Warby from a Sowell perspective

The vision of the anointed

Note: I have a new review of Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions. Mike Munger and I will be discussing the review on Wednesday, August 16, at noon New York time. Free for all who register.

Also, here is the video of a discussion with Lorenzo Warby last night. I think you will enjoy it.

Lorenzo Warby writes,

Many contemporary criticisms of Post-Enlightenment Progressivism’s histrionic victim culture echo pagan Roman critiques of Christianity.

Remember, the Christians won.

Warby offers a novel (to me) explanation for the fall of Rome.

What had been around 300 career officials under the Principate (27BC-284)—with its self-governing cities—became 30-35,000 officials under the Dominate (284-641), with most of the increase occurring under emperor Diocletian (r. 284-305).

A switch to in-kind taxation drove this bureaucratic expansion after the collapse of Roman silver production destabilised the silver-for-silk Eurasian trading system. The expansion reduced the capacity of the Roman state, as so much more state-extracted revenue was consumed by administration. The difficulty in coordinating this enormous bureaucracy led to the split into Western and Eastern Empires.

… Christianising simplified bureaucratic selection and coordination and generated moral projects that shielded officials from the demands of competence.

Religious tests rather than reality tests or character tests.

Warby writes,

Class arrogance—people who think like us can’t be a problem—is a pervasive feature of the contemporary progressive mindset. When highly educated Americans, for instance, make comments about the US being a deeply racist country (it’s not, not even comparatively), they are broadcasting their superiority over “morally vulgar” social lessers. This is an elite—particularly a tech elite—which is grotesquely ignorant about its own society

Thomas Sowell would say that class arrogance is not new. In 1996, he termed it The Vision of the Anointed. And some of what he said in that work was anticipated a decade earlier in his A Conflict of Visions. The core belief of the Anointed is that they possess cognitive and moral superiority over people who think differently. Traditional norms and institutions can be replaced by (supposedly) superior reason.

What Warby says about the current version of class arrogance that seems new is its ability to obtain and hold power.

A belief system that provides a sense of trumping grandeur—that generates conversion, motivation and coordination patterns—is well-suited for generating dominion capital: human and social capital organised for institutional infiltration and control. Belief in it creates its own reward: it can easily do without supporting evidence, and does.

As you know, I am no fan of activism. Warby writes,

Activists are the new priesthood for this cluster of quasi-religious ideologies, with activist scholarship providing the secular theology. The sanctification of activism, which is at the heart of the social strategy of dominion capital, is both toxic and ridiculous.

Activist organisations and networks have an interest in encouraging folk to feel as fearful, as threatened, as possible.

On the latter point, Warby is vulnerable to whataboutism. Aren’t Chrisopher Rufo, James Lindsay, and Warby himself just as motivated to encourage people to feel as fearful and threatened as possible? We live in this, the age of Apocalyptic Outrage, apparently fueled by digital communication.

Christianity brought to sexual norms the novel idea that you should not marry one of your relatives or have multiple wives. Joseph Henrich says that this made us Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic.

The Anointed’s latest sexual norms seem pretty novel to many of us. What sort of culture might they wind up with?

In a subsequent essay, Warby dwells on the trans phenomenon, which provides the Anointed with one of their strictest religious tests.

In the cultural struggles over Trans, the big divide is between those who treat “gender” (actually sex) dysphoria as psychological dysfunction and those who treat it as an identity. For the latter, to think of such dysphoria as a psychological dysfunction is to commit blasphemy, to mark oneself off as a moral infidel.

The Anointed judge the rest of us on our willingness to “affirm” deviant behavior. See Heather Heying’s essay on her visit to a drag show.

I think that what Warby calls the Transcult is very committed internally but very unpopular externally. That seems like a volatile situation. I would wager that within a decade the Anointed will feel it necessary to move on from the Transcult, just as progressives moved on from the eugenics that they embraced over a hundred years ago.

substacks referenced above:

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A crusading clerisy: II