Why we need a cultural elite more than ever
Anarchy on social media has proved you can’t have a tolerant and liberal society without ideas being filtered from above
Link / archive
James Marriott
Monday January 13 2025, 9.00pm GMT, The Times
The “cultural elite” is so widely despised at the moment that even quite unlikely enemies of entrenched privilege such as billionaire businessmen feel able to scorn them without fretting unduly over the appearance of hypocrisy.
In a piece in Saturday’s Financial Times, the Silicon Valley financier Peter Thiel (net worth $13.9 billion) took a swipe at the “Distributed Idea Suppression Complex”, sinisterly acronymised as “Disc”, which he defines as “the media organisations, bureaucracies, universities and government-funded NGOs that traditionally delimited public conversation”. Sweep away this sinister apparatus of professors, TV producers and newspaper editors, and citizens will be free to seek the truth for themselves.
Though Thiel’s rhetorical thunderbolts arrived veiled in clouds of pretension and obscurity (his anti-elite tirade begins, ironically enough, with a meditation on the etymology of the Ancient Greek word apokálypsis), the core of his argument is nowadays blandly uncontroversial. The right loathe the cultural elite as patronising and out of touch; the left worry that it excludes “marginalised voices”. The idea that society requires a class of people who promote certain values and “delimit” public conversation has very few adherents nowadays. But it is a view to which I find myself increasingly sympathetic.
As Thiel writes, the internet has radically democratised our culture. Facebook and X have broken the power of the mainstream media. Access to “the public conversation” — once restricted to the handful of people allowed to express their opinions in the Newsnight studio and on opinion pages — is now virtually unlimited.
In many ways this is a good thing. More voices and points of view are heard than ever before in history. It is undeniably true that the old “cultural elite” was flawed in many ways: biased, snobbish, self-satisfied, and all too obviously shaped by vested interests. And those who rage against “the mainstream media” are not wrong to point out that traditional media companies have never reflected every view under the sun.
But it is also the case that our newly democratised culture has not, to put it mildly, heralded the arrival of an egalitarian paradise of reasoned debate. As is now well documented, the advent of social media platforms has brought about rising political extremism, metastasising conspiracy theories, growing hostility to science and the shattering of the mainstream into a thousand different realities that are increasingly alien to one another. Modern citizens differ on matters that once seemed so obvious they were hardly worth discussing — who won the American election? Do vaccines work? What is a woman? True, many more views are heard. But the result is chaotic.
The problem is that a successful society requires a shared moral and cultural reality. A democracy whose citizens are divided not only on policy but on fundamental questions of what is and isn’t true will grow increasingly dysfunctional, as anyone who pays attention to American politics will have noticed.
The version of reality believed in by the complacent, and sometimes self-serving cultural elites had many shortcomings — you miss a great deal surveying the world from the senior common room or W1A. But it did at least provide a common worldview in which citizens could share. A chastening discovery of the 21st century is that a flawed consensus may be preferable to anarchy.
Indeed, the “public conversation” in the age of social media has revealed that many people are not as keen on liberal democratic values as the old cultural elites might fondly have imagined. Anybody who has spent much time on X will have noticed that values such as free speech, equality and tolerance simply do not seem to make much intuitive sense to many people.
Given half the chance, an awful lot of people (even those who think of themselves as liberals) would prefer to silence and abuse their enemies rather than tolerate views they disagree with. Many of the endless petty campaigns to censor books and silence speakers are in essence populist movements that would have struggled to get the same purchase in the more elitist cultural environment of the 20th century.
Even more alarming is the fact that support for democracy among young people has been falling since the advent of social media. We should be grateful that anti-democratic sentiment was one idea effectively suppressed by the elites who ran the “Distributed Idea Suppression Complex”. Avowed enemies of democracy would find it hard to get a position reporting for the BBC or teaching at a British university. But plenty of people with those views have found huge and influential platforms online.
It may be that liberal and democratic values do not arise naturally from the mass of the population when they are thrown together online. Liberalism has always been a counterintuitive creed that appeals more to the intellect than the emotions. A lot of people do not find it natural to treat their hated enemies with respect and tolerance. We may discover that you can’t have a tolerant and democratic liberal society without a cultural elite imposing those strange ideas from above.
I hope it is clear that my defence of cultural elites is the result not of gleeful snobbery but of rueful pragmatism. I am no special fan of elites and I would very much like to believe in a world in which all voices could be heard equally and all value systems constantly granted a hearing. It is simply that I am not sure that utopia is possible.
Anarchy on social media has proved you can’t have a tolerant and liberal society without ideas being filtered from above
Link / archive
James Marriott
Monday January 13 2025, 9.00pm GMT, The Times
The “cultural elite” is so widely despised at the moment that even quite unlikely enemies of entrenched privilege such as billionaire businessmen feel able to scorn them without fretting unduly over the appearance of hypocrisy.
In a piece in Saturday’s Financial Times, the Silicon Valley financier Peter Thiel (net worth $13.9 billion) took a swipe at the “Distributed Idea Suppression Complex”, sinisterly acronymised as “Disc”, which he defines as “the media organisations, bureaucracies, universities and government-funded NGOs that traditionally delimited public conversation”. Sweep away this sinister apparatus of professors, TV producers and newspaper editors, and citizens will be free to seek the truth for themselves.
Though Thiel’s rhetorical thunderbolts arrived veiled in clouds of pretension and obscurity (his anti-elite tirade begins, ironically enough, with a meditation on the etymology of the Ancient Greek word apokálypsis), the core of his argument is nowadays blandly uncontroversial. The right loathe the cultural elite as patronising and out of touch; the left worry that it excludes “marginalised voices”. The idea that society requires a class of people who promote certain values and “delimit” public conversation has very few adherents nowadays. But it is a view to which I find myself increasingly sympathetic.
As Thiel writes, the internet has radically democratised our culture. Facebook and X have broken the power of the mainstream media. Access to “the public conversation” — once restricted to the handful of people allowed to express their opinions in the Newsnight studio and on opinion pages — is now virtually unlimited.
In many ways this is a good thing. More voices and points of view are heard than ever before in history. It is undeniably true that the old “cultural elite” was flawed in many ways: biased, snobbish, self-satisfied, and all too obviously shaped by vested interests. And those who rage against “the mainstream media” are not wrong to point out that traditional media companies have never reflected every view under the sun.
But it is also the case that our newly democratised culture has not, to put it mildly, heralded the arrival of an egalitarian paradise of reasoned debate. As is now well documented, the advent of social media platforms has brought about rising political extremism, metastasising conspiracy theories, growing hostility to science and the shattering of the mainstream into a thousand different realities that are increasingly alien to one another. Modern citizens differ on matters that once seemed so obvious they were hardly worth discussing — who won the American election? Do vaccines work? What is a woman? True, many more views are heard. But the result is chaotic.
The problem is that a successful society requires a shared moral and cultural reality. A democracy whose citizens are divided not only on policy but on fundamental questions of what is and isn’t true will grow increasingly dysfunctional, as anyone who pays attention to American politics will have noticed.
The version of reality believed in by the complacent, and sometimes self-serving cultural elites had many shortcomings — you miss a great deal surveying the world from the senior common room or W1A. But it did at least provide a common worldview in which citizens could share. A chastening discovery of the 21st century is that a flawed consensus may be preferable to anarchy.
Indeed, the “public conversation” in the age of social media has revealed that many people are not as keen on liberal democratic values as the old cultural elites might fondly have imagined. Anybody who has spent much time on X will have noticed that values such as free speech, equality and tolerance simply do not seem to make much intuitive sense to many people.
Given half the chance, an awful lot of people (even those who think of themselves as liberals) would prefer to silence and abuse their enemies rather than tolerate views they disagree with. Many of the endless petty campaigns to censor books and silence speakers are in essence populist movements that would have struggled to get the same purchase in the more elitist cultural environment of the 20th century.
Even more alarming is the fact that support for democracy among young people has been falling since the advent of social media. We should be grateful that anti-democratic sentiment was one idea effectively suppressed by the elites who ran the “Distributed Idea Suppression Complex”. Avowed enemies of democracy would find it hard to get a position reporting for the BBC or teaching at a British university. But plenty of people with those views have found huge and influential platforms online.
It may be that liberal and democratic values do not arise naturally from the mass of the population when they are thrown together online. Liberalism has always been a counterintuitive creed that appeals more to the intellect than the emotions. A lot of people do not find it natural to treat their hated enemies with respect and tolerance. We may discover that you can’t have a tolerant and democratic liberal society without a cultural elite imposing those strange ideas from above.
I hope it is clear that my defence of cultural elites is the result not of gleeful snobbery but of rueful pragmatism. I am no special fan of elites and I would very much like to believe in a world in which all voices could be heard equally and all value systems constantly granted a hearing. It is simply that I am not sure that utopia is possible.
