KATIE INGHAM: Good evening. My name is Katie Ingham, and
I'm a junior biochemistry major here at Hillsdale College. It is my pleasure to introduce
our speaker this evening. Darel E. Paul is a professor
of political science at Williams College where
he has taught since 2001. A native of Minnesota,
he earned his BA and PhD from the University of
Minnesota Twin Cities. He is a regular
contributor to First Things and has written for
numerous other publications, including the American Mind,
Collette, and Arrow magazine. He has also written
for academic journals on class politics
in Western countries and the manifestation of elite
ideologies and public policies. He is the author or co-author
of three books, including the Theoretical Evolution of
International Political Economy and From Toleration to
Equality, How Elites Brought America To Same Sex Marriage. Please join me in
welcoming Darel E. Paul. [APPLAUSE] DAREL E. PAUL: Good evening. As Katie mentioned to
you all a moment ago, I'm a professor on the
faculty of Williams College. And according to US News
and World Report and Forbes and the Wall Street Journal-- not Washington Monthly, but we
don't care what they think-- Williams is supposedly the
number one liberal arts college in America. And one would expect then that
Williams being the number one liberal arts college in America,
one would expect then that when Williams most recently went
through its accreditation process-- it went through it most
recently four years ago-- those accreditors
would be duly impressed with the institution's clear
definition of and commitment to the liberal arts. Alas this was not the case. I quote from their report. Quote, "we observed that
Williams faculty, staff, administrative leaders,
and students expressed little consensus about what
the liberal arts is and does, what it represents
on their campus, how their approach intervenes
in the national discussion of the liberal arts model,
opportunities for developing a contemporary delivery
of the liberal arts, and what leadership in
this sector might comprise. Consistent with the
highly decentralized model of governance at
Williams, some faculty members asserted that each department
and program develops and implements its own vision of
the liberal arts, an assertion that sits uneasily
alongside the claim to the combined power
of depth and breadth and of initiatives that
cut across the disciplines and administrative divisions. More than one
professor responded to the question about
the liberal arts with a quip we know
it when we see it. Given the prominence of Williams
as a top ranked liberal arts institution, the team
was struck by the absence of a sharp articulation
of a forward looking liberal arts mission
distinctive to Williams both in the institution's
mission statement and across dozens
of conversations we conducted during our
time on campus," unquote. Now I don't mean to pick on my
employer by bringing this up. I offer it instead as
a way of suggesting that if the supposedly
number one liberal arts college in America does not
know what the liberal arts are or what the mission of a
liberal arts college should be, we shouldn't be at all surprised
if American higher education more broadly is
just as confused. As you've already indulged
me in one Williams story, I hope you'll be
patient with a second. Williams College
was founded in 1793. At its bicentennial
celebration about 30 years ago, the institution's eminent
historian Fred Rudolf gave an address marking out
three eras through which not only Williams but in the
view of Rudolf all elite higher education institutions
in America had passed through
up to that time. The first he said was what he
called the Christian college. From the colonial period up to
really the late 19th century, the Christian college
was characterized by a single classical curriculum
centered on ancient languages, and in fact, being able to
pass an entrance exam in Latin and/or Greek was
really kind of a marker of that emphasis on a
classical education, as well as mathematics,
logic, literature, the physical sciences. There was, of course,
in the Christian college mandatory chapel attendance to
cultivate a Christian spirit. The faculty was small
and primarily composed of generalists rather
than specialists. The student body
certainly at Williams was very much a local one, and
in fact in Rudolph's quote, he says that
Williams at that time was made up of, in his
words, poor boys of Calvinist upbringing who could not
afford to go to Yale. There is also a code
of conduct at what Rudolf called the Christian
college encouraging deference to authority and the curbing
of eccentric or nonconformist behavior. By the late 19th
century all this had transformed into the
second era, what Rudolf called the gentleman's college. What characterized a
gentleman's college? Things like a loosening
of the strictures of a classical curriculum
piece by piece. In fact, at Williams at
least the Latin requirement was abolished for
the class of 1938. No one need any longer
complete Latin to graduate from the institution. The student body went from
being a much local one, right, the poor boys that couldn't
afford to go to Yale to a more regional student body throughout
the Northeast and the Midwest. In an era of mass primary
and increasingly mass high school education, the
gentleman's student body cultivated by receiving students
from college prep schools at various parts of those
regions in the country. It was also characterized
by the cultivation of what you might call
gentlemanly values, especially through fraternities
and athletic teams, as well as a sense of
personal honor and a deference to hierarchy. And finally, the
growing support staff of the gentleman's
college was characteristic and an increasingly large
bureaucracy befitting one might say a gentleman's club. In the wake of
World War II, Rudolf observed the emergence of what
he called the consumer college opening colleges and
universities to the masses after World War I and
catering to their interests in civic and
professional advancement much more so than we
might say cultivation of their characters. By this time by the
1940s and 1950s, we have entered into a period
of universal high school education. So therefore, the students
who might go on to college were looking for an
experience much more similar to their high
schools than certainly private schools like Williams
were offering until that time. At Williams at least, mandatory
chapel ended in the 1950s, and fraternities were
eliminated at Williams in 1961, which I would say are
the two in rapid succession symbolic deaths, if you
will, of both the Christian and the gentleman's college. The college goes
coed in about 1970, as many schools did in the
United States, private ones in particular. Increasingly,
liberal or one might choose the word
libertine environment began to be predominant. There's an old joke, a
characteristic of the consumer college that the job
of a college president is to provide sex
for the students, a winning football
team for the alums, and parking for the faculty. Williams also became, as
most elite institutions of higher education at this time
became, a national institution and in Rudolph's terms a,
quote, "national institution going global." And as well, it was a
response to market forces. The growth of increasingly
lavish facilities, larger and larger bureaucracies,
providing services of all sorts, the
end of really what could be called any kind
of coherent curriculum in terms of to be replaced
with a essentially do it yourself education. One element of Rudolph's take
on the consumer college, though, in my view is overly naive. What Rudolf thought the consumer
college of the post-world War II period was about
was in his words-- this is a quote from
his work, a fulfillment of the Democratic
promise of America, or elsewhere he talks about the
Democratic tolerant and diverse culture that characterizes
the consumer college. In fact, in his speech
at the 200th anniversary of Williams College
in the early 1990s, he said Tocqueville himself
to defend this view. But rather than a great
Democratic wave washing over the elitist world of
the gentleman's college, I think the consumer
college is better thought of as the meritocratic college. This is the college we're
all familiar with today, one in which excellence
excellent performance on the SAT or a wealth of
advanced placement courses or a long resume
probably accumulated since middle school
demonstrating one's capacity for leadership
is the price of admissions. My point in walking through
this history is twofold. The first is to demonstrate
that the mission and even the definition of
the liberal arts has changed markedly over
the last 200 plus years. Who is to be served,
the ideal of character to be formed, the institutional
embodiment of learning, each has transformed
higher education and what we take to be the liberal arts. The second is to
suggest that America may be on the cusp of
a fourth era, a post meritocratic one defined
by a new curriculum, new standards of achievement,
a new ideal of character, and a new social
purpose generally going under the name-- at least certainly at Williams-- diversity, equity,
and inclusion or more succinctly social justice. Fred Rudolf, the
Williams historian that I've been quoting, his
sketch of higher education is really a small part of a much
larger tale of the evolution of the American elite. Higher education today tends to
be rather shy about this role that it serves in
our society that is to admit that its mission
is to cultivate an elite. It tends to be much more
comfortable with the claim that what the college does is
to develop, quote, "leaders," unquote. But what else is a
leader other than someone of superlative ability and
accomplishment and leaders as a group constituted
by such persons? Dare I suggest that
such a group might be considered to be the best
in their respective endeavors or in Greek an aristoi, who
together lead or govern as, of course, an aristocracy. Now I think we shouldn't
recoil from this thought. While the specifics of
any particular elite may exhibit much
to be condemned, such an elite very existence
is neither damnable nor really quite frankly preventable. Not simply difference
but inequality is written into the fabric of
human nature and human society. What we should care
about, therefore, I contend is not whether
we have an elite or not-- we shall have one-- but rather that elite's quality. Thomas Jefferson
offers, in my view, at least a very fruitful way
of thinking about the existence and role of a social elite. In his famous work Notes
on the State of Virginia, Jefferson advocated a system of
education that would cultivate not only the
population in general but also an elite who
would occupy the most prominent positions in society. If you know Notes on
the State of Virginia, this will all be, of
course, familiar to you. Jefferson recommended
in that work free universal education
at an elementary level in every locale
throughout the state to be complemented
by a winnowing process in which the student
in Jefferson's words, quote, "of the best
genius in the school" would be promoted on at public
expense to grammar schools. After that another
winnowing process would take place at
the grammar school where only the best
students therefore would be continued on
again at public cost. Certainly if you were able to
pay for this, you could stay, but this was a way essentially
to cultivate the talents and discover them,
quite frankly, of those who could not pay. At the end of grammar
school, a final culling would take place in which the
most accomplished students would be sent on to positions
at the state university, again, on public scholarships. Jefferson summed up his vision
by describing it thusly, and I quote, "the general
objects of this law are to provide an education
adapt to the years, to the capacity, and the
condition of everyone and directed to their
freedom and happiness." But this isn't the only
goal that Jefferson had for education. In fact, in his
famous correspondence with his longtime political
nemesis John Adams, Jefferson likewise
praised the role of what he referred to as
the natural aristocracy. Jefferson, of
course, distinguished what he called the natural
aristocracy from what he called the artificial aristocracy-- the artificial
aristocracy more sort of in the sense that
we generally understand the term aristocracy
someone born to a position rather than someone who has we
might say earned that position. But the definition
that Jefferson gave to what he called
the natural aristocracy was not simply one
of intelligence. It was not simply
one of as he says in Notes on the State of
Virginia one of genius. Instead Jefferson
asserts that the grounds of this natural
aristocracy among men are, quote, "virtue
and talents." One would hope, therefore, that
the liberal arts are training not simply in talent
and its cultivation but likewise in virtue. The ancient meaning of the word
liberal from which liberal arts takes its name partakes
not simply of a breadth of knowledge-- although
it certainly does that-- but also a generosity of spirit
and a nobility of character. The liberal arts thus
from its very origins is a realm of knowledge and
a mode of education befitting the free person, the person
at liberty, if you will, one unconstrained by
necessity, an education one might say proper
to a true aristoi. Now fears that American
elites are lacking in virtue is as old as the Republic. I mentioned a moment ago
the famous correspondence between Adams and Jefferson. Adams himself insisted that
Jefferson's distinction between the artificial
aristocracy, on the one hand, the natural aristocracy on the
other was in his words, quote, "not well-founded." Talent in Adam's view
was too diverse to find a common definition, and virtue
in Adams rather pessimistic view-- and if you know anything
about Adams' character, this won't be surprising
to you at all. He thought virtue was
destined to be corrupted as the artificial
aristocracy falls into monarchy and despotism. In our own time, books
are published every year lamenting the corruption
of America's elite. In fact, you can't swing
a dead sheepskin today without hitting a damning
critique of meritocracy. And in fact, in just
the last 18 months these eight titles
have hit the shelves. You may be familiar
with some of these, maybe even have read them. We have Daniel
Markovitz book, quote, that is titled The Meritocracy
Trap, How America's Foundational Myth Feeds
Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and
Devours the Elite. We have Michael Lind's book, The
New Class War, Saving Democracy from the Managerial
Elite, Joel Kotkin, The Coming of Neofuedalism, A
Warning to the Global Middle Class, Anthony Carnevale's
The Merit Myth, How our Colleges Favor the Rich
and Divide America, Freddie deBoer's, The Cult of Smart,
How our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice,
David Goodhart's, Head Hand Heart, Why Intelligence is
Over Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter and Caregivers
Deserve more Respect, Michael Sandel's The
Tyranny of Merit What's Become of the Common
Good, and finally Peter Mandler's The Crisis
of the Meritocracy, Britain's Transition to Mass
Education since the Second World War. These are all books
that have just been produced in
the last 18 months on essentially the same topic,
a critique of the elite, a critique of our meritocrats. It's fair to say that
America's positively swimming in condemnation
of its leadership class, and it's not simply from
one political perspective. We can find it from the left. We can find it from
the right as well. These are the people
who are supposed to be our best, our aristoi. The meritocratic system
created after World War II was supposed to be an
improvement upon what in Rudolph's terms was,
of course, the gentleman's college and the economic and
political system over which those gentlemen ruled. But it seems instead that the
social consensus on both sides of the political-- excuse me, political spectrum
is that this great effort has been largely a failure. I think a good instance
of this happened in 2018. Ross Douthat, who as
you probably know, is a columnist at
The New York Times, sort of, a minor
controversy on this theme. In 2018, when George
Herbert Walker Bush, the former president died,
Douthat published an opinion column, and the title of that
column was "We Miss the WASPs." It wasn't why we should. it wasn't we will. It was we do right now. We miss them. We miss the WASP-- that is the
white Anglo-Saxon Protestant gentleman who earned
their C's or maybe they earned better grades
than that at Yale and went on to run the
country's major corporations and governmental
institutions as, of course, George HW
Bush himself had done. Because our contemporary
meritocrats in contrast-- and this is Douthat's
words-- quote, "rule us neither as wisely
nor as well," unquote. Just to give you kind
of a brief synopsis, Douthat's argument
essentially went like this. Our currently elite,
the elite of 2018, the elite of the recent
period, if you will, is just as animated as
any elite has ever been. But power seeking is just as
exclusionary as the WASPs were, perhaps, on different grounds
just as self-replicating within families, but according
to Douthat at least, the WASPs had something that our
current mayor autocrats don't. And his claim was
that they had virtue. That is they had
noblesse oblige. They had an ethic of
personal service-- or sorry an ethic of service,
also an ethic of personal austerity, of self-discipline,
and a form of cosmopolitanism that didn't sort of descend
into simply sort of the lack of rootedness-- being a world citizen we
might call the alternative. Douthat called this
in his words, quote, "an aristocratic
spirit," unquote. So I think in
Douthat's view what the WASPs had that
the meritocratic don't is virtue, which realizes
itself in competence and effectiveness. And what that competence
combined with virtue produces in Douthat's view
is legitimacy and trust. Now as you can imagine,
Douthat's column was widely criticized,
and it was widely criticized on the grounds-- I bet all of you can predict
before I even tell you-- Douthat's column was bigoted. It was racist. It was white supremacist. But most of the criticism of
Douthat's argument back in 2018 at the death of George
Herbert Walker Bush really sidestepped I think
the explicit comparison that Douthat encouraged
us to do to engage in between this past
and this current elite and ultimately to engage in that
very question of competence, effectiveness,
legitimacy, trust. That was really at the
heart of Douthat's argument. And instead they simply favorite
a condemnation on Douthat on the grounds of
social justice. By this time in my talk-- I've seen about 20 minutes in-- it's probably appropriate
for me to define my terms a little more clearly. By social justice so-called,
I mean two related things. First, an ideology or perhaps
we might say a religion. Some of you may know
a recent book came out last year called
Cynical Theories by a pair of academics-- former academics Helen
Pluckrose and James Lindsay, and they argue that social
justice or postmodernism is characterized by what they
call the postmodern knowledge principle and the postmodern
political or sorry power principle. The knowledge
principle fundamentally is what can be known,
and it is highly oriented towards subjectivism
and relativism. The power principle
essentially says that the only thing that really
constitutes human society is power, and the
exercise of that power by group A over groups B
through whatever letter you might choose
in the alphabet. And really there is nothing else
in society except for power. So let's on the one hand so this
if you might say free floating ideology, but the second
thing I mean by social justice is the ideology or faith, if
you will, of the American elite. That is the system
of values and dogmas that empowers what is
quite frankly a younger somewhat browner but
still mostly white governing class to both displace
an older, whiter but still somewhat brown elite
and exercise power over the rest of society. And thus, therefore,
what social justice is not just simply a
free-floating ideology, but also an instrument of
what I certainly will happily call class struggle both within
the confines of the elite as well as outside of it. Seeing social justice as
a class ideology, I think, helps us to understand
its power and how it marks a changing of the
guard as it worked from one era to another, one
elite to another. In some way social
justice is a reaction against meritocracy and against
meritocracy's shortcomings. In reaction against an elite
brimming with intelligence but, perhaps, a
questionable deployment of their talent, social
justice weighs heavily on what it takes to be virtue
or, perhaps, social justice adherence might prefer
to call it moral clarity while largely dispensing with
talent as an elitist myth. So when I suggest that social
justice is a class religion or class faith, I
don't do so lightly. I certainly don't
mean it as some kind of veiled insult the way
that many secularist critics of social justice do use
it as simply a way to kind of tar social justice as
dogmatic or blind faith or overly simplistic. Social justice, I contend, is as
much a religion as Christianity or communism or the therapeutic. I'll get to that latter point. And being a class,
religion, or perhaps I should say a class
inflected religion much as say Episcopalian more
or Pentecostalism have their obvious class
inflected characteristics, as with any successful faith,
social justice shows every sign of capturing the
country's institutions of political and
economic and social power and thus of making itself
an established faith. We can see this, I think,
veiled in Fred Rudolph's three eras of higher education and
therefore his three colleges, if you will, from
American history. From the foundations of the
country in the colonial period all the way down to
the late 19th century, America's colleges
were Christian. Why? Because America's elite
was a Protestant elite. Conservative
Protestant morality was taught in the public
schools, as well as obviously in the institutions
of higher education. Conservative Protestant churches
were central institutions of socialization. Conservative Protestant
clergy played prominent roles in the moral life
of the country. Nearly all public
debate took place within the contours of
conservative Protestant sensibilities. After the Civil
War, the influence of this Protestant
establishment began to wane. A new secular
university model emerged supported by the rising titans
of industrial capitalism. The academy turned to
research rather than character formation. New professions emerged, such
as psychiatry and social work, which sometimes were
under the sponsorship of Protestant
seminaries eager to draw upon the new prestige of
science and academic training but over time eventually
displaced the clergy and began to rival them,
as well as the institutions of the professional class
began to rival churches and their ministers. Conservative Protestants
by the early 20th century found themselves tagged
as fundamentalists. The WASP gentleman was entering
into his spotlight constructing on his way both economic
and political empires. His liberal Protestantism
as contrasted to the conservative
Protestantism that came before blurred into an
imminent religion of humanity interested less in righteousness
and salvation and much more so in social responsibility
and material progress. But this era too, of
course, fell into eclipse. After World War II, the
meritocracy began to emerge. The number of students
sitting for the SAT, for example, increased 10-fold
over the course of the 1950s. The Civil Rights movement
and the women's movements of the '60s and
'70s quite literally changed the face
of America's elite. By the 1980s, diversity
had become higher education's cultural
project and its hoped for source of legitimacy. But rather than tag the
college of the meritocratz as one defined by an
act of consumption-- this is Rudolph's
term of course-- I think we can see that the
deeper culture of what Rudolf called the consumer college
or what I've been calling the meritocracy is therapeutic. It expresses the values
of individual success as well as the compensatory-- and as well as
being compensatory-- excuse me-- of the
psychological costs of this intense
competition and striving that defines the meritocrat. The therapeutic is
defined by its commitments to three core values,
individuality, authenticity, and liberation. Let me speak to those
just very briefly. Individuality is not exactly
the same thing as individualism. It takes traditional
American individualism, but it weds that individualism
to a romantic sensibility of the self as a unique
and creative spirit whose reason for existence
is its own expression. Authenticity therefore
builds upon individuality as the public expression of
each person's unique essence. To be authentic,
one must neither lie about nor obscure
one's inner life. Therefore, one must
publicly proclaim it. Thank God for social media. Now we can all proclaim
our individual inner lives to everyone. And therefore the feelings
and desires, imaginations and experiences are to be
announced to the world, the therapeutic self, if
you will, is to be revealed. This inner life must be brought
forward and outward expressed or one might even say from
a post-modern perspective performed in words and deeds
and confessions and self revelations. Authenticity urges one ever
onward to quote "be yourself" and to quote "speak your truth." Finally, liberation, liberation
is the wider social condition in which these authentic selves
become socially recognized. Mental health professionals
once counseled some decades ago the development of
prosocial interdictions that would enable an
individual's adaptation to social expectations. But under the therapeutic, what
mental health professionals-- at least the ones who are most
prominent in their fields-- now they advocate for the
wholesale transformation of society so that
society can facilitate the self-actualization
of each individual. Social justice, I
think, is very much an outgrowth of the
therapeutic but it is inflected through
intersectionality to be the qualities
rather of individuals and individual personalities
to be the qualities of identity groups and therefore, of course,
the individuals who constitute those identity groups. I'm assuming we're all
quite familiar, perhaps, overly familiar with the
doctrine of intersectionality. So those identity
categories of race, sex, color, sexual orientation,
gender identity, disability status, et cetera,
et cetera, et cetera, they're really the building
blocks from this perspective of society. That is this is the social
justice ontology, what really exists in the world. Each category says social
justice has its own experience of the world, its own
knowledge, if you will, and therefore its
own way of knowing that exists within
what we might call an inverted hierarchy in
which those who it's claimed suffer the most
oppression are, therefore, the most knowledgeable and
those who suffer the least oppression, therefore, are, in
fact, the least knowledgeable. This is the social
justice epistemology that is a way of knowing,
which comes to social justice through post-structuralism,
back to Antonio Gramsci, Marx, and really all the way back
to Hegel and his master slave dialectic. Thus social justice shares
with the therapeutic the sensibility of right
of radical subjectivity in which what you and I
might call the real world beyond ourselves and shared
with all others does not exist or at least does not exist
in any meaningful sense. The claim, of course, is
that everything that exists can only be known by human
beings through language, and therefore, the real
world, if we can call it that, can never really be known
outside of human language, and the construction therefore
of the real world so-called by the exercise of power
all the way down even into the roots of our
humanity, our material bodies, our rational souls. Thus we come to social justice's
political principle, a doctrine that asserts the
human experience is a wholly imminent one
of material, cultural, and psychological
oppression and liberation. The utopia of social justice
is the same as the utopia of the therapeutic, equal
esteem and equal social recognition, which we now
seem to be calling equity. One can see this I think clearly
in the best selling racialist book of the
post-George Floyd era, Ibram X. Kennedy's How
to be an Antiracist. I assume many of you
have heard of this. Some of you may
even have read it. This book relates
the author's lie about autobiographical journey
of cultural and psychological struggle to shed judgment and
embrace cultural relativism. The dream is equity through
all the institutions of social order. This includes the
state, of course, but it's not limited
importantly to the state. And among other sites
of power, the state really is hardly the
most important of all. I think we saw this very clearly
in the four years of the Donald Trump presidency. While social justice
was marginalized in the state throughout
those four years, it only grew stronger
outside the state. And its return under
the Biden administration is really about a capstone
now to its conquest of every institution of
elite power and authority in the country, the press,
the professions especially law and medicine, the culture
industries, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, higher education. As the emphasis of this
conference, of course, is higher education,
let me say something briefly on the matter of
the academy in particular. Social justice intends
to do to higher education with Soviet communism to
define art, literature, music. In the USSR under officially
approved socialist realism, art was judged
first and foremost by how well it depicted Soviet
ideals, how well it parroted Communist Party doctrine, and
how well it cultivated loyalty to the Soviet system. Not even the physical
sciences were exempted from serving a
primarily ideological purpose during the 30-year
reign of Lysenkoism over Soviet biology
and agronomy. Substitute critical race
theory for Marxism, Leninism. Substitute whiteness
for capitalism substitute racial
justice for dictatorship of the proletariat,
and I think you'll understand much of what
social justice offers us. This is the faith of our elites. Consider the mantra
diversity, equity, inclusion-- it's become the operating
faith of not all certainly, as you well know, but almost all
of American higher education. You may be familiar
with recent stories coming out of the most
elite prep schools in the country, the Dalton
School or the United Nations International school in New York
City or the Brentwood School in Los Angeles each of which,
again, are the most elite prep schools in America with
the price tags to prove it and each has been
completely overtaken by a particularly aggressive
and destructive form of social justice. I'm sorry to say that
in my view there's certainly very little
use in crying out for liberty in response. With American liberty,
there's always been and indeed there
must be definitions which prescribes certain
behaviors and proscribe others. For example, Christian elites
in their day banned obscenity and for a brief period,
right, even banned the consumption of alcohol. The gentlemen of their day
put Eugene Debs in prison and defined homosexuality
as a mental illness. The meritocratz, they
enforced standardized testing and imposed globalization
and deindustrialization on the American economy. Thus when social
justice elites today prescribe hate speech, when
they redefine the word sex, when they set out to racialize all of
American society, in one sense, they're doing what
elites have always done. They're promulgating
their own class culture and defining it as normative
for the rest of society. So therefore, my
contention here tonight is that we shouldn't lament
the existence of an elite or the power of
that elite to define social norms through the
force of custom and law. This is ubiquitous
to human society. What we should do
instead is eliminate the existence of this
elite, this culture, this exercise of power. Recall Jefferson's view of
the natural aristocracy. In his words, this was,
quote, "the most precious gift of nature for the instruction,
the trusts, and government of society," unquote. For even in a
democratic republic, the question of rulership
is not obviated. The need for coordination to
accomplish some good combined with the frailty of
mankind indicates as much. Thus a true aristocracy should
be both desired and cultivated both in its talents
and in its virtue precisely so that the
whole may benefit. How to do this? This is our great task not
simply for today but always. Shall we work through
national party politics? Shall we pursue an invigorated
form of federalism? Shall we seek to separate
the country into pillars as was done after World
War II and countries like the Netherlands and
Belgium where each community had its own institutions of media
and sports clubs and schools and universities and hospitals
and political parties? I take these to be
practical questions that people of goodwill can
certainly debate and differ on. What we should not
differ on however, is the cultivation of a counter
elite that knows and pursues the transcendentals of
truth, beauty, and goodness. Being spiritual,
these transcendentals are none the diminished for
being shared and, in fact, only enhanced in their sharing. Thus these are truly
common to society, the dignity of
every human being, the dissemination of
knowledge, of the reality that exist beyond us, the cultivation
of reason, the propagation and diffusion of beauty. The successes of the
social justice faith, such as they are,
point up the fact that mankind yearns for
a collective project through which he can pass beyond
the baseness of this world and into another. The meritocrats seemingly
have satisfied none, not even themselves. Success for its own
sake, accomplishment turned toward
individual gain, virtue as a series of leadership
opportunities completed have not satisfied. Social justice
adherence know as well as we do that mankind
is made for something greater than what we see. Satisfying such a
yearning with something that brings true
happiness to mankind is the only thing
that can answer it. Thank you. [APPLAUSE] SPEAKER 1: We now have
time for some Q&A. If you have a question,
please make your way to one of the microphones. DAREL E. PAUL: If
you don't talk, you're going to force me to
talk for another 20 minutes, and you don't want that. AUDIENCE: Thank
you for speaking. You mentioned that we-- you suggested this or
put forward the idea that we need to
raise up a new elite. What do you think of
the idea of the grifters or like a deceptive elite or a
tool used by the current elite to misdirect or misguide
a potentially new rising elite that could counter
them but misleading them by deception? You see a lot of this in
potentially like Koch brothers founded organizations
and things of that nature where people are led into rather
than using the institutions as promoting virtue
but as promoting a kind of liberty that
is more laissez faire or promoting like
freedom to do non-- promote non-virtue and
things of that nature. What do you think of that? DAREL E. PAUL: I
mean, I think this is one of the great
questions for what we might call it the
right, conservatives, whatever it might be. What I think characterizes
the American elite today is certainly a very left-wing
attitude shall we say on cultural issues, but actually
quite moderate to maybe from, perhaps, so-called conservative
attitude towards economics-- free trade, globalization, open
borders, these sorts of things. So I think that the older system
in which conservatives argue for the free market is not
particularly threatening and in fact can be
incorporated in many ways into the kinds of elite
thought that we have today. There are some differences. I don't want to downplay
them completely, but I don't think
it would constitute any kind of counter elite. And so certainly the aspects
of globalization that we see is something that's
quite amenable to what we take to the left as well
as to much of the right today. And this is where I think
the Trump presidency was most distinct in terms
of its foreign policy on trade, on immigration,
on war, which I fear we're going to see quite
a reversal under the Biden administration. AUDIENCE: Thank you for coming
and speaking today, Dr. Paul. My question is you say
that we need this counter elite to pursue the true
and the good and knowledge and things like that, but my
question more is do we even think that whether you raise up
that good or not it still has-- that elite it still
has to be somewhat popular to get in power
and places of power, and do you think that it even
can be popular even more? And if so how? DAREL E. PAUL: I think
it's a good question, and I think there are a couple
of different ways to answer it. One is to obviously
focus on institutions and to suggest that
perhaps it is not popular at a national
level, but it may be popular at local levels. And so there may be institutions
at levels of state government or there may be
institutions in terms of particular kinds of
professional institutions that might be able
to be locations in which this new
elite can form itself. And certainly when
we see the experience of the social justice
elite that we have now, that was not particularly
popular at its time and may not even be
that popular today. It's difficult to tell. But there is the
occupation of positions of power and authority
and institutions and then the use of those
positions of institutions to propagate views, and
so I guess much of it comes down to the boundaries,
if you will, of democracy. And if one takes the
United States to have been a democratic republic
for its entire history, I think we still have seen
many kinds of elite projects that have not been
particularly popular but still have been instantiated
because of elite power, and so therefore I think
popularity in and of itself is not necessarily an
impediment to the cultivation of accountability
a counter elite. AUDIENCE: Thank you
kindly for your time. As you yourself identified
in your definition of terms, the precision of language
is incredibly important, especially in this discussion
within the public square. So my question is, in this
rising of the new elite, how do you recommend that once the
new elite themselves identifies and understands what certain
terms mean, specifically terms like social justice and
truth, as they're misused and misdefined on
the alternate side how should the new
elite seek to permeate the culture with the correct
definitions, if you will. DAREL E. PAUL: I mean, this
is quite a difficult task, because if one is trying
to counter definitions with alternative ones. The possibility, of
course, one begins speaking a different
language in essence. And so I saw something similar. So two years ago, a
little over two years ago, there was a social
justice flare up, shall we say, at my institution. And much of the dispute
was around the definition of words like
violence, and I found that it was extremely
difficult to talk to people about what violence is. But I think at the same
time it's essential, because much of, I think,
social justice ideology uses terms that have
particular kinds of meanings, and people don't
question those meaning and so, therefore, are
willing to, shall we say, give the benefit of the doubt to
people whose usage of language should not have the
benefit of the doubt. Some of the most hardcore are
not going to be persuaded. They are not persuadable. But I think there is-- at least my experience
certainly suggests-- a much larger middle group
that is either persuadable or certainly
reachable and can be talked to and with on these
topics, because I think they are worried. They are concerned by the power
of the social justice ideology, but there are such pressures
upon people to conform. And I'm not sure how it is
here at Hillsdale College but certainly at Williams
College-- it's a similar place, a rather small liberal
arts college, very remote, kind of in the
middle of nowhere-- there's a tremendous amount
of social pressure to conform, because you want to
have friends and you want to be well thought of. And so it takes some
degree of courage, I think. And so that would
be a piece of advice that I would give as
well to have courage. AUDIENCE: Thank
you for your talk. This is sort of similar
to that question but on a slightly
different note. How do you think that the
increased use of social media to propagate some of
these ideas has impacted the rise of the newly,
and is it worth it at all to engage on that platform
to help with bringing people to understanding more correct
definitions about things like social justice? DAREL E. PAUL: So
I've seen data that suggests that when it comes
at least to political topics, social media is pretty
heavily weighted on the left. For whatever reasons
we could speculate on-- I'm sure there's probably
research on this as well-- there tends to be a more
kind of left orientation on social media. My sense is a social
media is a platform built for emotional outbursts
and diatribes, and so therefore it doesn't
lend particularly well to we might say reasoned argument. But what it can do
also is be a medium of symbols and symbolism. So rather than engaging
people in argument, I think what might
be better is to-- well, you guys are far
better at this than I-- share memes. Use humor, mock. One thing that people who
are deadly, deadly serious, as most social
justice people are-- they tend not to have a very
well-developed sense of humor-- is to make fun of them because
it is something they absolutely cannot bear. And so I'm guessing
you know of places, websites like the Babylon
Bee, which is very good. Sometimes their articles don't
live up to the headlines, but by God those
headlines are 90% the time absolutely hilarious. Those kinds of things,
I think, can actually be probably more
productive than trying to take the high ground
engage in reasoned debate. AUDIENCE: Hi, thank you
so much for your time. I was just wondering
since social justice says that the unoppressed can
never fully learn or know what it means to
be oppressed, do you think that inserting social
justice into the education system kind of promotes an
attitude of deserved ignorance in a way, and it
actually stunts people from reaching across the aisle
and learning about cultures and experiences and basically
that it's a social justice-- Do you think it's a
self-defeating concept? DAREL E. PAUL: I
guess in part it depends on what we think the
goal of social justice is. If we think it is a more
integrated society, one that is characterized by kind of a
flourishing of understanding and sharing across
groups, then I think that's very much not
what it's accomplishing. Certainly, it seems to be
doing exactly the opposite. That being said,
I'm personally not convinced that that's its goal. I think its goal is much
more the exercise of power and to transform
the current elite and to provide places for
they themselves to occupy. When we look at the incident
in The New York Times, for example, in the spring
around the whole Tom Cotton editorial where the name escapes
me but the editor of the Times was essentially
fired over that, it was a way to open
up space and allow new people to come
in and take positions of power and authority. If we think that that's
the fundamental goal, then we shouldn't be
surprised that it's not lending to the kinds of
conversations, if you will, that it claims to want to have. One of the things that I
think is the most certainly depressing and maybe if I was in
a particularly pessimistic mood dangerous aspects of social
justice is it's racialism. That is that there is
really no human experience, and I think the speaker
at 4 o'clock today spoke very eloquently on
so many of these aspects of the human experience. And social justice
tends to eliminate those kinds of conversations. My hope certainly
is that by engaging in those conversations, one can
find probably not very hard, in not a very difficult way
that kind of common humanity, because that is what I
would hope that we would all want to gather around,
certainly some kind of intercultural sharing
and understanding but underneath that
common human experience. SPEAKER 2: We have time
for one more question. AUDIENCE: Hi, thank
you for speaking today. I'm curious. We've been talking to both about
public opinion and then also about the, kind of, character
of the elite classes, and I'm kind of
curious about which one do you think is more
important or like which follows from the other. Like, does the character of the
elite affect public opinion, or does like public opinion
and common perceptions affect the character
of the elite? DAREL E. PAUL: I'm sad to
say that the social science research seems to suggest that
it's elite opinion creates public opinion. In fact, a friend of
mine in my department showed me some research
within the last five years or so that seems to have
pretty good empirical support that people look to those who
they take to be their leaders. They don't have
opinions on subjects, but they look to those leaders
to have those opinions. And so it is for the
most part the elites that craft the opinions
that the public has, not fully, not completely. I don't want to go down too much
of a kind of a Thorstein Veblen sociology in which
the cultural values the top are just
kind of flow down or are forced down
upon the lowers or of Pierre Bourdieu
or someone like that. I think there is some
dimension of autonomy among middle classes
and working classes, but those autonomous
views, opinions, values are very difficult
to express politically. And so this is why I think the
project of elites is one that we cannot avoid and one that's
desperately important to engage in and not to simply
give up and say, well, those are the people that
run the American Medical Association and the American
Legal Association and much of higher education. And nothing we can do about it. But at least here
we can have whatever we want to believe in my
church or in my neighborhood or whatever it is. Because those smaller,
more local kinds of spaces are not going to be left alone. I think we can see that already
in just the first couple of weeks of the
Biden administration. And so the project
of forming an elite is an unavoidable one
and one that a place like Hillsdale I take embraces. SPEAKER 1: Please join
me in thanking Dr. Paul. [APPLAUSE]
