Wisdom and Influence
We suffer from their disconnect
Here is a simple theory of history:
When wise people are influential, good things happen. When unwise people are influential, bad things happen.
I will just offer two data points. During the era of the American founding, influential people included George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, and other men who had great wisdom. Today, we have social media “influencers” who are idiots.
In politics, the Democratic Party is drifting way to the left, influenced by Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, the Squad, and a cadre of young activists. None of them has any wisdom.
The Republican Party looks worse. The new Speaker of the House does not strike me as wise. Nor does the prospective Republican Presidential nominee.
Contemporary journalism is a disaster. The influential writers are partisan hacks. No wise person could trust Paul Krugman or Tucker Carlson.
Most galling of all is the disconnect between influence and wisdom in higher education. The dominant influence at universities used to be faculty. And they were faculty in real disciplines, not grievance studies. Professors can be petty and juvenile, but there was enough wisdom to maintain a decent atmosphere for seeking truth and reasoning with rigor.
Today, the influence comes from administrators. Most notorious are the DEI administrators. They are not at all wise. The critical theorists and the grievance studies professors cause harm both psychologically and intellectually.
I suspect that the rise of foolish influencers reflects the new information environment. The Internet rewards tribalism, not wisdom.
I conceived of the Fantasy Intellectual Teams project as a way to reconnect wisdom with influence. The scoring system rewarded points for commentary that showed wisdom. It awarded points for stating a clear proposition in which you acknowledge the strongest arguments for a different opinion.
Suppose that we could train a Large Language Model to score individuals on their ability to use reason in disagreement. We could also award negative points for using ad hominem attacks and mischaracterizing the other side.
Ideally, people would start to pay attention to rankings of individuals based on this scoring system. High scorers would increase their influence. That would help to reverse the social breakdown that has occurred over the past twenty years.
I suspect that you are correct when you suspect that the rise of foolish influencers is a reflection of the “new information environment.” When I struggle to understand how a U.S. society that not long ago could be counted on as having a broadly sensible populace from the center-right to the center-left could recently have “gone off the rails” to this extraordinary degree, it is at least somewhat consoling to remind myself that the current stage of the “digital revolution” will probably be looked back upon (in future centuries) as one of the most profound challenges in the history of human civilization. Perhaps far more disruptive than the agricultural and industrial revolutions.
The story I find most compelling for explaining this disconnect is a Yuval Levin / Martin Gurri story. From Levin we see that formative institutions are being outcompeted by performative ones. One of the main problems with this is that formative institutions impart wisdom, whereas performative institutions are at best indifferent to it and often hostile. From Gurri, we see that modern technology has awakened the masses to the fact that even the relatively wisest, and a fortiori the *apparently* wisest, screw up a lot and lie about it. They have responded by devaluing wisdom altogether. Combine those two trends and you get a drastic reduction in both opportunity and incentive to gain wisdom.
I think those who blame social media or wokism have got the causation backwards. The Levin and Gurri trends have been in full swing since the 1960s. They are accelerating now, and making the excesses and toxicities of Facebook and DEI more powerful, because with the passing of the Greatest Generation, almost no one left alive has any personal experience of any world but a performative-centered, antinomian one. This means that the traditional correlation between wisdom and age no longer holds: it is common for even 80-year-olds to have never encountered a wisdom-imparting formative institution in their entire lives, and Trump is only the most florid and notorious example of this. That also ironically contributes to our gerontocracy, the old of today being no longer wise enough to know when to pass the torch.
If this story is correct, it is futile to try to put the genie back in the bottle by reimposing pre-1960s institutions or mores. For one thing, the obsolescence of those is probably itself an inevitable product of the now 200-year-old Great Enrichment. Instead we must rebuild forward. That means
1. building new formative institutions that offer tangible functional appeal to 21st century WEIRD people;
2. shaping a new appreciation of wisdom's value that does not obfuscate the fallibility of the wise.
Those two things are complementary and neither is sufficient on its own. Fantasy Intellectual Teams could, maybe with a bit of reprioritization, help with (2), but it needs some partnership with (1) to have a big impact.