They don’t make elites like Oppenheimer any more

The “father of the atomic bomb” was a well-heeled, snobbish, arrogant, coastal elitist fascinated with modern art, Eastern spirituality, French literature and psychoanalysis

Photo by NOAA on Unsplash

It might be argued that Christopher Nolan’s most impressive achievement hasn’t been getting hundreds of millions to rush to a three-hour-long movie about theoretical physics, but getting hundreds of millions of people to rush to a three-hour-long movie about a Bhagavad Gita-quoting, Picasso-owning, New York Jew who studied and taught at some of the world’s most elite universities.

(As an aside, if Oppenheimer has whetted your appetite for 1950s ‘Red Scare’ politics, you might want to check out Oppenheimer’s near contemporary and ideological mirror image, Roy Cohn. Nowadays, he’s best known for being Donald Trump’s consigliere. But he was once Joe McCarthy’s. There isn’t space to get into here, but Cohn played a crucial role in the conviction of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The Rosenbergs were executed for passing on American secrets, including ones relating to what was going on at Los Alamos, to the Soviets.)

The insider’s outsider
Around the time Oppenheimer died (1967), America’s White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) establishment began abolishing itself and dismantling explicitly anti-semitic policies. Such as, for instance, strictly limiting the number of overachieving Jews who could study or teach at top universities.

As far as this non-Jewish, Australian Gen Xer can tell, the film accurately portrayed the ambient but subtle anti-semitism of prestigious institutions in mid-century America. But, to put it bluntly, Oppenheimer was Jewish but not particularly Jew-ish. I’m no expert in these things, but I’m guessing there aren’t too many New York Jews who like to unwind by horse-riding and camping in New Mexico. Oppenheimer has been described as “highly assimilated”. There is a scene where Oppenheimer – a man with a German-speaking father and the ability to pick up difficult languages with ease – explains he doesn’t speak Yiddish to a Jewish colleague of humbler origins.  

In short, Oppenheimer comes across more as Don Draper than Woody Allen.

(Another aside: I once got to interview Matthew Weiner, the creator of Don Draper. We spoke at length about what he regards as America’s Faustian bargain – you can reinvent yourself to achieve wealth and influence, but you’ll have to leave your tribe behind. (Here’s the money quote: “Assimilation is one of the big stories in American culture. Don’s an American archetype, a Jay Gatsby figure. People abandon their past, change to succeed, but those past, inauspicious beginnings are something that haunt all of us if we become part of the culture. Maybe that’s universal, but it’s certainly true in societies such as Australia and America. There’s a cost for that mobility; you have to give up a lot of your past.”)

Oppenheimer was nominally an outsider given he was ethnically Jewish. However, his downfall was far more related to his political views than his Jewishness. (Of course, his political views were undoubtedly tied to his Jewishness, but that’s a whole separate article.)  

The film frequently shows Oppenheimer bestriding the corridors of power and treating US generals and presidents as either equals or inferiors. Oppenheimer enjoys being part of the ruling elite and doesn’t seem much troubled by imposter syndrome. Indeed, the film's narrative arc hinges on Oppenheimer needlessly humiliating a powerful individual he’s previously dismissed as a “lowly shoe salesman”.

(A final aside: I’m constantly amazed at how many brilliant men don’t possess the entry-level emotional intelligence to understand that the non-brilliant individuals they are so blasé about casually insulting may one day exact their revenge.)

An elite that delivered the goods
Having devoted billions of pixels to the elite overreach of recent decades, I think I’m entitled to offer a defence of old-school elites. I don’t care if those in privileged positions seduce their colleagues’ wives, overindulge in drink or drugs, have a preference for certain types of foods and beverages, have unusual philosophical or spiritual beliefs, come from money, don’t come from money, think they are better than everyone else, treat people in humbler positions condescendingly or treat people in more powerful positions dismissively – so long as they are making the world a better place for the majority of people.

Nolan’s masterwork devotes itself to the broader question of whether humanity was served by Oppenheimer midwifing the atomic bomb. I’ll leave that for smarter people to mull over. I would merely point out that men such as Oppenheimer and his boss Lieutenant General Leslie Groves (a chaplain’s son with an engineering degree from MIT), were charged with a task. They completed that task. That meant hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of Americans and Japanese who would have otherwise died didn’t.

My sole complaint about contemporary elites is that they have all the vices of Oppenheimer-era elites but few of the virtues. They maintain the infuriating style (smug self-satisfaction) but fail to deliver the substance (e.g. a war-concluding weapon).

Elites react poorly to reports of their dominance (again)
In April, I devoted a couple of these Musings to Professor Matthew Goodwin’s book, Value, Voice and Virtue: The New British Politics. Goodwin argues a meritocratic, technocratic elite is driving Western Civilisation into a ditch, to the increasing dismay of non-elite types. If you’re guessing this was an inconvenient truth meritocratic, technocratic elites had little time for, you’d be correct.   

Three months on, a similar story has played out in the US. I’m not sure if David Brooks is aware of the Goodwin book. But a week ago he attempted to gently explain, in the house journal of America’s socially and economically liberal ruling class, why non-elites aren’t as impressed with elites as elites are with themselves.

In a now-viral (paywalled) New York Times article entitled ‘What if We’re the Bad Guys Here?’ (presumably a nod to the famous Mitchell and Webb sketch), Brooks patiently tried to explain to elite Americans what the world looks like to non-elite Americans.

Here are some of the money quotes:

“We anti-Trumpers are the good guys, the forces of progress and enlightenment. The Trumpers are reactionary bigots and authoritarians. Many Republicans support Trump no matter what, according to this story, because at the end of the day, he’s still the bigot in chief, the embodiment of their resentments and that’s what matters to them most.

I partly agree with this story, but it’s also a monument to elite self-satisfaction.

So let me try another story on you… The [post-WWII] ideal that we’re all in this together was replaced with the reality that the educated class lives in a world up here and everybody else is forced into a world down there. Members of our class are always publicly speaking out for the marginalized, but somehow we always end up building systems that serve ourselves. The most important of those systems is the modern meritocracy… Highly educated parents go to elite schools, marry each other, work at high-paying professional jobs and pour enormous resources into our children, who get into the same elite schools, marry each other and pass their exclusive class privileges down from generation to generation...

Meritocracy blocks the middle class from opportunity. Then it blames those who lose a competition for income and status that, even when everyone plays by the rules, only the rich can win… Armed with all kinds of economic, cultural and political power, we support policies that help ourselves. Free trade makes the products we buy cheaper, and our jobs are unlikely to be moved to China. Open immigration makes our service staff cheaper, but new, less-educated immigrants aren’t likely to put downward pressure on our wages…

Does this mean that I think the people in my class are vicious and evil? No. Most of us are earnest, kind and public-spirited. But we take for granted and benefit from systems that have become oppressive… It’s easy to understand why people in less-educated classes would conclude that they are under economic, political, cultural and moral assault.

As the always readable

Damon Linker

observed, the New York Times’ upmarket readership did not appreciate these home truths. As Linker noted:

Almost immediately, I noticed on Twitter X that at least some of the well-educated, meritocratically successful people Brooks addressed in his column didn’t appreciate it at all. I found that sadly ironic, since one of Brooks’ goals in writing the piece was to inspire a few minutes of soul-searching about our present situation…

Brooks’ column was not one-dimensionally about economic class… A contractor from rural Ohio might earn a good living and own a nice home, cars, and a boat. But he will still feel very far from the country’s power centers, where people with very different political, moral, and cultural convictions and attachments run the show—often pretty poorly, in the eyes of this contractor and his family and friends. Why are those people in charge? Do they really merit their power and influence? Why is the system rigged to reward them over and over again—after Iraq, after Afghanistan, after the financial crisis, after overrun borders and outsourced jobs and COVID miscalculations and surging violent crime and “gender-affirming care” on demand for minors and rampant homelessness and inflation and spiking interest rates and a multitude of inaccurate mainstream media stories? 

I get the impression Oppenheimer was enthralled by his cleverness. Until he wasn’t.

Many of today’s elites may one day feel a similar sense of remorse about the world they brought into being.