In a year when prominent heads fell victim to cultural issues, Edward Venning, Partner at Six Ravens Consulting, reviews new books with lessons on how to navigate them.
Are the culture wars a 1960s mind virus, promulgated by university failures? Or just the latest way for privileged folk to use higher education as a tool of oppression? And does it matter, now that Peak Woke has passed?
Luxury beliefs
These questions matter viscerally for Rob Henderson, who started life at the mercy of the Los Angeles County foster care system. He fought his way out through the US Air Force, therapy and Yale, taking his doctorate at the University of Cambridge. There, he spent the pandemic on his memoir, Troubled, while writing a weekly newsletter, now a high earner on Substack. Building on Max Weber’s insights into elite cultural norms, these market his concept of luxury beliefs – ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class while inflicting costs on the lower classes,
Henderson recounts his intolerable upbringing, due to adult neglect and multiple failures of social care. The leitmotif is that ‘People are here, and then they’re gone’. Henderson’s character is good company, determined to understand human nature even in numerous dead-ends and his own errors.
In the era of ‘lived experience’, Henderson’s backstory gives him every right to the vivid commentary on social class at university which takes up the last quarter of the book. Troubled is in part an ode to the life-changing effects of higher education, interlaced with the realisation that it does not work as advertised. Of widening participation, he observes that elite institutions strip-mine talented people out of their communities. Arriving at Yale via the GI Bill, he takes an outsider’s interest in insiders who pose as more oppressed than him, described in mordantly funny scenes. And when he reaches Cambridge as a Gates Scholar, he observes drily that few, if any, of the other scholars had ever ditched class to go joyriding and shoot paintball guns at pedestrians.
His central thesis and ire are reserved for the way universities are an accelerator for elite hypocrisy. He argues that, when affluent people express support for policies such as drug legalisation, open borders, white privilege and permissive sexual norms (many with their roots in 1960s counterculture), this is a status display. It affirms behaviours, decisions and attitudes they would never accept for themselves or their own children. When such policies are implemented, ‘it won’t be Yale graduates who are harmed’.
Cultural socialism
Like Henderson, Eric Kaufmann sees himself as an outsider. And he too has a concept to promote, in a book bustling with ideas, data and opinion. As with his previous books, Taboo – How making race sacred produced a cultural revolution pokes the bear of progressive thinking, using his new theory of cultural socialism as the stick.
As a political scientist, Kaufmann is an acute observer of how Western society and knowledge work at the systemic level. For him, universities are pre-eminent among the ‘mediating institutions’ which bear on culture and society, and deserve greater scrutiny and regulation. He lucidly observes that exponential change may result from the compound effect of incremental guilt and compassion. He points to the historic weakness of civil society. And he may be right that busy people grant progressives the benefit of the doubt, although one could argue that neoliberalism also gets a free pass.
Whereas Henderson treats the culture wars as just one manifestation of elite behaviour, Kaufmann sees them as part of a major change in human affairs. He describes cultural socialism as a moralistic ethos at the logical extreme of humanitarianism. In the first part of the book, he traces its emergence to the crucible of the 1960s. Shifting from class to identity politics, cultural socialism emphasises diversity, cosmopolitanism and novelty and wokeness is its fundamentalist incarnation. In the second part of the book, he outlines his sense of the current and future impact of this ethos on society.
Kaufmann works at the grand scale, and occasionally misses the obvious. Though he sees universities as the cradle of cultural socialism, Kaufmann is notably incurious about professional services. These represent almost half the university workforce, including the ‘faceless administrators’ who sat in judgement over his ‘wrongspeak’ at Birkbeck. They are a major point of leverage in the processes and changing cultural life of universities. He thinks little of them, in both senses.
And though he tells us that wokeness has deep roots and the future of civilisation is at stake, he seems hazy about the mechanisms bringing this about. Some combination of universities, the media, celebrity culture, social media influencers and schools seems to be involved. But then half of his 12-point plan involves government intervention. At the very least, this would dynamite the foundations of university autonomy, contrary to the persuasive views of his new vice-chancellor.
Learning from the awkward squad
What is a left-leaning sector prepared to learn from contrarian, conservative thinkers?
Many will argue points of fact, theory and principle. Notwithstanding his range and scholarship, it’s hard not to be entertained by Kaufmann’s revulsion at universities (and indeed journalists) doing what they are supposed to do – generate ideas and promulgate them via teaching and the media. Kaufmann may not like those ideas, but he can counter them with this book, his own journalism and his new courses in the congenial environment of the University of Buckingham.
Nevertheless, these views deserve consideration at academic and executive boards. Few universities actively manage the risk posed by cultural issues. Even though these are a notorious shortcut to occupations, cancellations, votes of no confidence and tribunals, how often do they make it to Audit Committee? And Henderson is right that status-seeking will always have normative and/or malign effects within and outside the academy. We know that marginalised academics are targets for abuse, which is bound to find expression in internal processes and may be a contributory factor in some ‘cancellations’. This too deserves oversight and active management. Universities should therefore treat these books as an endorsement of our ongoing cultural significance, offering insights into the DNA of knowledge institutions, an invitation to greater self-awareness, and a warning.