I think that Ortega was close to the truth but a bit off—the downs reject the ups (and vice-versa) because the ups have a different value system.
Gramsci understood this—that communism would never take root in Italy as long as all Italians held the same culture and values, and worked to create a new working class culture and a new hegemony of values.
In America, Gramsci’s focus has been inverted: create a new upwardly mobile culture through universities, and a new hegemony of professional values.
Thus, America has two cultures and two value systems. The masses aren’t opposed to experts. They are opposed to experts who have a different culture and value system.
It's not that simple either. It is the contempt they radiate downward that has created the disdain directed upward, along with the constant, never-ending diffusion of responsibility by this elite group downward and onto external groups. That is what makes them so hated by the "masses" that constitute the majority of human beings; more than class, more than money, more than power, and more than any difference in values.
That "up" contempt radiates throughout this own comments section from people who clearly do not respect the other group, which openly calls them a number of colourful names and speaks of them like a swarm of locusts. It is as if the assertion of status, degrees, and money is considered by the "up" group to be enough to demand the respect it believes it deserves from others not within it, although it does not itself show that same respect to any of its own outsiders.
The philosopher Malebranche wrote (1684) in his Traité de Morale: “Men forgive everything, except contempt. An elite that fails in its duties is called élitist; From then on, their activity seems unjust and abusive, but more importantly, their very existence is an affront. This is the source of hatred, of the transformation of emulation into jealousy, and of jealousy into a thirst for revenge—and consequently of wars."
IMHO, two characteristics of the current aggregation of “ups” is to equate education with wisdom and sound judgment, and to measure “truth” by consensus. Every one of us—up or down—knows individuals with advanced degrees who are dolts, and is there a man or woman alive who doesn’t act contrary to consensus at least once per day?
In many instances, is not the conflict between individual thought and action and coercion by programming?
You seem quite righteous in your defence of anti-elitism. I take issue with that because all it’s doing is mistakingly transposing a Marxist/classist paradigm onto the Up/Down phenomenon - a sort of “pity the anti-elitists, for they are the salt of the earth.”
What’s actually happening is that everyone - regardless of wealth, background, education, political affiliation, identity - suddenly has a means to find others who share their specific grievances against ANY institution and position it as “elite” and themselves as righteous anti-elitists. The only common enemies are institutions - government, law, corporations, universities, media. The cornerstones of liberal democracy, in other words.
There is a huge but utterly fragmented push to dismantle liberal democracy right now because everyone seems to be able to point to something about it that isn’t serving them. And the problem is - the feminists! Or the Christian right! Or the manosphere! Or critical theory! Or communism! Or capitalism! Or globalism! Or nativism! What ever you do though, don’t listen to anyone with institutional responsibility and an interest in trying to find workable compromises, because they are inherently corrupt. Listen to the guy who says what you like to hear, because it feels authentic and what’s “truth,” anyway?
There is no reason for Up to “respect” the Down, because the Down is pure id. Down doesn’t need to take responsibility for fixing things, because it only exists when it’s against things. The outcome of righteously aligning yourself with Down is dystopian because all Down can agree on is that institutions and experts are bad.
I agree, and the masses do sometimes have the experts with the real expertise. This is what the low carb no seed oiks no soy red meat trend is, based on better science than the bias of the Ups has allowed them. Unfortunately right coded in the US but more left coded in the UK where socialism is still about giving the workers power over their own lives .
Yeah, not quite. Ted's is based more on factual analysis, while yours is based more on your libertarian ideological lens that ends up painting Donald Trump as some sort of "hero of the unwashed", and all that because you let readers know in your biography that taxation is "theft". Readers, be forewarned.
The perspective this essay offers is revealing and relieving to me. I'll stick with the "Up" as I was raised in the "Down" that had simple virtues: Keep your mouth shut; mind your own business; take care of yourself. These virtues work for a singe individual who experiences "luck" in any, or all of its forms. But, it does not take into consideration the larger community welfare that is ours to protect in order to protect ourselves from harm and destitution.
I would say that the current Ups in America are part of a culture of extreme corruption that values getting wealth over anything else including doing one’s job. When I read about the many failures and crimes of business executives, politicians, and bureaucrats it always seems to come back to money. The previous Ups, before the 1970s and the ideological takeover of Neoliberalism, which is the financialization of everything, money was not The Value of All Things, but now it is. Perhaps, it is not economic class or social ideology or identity, but the divide between those who ultimately use money to give meaning to their lives versus those who don’t.
I am born in the "down", but have educated myself into acknowledging that it's the "up" who has the keys to our survival as a species.
I have worked in both. But I have never really felt at home in the "up".
At the same time, whilst I romanticize the "down", I must also admit that if they were allowed to rule, they would doom the planet in a very short time. They may already have done so, without us truly feeling the full effects of it yet. And this is of course because - and I know it's not polite to say it, but these people are idiots! They are fun to be with, but they are not good at planning ahead.
How is that? I would be curious if you could explain your views. It is hard for me to understand your perspective. I doubt either group has such a key, myself, but I am most sceptical of it being in the hands of those who created the problems.
I see it being the elite "ups" whose failure of imagination and foresight — as well as of leadership and policy — led to every dilemma we are facing today, precisely from a failure to plan ahead. Everything that threatens our survival as a species, every structuring and restructuring of society that has led to current issues, has been a result of vast technological and societal changes instituted quickly without regard for the consequences; nor consent of or discussion with most of the population.
The massive works of social and other engineering that have created present society and all of its problems — this long trajectory that began with the Industrial Revolution and Enlightenment rational thought — all this which has spoiled the tremendous inheritance from humanity's past through unfettered progress and development is unlikely to have ever come to be without the "up" group of elites, academics, experts, etc.
Society, in the past, was very conservative toward change and technological progress was not pursued for its own sake. It was allowed to develop slowly. Cognitive evolution and the ability to plan ahead was kickstarted by early agriculturalists having to consider the next seasons and work for future benefit, as I understand it, and it's hard to see primitive tribes as more comparable to the "up;" elites have just as often been sources of cognitive decline, like in the Roman Empire.
Before the emergence of this new group in modern times that I don't think predates the Industrial Revolution, human survival was not threatened once. Idiots, for that matter, could never manage the level of hubris in coming up with ingenious plans of unforeseen consequences that ultimately doom us all and the planet!
This is probably a discussion we could spend some time on because it is a complex issue. But my basic thesis is this:
The "ups" are the people with the curiosity, the will and the desire to pursue education and knowledge in order to build a better world. I am willing to wager that 100% of all human progress has come from people like this.
However, many people pursue an education simply because it is a requirement for high paying jobs and social status. These people are actually part of the "down", although they very much consider themselves to be part of the "up".
The reason I romanticize the "down", is because these are the people that tend to bring the "fun" into their own and others lives. They also do most of the heavy lifting and the jobs that actually need doing.
The problem is that they also have a dark side. They tend to consider themselves as the purveyors of the "true knowhow" in the form of "common sense", and having learned everything worth knowing in the "school of life". If they are not given an environment where they can thrive, they are likely to rebel.
What we are seeing in large parts of the West now, is that the "down" is looking for someone to rebel against, and they are directing their anger NOT at the people responsible for their plight, but at the "up" whom they PERCIEVE as the problem.
According to your definition of "ups", i would agree partially. Sometimes the ambition to strive forward for the sake of progress itself can lead to not considering the consequences. It really depends on whether the truth-seeking and striving toward something better is defined by values that has the ability to reckon with your own being, if they are an obstacle to something more true that YOU can feel inside, but would require changes in attitude, opinions and approaches to the world. I find that many of these deep values and processes are described inside ancient and religious scriptures and stories.
I absolutely agree on the "Downs" dark side. This dark side really can be harmful, because of its apparently 'real life application'. But it can be as much of an illusion as the "Up's" so called educated expert worldview. Both can be totalitarian groupthinking, waging war aginst each other... That's what i would call the conflict between Up and Down in my view.
Neither of them are right. They are both narcissistically rigid and stale, and need to change or shift, rather than becoming more rigid and antagonizing against each other.
I suspect that both the "up" and the "down" actually need each other equally, but they are easily antagonized by each other.
At the moment though, the "up" is being accused by the "down" of destroying everything, when in fact the ones everyone SHOULD be angry at is the 1% who own everything. And these people are NOT the "up".
1. Class has less to do with money than it does to one's relationship to the means of production. I know an electrical contractor who makes as much money as a Goldman Managing Director, but he is treated very differently.
2. There *is* a counterculture, but it's not where you might first think to look. The subversives, the class clowns, the Tellers Of Forbidden Truths and the roasters of sacred cows are largely found today on the alt-right, and to some extent, the Dirtbag Left.
Meanwhile, liberals have become finger-wagging humorless moralists so smug and self-righteous, they make The Church Lady look like Lenny Bruce by comparison.
This is not because of any inherent love of liberty on the Alt Right, nor any natural censoriousness among liberals, but is an artifact of their respective relationships to power.
We need a new term for the people you refer to as "Dirtbag Left".
The American political vocabulary is so twisted by competing fractions of liberal ideology that it is impossible to refer to people outside that conflict zone in a way that Americans and Americanized "westerners" can easily understand.
You are talking about "class-first" socialists of one variety or another. But of course the moment you mention "class" all the American buttons have been pushed and thinking becomes impossible. Ditto for "socialism".
When you use "left" in an American(ized) discursive context, you have the spectre of Hillary Clinton giving million dollar a pop talks to Wall Street, or DroneBone Obama raising the roof with talk of hope and change while starting another brushfire war in some shithole country.
As always, the first term that has to be eliminated from any "insightful" discussion of the present conflict is "capitalism". That is why we have to pretend that this "situation" has no economic or material basis. It can only be about "culture".
The moment you invoke the American rule that says no understanding can be gained by talking about class or economic relations you are eliminating any possible "thought".
"Ups and Downs" is yet another in a long line of thought terminating cliches trotted out to obscure and deny reality, and thus extend the life of the braindead corpse of liberalism, giving capitalism time to cast about to find its imperial new clothes for when the corpse comes off the machines.
It is not clear here (and in this sort of essay in general) who or what the Ups and Downs are, what the categorizing principle(s) may be. You can always assign items (persons, beings) to categories but the question is whether the assignment is useful, whether it tells us anything. Here, "class" is dismissed, but in the real world class conflict is currently pretty severe and affects people's lives in many ways. And, as you note, those categorized often have reasons to conceal how they are categorized.
This is a great, disturbing essay, Ted, both the original thesis and your extrapolation of it. How much it differs at root from old-fashioned anti-intellectualism I'm not sure, but it matches up closely with the world I'm seeing. My first inklings of this shift came a couple of decades ago when I noticed that, much like some Black Americans embracing "street" behaviors in the name of authenticity, some Whites were actively resisting moving up the social ladder and retaining. what my parents would have called "trash" traditions for the same reason. My family with lower middle class. My dad worked at a foundry and my mom was a bank teller. They wanted my brother and me to get degrees and rise in society. They were proud when we did, but I know that they also sometimes felt that they'd lost a little of us. So, here I am, a Down who became an Up, though I didn't make a ton of money. My only advice regarding how we can mend the divide is to remind ourselves and each other to recognize and respect different types of intelligence and different skills. It really does take "all kinds," and we need each other for a healthy life.
Erm. I think many Black Americans chose not to hide their own culture, vernacular English, music and much more from white people. It was a bold move, and i believe it revitalized American culture as a whole. People code-switch constantly; Black Americans are particularly adept at it. But their culture most definitely *is* part of American culture. There is no reason to hide or downplay that. And much reason to be proud of it - of where folks come from, even the elite.
That's not what I thought I was saying, but perhaps you are correct. My bad. American culture wouldn't be American culture if the creativity and resistance of African-Americans hadn't changed it. That said, if I, a White, working-class Mississippian by birth, hadn't made an effort to rise above the negatives that are also part of my heritage, I would have seriously limited my life opportunities. And I believe that's true for all of us who start from the lower rungs of the ladder.
Do you think that time was only about "negatives" for Black people? I'm a bit baffled,,since I'm assuming you're talking about the 60s and 70s, and that simply doesn't fit with what you said in your reply. Maybe it was rarely about "negatives"? I certainly don't think "street" = criminality, or anything that's necessarily bad or wrong. It's not even truly applicable to most rap/hip-hop. The people who acted like gangsters aside (again, there really weren't all *that* many of them).
Americans of every color have written and performed and frequently had hits with what one writer described as "bad man ballads." Whether it's Billy the Kid or Stagger Lee, our popular songs and folklore are full of such characters.
Do you think that time was only about "negatives" for Black people? I'm a bit baffled,,since I'm assuming you're talking about the 60s and 70s, and that simply doesn't fit with what you said in your reply. Maybe it was rarely about "negatives"? I certainly don't think "street" = criminality, or anything that's necessarily bad or wrong. It's not even truly applicable to most rap/hip-hop. The people who acted like gangsters aside (again, there really weren't all *that* many of them).
Americans of every color have written and performed and frequently had hits with what one writer described as "bad man ballads." Whether it's Billy the Kid or Stagger Lee, our popular songs and folklore are full of such characters.
Respect different types of intelligence is the key. Couldn’t agree more. We persist all in all because we fulfill roles that keep society going. I think it’s how we compensate those differences what causes such a rift. Figuring out that part is definitely hard.
Yeah, there seems to be hatred rather than respect for elites, experts, the educated (not to mention the experienced, veterans and elders) -- which obviously must include scientists, doctors, architects, engineers (maybe less?), who truly know how to do something irl. End polio, reduce tooth decay, extend life, keep air and water clean -- bah, humbug! Coalition of the Uninformed, Church of the Vague Impression.
Howard, that's never *not* been true, at least in my lifetime + personal experience. (I'm in my late 60s.)
Being from a small, mostly working-class town, i was constantly ridiculed for *reading books* by my peers and even by one of my teachers in elementary school. Many years later, i read a brief account of how an immigrant boy's father (a steelworker) used to literally kick books right out of his son's hands whenever he "caught" him reading. The person who went through that is Michael Dirda, former editor of the Washington Post's Book World Sunday section. (It was killed some years ago.) While i grew up in a family full of readers, and am female, I'm about Dirda's age and i get what he went through.
I grew up hearing great disparagement of "book learning" throughout my childhood and adolescence, though thankfully not from family members. I think many people saw our family as eccentric b/c of how much we read, but they were either kind enough or polite enough to avoid mentioning it.
I don’t think that’s it at all. I think it’s been a pretty common experience that the “elite” preach beliefs that are obviously false and oftentimes silly (a man can be a woman)and then resort to sneering and contempt for anyone who questions their ridiculous assertions. An electrician actually needs to be able to do his job to work, whereas a professor can be wrong 100% of the time and have a prestigious career. These are pigs rolling around in their own shit.
I have thought of the problem as establishment vs anti establishment. The establishment doctors could not effectively treat my chronic migraines, but the alternative medicine doc with unconventional treatment did effectively treat them. The establishment docs were rude and gave solutions ranging from ineffective to harmful. I am far from alone in this experience, and I think there are analogous examples in fields outside of medicine. I bring this example up to illustrate what I think fuels a lot of the problem: when experts/establishment show themselves to be bankrupt of the very value they are supposed to provide.
The whole article reminded me of Robert Reich’s observation that America has, de facto, six political parties, split just as starkly between establishment and grassroots as between left and right: https://robertreich.org/post/166784538395/
Postulates 7 and 8 also reminded me of chapter 6 of Aldous Huxley’s 1957 book Brave New World Revisited, where he claims that in order for a politician to acquire power, he has to present himself to the public as a rugged cowboy hero, a caring father, an astute lawyer and a glamorous entertainer all at once, the result of this reliance on short, snappy summaries of policies and on mass media being a deadening democracy
Well, I disagree with simplistic view. You described populism, that can come from right or left. And it's basically an anti-elite sentiment but does not represent any political reality on the ground. The biggest divide is still class even with a lot of exceptions and complicated rationales. So this Up and Down thing feels just like something invented to appeal to populism and reduce the importance of class.
Well, one might consider that "class" is one of the ideals of Marxism, in order to be used divisively. My Mom, who would today be considered upper middle class because of her family's financial status in the 30s often said: Money can't by class. She was absolutely correct. She was definitely classy, but not wealthy after she married my Dad. I think the up/down is a better description, specifically when considering the people today who think they're our betters, and they have a great tendency to come from those who are generally thought of as elites. Elites: Language is a tricky thing, particularly when words are redefined on a constant basis. Being in my sixth decade I still think of being gay as being happy or joyful, not being attracted to someone of the same sex. Which brings us to gender.... And beyond. It never stops. But, though I'm relatively well-off (because I don't waste money), I consider myself a "down" in Ted's context. Who knows, the meaning will most likely change tomorrow?
Contrary to what we are often told, the most telling historical conflicts over the past century have not been economic or political but cultural - by which I don’t mean those issues that have been randomly deemed cultural when they really belong somewhere else (like gender, race, national identity etc) but disputes over actual cultural artefacts - music, literature, film, painting, buildings etc - ‘popular’ against ‘educated’ taste, how those tastes are formed, the relative cultural status of different forms and genres, the impact on all this of changing modes of cultural production and changing audiences. (You mention the changing cultural status of jazz - I’ve just been listening to a jazz programme on the BBC’s most high-cultural radio channel, including music that definitely originated from ‘down’.) As a good citizen I get into Facebook disputes about the centre of the city where I live, and despite the many economic and political issues around the current crisis of town centres, the argument seems to always come down to taste in architecture. ‘ Downs’ don’t like modernist buildings, and think that being old is sufficient to be beautiful. People who say they like (or even don’t mind) modernist buildings are stuck-up elitists and lackies of the establishment - or just lying. Education, maybe, is the key to this - it doesn’t just make you like different things, it gives you a different take on the whole business of ‘liking’, a process based on knowledge and cogitation, not - as someone said earlier - instinct. If you diss my instinctive likes and dislikes you are just another arrogant elitist. Bourdieu might be helpful here, said the over educated asshole. Or maybe not. But the left will not get anywhere with ‘populism’ without recognising that it’s not about politics but about the perception that we are different kinds of people, and not in a good way, and cultural tastes are a sure marker of that difference. (we also need to ask why we use that dubious term ‘populism’ for all this, which I think is an evasion of historic proportions, but that’s another issue).
Read James Kaplan’s recent book “3 Shades of Blue” (Ted has a blurb on the back cover). Kaplan does a great job helping to illustrate how jazz went from being a music of the masses (dancing) to one for the elites (listening and musing).
Europeans have historically been far more receptive to jazz, and taken it much more seriously as an art form, than the vast majority of Americans. So yeah, jazz on the Beeb. Why not?!
I find it all unbelievably depressing. But at least now I know why I roll my eyes and barf at TikTok, YouTube "stars", people who claim they "do their own research", and so very much more. I'm an Up to the core. The Up mindset is how I think the world should work, in a normative sense. You shouldn't be famous unless you've done something truly worth rising above the noise for. Respect is earned through experience, not arrogated by bluster. Expertise is the product of long, hard, diligent effort and means vastly more than some schmuck's off-the-cuff opinion. These things feel utterly obvious. And yet here we are.
“Expertise is the product of long, hard, diligent effort and means vastly more than some schmuck's off-the-cuff opinion.”
The problem is that experience has been replaced with credentialism as the determinant. An Ivy League degree aside from wealth is more important than anything else in the circle of our ruling class.
Your comments embody the Up elitism that the downs are rejecting. You could almost interpret them as - if you’re not school educated and sanctioned by the professionals you have no standing. Lack of self awareness in black and white.
Yet that "bluster" is what you express, isn't it? But you still demand respect merely for the assertion of your expertise without any effort to earn it from others. If you want respect, give respect, and don't assume others are simply schmucks; this feels obvious too, yet here we are.
It is an archetypal "up" mindset: learn a group of people with a separate way of thinking exists that presently is far more successful, while the opposing cohort is failing everywhere all at once and "up" media struggling to even stay in business, and instead of looking within at why it has become divided in such a manner, assert a natural superiority only kings used to believe they had and double down on everything. Those who think differently must conform!
I suggest keeping the vomit bag at hand, since following current trends, the "down" group is only going to get bigger.
New words ascribed to old herd mentality. We don’t evolve much beyond the high school hallway. We herd where we feel accepted. Elites feel safest around other elites. Anyone who’s spent any time around them feel that immediately. Understandable, since we have access to the up and down details of their lives and they know nothing of us masses. At the top of the “up” the king and Queen prefer when the masses are angry with each other, as it means they’re not angry at them. So maybe bubbling just below the boil is our forever fate.
I think the difference would be that elites convince non-elites that they are part of the elite group if they act, vote, dress or consume a certain way; while other elites work very hard to portray themselves as non-elite, taking on the attitudes of those they know really don't belong in the popular group in order to gain power over them. I suppose this would be like the cool kids allowing a whole pack of uncool kids follow them around and pretending to accept them, while another group of cool kids started dressing and behaving like the uncool kids so they could get their trust and exploit them.
The King and Queen preferring the masses stay angry at each other feels exactly right, though. It's very easy for those highest-level elites to use news and social media, along with entertainment and advertising, to keep that near-boil simmer going. But even saying that makes me part of the "down" group, right?
There is a lot to consider in this points so I’ll pick one. We in a long trend eroding central power. Web3 and crypto are the technological edge point but how people engage is rightly pointed out by Ted. User reviews have more and more power. Prestige critics continue to have a place but even now we see individuals with massive followings.
This decentralization, pushing things to the edges, is the norms and our understanding of institution building is stuck in centralized ideals. It isn’t left right or up down, we can now connect and argue in unlimited dimensions. Buckle up because that means more friction and more conflict.
This quote is attributed to Winston Churchill, writing in 1901, with eerie relevance to the article:
"Nothing would be more fatal than for the government of States to get into the hands of the experts. Expert knowledge is limited knowledge: and the unlimited ignorance of the plain man who knows only what hurts is a safer guide, than any vigorous direction of a specialised character. Why should you assume that all except doctors, engineers etc., are drones or worse?
To manage men, to explain difficult things to simple people, to reconcile opposite interests, to weigh the evidence of disputing experts, to deal with the clamorous emergency of the hour; are not these things in themselves worth the consideration and labour of a lifetime? If the Ruler is to be an expert in anything he should be an expert in everything; and that is plainly impossible. Wherefore I say from the dominion of all specialists (particularly military specialists) good Lord deliver us."
Ted, I appreciate you reposting this!
I think that Ortega was close to the truth but a bit off—the downs reject the ups (and vice-versa) because the ups have a different value system.
Gramsci understood this—that communism would never take root in Italy as long as all Italians held the same culture and values, and worked to create a new working class culture and a new hegemony of values.
In America, Gramsci’s focus has been inverted: create a new upwardly mobile culture through universities, and a new hegemony of professional values.
Thus, America has two cultures and two value systems. The masses aren’t opposed to experts. They are opposed to experts who have a different culture and value system.
It's not that simple either. It is the contempt they radiate downward that has created the disdain directed upward, along with the constant, never-ending diffusion of responsibility by this elite group downward and onto external groups. That is what makes them so hated by the "masses" that constitute the majority of human beings; more than class, more than money, more than power, and more than any difference in values.
That "up" contempt radiates throughout this own comments section from people who clearly do not respect the other group, which openly calls them a number of colourful names and speaks of them like a swarm of locusts. It is as if the assertion of status, degrees, and money is considered by the "up" group to be enough to demand the respect it believes it deserves from others not within it, although it does not itself show that same respect to any of its own outsiders.
The philosopher Malebranche wrote (1684) in his Traité de Morale: “Men forgive everything, except contempt. An elite that fails in its duties is called élitist; From then on, their activity seems unjust and abusive, but more importantly, their very existence is an affront. This is the source of hatred, of the transformation of emulation into jealousy, and of jealousy into a thirst for revenge—and consequently of wars."
IMHO, two characteristics of the current aggregation of “ups” is to equate education with wisdom and sound judgment, and to measure “truth” by consensus. Every one of us—up or down—knows individuals with advanced degrees who are dolts, and is there a man or woman alive who doesn’t act contrary to consensus at least once per day?
In many instances, is not the conflict between individual thought and action and coercion by programming?
This is exactly right.
You seem quite righteous in your defence of anti-elitism. I take issue with that because all it’s doing is mistakingly transposing a Marxist/classist paradigm onto the Up/Down phenomenon - a sort of “pity the anti-elitists, for they are the salt of the earth.”
What’s actually happening is that everyone - regardless of wealth, background, education, political affiliation, identity - suddenly has a means to find others who share their specific grievances against ANY institution and position it as “elite” and themselves as righteous anti-elitists. The only common enemies are institutions - government, law, corporations, universities, media. The cornerstones of liberal democracy, in other words.
There is a huge but utterly fragmented push to dismantle liberal democracy right now because everyone seems to be able to point to something about it that isn’t serving them. And the problem is - the feminists! Or the Christian right! Or the manosphere! Or critical theory! Or communism! Or capitalism! Or globalism! Or nativism! What ever you do though, don’t listen to anyone with institutional responsibility and an interest in trying to find workable compromises, because they are inherently corrupt. Listen to the guy who says what you like to hear, because it feels authentic and what’s “truth,” anyway?
There is no reason for Up to “respect” the Down, because the Down is pure id. Down doesn’t need to take responsibility for fixing things, because it only exists when it’s against things. The outcome of righteously aligning yourself with Down is dystopian because all Down can agree on is that institutions and experts are bad.
I agree, and the masses do sometimes have the experts with the real expertise. This is what the low carb no seed oiks no soy red meat trend is, based on better science than the bias of the Ups has allowed them. Unfortunately right coded in the US but more left coded in the UK where socialism is still about giving the workers power over their own lives .
Some good points.
Astute observations. We are in the midst of a realignment in the counter-cultural revolution. Down vs. up can also be framed as institutionalized vs. instinctual: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/americas-counter-cultural-revolution-institutional-instinctual
Yeah, not quite. Ted's is based more on factual analysis, while yours is based more on your libertarian ideological lens that ends up painting Donald Trump as some sort of "hero of the unwashed", and all that because you let readers know in your biography that taxation is "theft". Readers, be forewarned.
I would describe what you refer to as his ideological lens, more as a "greatest hits" of anti-intellectualist memes in essay form.
The sort of dissertation that a Russian troll factory would produce, if they worked REALLY hard on their sentence structure.
Of course. Everything is Russia, right? 🙄🙄🙄
The perspective this essay offers is revealing and relieving to me. I'll stick with the "Up" as I was raised in the "Down" that had simple virtues: Keep your mouth shut; mind your own business; take care of yourself. These virtues work for a singe individual who experiences "luck" in any, or all of its forms. But, it does not take into consideration the larger community welfare that is ours to protect in order to protect ourselves from harm and destitution.
Oma Rose - THIS
I would say that the current Ups in America are part of a culture of extreme corruption that values getting wealth over anything else including doing one’s job. When I read about the many failures and crimes of business executives, politicians, and bureaucrats it always seems to come back to money. The previous Ups, before the 1970s and the ideological takeover of Neoliberalism, which is the financialization of everything, money was not The Value of All Things, but now it is. Perhaps, it is not economic class or social ideology or identity, but the divide between those who ultimately use money to give meaning to their lives versus those who don’t.
I am born in the "down", but have educated myself into acknowledging that it's the "up" who has the keys to our survival as a species.
I have worked in both. But I have never really felt at home in the "up".
At the same time, whilst I romanticize the "down", I must also admit that if they were allowed to rule, they would doom the planet in a very short time. They may already have done so, without us truly feeling the full effects of it yet. And this is of course because - and I know it's not polite to say it, but these people are idiots! They are fun to be with, but they are not good at planning ahead.
Needless to say, this is a dilemma for me.
How is that? I would be curious if you could explain your views. It is hard for me to understand your perspective. I doubt either group has such a key, myself, but I am most sceptical of it being in the hands of those who created the problems.
I see it being the elite "ups" whose failure of imagination and foresight — as well as of leadership and policy — led to every dilemma we are facing today, precisely from a failure to plan ahead. Everything that threatens our survival as a species, every structuring and restructuring of society that has led to current issues, has been a result of vast technological and societal changes instituted quickly without regard for the consequences; nor consent of or discussion with most of the population.
The massive works of social and other engineering that have created present society and all of its problems — this long trajectory that began with the Industrial Revolution and Enlightenment rational thought — all this which has spoiled the tremendous inheritance from humanity's past through unfettered progress and development is unlikely to have ever come to be without the "up" group of elites, academics, experts, etc.
Society, in the past, was very conservative toward change and technological progress was not pursued for its own sake. It was allowed to develop slowly. Cognitive evolution and the ability to plan ahead was kickstarted by early agriculturalists having to consider the next seasons and work for future benefit, as I understand it, and it's hard to see primitive tribes as more comparable to the "up;" elites have just as often been sources of cognitive decline, like in the Roman Empire.
Before the emergence of this new group in modern times that I don't think predates the Industrial Revolution, human survival was not threatened once. Idiots, for that matter, could never manage the level of hubris in coming up with ingenious plans of unforeseen consequences that ultimately doom us all and the planet!
This is probably a discussion we could spend some time on because it is a complex issue. But my basic thesis is this:
The "ups" are the people with the curiosity, the will and the desire to pursue education and knowledge in order to build a better world. I am willing to wager that 100% of all human progress has come from people like this.
However, many people pursue an education simply because it is a requirement for high paying jobs and social status. These people are actually part of the "down", although they very much consider themselves to be part of the "up".
The reason I romanticize the "down", is because these are the people that tend to bring the "fun" into their own and others lives. They also do most of the heavy lifting and the jobs that actually need doing.
The problem is that they also have a dark side. They tend to consider themselves as the purveyors of the "true knowhow" in the form of "common sense", and having learned everything worth knowing in the "school of life". If they are not given an environment where they can thrive, they are likely to rebel.
What we are seeing in large parts of the West now, is that the "down" is looking for someone to rebel against, and they are directing their anger NOT at the people responsible for their plight, but at the "up" whom they PERCIEVE as the problem.
According to your definition of "ups", i would agree partially. Sometimes the ambition to strive forward for the sake of progress itself can lead to not considering the consequences. It really depends on whether the truth-seeking and striving toward something better is defined by values that has the ability to reckon with your own being, if they are an obstacle to something more true that YOU can feel inside, but would require changes in attitude, opinions and approaches to the world. I find that many of these deep values and processes are described inside ancient and religious scriptures and stories.
I absolutely agree on the "Downs" dark side. This dark side really can be harmful, because of its apparently 'real life application'. But it can be as much of an illusion as the "Up's" so called educated expert worldview. Both can be totalitarian groupthinking, waging war aginst each other... That's what i would call the conflict between Up and Down in my view.
Neither of them are right. They are both narcissistically rigid and stale, and need to change or shift, rather than becoming more rigid and antagonizing against each other.
These are good points.
I suspect that both the "up" and the "down" actually need each other equally, but they are easily antagonized by each other.
At the moment though, the "up" is being accused by the "down" of destroying everything, when in fact the ones everyone SHOULD be angry at is the 1% who own everything. And these people are NOT the "up".
1. Class has less to do with money than it does to one's relationship to the means of production. I know an electrical contractor who makes as much money as a Goldman Managing Director, but he is treated very differently.
2. There *is* a counterculture, but it's not where you might first think to look. The subversives, the class clowns, the Tellers Of Forbidden Truths and the roasters of sacred cows are largely found today on the alt-right, and to some extent, the Dirtbag Left.
Meanwhile, liberals have become finger-wagging humorless moralists so smug and self-righteous, they make The Church Lady look like Lenny Bruce by comparison.
This is not because of any inherent love of liberty on the Alt Right, nor any natural censoriousness among liberals, but is an artifact of their respective relationships to power.
We need a new term for the people you refer to as "Dirtbag Left".
The American political vocabulary is so twisted by competing fractions of liberal ideology that it is impossible to refer to people outside that conflict zone in a way that Americans and Americanized "westerners" can easily understand.
You are talking about "class-first" socialists of one variety or another. But of course the moment you mention "class" all the American buttons have been pushed and thinking becomes impossible. Ditto for "socialism".
When you use "left" in an American(ized) discursive context, you have the spectre of Hillary Clinton giving million dollar a pop talks to Wall Street, or DroneBone Obama raising the roof with talk of hope and change while starting another brushfire war in some shithole country.
As always, the first term that has to be eliminated from any "insightful" discussion of the present conflict is "capitalism". That is why we have to pretend that this "situation" has no economic or material basis. It can only be about "culture".
The moment you invoke the American rule that says no understanding can be gained by talking about class or economic relations you are eliminating any possible "thought".
"Ups and Downs" is yet another in a long line of thought terminating cliches trotted out to obscure and deny reality, and thus extend the life of the braindead corpse of liberalism, giving capitalism time to cast about to find its imperial new clothes for when the corpse comes off the machines.
What on Earth is the "Dirtbag Left?" Be specific. For that matter, what is the "alt-right?"
It is not clear here (and in this sort of essay in general) who or what the Ups and Downs are, what the categorizing principle(s) may be. You can always assign items (persons, beings) to categories but the question is whether the assignment is useful, whether it tells us anything. Here, "class" is dismissed, but in the real world class conflict is currently pretty severe and affects people's lives in many ways. And, as you note, those categorized often have reasons to conceal how they are categorized.
This is a great, disturbing essay, Ted, both the original thesis and your extrapolation of it. How much it differs at root from old-fashioned anti-intellectualism I'm not sure, but it matches up closely with the world I'm seeing. My first inklings of this shift came a couple of decades ago when I noticed that, much like some Black Americans embracing "street" behaviors in the name of authenticity, some Whites were actively resisting moving up the social ladder and retaining. what my parents would have called "trash" traditions for the same reason. My family with lower middle class. My dad worked at a foundry and my mom was a bank teller. They wanted my brother and me to get degrees and rise in society. They were proud when we did, but I know that they also sometimes felt that they'd lost a little of us. So, here I am, a Down who became an Up, though I didn't make a ton of money. My only advice regarding how we can mend the divide is to remind ourselves and each other to recognize and respect different types of intelligence and different skills. It really does take "all kinds," and we need each other for a healthy life.
Erm. I think many Black Americans chose not to hide their own culture, vernacular English, music and much more from white people. It was a bold move, and i believe it revitalized American culture as a whole. People code-switch constantly; Black Americans are particularly adept at it. But their culture most definitely *is* part of American culture. There is no reason to hide or downplay that. And much reason to be proud of it - of where folks come from, even the elite.
That's not what I thought I was saying, but perhaps you are correct. My bad. American culture wouldn't be American culture if the creativity and resistance of African-Americans hadn't changed it. That said, if I, a White, working-class Mississippian by birth, hadn't made an effort to rise above the negatives that are also part of my heritage, I would have seriously limited my life opportunities. And I believe that's true for all of us who start from the lower rungs of the ladder.
Do you think that time was only about "negatives" for Black people? I'm a bit baffled,,since I'm assuming you're talking about the 60s and 70s, and that simply doesn't fit with what you said in your reply. Maybe it was rarely about "negatives"? I certainly don't think "street" = criminality, or anything that's necessarily bad or wrong. It's not even truly applicable to most rap/hip-hop. The people who acted like gangsters aside (again, there really weren't all *that* many of them).
Americans of every color have written and performed and frequently had hits with what one writer described as "bad man ballads." Whether it's Billy the Kid or Stagger Lee, our popular songs and folklore are full of such characters.
Do you think that time was only about "negatives" for Black people? I'm a bit baffled,,since I'm assuming you're talking about the 60s and 70s, and that simply doesn't fit with what you said in your reply. Maybe it was rarely about "negatives"? I certainly don't think "street" = criminality, or anything that's necessarily bad or wrong. It's not even truly applicable to most rap/hip-hop. The people who acted like gangsters aside (again, there really weren't all *that* many of them).
Americans of every color have written and performed and frequently had hits with what one writer described as "bad man ballads." Whether it's Billy the Kid or Stagger Lee, our popular songs and folklore are full of such characters.
We're a trashier country now than we were when I was growing up, and it's not a racial thing.
Respect different types of intelligence is the key. Couldn’t agree more. We persist all in all because we fulfill roles that keep society going. I think it’s how we compensate those differences what causes such a rift. Figuring out that part is definitely hard.
Yeah, there seems to be hatred rather than respect for elites, experts, the educated (not to mention the experienced, veterans and elders) -- which obviously must include scientists, doctors, architects, engineers (maybe less?), who truly know how to do something irl. End polio, reduce tooth decay, extend life, keep air and water clean -- bah, humbug! Coalition of the Uninformed, Church of the Vague Impression.
Many downs are equally dependent on the expertise of their own elites: the contractors, trades people, auto mechanics, electricians...
It never ceases to amaze/amuse me how people will accept whatever their mechanic says but reject whatever their meteorologist says...
Howard, that's never *not* been true, at least in my lifetime + personal experience. (I'm in my late 60s.)
Being from a small, mostly working-class town, i was constantly ridiculed for *reading books* by my peers and even by one of my teachers in elementary school. Many years later, i read a brief account of how an immigrant boy's father (a steelworker) used to literally kick books right out of his son's hands whenever he "caught" him reading. The person who went through that is Michael Dirda, former editor of the Washington Post's Book World Sunday section. (It was killed some years ago.) While i grew up in a family full of readers, and am female, I'm about Dirda's age and i get what he went through.
I grew up hearing great disparagement of "book learning" throughout my childhood and adolescence, though thankfully not from family members. I think many people saw our family as eccentric b/c of how much we read, but they were either kind enough or polite enough to avoid mentioning it.
A small amount of snobbery and derision goes a long way.
I don’t think that’s it at all. I think it’s been a pretty common experience that the “elite” preach beliefs that are obviously false and oftentimes silly (a man can be a woman)and then resort to sneering and contempt for anyone who questions their ridiculous assertions. An electrician actually needs to be able to do his job to work, whereas a professor can be wrong 100% of the time and have a prestigious career. These are pigs rolling around in their own shit.
I have thought of the problem as establishment vs anti establishment. The establishment doctors could not effectively treat my chronic migraines, but the alternative medicine doc with unconventional treatment did effectively treat them. The establishment docs were rude and gave solutions ranging from ineffective to harmful. I am far from alone in this experience, and I think there are analogous examples in fields outside of medicine. I bring this example up to illustrate what I think fuels a lot of the problem: when experts/establishment show themselves to be bankrupt of the very value they are supposed to provide.
The whole article reminded me of Robert Reich’s observation that America has, de facto, six political parties, split just as starkly between establishment and grassroots as between left and right: https://robertreich.org/post/166784538395/
Postulates 7 and 8 also reminded me of chapter 6 of Aldous Huxley’s 1957 book Brave New World Revisited, where he claims that in order for a politician to acquire power, he has to present himself to the public as a rugged cowboy hero, a caring father, an astute lawyer and a glamorous entertainer all at once, the result of this reliance on short, snappy summaries of policies and on mass media being a deadening democracy
https://www.huxley.net/bnw-revisited/index.html
Well, I disagree with simplistic view. You described populism, that can come from right or left. And it's basically an anti-elite sentiment but does not represent any political reality on the ground. The biggest divide is still class even with a lot of exceptions and complicated rationales. So this Up and Down thing feels just like something invented to appeal to populism and reduce the importance of class.
Well, one might consider that "class" is one of the ideals of Marxism, in order to be used divisively. My Mom, who would today be considered upper middle class because of her family's financial status in the 30s often said: Money can't by class. She was absolutely correct. She was definitely classy, but not wealthy after she married my Dad. I think the up/down is a better description, specifically when considering the people today who think they're our betters, and they have a great tendency to come from those who are generally thought of as elites. Elites: Language is a tricky thing, particularly when words are redefined on a constant basis. Being in my sixth decade I still think of being gay as being happy or joyful, not being attracted to someone of the same sex. Which brings us to gender.... And beyond. It never stops. But, though I'm relatively well-off (because I don't waste money), I consider myself a "down" in Ted's context. Who knows, the meaning will most likely change tomorrow?
Contrary to what we are often told, the most telling historical conflicts over the past century have not been economic or political but cultural - by which I don’t mean those issues that have been randomly deemed cultural when they really belong somewhere else (like gender, race, national identity etc) but disputes over actual cultural artefacts - music, literature, film, painting, buildings etc - ‘popular’ against ‘educated’ taste, how those tastes are formed, the relative cultural status of different forms and genres, the impact on all this of changing modes of cultural production and changing audiences. (You mention the changing cultural status of jazz - I’ve just been listening to a jazz programme on the BBC’s most high-cultural radio channel, including music that definitely originated from ‘down’.) As a good citizen I get into Facebook disputes about the centre of the city where I live, and despite the many economic and political issues around the current crisis of town centres, the argument seems to always come down to taste in architecture. ‘ Downs’ don’t like modernist buildings, and think that being old is sufficient to be beautiful. People who say they like (or even don’t mind) modernist buildings are stuck-up elitists and lackies of the establishment - or just lying. Education, maybe, is the key to this - it doesn’t just make you like different things, it gives you a different take on the whole business of ‘liking’, a process based on knowledge and cogitation, not - as someone said earlier - instinct. If you diss my instinctive likes and dislikes you are just another arrogant elitist. Bourdieu might be helpful here, said the over educated asshole. Or maybe not. But the left will not get anywhere with ‘populism’ without recognising that it’s not about politics but about the perception that we are different kinds of people, and not in a good way, and cultural tastes are a sure marker of that difference. (we also need to ask why we use that dubious term ‘populism’ for all this, which I think is an evasion of historic proportions, but that’s another issue).
Read James Kaplan’s recent book “3 Shades of Blue” (Ted has a blurb on the back cover). Kaplan does a great job helping to illustrate how jazz went from being a music of the masses (dancing) to one for the elites (listening and musing).
Europeans have historically been far more receptive to jazz, and taken it much more seriously as an art form, than the vast majority of Americans. So yeah, jazz on the Beeb. Why not?!
I find it all unbelievably depressing. But at least now I know why I roll my eyes and barf at TikTok, YouTube "stars", people who claim they "do their own research", and so very much more. I'm an Up to the core. The Up mindset is how I think the world should work, in a normative sense. You shouldn't be famous unless you've done something truly worth rising above the noise for. Respect is earned through experience, not arrogated by bluster. Expertise is the product of long, hard, diligent effort and means vastly more than some schmuck's off-the-cuff opinion. These things feel utterly obvious. And yet here we are.
“Expertise is the product of long, hard, diligent effort and means vastly more than some schmuck's off-the-cuff opinion.”
The problem is that experience has been replaced with credentialism as the determinant. An Ivy League degree aside from wealth is more important than anything else in the circle of our ruling class.
Your comments embody the Up elitism that the downs are rejecting. You could almost interpret them as - if you’re not school educated and sanctioned by the professionals you have no standing. Lack of self awareness in black and white.
Yet that "bluster" is what you express, isn't it? But you still demand respect merely for the assertion of your expertise without any effort to earn it from others. If you want respect, give respect, and don't assume others are simply schmucks; this feels obvious too, yet here we are.
It is an archetypal "up" mindset: learn a group of people with a separate way of thinking exists that presently is far more successful, while the opposing cohort is failing everywhere all at once and "up" media struggling to even stay in business, and instead of looking within at why it has become divided in such a manner, assert a natural superiority only kings used to believe they had and double down on everything. Those who think differently must conform!
I suggest keeping the vomit bag at hand, since following current trends, the "down" group is only going to get bigger.
Didn’t someone say once, Beauty is truth, truth beauty?
New words ascribed to old herd mentality. We don’t evolve much beyond the high school hallway. We herd where we feel accepted. Elites feel safest around other elites. Anyone who’s spent any time around them feel that immediately. Understandable, since we have access to the up and down details of their lives and they know nothing of us masses. At the top of the “up” the king and Queen prefer when the masses are angry with each other, as it means they’re not angry at them. So maybe bubbling just below the boil is our forever fate.
I think the difference would be that elites convince non-elites that they are part of the elite group if they act, vote, dress or consume a certain way; while other elites work very hard to portray themselves as non-elite, taking on the attitudes of those they know really don't belong in the popular group in order to gain power over them. I suppose this would be like the cool kids allowing a whole pack of uncool kids follow them around and pretending to accept them, while another group of cool kids started dressing and behaving like the uncool kids so they could get their trust and exploit them.
The King and Queen preferring the masses stay angry at each other feels exactly right, though. It's very easy for those highest-level elites to use news and social media, along with entertainment and advertising, to keep that near-boil simmer going. But even saying that makes me part of the "down" group, right?
There is a lot to consider in this points so I’ll pick one. We in a long trend eroding central power. Web3 and crypto are the technological edge point but how people engage is rightly pointed out by Ted. User reviews have more and more power. Prestige critics continue to have a place but even now we see individuals with massive followings.
This decentralization, pushing things to the edges, is the norms and our understanding of institution building is stuck in centralized ideals. It isn’t left right or up down, we can now connect and argue in unlimited dimensions. Buckle up because that means more friction and more conflict.
This quote is attributed to Winston Churchill, writing in 1901, with eerie relevance to the article:
"Nothing would be more fatal than for the government of States to get into the hands of the experts. Expert knowledge is limited knowledge: and the unlimited ignorance of the plain man who knows only what hurts is a safer guide, than any vigorous direction of a specialised character. Why should you assume that all except doctors, engineers etc., are drones or worse?
To manage men, to explain difficult things to simple people, to reconcile opposite interests, to weigh the evidence of disputing experts, to deal with the clamorous emergency of the hour; are not these things in themselves worth the consideration and labour of a lifetime? If the Ruler is to be an expert in anything he should be an expert in everything; and that is plainly impossible. Wherefore I say from the dominion of all specialists (particularly military specialists) good Lord deliver us."