The House of Lords, American-Style

In a recent online discussion of the foibles of academics (many of the participants in which were themselves of that persuasion) Professor Esolen made this comment:

I can divide academics into two groups -- and these do cross the political divide. There are those who know that academics can be a bunch of weenies, and those who are actually surprised that anybody would think of them as less than the natural rulers of the universe. It's as if they'd never entertained the suspicion that they aren't as smart as they think they are.

This made me recall The Admirable Crichton, which I saw as a boy.  The play showed an upper-class British family marooned on a desert island with their servants, among whom is the butler Crichton.  The pater familias attempts to assert his customary authority, but finds the accomplishments of a plump and well-served toff unequal to the situation's requirements.  The necessity of survival brings forward the highly competent butler as the natural ruler.  At the end of the play Crichton is the master, and his former lord, a servant. This is meant, I presume, to poke fun at the British upper class, but the point it makes goes deeper than that, and applies to comment above, in which Tony indicates the typical academic is like that British lord: too narrow, and frankly, too ignorant, to relate intelligently or usefully to the world outside his well-financed and well-fenced boundaries.  

If I were to make a general rule to address this situation it would be that no one should be given the opportunity to master specificities until he has shown competence in generalities, which would mean in the case of prospective savants that they should not be allowed to take a Ph.D. until they can wash their own clothing, make their own bread, and do five years' self-supporting labor (ten years for candidates in the arts and humanities) among those the academy encourages them to view as objects of pity or disdain.  

In the United States, much of the class system the Founders hoped to leave behind has been transferred to the academy.  It is typically American in that it is, at least in theory, meritocratic.  But, in its decline, especially, it carries every bit of the iron-bound exclusivity, narrowness, injustice, and power to harm that its denizens so typically allege of other entrenched social aristocracies. 

Along these lines I observe that the two remaining Democratic contenders for the U.S. President’s office have ineluctably become, despite their attempts to appear "of the people," the most prominent examples of this aristocracy's pity and disdain. One would think the Republican nominee well-advised simply to play himself while Senator Obama struggles hopefully up from slavery and Mrs. Clinton continues to fight hard for lil’ old cookie-bakers like herself.  

They are both, in their own ways, members of the nobility, coming to it in good American fashion through Harvard and Yale. This would not necessarily put them in bad odor with their constituents, except that in the fashion of their ideological kind they assume the stupidity of all lesser beings, and have been playing accordingly to the serfs historically attached to the Democratic manor. They would have done better without the proletarian pretension--an embarrassingly obvious mark of the elitist out for votes--but it’s too late for that now. We're too far along in the play.