'The clerisy' is an excellent term and this is a great analysis. I hope you're going to write a book about this. The NGOs in particular are very significant and get very little attention, but they seem to be effectively making the running, not to mention writing the language.
One thing I'd take issue with is your use of the terms 'progress' and 'reaction', as if they were uncomplicated; and as if it were clear that one side was good and one bad. It doesn't look that way to me: not only does an unquestioning pursuit of 'progress' look like the heart of the problem, but various forms of 'reaction' are a useful counterpoint to it. To me, the failure of 'progress' in almost every department is a bomb under the left as well as the bourgeois century.
That’s very true that we shouldn’t use progress and reaction in that way but what if the enlightenment as an engine of scientific innovation is happening anyway for better or worse because capitalism tends toward (used in a morally neutral way that could lead to disaster or whatever Star Trek vision progressives have)? Wouldn’t it keep needing to overthrow things that get in its way regardless of their moral value? I’m just wondering if it will do that with this stagnant clerisy and probably create a new one, which could be worse or better (likely worse) but more suited to its new needs...
Yes, that makes sense. I wonder if it can manage in that case to overthrow the sticky bits of clerical wokeism (science is racist, two plus two equals five, women can have penises etc) but keep the useful parts (borders are bad, 'openness' is good, all traditions are unfair limitations on personal consumer freedom). Or whether it all comes as a package.
I also wonder whether the woke clerisy is after all a natural product of enlightenment liberalism, as Deneen suggested, as opposed to its enemy, as today's liberals like to complain. If so, maybe is is a glitch in the capitalist matrix.
Many things I would like to comment upon, but instead of bloviating I'll try my best to make my main point concisely in re: "The three main clerical institutions are academia, the NGO sector and the media."
Speaking from a US perspective, I'd add the intelligence agencies, especially the CIA -- whose links to and manipulation of the other three institutions has been extensively documented. Marks and Marchetti explicitly analyzed the Agency's clerical/insular culture in their early exposé THE CIA AND THE CULT OF INTELLIGENCE (1974): https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/342587.The_CIA_And_The_Cult_Of_Intelligence
Seen through the lens of your analysis here, it's not difficult to make some assumptions about why US military intelligence (DIA, the service intel branches, and to some extent NSA, which belongs to DOD) are frequently at loggerheads with CIA. The military -- through necessity -- is an innately populist institution; the majority of recruits are from the lower half of the socioeconomic strata. The CIA has always stressed its elite, credentialist Ivy League image (even though it struggled at many times in its history to recruit actual Ivy Leaguers).
Military intelligence people have a tough row to hoe. The command structure tends to divert weird/smart poor kids into intel rather than combat arms. They get to be part of the clerisy, but it's always made clear they won't make it to the top; kind of like Discalced Carmelites. (Chelsea Manning is a key example.)
That's an interesting distinction between the military and civilian intelligence services in the US, one that I haven't really considered or meaningfully noticed before. It's doubly interesting given what appears to be a growing gap between the enlisted soldiers and NCOs on one hand and the officer class and Pentagon on the other, with the latter becoming increasingly open in their embrace of the clerisy's morals and politics even as the former remain poorer, less educated and less "coastal" than the nation at large (let alone their own officers).
From my own observations as someone who has never been in the military, this political shift has radicalized and "blackpilled" more people on the right than any other individual issue since the rise of Trump, with the possible but related exception of the newest wave of clerical identitarian propaganda making its way into schools. It would be very interesting to know what impact this is having on the enlisted soldiers themselves.
"It's doubly interesting given what appears to be a growing gap between the enlisted soldiers and NCOs on one hand and the officer class and Pentagon on the other"
It's not really too new of a thing -- working-class draftees "fragging" their inept college-educated "Shake-'N'-Bake" 2LTs was a significant phenomenon in the Vietnam War, one of several factors that led to the end of the draft and the establishment of the All-Volunteer Force.
I am utterly unable to find a link now and am working from memory, but Stars And Stripes ran a pre-primary election poll in 2016 showing enlisted people who intended to vote almost evenly split between Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders and officers narrowly favoring Hillary Clinton.
There's a well-known saying in the US military to the effect of: "If you're an O-6 (colonel in the other services, captain in the Navy), you're still a troop. Once you make O-7 (brigadier general/Rear Admiral Lower Half), you're a politician."
I couldn't track this one down either -- it's possibly apocryphal -- but there is allegedly a similar saying from the Polish Army; "If you want to become a colonel, they take your heart. If you want to become a general, they take your brains."
I remember that Hersh piece very well, blew my mind at the time, as did his piece about the killing of Bin Laden- miss seeing his name pop up here and there
"At their current enormous levels of power, the clerisy is too big to take on directly and anyone who tries will have the full force of all of the institutions against them."
This is an important point to make, as there are those that say "you need to speak up, regardless of the consequences, and make your voice heard! That will stop this insanity! I'm totally not sending you to be devoured by wolves! Yea!" I wrote about this recently (https://www.splicetoday.com/writing/surviving-cultural-turmoil):
"choose your fights wisely, preferably ones that will benefit you personally, socially or financially. Don’t be a fool, don’t become an unwitting asset in someone else’s activist portfolio. You do no favors by martyring yourself to provide a “noble example.”
Hi Angela, another great post, as usual. Can you put links or citations in so I can look some of your sources up? I understand not wanting to clutter it up too much and make it too academic, but for example, I want to read more about what this man Edward Turner says about NGOs and Graduate students, and elite overproduction stuff more generally. :*
This is very good. I remember Tom Wolfe referring to them as a “clergy” back in the 80s. The crisis of legitimacy is at the heart of this discontent. The clergy has nothing in common w working class or everyday people.
this has got me thinking. challenged some of my own perceptions. thanks Angela.
I am old middle class gay Australian used to think of myself as left, I hope I still am a bit. I have found the sermonizing tone of identitarian politics and the allocation of people into categories a bit oversimplified and bureaucratic. Neither do I like the corporate , pretty ruthless or the very right wing identity prone. so I'm a bit lost really.
Being an early 40s Irish person, I have the benefit of seeing the change in the clerisy class in real time over a period of only 25 years - mid-1980s to about 2010. In many cases, the same organisations were there: Concern, Trocaire, Amnesty International, but their ideologies and personnel changed at pace. A lot of the change was driven by "professionalisation" of charities, essentially replacing volunteerism with credentialism. Whereas before the charity was focused on practical assistance it is now about "raising awareness" and extracting taxpayer funding. I live in England, where the change took place more gradually over a longer period - and is still much less complete than in Ireland. I notice that an increasing number of Irish people are able to recognise that the NGO leaders of today are the bishops of a generation ago.
Dear Angela, I just wanted to let you know that I have come back to this piece many times since its publication. PMC analysis through others combined with your First As Tragedy, Then As Farce article to changed everything for me. Thinking of the PMC as a clerisy, and of populism as an anti-clerisy movement, has been very illuminating.
Your contribution has been so formative to me that I am incorporating it into my underground course on the PMC that has been ongoing for the last couple of months. Your piece here is one of the two final week readings this week. I will be lecturing on this and the conclusion of Catherine Liu's Virtue Hoarders with the co-instructor of the course. In this course I represent a sort of post-left position whereas he represents a sort of PMC-critical class-based DSA position. Just thought you would find that interesting! Have a good day.
'The clerisy' is an excellent term and this is a great analysis. I hope you're going to write a book about this. The NGOs in particular are very significant and get very little attention, but they seem to be effectively making the running, not to mention writing the language.
One thing I'd take issue with is your use of the terms 'progress' and 'reaction', as if they were uncomplicated; and as if it were clear that one side was good and one bad. It doesn't look that way to me: not only does an unquestioning pursuit of 'progress' look like the heart of the problem, but various forms of 'reaction' are a useful counterpoint to it. To me, the failure of 'progress' in almost every department is a bomb under the left as well as the bourgeois century.
I would still read that book though.
That’s very true that we shouldn’t use progress and reaction in that way but what if the enlightenment as an engine of scientific innovation is happening anyway for better or worse because capitalism tends toward (used in a morally neutral way that could lead to disaster or whatever Star Trek vision progressives have)? Wouldn’t it keep needing to overthrow things that get in its way regardless of their moral value? I’m just wondering if it will do that with this stagnant clerisy and probably create a new one, which could be worse or better (likely worse) but more suited to its new needs...
*tends toward competition for innovation
Yes, that makes sense. I wonder if it can manage in that case to overthrow the sticky bits of clerical wokeism (science is racist, two plus two equals five, women can have penises etc) but keep the useful parts (borders are bad, 'openness' is good, all traditions are unfair limitations on personal consumer freedom). Or whether it all comes as a package.
I also wonder whether the woke clerisy is after all a natural product of enlightenment liberalism, as Deneen suggested, as opposed to its enemy, as today's liberals like to complain. If so, maybe is is a glitch in the capitalist matrix.
Excellent piece.
Many things I would like to comment upon, but instead of bloviating I'll try my best to make my main point concisely in re: "The three main clerical institutions are academia, the NGO sector and the media."
Speaking from a US perspective, I'd add the intelligence agencies, especially the CIA -- whose links to and manipulation of the other three institutions has been extensively documented. Marks and Marchetti explicitly analyzed the Agency's clerical/insular culture in their early exposé THE CIA AND THE CULT OF INTELLIGENCE (1974): https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/342587.The_CIA_And_The_Cult_Of_Intelligence
Seen through the lens of your analysis here, it's not difficult to make some assumptions about why US military intelligence (DIA, the service intel branches, and to some extent NSA, which belongs to DOD) are frequently at loggerheads with CIA. The military -- through necessity -- is an innately populist institution; the majority of recruits are from the lower half of the socioeconomic strata. The CIA has always stressed its elite, credentialist Ivy League image (even though it struggled at many times in its history to recruit actual Ivy Leaguers).
Military intelligence people have a tough row to hoe. The command structure tends to divert weird/smart poor kids into intel rather than combat arms. They get to be part of the clerisy, but it's always made clear they won't make it to the top; kind of like Discalced Carmelites. (Chelsea Manning is a key example.)
Great article by Seymour Hersh, if you haven't seen it already: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v38/n01/seymour-m.-hersh/military-to-military US military and CIA literally backing opposite sides in Syria.
That's an interesting distinction between the military and civilian intelligence services in the US, one that I haven't really considered or meaningfully noticed before. It's doubly interesting given what appears to be a growing gap between the enlisted soldiers and NCOs on one hand and the officer class and Pentagon on the other, with the latter becoming increasingly open in their embrace of the clerisy's morals and politics even as the former remain poorer, less educated and less "coastal" than the nation at large (let alone their own officers).
From my own observations as someone who has never been in the military, this political shift has radicalized and "blackpilled" more people on the right than any other individual issue since the rise of Trump, with the possible but related exception of the newest wave of clerical identitarian propaganda making its way into schools. It would be very interesting to know what impact this is having on the enlisted soldiers themselves.
"It's doubly interesting given what appears to be a growing gap between the enlisted soldiers and NCOs on one hand and the officer class and Pentagon on the other"
It's not really too new of a thing -- working-class draftees "fragging" their inept college-educated "Shake-'N'-Bake" 2LTs was a significant phenomenon in the Vietnam War, one of several factors that led to the end of the draft and the establishment of the All-Volunteer Force.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fragging
I am utterly unable to find a link now and am working from memory, but Stars And Stripes ran a pre-primary election poll in 2016 showing enlisted people who intended to vote almost evenly split between Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders and officers narrowly favoring Hillary Clinton.
There's a well-known saying in the US military to the effect of: "If you're an O-6 (colonel in the other services, captain in the Navy), you're still a troop. Once you make O-7 (brigadier general/Rear Admiral Lower Half), you're a politician."
I couldn't track this one down either -- it's possibly apocryphal -- but there is allegedly a similar saying from the Polish Army; "If you want to become a colonel, they take your heart. If you want to become a general, they take your brains."
OK that is so fascinating. Thank you. Going to read all these.
I remember that Hersh piece very well, blew my mind at the time, as did his piece about the killing of Bin Laden- miss seeing his name pop up here and there
I'm not in the journo biz, but I'm given to understand he's pretty much retired. He's old! One of the greats.
"At their current enormous levels of power, the clerisy is too big to take on directly and anyone who tries will have the full force of all of the institutions against them."
This is an important point to make, as there are those that say "you need to speak up, regardless of the consequences, and make your voice heard! That will stop this insanity! I'm totally not sending you to be devoured by wolves! Yea!" I wrote about this recently (https://www.splicetoday.com/writing/surviving-cultural-turmoil):
"choose your fights wisely, preferably ones that will benefit you personally, socially or financially. Don’t be a fool, don’t become an unwitting asset in someone else’s activist portfolio. You do no favors by martyring yourself to provide a “noble example.”
I sure as hell am not going to speak my mind candidly on Twitter. This, in contrast, I feel to be a safe space.
Hi Angela, another great post, as usual. Can you put links or citations in so I can look some of your sources up? I understand not wanting to clutter it up too much and make it too academic, but for example, I want to read more about what this man Edward Turner says about NGOs and Graduate students, and elite overproduction stuff more generally. :*
I will! First thing tomorrow my friend.
No rush or anything. Much appreciate you!
Just remembered to do this!
Here is Turner https://escholarship.org/uc/item/97p470sx
<3
This is very good. I remember Tom Wolfe referring to them as a “clergy” back in the 80s. The crisis of legitimacy is at the heart of this discontent. The clergy has nothing in common w working class or everyday people.
this has got me thinking. challenged some of my own perceptions. thanks Angela.
I am old middle class gay Australian used to think of myself as left, I hope I still am a bit. I have found the sermonizing tone of identitarian politics and the allocation of people into categories a bit oversimplified and bureaucratic. Neither do I like the corporate , pretty ruthless or the very right wing identity prone. so I'm a bit lost really.
mabye reactionary will do. who listens to blues.
Being an early 40s Irish person, I have the benefit of seeing the change in the clerisy class in real time over a period of only 25 years - mid-1980s to about 2010. In many cases, the same organisations were there: Concern, Trocaire, Amnesty International, but their ideologies and personnel changed at pace. A lot of the change was driven by "professionalisation" of charities, essentially replacing volunteerism with credentialism. Whereas before the charity was focused on practical assistance it is now about "raising awareness" and extracting taxpayer funding. I live in England, where the change took place more gradually over a longer period - and is still much less complete than in Ireland. I notice that an increasing number of Irish people are able to recognise that the NGO leaders of today are the bishops of a generation ago.
Dear Angela, I just wanted to let you know that I have come back to this piece many times since its publication. PMC analysis through others combined with your First As Tragedy, Then As Farce article to changed everything for me. Thinking of the PMC as a clerisy, and of populism as an anti-clerisy movement, has been very illuminating.
Your contribution has been so formative to me that I am incorporating it into my underground course on the PMC that has been ongoing for the last couple of months. Your piece here is one of the two final week readings this week. I will be lecturing on this and the conclusion of Catherine Liu's Virtue Hoarders with the co-instructor of the course. In this course I represent a sort of post-left position whereas he represents a sort of PMC-critical class-based DSA position. Just thought you would find that interesting! Have a good day.
Wow that’s so great to hear. Thanks.
Can I send you an email? I can't find an address for you but mine is theorypleeb@gmail.com Take care!