Despite the past records of the middle majority, the intellectual alternates between paying no attention at all to it and being terrified of it.

Via Social Volatility, Career Success, Murder Rates by Rob Henderson.  A link to a New York Times article from fifty-three years ago which was almost clairvoyant in its prescience.  

The article is Intellectuals As an ‘Ethnic Group’ by Andrew M. Greeley.  Many of the names bandied about would be little recognized today but the analysis and insight are astonishing.  I have been talking about the academic bubble, social and cultural isolation of the MSM, and the Gramscian dynamics those isolations create since the beginning of this blog in 2007.  Greeley is writing about it thirty-seven years before that.

America's intellectual elite, normally secure from criticism, has been taking some lumps lately—and not just from Spiro Agnew. Writing in The Nation, John McDermott has accused lower‐level members of the elite of thinking of themselves as missionaries bringing culture to the heathens, and Michael Lerner, in The American Scholar, anticipated Agnew with the suggestion that the intellectual leaders may be snobs. Culture is indeed missionaried at some of the working‐class institutions (state colleges are what I have in mind) at which exiled members of this elite are forced to teach to earn their daily bread, and snobbery is as present among this elite as among other groups of human beings.

I would like to suggest a way to understand the split which columnist Joseph Kraft has called “the most dangerous in American society—that between better‐educated America and middle America.” I propose that we can best judge the relationship between the intellectual elite and the rest of society if we perceive that the intelligentsia is, in fact, an ethnic group. Once we accept this, we begin to see the present tension between this ethnic group and other ethnic groups in its proper perspective.

There are six characteristics which delineate an ethnic group:

(1) A presumed consciousness of kind rooted in a sense of common origin.

(2) Sufficient territorial concentration to make it possible for members of the group to interact with each other most of the time and to reduce to a minimum interaction with members of other ethnic groups.

(3) A sharing of ideals and values by members of the ethnic group.

(4) Strong moralistic fervor for such ideals and values, combined with a sense of being persecuted by those who do not share them and hence are not members of the ethnic group.

(5) Distrust of those who are out side the ethnic group, combined with massive ignorance of them.

(6) Finally, a strong tendency in members of an ethnic group to view themselves and their circle as the whale of reality, or at least the whole of reality that matters. Thus, many primitive tribes use the same word for “human being” as they do for members of the tribe. Those who are outside the group, even if they are conceded some sort of human status, are, nonetheless, not considered terribly important.

Greeley begins by claiming:

Few probably will disagree that the first two characteristics apply to members of the American intellectual elite. 

 In 2023, I cannot imagine any stalwart observer of the current scene not to be in complete agreement that the public intellectuals and clerisy share not only the first but two but characteristics three through six as well.  

Academia and MSM acolytes, worshippers of the various factions of Marxism such as Socialism, National Socialism, International Socialism, Postmodernism, The Frankfurt School, Social Justice, Critical Race Theory, Anthropogenic Global Warming, DEI, ESG, Intersectionality, Trans ideology, Third-Wave feminism, etc., are indeed a cloistered ethnic group with a shared origin story, living in scattered monasteries, with completely shared (and well policed) ideals, ideals which must frequently be signaled with fervor, an aversion bordering on an abhorrence for anyone not considered a left leaning member of the clerisy, and an obstinate insistence that the worldview of their tribe is the only worldview which can be permitted.

Greeley ends with:

Because they are ignorant of and unconcerned about other ethnic groups, the intellectual ethnics are confused and frightened when they detect a change of behavior among the members of other groups. Just as they betrayed ignorance of other groups by assuming that every new scheme which was alleged to improve the conditions of the poor and the blacks would be accepted by the white majority because the scheme was sanctioned by the elite as the only moral one, so they display equal ignorance in overestimating the so‐called white backlash. Despite the past records of the middle majority, the intellectual alternates between paying no attention at all to it and being terrified of it. The terror is real enough, but it does not necessarily correspond to some reality which ought to generate terror. The intellectual who shivers with delight at the fantasy of a Polish storm trooper kicking in his door at 4 o'clock in the morning has the same contact with reality as does the Polish homeowner on the Northwest Side of Chicago who thinks that Black Panthers are lurking in his corner drugstore. Both have created terrors for their own entertainment and delight; both are completely unaware of what really is going on in other ethnic groups; both pre sent classic examples of frightened ethnic behavior.

All of this is unfortunate, of course, because in addition to being members of one particular ethnic group, the intellectual” elite are, by definition, the idea‐shaping segment of the leadership of American society. For them to be alienated from the rest of society for reasons of presumed moral superiority or ignorance of what is going on in the rest of the society is a tragedy both for them and for the whole country. Curiously enough, members of the other ethnic groups have a great deal of respect for the intellectuals, though the respect is mixed with negative feelings. It would, one suspects, take relatively little in the way of sympathetic understanding on the part of the intellectual ethnics to begin to re‐establish some kind of communication with the rest of America. 

I hope we have reached the point where the wonderful melting pot which is America can reintegrate the public intellectual ethnic group back into the American commonweal.  Left in their poisonously isolated stew they are a danger to themselves and the nation.