She Blinded Me With Science
New Class Theory 6: The Clerisy
This is Part Six of my attempt to reframe class politics, and so to reframe politics in general. To bring yourself up to speed, read this entry material:
Adjacent Entries will be linked at the bottom.
The word clerisy feels like a neologism, and in a way, it is. The term was coined by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who in 1818 posited the need to describe “a secular organization of learned individuals, ‘whether poets, or philosophers, or scholars’ to ‘diffuse through the whole community … that quantity and quality of knowledge which was indispensable.’”1
I use the word in the same way that Coleridge used it. It describes the modern intellectual class, the Academy of Reason and Science which has shunted aside the religious clergy as the Gate-Keepers of Truth. They are allied with the Bourgeoisie the way the Clergy of old allied with the Aristocracy, because one ruling class is never enough. And with the exception of ancient Rome2, most societies have maintained a priestly/scholarly class to maintain traditions and records. In China, they were the Mandarins. In the Islamic Ummah, they are the imams, who have no ritual power, but function purely as scholars of the Quran and hadiths. In Hindu India, they are the Brahmins, the highest of all castes.
And in the west, this role was played for most of history by priests, first pagan, then Christian. It is a purely modernist fairy tale that this priesthood was composed of anti-intellectual bigots incapable of ratiocination. All the evidence points to the priests of old maintaining and expanding the cultural and scientific corpus they were given. The very modality of academic scholarship in the West was birthed at the Universities created by the Church in the High Middle Ages, and every scientific rebel from Galileo on down was trained at one. The Church built the engine of its demise not out of any act of supreme charity but because such is what a clerisy does.
Stop talking about the transgender shooter, which is being a hater, and just focus on the kids. The obvious rejoinder being that a discussion about the person who shot the children literally is about the children, but whatever. No one goes looking for logic from Jacob Frey. The point is that a stern lecture on what you may not think or say makes you immediately and persistently think about the thing that the commissar is demanding you eject from your mind.
This structural trap is appearing everywhere:
“[X] is not an appropriate thing to think or say or notice,”
Which makes everyone notice the hell out of [X].
-Chris Bray “The Doom Loop of the Commissariat”
There you have it. In attempting to define the limits of discourse, you lay seeds of dissent. An Index Expurgatorius is a manual for rebellion. The more you tighten your grip, the more people slip through your fingers. The Church discovered this in the Modern Age. Every clerisy will suffer the same fate. It is their doom. So why do we suffer them?
Because the maintenance of traditions and records is absolutely necessary, it requires training and education, and is limited in number. Not everyone has the necessary mental focus and gift for abstraction to pour through old tomes and make hyper-nuanced distinctions between ideas. Only a select few do, in fact. So naturally, power leaks to them.
But they cannot hold power alone. A book cannot stand against a sword, and it needs capital investment to even exist in the first place. So historical clerisies have always preferred to hide their power, creating temples and monasteries and other forms of ivory towers to segregate from the masses, to operate in hermetic peace. One does not penetrate the Truth in a crowd.
Who are the Clerisy? I organize them thusly:
Professional Academics, Scientists, Researchers
The Medical Profession
The Legal Profession
Government Bureaucrats/Commissars
The Education Profession
This is a wide swath of professions, all linked by a common thread: they earn their living and place in society by mastery of a body of knowledge. Medicine, Law, regulation, and the like are not skills involving the direct manipulation of the physical world.3 They are compendiums of lore, which must be integrated into the mind through long years of study.
Teachers are of course, the lowest rung of the Clerisy, a veritable Outer Party who follow directives far more than they issue them. But as local institutions, schools have immense power, prestige, and income. You literally pay taxes on your domicile to pay for public schools, whether you have children or not, educate them in public schools or not. You can avoid paying the vig to a mafia capo with greater ease than you can diminishing the budget for a public school system.
As below, so above. There is no industry in America which has raised its prices as continuously and shamelessly as has higher education.4 Credit Card companies are less rapacious. Three generations of Americans have been sold into crippling levels of lifelong debt, on the promise of upward mobility long known to be a distortion at best, a lie at worst, just to keep our academics - and the bureaucrats who manage them - fed.
Friends, that is power.
And entirely unearned. What gives the clerisy its power is less contribution to the daily lifeblood of society than prestige that accrues from being the guardians of its truths. They are the people who are right about things, who define the terms of what it means to be right. The so-called Overton Window is their toy, the thing called “Science” their exclusive dominion.
And their Gospel is Socialism.
Which is to say, Socialism is the ideology that grants to them the highest degree of power, power over life and death, power over food and war, over labor and wealth, over everything. As I’ve said before, a Communist cannot afford to have true class consciousness. He must be blind to his own class, pretend he is not a member of what he so obviously is.
When Vladimir Lenin arrived by train at Finland Station in 1917, and was asked his profession by the customs clerk, he gave it as “man of letters”. I can think of no better appellation for him: he was not a soldier, nor a nobleman, nor a businessman, nor had ever in his born days worked for his bread.5 His father had been a bureaucrat, the Russian equivalent of a noblesse de la robe.6 And practically overnight after his arrival at Finland Station, he gained the powers of a Tsar and a Russian Orthodox Patriarch combined.
The Communist Party, including the professional party bureuacracy, stands above the regulations and behind every single one of the state’s acts.
It is the bureaucracy which formally uses, administers, and controls both nationalized and socialized property as well as the entire life of society. The role of the bureaucracy in society, i.e., monopolistic administration and control of national income and national goods, consigns it to a special privileged position. Social relations resemble state capitalism. The more so, because the carrying out of industrialization not with the help of capitalists but with the help of the state machine. In fact, this privileged class performs that function, using the state machine as a cover and an instrument.
So writes Milovan Djilas, a Yugoslav exile who once stood at Tito’s right hand, in his 1957 book The New Class. It is perhaps the most fundamental critique of communism in praxis. It demonstrates the falsehood that lies at the heart of Marxist theory: not the show trials and the gulags and the other tyrannies petty and grand, but the claim that all of this is done in the name of the proletariat and peasants is revealed to be a cruel lie. The Proletariat do not rule under Communism. The Yeomanry does not rule. The Bureaucrats rule.
The worst thing about Communism wasn’t the show-trials or the gulags, it was the fact that when they got rid of the show-trials and gulags there was still a They who had the power to bring them back. A They who had nice clothes and drivers and dachas on the Black Sea where they fucked ballerinas from the Bolshoi and made arrangements for their kids to get the same cushy life while you had to wait in line for bread and live six-deep in an apartment made for two and suck Them off to get a car. All that blood and misery to end up with another ruling class, except they couldn’t speak French.
-A Demonology of Hot Takes
In all fairness, Djilas recognizes that the Communist Party recruited members of the proletariat and Yeomanry into the New Class. At the time of his writing, Nikita Kruschev, the son of poor farmers from the Kursk region, had the Powers of Tsar and Patriarch that had been Lenin’s and Stalin’s before him. In 1964, he was ousted by Brezhnev, who had proletarian origins. Andropov claimed Proletarian origins but his mother may have came from diamond-merchants. Chernenko’s people were poor and Siberian. Gorbachev was also from peasant stock.7
None of this matters. They attained power not from the work of their hands but from their devotion to the diktats of the Party. They absorbed the theory, proclaimed it zealously, climbed the ranks of office, and were rewarded. Medieval Popes were groomed in precisely the same way.
The road to the top is theoretically open to all, just as every one of Napoleon’s soldiers carried a marshal’s baton in his knapsack. The only thing that is required to get on the road is sincere and complete loyalty to the party or to the new class. Open at the bottom, the new class becomes increasingly and relentlessly narrower at the top. Not only is the desire necessary for the climb; also necessary is the ability to understand and develop doctrines, firmness in struggles against antagonists, exceptional dexterity and cleverness in intra-party struggles, and talent in strengthening the class. Many present themselves but few are chosen. Although more open in some respects than other classes, the new class is also more exclusive than other classes. Since one of the new class’ most important features is monopoly of authority, this exclusiveness is strengthened by bureaucratic hierarchical prejudices.
-The New Class, pp. 61-62
The Soviet Union is best considered not as an ideological exercise, and not at all as a “struggle for justice”, but as an attempt to govern a state with only one ruling class, that of the Clerisy, organizing production, trade, war, and truth out of fealty to the same ideological precepts. War must be Communist, Production must be Communist, the harvest must be Communist, and if it is not, it is the fault of non-Communist impulses. Mastery of a body of lore means the reduction of all phenomena to expressions of that lore. It cannot be otherwise.
The problem, of course, is that no ideology can contain the variform complexities of any human pursuit, because ideology is itself a human pursuit, and thus cannot contain all matters. But when your trade is in words and abstractions, this limitation feels false. It always feels like you can just follow the trail of premises and conclusions to a whole new world, and everything you think can infest everything that can be thought of, so you truly can define phenomena and have them behave accordingly! You just need to read enough!
One can fashion a theory that Communism survives in China while failing in Russia because in China Communism simply means the rule of the Mandarin class, and the Mandarins have been aching to rule China since they have existed. Swapping out Confucius for Karl Marx is but a shift in priors, not praxis, just as German Communists easily became Nazis after 1933, and Communists again after 1945. The Mandarins of China can operate Communism without enslaving themselves to it, at least now that Mao is dead. You can require that your allies call a deer a horse, so long as you don’t fool yourself in the process.
Unfortunately, fooling yourself is a disease to which the clerisy is particularly prone, the slavery to words binding them to believe their word-games are as authoritative as the Law of Gravity. This is how highly-educated people convince themselves that the definition of woman is “someone who identifies as a woman”, despite this violating a very basic precept we all learned in elementary school. Using a word in its definition creates an ontological feedback loop. In this case, the word woman is mangled to mean “someone who identifies as someone who identifies as someone who identifies as someone who identifies as someone who identifies as someone…” ad infinitum. If an AI did this, we’d throw something at the programmer, but when a sufficient number of academics play word games with it, the intellectually hazed chirp along just as they’ve been conditioned to.
When you see yourself not as the Guardians and Keepers of an ancient truth, but as the prophets of an unfolding reality, then you really do come to believe that the world is whatever you can consistently say it is. That is the true purpose of Post-Structuralism and all the other descendants of Continental Philosophy and New Criticism; not gaining a new understanding of truth, but conditioning new generations to accept whatever nonsense descends ex cathedra from the Blessedly Accredited.
One advantage of pseudodiglossia is that once a text written in the pretentious style has entrenched itself into the academic repertoire, it wins over converts who will stay converted. The reason is psychological. Confidence game schemers, pick-up artists, and other various kinds of predators and manipulators have learned from trial and error that the way you earn someone’s loyalty isn’t by doing things for them. Instead, it is by getting them to do things for you. The effort one expends upon a project makes it appear, in the person’s mind, far more valuable than it normally would seem had it required less work. This feeling is a cognitive distortion commonly known as the “sunk cost fallacy,” and it helps to explain the impressive loyalty that participants have for fraternal organizations with intense hazing rituals as well as religions with long and demanding conversion processes. Pretentious texts that belong to the “elite” pole in the academic pseudodiglossic split require a great deal of effort to understand. But most of the time, they do make sense and can be understood. Their actual value is often questionable, but for the man who has spent weeks or months trying to grasp their meaning on the most basic level, the effort he has spent makes him all the more ready to accept them as an influence and apply them as an interpretive lens to what he encounters.
-Kerwin Fjøl, “On Pretentious Rhetoric”
This is the other half of Modernity’s curse: what the Bourgeois do not reduce to price and cost, the Clerisy invert and declare to be Science. The TV Watches You!8 The Shit Takes You! Up is Down! Black is White! Freedom is Slavery! What are you, some kind of Science-Denier?
At the beginning of his Politics, Aristotle wrote that the foundation of the state is to pursue what men consider good. This means that statements of mutually-agreed truth are the bedrock upon which social systems function. So, every society has Truths Held To Be Self-Evident, and those who step away from them are cast out. The impulse to arrest anti-vaxxers is no different than the impulse to make war upon Huguenots. When you don’t share the priors, you can’t be part of the club. That’s we talk about ideas as “un-American”, why “America is an idea” has become a meme to so many. Each nation has its creed, either received prior or self-made. The clerisy, or clergy, or what-have-you, are the keepers of the creed. So long as they do not slip into decadence, they will be trusted. Once they lose that, they spiral into collapse and irrelevance, and another form of them steps into the role.
So, with all of that, what are the Clerisy’s Legitimate Interests?
Simply, the authority of subject-matter experts, the free space to nerd, the idea that their study will earn them a space in society. Their first responsibility is to their lore, and their second is not to get lost in it, to have the greater awareness of the needs of other classes, as a responsibility of leadership. These two responsibilities will clash, and often, the first will win.
The current clerisy of Academic Science and its penumbra is in a dark and decadent place, similar to the 15th-Century Church. The struggle to integrate Aristotelian philosophy had been successfully achieved, at the cost of the return of theological sophistries. Whether or not anyone ever actually debated how many angels could dance on the head of a pin, the influence of Aquinas and Duns Scotus created an ever-expanding debate on ever-more abstruse topics. Meanwhile, the printing press made counter-narrative possible to create, and difficult to destroy. It was only a matter of time before a heretic found political cover, and then Christianity was sundered forever.
Today the idea of the “reproducibility crisis” has escaped out of the ivory tower. If Science cannot reproduce experimental results, then one of two things is true: 1) we can no longer rely on observable reality to be consistent, or 2) we can no longer rely on the academic establishment to report its findings faithfully. In either case, the authority of the Academy is diminished, just as the Internet makes counter-narratives possible to create, and difficult to destroy.
So this cannot be the class that, to answer the question of my previous entry, will keep the Bourgeoisie in check, much as they think they can and have desired to. They have been in power too long, are too comfortable, and have lost the pursuit of truth that gave them authority. They are unmoored from reality. The system will not refresh itself with its existing players.
Previously: The Bourgeoisie
Next: The Aristocracy
As written before, Rome’s ruling classes were the Senatorial Aristocracy and the Equite Bourgeiosie. They shared priestly and judicial duties between them.
Some might think Medicine is more a skill than a pile of lore. Surgery might so qualify, but the rest of medicine is running a script and making an analysis of data. You just have to learn the human body and how it works.
Except for the medical industry, of course.
The only 20th century dictator who was ever a member of the proletariat in any way was of course Adolf Hitler.
Lawyers in the parlements of Pre-Revolutionary France were considered a separate branch of nobility.
Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Putin are the only modern Russian leaders born under Soviet rule, and Putin the only one born after World War II. As written elsewhere, Putin was the son of a Chekist.
Baudrillard ACKSHUALLY has a good point with this: he meant that television becomes a means of advertising, of creating markets, and of manipulation and propaganda. The Circus is intensely interested in what you’re interested in, in what you want to watch and don’t. It’s a clever metaphor, and clever metaphors don’t translate to the masses.
I am here.