, could prove a harbinger of things to come in Europe, Australia, and North America.63
Before we permit the clerisy to have such powers, we may want to consider the old Latin phrase: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes—who watches the watchers?
CHAPTER 8
The Control Tower
Universities have long served as gatekeepers for the upper classes, but they are doing less well at what was arguably their greatest twentieth-century triumph: expanding opportunities for the many.1 The reach of higher education grew dramatically in the last century, and so did the importance of academic credentials for getting good jobs. Elite degrees have become more crucial for access to the most lucrative positions, even as the top schools have grown more socially exclusive.
This is not just an American story. In China, for example, the regime has greatly expanded higher education, especially in technical subjects, in a drive to achieve economic and technological preeminence. The number of college teachers in China has risen by one million in the past two decades.2 But higher education also serves as a key to entrance into the nation’s ruling class, and an elite degree is highly prized. By 2012, at least five of the nine members of the Politburo Standing Committee, China’s top decision-making body, had children or grandchildren who had studied at elite American universities in a program launched ten years ago by the Communist Party to train the next generation of Mandarins.3
Looking at the question globally, David Rothkopf, author of Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making, compiled a list of more than six thousand members of what he calls the global “superclass”: leaders of corporations, banks and investment firms, governments, the military, the media, and religious groups. From this list, Rothkopf and his colleagues drew a “globally and sectorally representative sample” of three hundred randomly selected names, and found that nearly three in ten had attended one of twenty elite universities, particularly Stanford, Harvard, and the University of Chicago.4
Universities have also been seen as reinforcing the preeminence of what John Sexton, president of New York University, calls the “idea capitals” of the world, such as New York, Boston, London, Paris, and Beijing—all having universities and their graduates as a major part of their economic growth engine.5
Forging the New Elite
Perhaps nothing has so defined or
