If you want to know how to implement this, ask Lee Kwan Yew.
That said, it won't work. It's not even clear what a "moral" and "virtuous" elite would look like today, since we no longer have any basis for standards of morality or virtue. Well, we do... it's Nietzsche, but our current elite show neither the temperament nor ability to become overmen.
A virtuous elite requires a broadly shared definition of virtue: what is "good" and "evil". So let's say the Ivies decided tomorrow to embrace this vision and intentionally train moral and virtuous leaders for America. Where would they get their standard of virtue from?
With some exceptions, I doubt that the administrators of many colleges have the desire or ability to mobilize their faculty to promote the concept of noblesse oblige among students. The exceptions are military and religious academies — which is appropriate — as well as abusive enforcement of DEI discrimination, which is not.
For better or worse, a sense of responsibility towards society overall needs to be learned from family and peers well before college age.
Eloquently written. I would add that 1) the USA didnt have what typically mean by a National Elite until relatively recently in our history. 2) the effective Elite (if one wants to call it that) was far larger as a share of the population. 3) most didnt attend the prestige universities, or other like them, as late as the 1940s (and it didnt end overnight, this faded over decades) most business manager, most scientists, and most government officials didnt attend what we commonly define today as university at all. The American academe was, quite deliberately and by design, decentralized, diffused, and compared to today just astonishingly institutionally pluralized.
Hillsdale College, founded in 1844, embodies the institution preparing a virtuous elite. The fact that they accept no federal or other government funding is instructive.
If you believe polling data, it is clear that the bulk of the American people do not define elite this way. Rather they identify billionaires and celebrities. So quit calling them elites and use Ruling Class. Any ruling class has junior, middle and senior members so differing privileges and power can be logically explained.
Almost invisibly, as the cognitively talented ascended to power beginning in the late 1960’s, their corrupted values infused popular culture, and, since it seemed so natural and was so gradual, few noticed. Their values are not the aristocratic values of nobility of soul and refinement of sensibilities; or traditional character virtues like honor, duty, and courage; or American Puritan values of restraint, modesty and self-sacrifice.
Meritocratic elites worship ambition, money and status, classic bourgeois values, to which they welded social and economic libertarianism. They corrupted the meaning of liberation from self-mastery, which frees us from servitude to our passions, to the unbridled pursuit of appetites. And they remade society to benefit themselves based on liberation arguments.
This above quotation is from my essay “The Corrupted Values of the Meritocracy” found on my Substack Against the Current.
What the common people perceive matters to the relationship between elites and commoners. Increasingly, what the common people perceive are elites who, despite attending these top universities, come across as incorrigible ideological idiots. This casts both elites and the universities they attend in a bad light. One result is that fewer and fewer people with common sense aspire to attend these institutions and thus a vicious cycle is born. The more obvious result is that the problem commoners have with elite institutions is that their standards aren't high enough. Consequently, commoners are beginning to romanticize the old age of rarified Bertrand Russell style elites. This article seems to downplay this most important cultural observation.
“But any effort to restore or recreate some diversity of elites would have to start with the reality of their consolidation and work to imbue different elite-run institutions with distinct modes of integrity and legitimacy. Such work would have to begin as better formation of the elite we have, and so by recognizing that different sectors of American society no longer really have their own elites because there is just one elite, and it is increasingly becoming its own sector of our society.”
This sounds suspiciously like Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. That is not a criticism. DEI had a point and conservatives completely missed it, screwing things up in the process.
Eloquently written. I would add that 1) the USA didnt have what is typically mean by a National Elite until relatively recently in our history. 2) the effective Elite (if one wants to call it that) was far larger as a share of the population. 3) most didnt attend the prestige universities, or other like them, as late as the 1940s (and it didnt end overnight, this faded over decades) most business manager, most scientists, and most government officials didnt attend what we commonly define today as university at all. The American academe was, quite deliberately and by design, decentralized, diffused, deliberately redundant, and compared to today just astonishingly institutionally pluralized.
And that paradigm in the academe also, necessarily so, was the paradigm in out financial, corporate, governmental, and scientific institutional topologies as well
“They should stop viewing those students as customers, and should see them instead as rising leading citizens who require formation in a sense of gratitude, commitment to the fate of the country, and restraint in the use of power.”
Until students are no longer customers, universities will continue to see them as customers. But students will remain customers as long as they have to pay exorbitantly to attend university: they will arrive on campus (if at all) expecting their antecedent desires to be satisfied, seeing as how they are paying so much for the service.
You can’t just make people in an institution start seeing things in a way the very institution is set up to oppose. Conservatives such as Mr. Levin should know this — incentives, incentives, incentives!
Long ago, conservatives reasoned that making students pay for college would make them take responsibility for their education. Alas, making students pay for college has turned them into customers unwilling to submit to soul-turning training.
The Aristocratic were never virtuous, and trying to impose “Noblesse oblige” is a fools errand. You cannot make a better aristocracy by making a better aristrocrat.
The core issue is financialization, not merit. Higher education has become hedge funds with libraries, and the leadership reflects this. The only way to stop it is to de-financialize, which seems impossible now, but one never knows what might be eventuated.
If you want to know how to implement this, ask Lee Kwan Yew.
That said, it won't work. It's not even clear what a "moral" and "virtuous" elite would look like today, since we no longer have any basis for standards of morality or virtue. Well, we do... it's Nietzsche, but our current elite show neither the temperament nor ability to become overmen.
A virtuous elite requires a broadly shared definition of virtue: what is "good" and "evil". So let's say the Ivies decided tomorrow to embrace this vision and intentionally train moral and virtuous leaders for America. Where would they get their standard of virtue from?
With some exceptions, I doubt that the administrators of many colleges have the desire or ability to mobilize their faculty to promote the concept of noblesse oblige among students. The exceptions are military and religious academies — which is appropriate — as well as abusive enforcement of DEI discrimination, which is not.
For better or worse, a sense of responsibility towards society overall needs to be learned from family and peers well before college age.
Eloquently written. I would add that 1) the USA didnt have what typically mean by a National Elite until relatively recently in our history. 2) the effective Elite (if one wants to call it that) was far larger as a share of the population. 3) most didnt attend the prestige universities, or other like them, as late as the 1940s (and it didnt end overnight, this faded over decades) most business manager, most scientists, and most government officials didnt attend what we commonly define today as university at all. The American academe was, quite deliberately and by design, decentralized, diffused, and compared to today just astonishingly institutionally pluralized.
Hillsdale College, founded in 1844, embodies the institution preparing a virtuous elite. The fact that they accept no federal or other government funding is instructive.
If you believe polling data, it is clear that the bulk of the American people do not define elite this way. Rather they identify billionaires and celebrities. So quit calling them elites and use Ruling Class. Any ruling class has junior, middle and senior members so differing privileges and power can be logically explained.
Almost invisibly, as the cognitively talented ascended to power beginning in the late 1960’s, their corrupted values infused popular culture, and, since it seemed so natural and was so gradual, few noticed. Their values are not the aristocratic values of nobility of soul and refinement of sensibilities; or traditional character virtues like honor, duty, and courage; or American Puritan values of restraint, modesty and self-sacrifice.
Meritocratic elites worship ambition, money and status, classic bourgeois values, to which they welded social and economic libertarianism. They corrupted the meaning of liberation from self-mastery, which frees us from servitude to our passions, to the unbridled pursuit of appetites. And they remade society to benefit themselves based on liberation arguments.
This above quotation is from my essay “The Corrupted Values of the Meritocracy” found on my Substack Against the Current.
What the common people perceive matters to the relationship between elites and commoners. Increasingly, what the common people perceive are elites who, despite attending these top universities, come across as incorrigible ideological idiots. This casts both elites and the universities they attend in a bad light. One result is that fewer and fewer people with common sense aspire to attend these institutions and thus a vicious cycle is born. The more obvious result is that the problem commoners have with elite institutions is that their standards aren't high enough. Consequently, commoners are beginning to romanticize the old age of rarified Bertrand Russell style elites. This article seems to downplay this most important cultural observation.
“But any effort to restore or recreate some diversity of elites would have to start with the reality of their consolidation and work to imbue different elite-run institutions with distinct modes of integrity and legitimacy. Such work would have to begin as better formation of the elite we have, and so by recognizing that different sectors of American society no longer really have their own elites because there is just one elite, and it is increasingly becoming its own sector of our society.”
This sounds suspiciously like Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. That is not a criticism. DEI had a point and conservatives completely missed it, screwing things up in the process.
Eloquently written. I would add that 1) the USA didnt have what is typically mean by a National Elite until relatively recently in our history. 2) the effective Elite (if one wants to call it that) was far larger as a share of the population. 3) most didnt attend the prestige universities, or other like them, as late as the 1940s (and it didnt end overnight, this faded over decades) most business manager, most scientists, and most government officials didnt attend what we commonly define today as university at all. The American academe was, quite deliberately and by design, decentralized, diffused, deliberately redundant, and compared to today just astonishingly institutionally pluralized.
And that paradigm in the academe also, necessarily so, was the paradigm in out financial, corporate, governmental, and scientific institutional topologies as well
“They should stop viewing those students as customers, and should see them instead as rising leading citizens who require formation in a sense of gratitude, commitment to the fate of the country, and restraint in the use of power.”
Until students are no longer customers, universities will continue to see them as customers. But students will remain customers as long as they have to pay exorbitantly to attend university: they will arrive on campus (if at all) expecting their antecedent desires to be satisfied, seeing as how they are paying so much for the service.
You can’t just make people in an institution start seeing things in a way the very institution is set up to oppose. Conservatives such as Mr. Levin should know this — incentives, incentives, incentives!
Long ago, conservatives reasoned that making students pay for college would make them take responsibility for their education. Alas, making students pay for college has turned them into customers unwilling to submit to soul-turning training.
The Aristocratic were never virtuous, and trying to impose “Noblesse oblige” is a fools errand. You cannot make a better aristocracy by making a better aristrocrat.
The core issue is financialization, not merit. Higher education has become hedge funds with libraries, and the leadership reflects this. The only way to stop it is to de-financialize, which seems impossible now, but one never knows what might be eventuated.