Is the fourth estate capable of intellectual humility?

If New York Times’ heavy hitters can take part in a self-criticism session, who knows what might be possible?

Photo by dusan jovic on Unsplash

In the Terminator movies, Skynet becomes self-aware at 2:14 am Eastern Time, on August 29th, 1997, unleashing an apocalypse. Almost exactly a quarter of a century later, some of the most feted columnists at the world’s most prestigious newspaper achieved sufficient self-awareness to confess to making a mistake. That just might go some way to averting a savage day of reckoning.

Theological certainties

There are a variety of terms floating around for those academics and journalists who take it upon themselves to convince the masses of the rightness of ruling-class ideas. For a time, ‘the clerisy’ was popular, but it now seems ‘the cathedral’ has become the go-to descriptor.

Like members of the clergy (the ‘first estate’ in medieval times), journalists and academics occupy an intermediate class position between the nobility (i.e. the plutocrats and their political handmaidens) and the commoners (i.e. the underclass, the working class and what’s left of the middle class).

In terms of their educational backgrounds, journalists and academics, especially if they work for top-tier institutions, tend to resemble the nobility. In terms of their remuneration, they tend to be closer to the commoners. Occupationally, they are in the somewhat unusual position of frequently rubbing shoulders with both the lower orders and the blue bloods.  

Given their meat-in-the-sandwich position, members of the cathedral often have complicated feelings towards both their overclass overlords and proletarian inferiors. But in much the same way their predecessors believed their class interests would usually be best served by convincing the starving and oppressed peasants that kings had a divine right to rule and thus shouldn’t be questioned, today’s public intellectuals will typically seek to convince those in the bottom four quintiles of the income distribution that they live in a perfectly functioning meritocracy and therefore have no good reason to question the intelligence, morality or motives of cognitively superior elites.

Of course, I’m necessarily making broad generalisations here. There are many Far Left journalists and academics and even a few Far Right ones.

But most members of the cathedral are all too aware that the path to a columnist gig at the New York Times or a faculty position at Harvard lies in not departing too violently from established neoliberal orthodoxies. Orthodoxies such as:  

• Diversity is our strength; the more immigration, the better!

• Biological race doesn’t exist, except when it does!

• Free trade is always and everywhere a good thing; borders are an irritating anachronism that get in the way of the free flow of capital and (cheap and compliant) labour

• It’s racist and sexist to worry about the loss of reasonably paid blue-collar jobs. Also, it's selfish and short-sighted to worry about the 1% making out like bandits in developed nations over the last four decades because lots of people in developing countries have gone from labouring in rice paddies to living it up in shoe factories during this period

• There was nothing objectionable about deregulating the US financial system then socialising its (inevitable) losses. After all, as our girl Hillary explained it to you idiots, “If we broke up the big banks tomorrow, would that end racism?”. Now please stop worrying about a future where you will be consigned to poorly paid, insecure work and will own nothing and check out this article on whether you’re asexual, bisexual, cisgender, gay, demisexual, gender-fluid, gynesexual, intersex, nonbinary, omnisexual, pansexual, polysexual, queer, questioning, or transgender     

• China will shortly become a freedom-loving liberal democracy, so there’s absolutely no need to worry about moving the manufacturing capacity of the US and many other nations to a country inhabited by over a billion ethnonationalist Han Chinese still steaming about the century of humiliation visited upon their ancestors by the Americans, British, French, Germans, Japanese, Portuguese and Russians.

• OK, maybe it will take a bit longer for China to turn into America-lite than initially predicted. But American, Australian, British and European companies certainly shouldn’t be prevented from trying to pocket some sweet yuan just because Xi is copying the playbook of another ultra-nationalist and somewhat socialist dictator with an openly stated objective of Anschluss        

Finally, a struggle session we can all enjoy   

In an unusual move for any media organisation, let alone the hallowed New York Times, some high-profile Times staffers were recently invited to pen a full and frank mea culpa.  

Predictably, this proved too big an ask for most of them.

The best Gail Collins could manage in ‘I was wrong about Mitt Romney (and his dog)’ was a jokey admission that perhaps she shouldn’t have been so hard on the 2012 Republican presidential nominee given the subsequent Republican presidential nominee. In ‘I was wrong about inflation’, Paul Krugman concedes through clenched teeth that he was “wrong for the right reasons” about inflation being transitory, then blames his mistake on the unforeseeable economic distortions generated by a once-in-a-century pandemic

I wouldn’t be writing this piece if all of the Times’ star writers had opted to salve their egos rather than acknowledge a bad call. But Bret Stephens, Thomas Friedman and David Brooks did manage to choke down some humble pie.

Friedman: ‘Maybe the Chinese Communist Party is a little bit authoritarian’

Thomas Friedman couldn’t quite bring himself to acknowledge globalisation might have some downsides. Or even that allowing China to join the WTO then turning a blind eye to its market-distorting subsidies, rampant intellectual property (IP) theft, even more rampant forced technology transfer, unfair tax and regulatory treatment of foreign competitors and unabashed mercantilism was foolish.  

However, with China now posing a greater threat to the US than the USSR ever did, Friedman is willing to admit that ‘I was wrong about Chinese Censorship’. The TL;DR version of the piece is that Friedman is probably just guilty of overestimating how quickly China would liberalise politically in order to build a sophisticated, high-tech economy, but that it’s also conceivable that China’s authoritarian political structure is a feature not a bug. Somewhat incredulously, Friedman even brings himself to acknowledge:

Xi and the Chinese Communist Party are reaffirming their belief that a free press in the Western sense is not a prerequisite for effectively integrating with the global economy or dominating the most advanced industries in the 21st century. When you look at how China has grown in just four decades from a poor country to a middle-income country with amazing infrastructure, you’d have to say that Xi is not crazy to believe that.

Despite all the evidence his lying eyes are transmitting to his brain, Friedman isn’t willing to throw in the towel just yet. He ends his article on this cautiously hopeful note: “While I plead guilty to premature optimism when it comes to China developing a more open information ecosystem, I’m going to ask the court for a suspended sentence. Let’s all wait and see how this plays out over the next decade.”

Stephens: ‘Perhaps we should have expected some blowback from pauperising then demonising half the population’  
Bret Stephens is a conservative. But as would be expected of a New York Times employee, he’s a never-Trump conservative. He’s certainly not about to walk back any of his jeremiads against the Bad Orange Man. But in ‘I was wrong about Trump voters’, he does admit caricaturing his supporters “probably did more to help than hinder Trump’s candidacy… Telling voters they are moral ignoramuses is a bad way of getting them to change their minds”.

Stephens concedes he and his ilk belong “to a social class that my friend Peggy Noonan called ‘the protected’ [and are]… insulated against life’s harsh edges”. In contrast, many of Trump’s most passionate fans had long been left to fend for themselves. As Stephens belatedly recognises:  

Their neighbourhoods weren’t so safe and pleasant. Their schools weren’t so excellent. Their livelihoods weren’t so secure. Their experience of America was often one of cultural and economic decline, sometimes felt in the most personal of ways.

Remarkably, Stephens goes on to acknowledge the unprotected might have some legitimate grievances given their treatment at the hands of business and cultural elites:

Trump voters had a powerful case to make that they had been thrice betrayed by the nation’s elites. First, after 9/11, when they had borne much of the brunt of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, only to see Washington fumble and then abandon the efforts. Second, after the financial crisis of 2008, when so many were being laid off, even as the financial class was being bailed out. Third, in the post-crisis recovery, in which years of ultralow interest rates were a bonanza for those with investable assets and brutal for those without.

Oh, and then came the great American cultural revolution of the 2010s, in which traditional practices and beliefs — regarding same-sex marriage, sex-segregated bathrooms, personal pronouns, meritocratic ideals, race-blind rules, reverence for patriotic symbols, the rules of romance, the presumption of innocence and the distinction between equality of opportunity and outcome — became, more and more, not just passé, but taboo.

Then comes the money quote that every op-ed pontificator should have taped to their computer screen:

I could have thought a little harder about the fact that, in my dripping condescension toward [Trump’s] supporters, I was also confirming their suspicions about people like me – people who talked a good game about the virtues of empathy but practice it only selectively; people unscathed by the country’s problems yet unembarrassed to propound solutions.

David Brooks: ‘Possibly there was a reason capitalism was regulated before business journalists like me started demanding that it be deregulated’
I’ve had a soft spot for David Brooks ever since chortling my way through Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There many years ago. So, in as a schadenfreude-free a fashion as possible, I’ll summarise the political journey he details in ‘I was wrong about capitalism’. After starting off as a democratic socialist in his youth, Brooks surveys the US economy of the early 1980s and concludes:

The chief problem was sclerosis. Over the years special-interest groups had clogged up the economy with overly burdensome regulations, work rules, perverse tax structures and all the other sinecures the economists call “rent seeking.” The United States needed a shot of dynamism to get the entrepreneurial and innovative juices flowing.

Brooks ends up at the Wall Street Journal, where he “drink[s] deep from the wells of free-market thinking”. For a long time, he’s a true believer but then recognises:

The post-industrial capitalism machine — while innovative, dynamic and wonderful in many respects — had some fundamental flaws. The most educated Americans were amassing more and more wealth, dominating the best living areas, pouring advantages into their kids. A highly unequal caste system was forming. Bit by bit it dawned on me that the government would have to get much more active if every child was going to have an open field and a fair chance… By the time the financial crisis hit, the flaws in modern capitalism were blindingly obvious, but my mental frames still didn’t shift fast enough… I wrote a bunch of columns urging Obama to keep the stimulus reasonably small, columns that look wrong in hindsight. Deficits matter, but they were not the core challenge in 2009. 

In another money quote every media blowhard should also have stuck to their computer screen, Brooks concludes by observing:

Sometimes in life you should stick to your worldview and defend it against criticism. But sometimes the world is genuinely different than it was before. At those moments the crucial skills are the ones nobody teaches you: how to reorganise your mind, how to see with new eyes.