The Rise of the Secular Clerisy

Misanthropic Distrust of Humanity

We have posted several pieces in recent months on the rise of ideological authoritarianism in the West, particularly in the Europe, Canada, the UK, and the United States.  Further in this vein we are going to reproduce an article written by Joel Kotkin, entitled "Watch What You Say, The New Liberal Power Elite Won’t Tolerate Dissent" that not only calls attention to this phenomenon in the United States, but identifies the nodes of its influence and power.  

We believe Christians, along with all citizens should be not just aware of these developments, but conscious of the implications for civil freedom, liberty, and the threats to the right of dissent.  One of the reasons Christians need to be aware is that common to all the nodes of influence of the new ideological authoritarianism is a disdain, if not outright hatred of the Christian faith, and a despising of Christians and the Church. 

Watch What You Say, The New Liberal Power Elite Won’t Tolerate Dissent

by Joel Kotkin 

06/07/2014 

New Geography

 

In ways not seen since at least the McCarthy era, Americans are finding themselves increasingly constrained by a rising class—what I call the progressive Clerisy—that accepts no dissent from its basic tenets. Like the First Estate in pre-revolutionary France, the Clerisy increasingly exercises its power to constrain dissenting views, whether on politics, social attitudes or science.


An alliance of upper level bureaucrats and cultural elites, the Clerisy, for for all their concerns about inequality, have thrived, unlike most Americans, in recent years. They also enjoy strong relations with the power structure in Washington, Silicon Valley, Hollywood and Wall Street.

As the modern clerisy has seen its own power grow, even while the middle class shrinks, it has used its influence to enforce a prescribed set of acceptable ideas. On everything from gender and sexual preference to climate change, those who dissent from the official pieties risk punishment.

 The "official" pieties are not defined in a creed or other formal statement.  They reflect a world-view which coheres around doctrines such as economic egalitarianism, distributive economic rights, a strong emphasis upon identity politics--both racial, class, and gender--a misanthropic distrust of the human race, along with a deeply held inchoate (as opposed to, reasoned) commitment to the omni-competent regulatory despotic state to create a society consistent with the shared world-view.  

Increasingly, those who dissent publicly and even privately are subjected to discrimination with teeth--so much so that people are now being hounded out of positions and occupations because they do not hold the received view. 

This power has been seen recently in a host of cancellations of commencement speakers. Just in the past few months Ayaan Hirsi Ali, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, International Monetary Fund managing director Christine Lagarde, and former UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau, have been prevented from speaking by campus virtue squads whose sensibilities they had offended.

The spate of recent cancellation reflect an increasingly overbearing academic culture that promotes speech codes on what is permissible to say and even seeks to provide “trigger warnings” to warn students about the presence of nominally troubling subject matter in readings and discussions so they can avoid the elements of reality they find offensive. 

The emerging mien of the "politically correct" brigade is that it would stand upon the bridge, shouting "You shall not pass", thereby preventing any heretics or naysayers to enter any academic hall, place of work, or government position, or society in general, lest the heretics do great harm to others by offending them.

The very term Clerisy first appeared in 1830 in the work of Samuel Coleridge to described the bearers society’s highest ideals: the intellectuals, pastors, scientists charged with transmitting their privileged knowledge them to the less enlightened orders.


The rise of today’s Clerisy stems from the growing power and influence of its three main constituent parts: the creative elite of media and entertainment, the academic community, and the high-level government bureaucracy.

The Clerisy operates on very different principles than its rival power brokers, the oligarchs of finance, technology or energy. The power of the knowledge elite does not stem primarily from money, but in persuading, instructing and regulating the rest of society. Like the British Clerisy or the old church-centered French First Estate, the contemporary Clerisy increasingly promotes a single increasingly parochial ideology and, when necessary, has the power to marginalize, or excommunicate, miscreants from the public sphere.

Of course, every society needs a clerical class, to instruct the young and maintain cultural standards. But in the past, at least in modern America, they tended to be a tolerance for fairly disparate views. Today’s Clerisy, by contrast, is increasingly homogeneous in its beliefs- despite pockets of conservative power such as the Heritage Foundation and most notably the media empire controlled by the Murdoch family.

Like all destructive ideologies, it relies not upon reason nor persuasion of the will, but upon the exercise of  social, political, and legal powers, such as ostracism, sending to Coventry, exile, ridicule, mockery, and ad hominem attacks--very much like classical racism. 

The modern Clerisy’s homogeneity springs from their social conditioning. Educated along similar ideological lines at major universities, they tend to be geographically concentrated in wealthy, “progressive” places, where few dissent from the prevailing worldview. As such they breathe, as analyst Walter Russell Mead suggests, “within a cocoon.” Inside their urban cocoons they operate from a thoroughly internalized set of progressive tropes on such issues as the environment, urbanism, gender and race. In practical terms, such as in their support of President Obama and the Democratic Party, they are both broadly allied with centers of power and influence, much as the clergy was in Medieval and early modern times.

When a people come to hold verities which they view as impeccable, but are unable to argue for them in any winning way apart from blackmail, threat, and force, we are confronted with invincible ignorance.