Arts degree changes the latest battle in elite war for cultural power
It’s not racism, COVID-19, or protests that have made the world go mad. Instead, this is what happens when there are too many arts degrees and not enough jobs. And it’s happened before, writes James Morrow.
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If you want to know why so much of the world seems to have tipped over into a bizarre replay of the Cultural Revolution, don’t blame racism or the death of George Floyd or a statue of Winston Churchill or Mahatma Gandhi (yes, even he’s in the crosshairs now).
Instead, blame economics – and specifically, the promiscuous minting of degrees which would have once eased young peoples’ way into a life of status and middle class respectability, but which now only offer the prospect of debt, insecurity, and gig work.
While the woke ideology driving much of the present madness may feel like a heretical retelling of Christianity for our secular age – right down to the original sin of white “privilege” – the fact that it is clearly fulfilling the spiritual needs of many of its adherents is not the real prime mover.
Instead, this is not so much a revolt of what anti-colonial writer Frantz Fanon called “the wretched of the earth” as it is a battle for money, power, and cultural supremacy between an established older elite and a rising generation that wants what’s coming to them but feels it’s been denied.
And all the statue smashing and picking through history and literature and picking over private conversations for evidence of racism or other un-woke behaviour is just window-dressing.
Fascinatingly, this was all predicted by Russian-American scientist Peter Turchin years ago, in an in-depth article published in 2013 which reads like it could have been written yesterday.
Turchin’s area of expertise is cultural evolution and specifically something called cliodynamics – the mathematical modelling and statistical analysis of the patterns of history.
According to Turchin, while things like rising national debt and declining living standards can make societies less stable, the real tipping point comes when there is what he calls “elite overproduction”.
Or, to put it another way, too many prestigious degrees being handed out with not enough prestigious jobs to go around.
Sound familiar?
In his essay (which predicted “many years of political turmoil, peaking in the 2020s”) Turchin says we can expect more “intra-elite competition” as the number of degrees rises disproportionately to the job market.
A perfect example of this was seen recently when young journalists at the New York Times rose up to get an editor fired for publishing an article by a sitting US Senator they claimed put black Americans in danger (it didn’t).
It would also be why, according to reports out of Perth this week, more than a dozen experienced senior doctors said they had been the victim of an administrative witch hunt at the hands of younger doctors.
These rising medicos, say the older doctors, use HR processes and administrative procedures to complain that their often brusque style does not fit with the soft corners and safety scissors expectations of those in their 20s – causing many senior surgeons and specialists to reconsider their profession.
Again, under Turchin’s theory, these medical workers don’t want their elders to be nicer to them. They want them out of the way.
According to Turchin, this “elite overproduction” has featured in and driven countless periods of upheaval throughout history, from the crisis of the late Roman Republic to the French Wars of Religion to even the American Civil War.
“The more contenders there are, the more of them end up on the losing side. A large class of disgruntled elite-wannabes, often well-educated and highly capable, has been denied access to elite positions”, writes Turchin.
Again, sound familiar?
Turchin’s theories would explain a lot – including why, even if they did not have these theories in mind, the federal government on Friday proposed hiking fees for tertiary humanities courses to stem the flood of debt-ridden arts graduates flooding the post-coronavirus job market with nothing to do.
It’s also why so many of the most ardent advocates for the violent side of this woke revolution in the United States and around the world are not aggrieved minorities, but white kids often from what appear to be privileged backgrounds.
A few weeks ago two sisters from a sleepy town in upstate New York were arrested in Brooklyn for throwing a molotov cocktail at a police van with four officers inside. Thankfully all four made it out unharmed, but the young women in their 20s are now facing serious federal charges.
In Atlanta, which recently saw the death of Rayshard Brooks after he was found intoxicated and passed out in a fast food drive-through and then went on to steal a police officer’s taser, footage released on Twitter appeared to show a young white woman setting fire to the restaurant.
“Look at the white girl trying to burn down the Wendy’s”, the man filming says to the camera.
“This wasn’t us.”
And in Philadelphia, the FBI tracked down a suspect who allegedly set a police cruiser on fire because she wore a T-shirt (slogan: “Keep the Immigrants, Deport the Racists) authorities were able to find on the twee hipster craft site, Etsy.
So where to from here?
It’s tempting to think that all this might just burn itself out, particularly once enough elite scalps are taken to provoke a pushback (just think about what happened to the #MeToo movement, which these days seems about as ancient history as Game of Thrones).
But Turchin’s research suggests otherwise, particularly as it can take only a small number of very devoted followers to get large swathes of society – who will go along with the crowd if nothing else than for the hope of a little peace and security.
This would certainly explain the cravenness of big corporations flooding their social media channels with pledges to fight racism, with even Apple’s Siri now making a pitch for Black Lives Matter when asked if “all lives matter”.
But rather than appease the mobs, such behaviour will likely only encourage it.
Instead, the only way to really quell this nascent revolution according to Turchin is reforms of the sort that will likely make neither the left nor the right comfortable – though Australia seems further down this road than the United States.
These include business working more cooperatively with Labor (something the Morrison government seems to have achieved out of the coronavirus crisis) but also elites realising “we are all in this boat together”.
This would suggest, among other things, a political realignment that might see traditional conservatives and traditional Labor types working to keep jobs at home rather than following a doctrinaire economic libertarianism that would export them.
And, as much as Australia needs more, not less, culture and arts and literature, it would also mean pumping out a good deal fewer arts degrees.
For all of our sakes, more young people need to learn how to make things in a shop or building site rather than tear them down in a classroom or the public square.