Our politics, in the meantime, has become sharper-edged, more identity-based, and extra reactionary, in part because politics is the one arena by which the bobos can’t dominate—there aren’t sufficient of us. The creative class has transformed cultural attainment into financial privilege and vice versa. It controls what Jonathan Rauch describes in his new guide, The Constitution of Knowledge, as the epistemic regime—the massive community of teachers and analysts who decide what is true.
Chapters On This Book
Although a stint at Cambridge and Oxford continued to be seen as de rigueur for the English gentry, just as acceptance at Harvard, Yale, or Princeton was for their American counterparts, neither set was famed for his or her dedication to learning. Even among the many well-off, fashionable set, it would be fairly rare to seek out somebody who remembered their schoolboy Latin or who might discourse with any sense of authority on the work of the ancients. Edith Wharton claimed that, though her childhood house was filled with books, nobody ever read them — that actually, to her data, nobody in her extended family had ever read her personal books.
Anti
If you’re feeling seen in society, that’s as a end result of the creative class sees you; when you really feel unseen, that’s as a end result of this class doesn’t. The January letter from Chancellor Dirks confirmed no consciousness that a college might train students in the responsible practice of freedom, quite than merely protect them from the irresponsible abuse of it. To offer the education that befits a free person, nevertheless, liberal schooling must recover the sense of self-discipline born of surprise at humanity’s biggest achievements. For liberal schooling, there may be solely the excessive, exhausting way of instilling order into disordered souls. For the ancients and Christians who first cast the seven liberal arts, this gave it an virtually missionary facet, an ethical and even religious follow that might remodel students inwardly. For a younger St. Augustine, it may even inspire a conversion away from enslavement to decrease goods and towards a universal good that would set his mind free.
To enter this follow, nevertheless, a pupil must first die to himself. It holds out the potential of freedom, but only on the condition of mental asceticism, asking college students to renounce their passions so as to submit them to important examination. Such freedom plainly isn’t that of expressive individualism — the illusory energy to outline a chosen actuality that now motivates campus politics. Charles Taylor calls this “individualized identification,” by which one seeks an unique way of being human.