Agree or disagree with him (I can do plenty of both, sometimes strongly so), the British philosopher John Gray is a consistently thought-provoking, if not always exactly cheery, writer. His latest book, The New Leviathans, which will be out shortly, is well worth reading — and not only for fans of Thomas Hobbes, although they in particular ought to enjoy the starring role old Tom plays in the book, and the quotes, the quotes.
Hobbes (from Behemoth):
The universities have been to the nation, as the wooden horse was to the Trojans.
After citing that line, Gray has this to say:
The decades that led up to revolution in tsarist Russia display several features that presage the twenty-first-century West. One is the rise of an antinomian intelligentsia, which professes to instruct society by deconstructing its institutions and values.
As we have been reminded yet again (this time by the grotesque scenes in some European and North American cities in the aftermath of the pogrom in Israel) that rise — and its consequences — are what we are witnessing now.
Gray recently participated in an UnHerd podcast hosted by Freddie Sayers. The transcript of their conversation is now online. There’s plenty in it to discuss at another time (not least Gray’s thoughts on net zero), but, for now, there are his views on why the changing economy (partly) explains the rise of, to use the shorthand, wokery:
I interpret it in the book [The New Leviathans] as partly a revolt of the professional bourgeoisie against their own [superfluity]. They’re increasingly redundant. The cognitive elite doesn’t know anything, most of it. It knows a patois, a vernacular, that it learns at university, then it moves out into the world and finds that the opportunities for that are not infinite and they’re shrinking, shrinking for various reasons, one of which is now AI. So they’re all on the hiding to nowhere actually, those people. And therefore they get an idea: how can I possibly be safe; how can I get on a career ladder when most of the career ladders have been destroyed, or the rungs have been pulled out? Well, you can get a career if you’d like as a guardian of society, as an enlightened guardian of society.
This, I think, is right, although the economic argument goes further than that. For example, ever-changing speech codes are a handy way of shutting out potential economic competitors who are insufficiently “educated” to know how to navigate them.
In The New Leviathans, Gray elaborates on the economic factors driving this “revolt of the professional bourgeoisie” and specifically the creation of “a lumpen intelligentsia that is economically superfluous” but profoundly destabilizing. Gray notes the work done by the Russian-American social scientist Peter Turchin on the question of “elite overproduction.” One of the consequences of this surplus is, of course, job insecurity (and, for that matter, status anxiety).
Gray:
Surplus elites are waging a war for economic survival in which hyper-liberal values are commodified in the labour market. Woke is a career as much as a cult.
Also citing Turchin, I wrote for NR in 2016 about the dangers posed by automation’s effect on the job market, highlighting, among other considerations, the consequences of its impact higher up the employment ladder. This, I argued, could mean trouble (and possibly already was: I was writing not that long after Occupy):
Karl Marx would have welcomed the advent of our new robot overlords as a trigger for revolution, though one more upscale than he’d hoped for: A rising not of, or for, the working class, but by the well educated and ambitious, furious at being denied what they see as their fair share of the pie. The meek will never inherit the earth; clever people with a grudge just might.
To understand why “robots” — sexy, sinister shorthand for the increasing automation of work — might drive them to try, “elite overproduction” (a phrase coined by the University of Connecticut’s Peter Turchin) is an excellent place to start. To put it more crudely than Professor Turchin ever would, this occurs when members of the elite (or those with the talents to join it) become too numerous for society to accommodate their aspirations.
Turchin can stretch this concept too far, but he’s correct that it can be a useful indicator of trouble to come. . . . According to Turchin, elite overproduction can cause such fierce competition within the elite that the old order risks being pulled apart. Perhaps that’s so, but there may be a simpler way to look at this. Oppressed masses generally stay oppressed. They may smolder, but it takes the bright to spark a revolution. And if the bright feel they are missing out, that’s what they will be tempted to do.
Alternatively, of course, the bright may reorder the existing system so as to secure their social and economic status.
And that is what they seem to be doing.