Loyalty Tests Signify Religious Authority

Lorenzo Warby's analysis of modern progressive elites

Lorenzo Warby writes,

The more a social milieu lacks character tests—and the weaker its reality tests—the more unconstrained selection-by-approval is likely to become.

Warby argues that the modern progressive elite exercises power through use of loyalty tests. That is what he means by the phrase “selection-by-approval.”

In order to be judged worthy, you have to first show your willingness to conform. To join a university faculty, you might be required to provide a “diversity statement.” More often, the loyalty test is less explicit and formal. From interacting with you, authorities are able to discern whether you share the approved beliefs.

Note that when the contents of beliefs are verifiable, such as the belief in the law of gravity or a belief that there are two genders, anyone can hold them. It is when beliefs are contestable, downright false, or even internally inconsistent, that they can provide a test of loyalty.

The effectiveness of loyalty tests depends on context. In some contexts, loyalty tests do not work as well as other tests.

If you are growing crops or conducting scientific experiments or playing a sport, the test is whether what you are doing works. It is a reality test.

If you are trying to succeed as an entrepreneur, you need individual persistence and the ability to gain the confidence of workers, investors, and customers. It is a character test.

Warby claims that we have accumulated a class of people who operate outside of a context in which reality tests or character tests prevail.

The human-and-cultural capital class—people whose social position derives from what’s in their heads—has grown.

…This pattern is most intense in the epistemic industries: entertainment, media, education, online IT.

…dominant members of human-and-cultural capital classes are people with religious authority. Religious authority provides social leverage through legitimating word and action.

In recent decades, hiring at universities has increasingly involved loyalty tests. To become an administrator, there is no relevant reality test, also little or no need to meet a character test. And administrators are the fastest-growing segment of university employment.

Faculty were once chosen on the basis of scholarship, which in science and engineering is a reality test and in the humanities and social sciences is a character test (can you complete a Ph.D dissertation and get papers published in journals?). But affirmative action and loyalty tests have diluted the importance of reality and character tests.

As a society as a whole, we now seem to be able to afford a class of highly-educated parasites. These include: bureaucrats in government, who write regulations with low benefits and high costs; bureaucrats in corporations, who are tasked with compliance; and bureaucrats who work in non-profits, subsisting on grants from the government and from wealthy donors.

If the main reason you have your position in society is that you have passed a loyalty test, then you will be motivated to reinforce the legitimacy of loyalty tests. Warby writes,

Those actively seeking to entrench this normative system have particularly strong incentives to select fellow believers. The larger such belief networks become, the more folk play (and mutually support) a shared status game: this is what the smart and good believe.

Thus, we now have a large class of people who were selected for high-status positions in part for their progressive ideology, and this gives them a strong incentive to sustain that ideology. That class has achieved sufficient critical mass and cultural power that its loyalty tests are effective. Trying to dislodge the religious authority of the progressives in America today is like trying to dislodge the religious authorities in a medieval Catholic country or a contemporary Islamic state. Ergo, Warby says, we can view progressivism today as a religion.

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