Officer Class redux: the Clerisy

tractatus officerius literatus

Hi! It’s time for yet another digression from the long-promised next two essays to further define the jargon I’ve been throwing around lately! Here’s a tiny and necessarily incomplete thought about some questions raised in the comments of the last piece

Shortly after I published my last essay

Naomi Kanakia

asked a completely obvious question that I hadn’t really even thought of while writing it: “what about the people who actually have culture?” This brings us back to essentially the same bifurcation noted by Alvin Gouldner between “Intellectuals” and what he called “Technical Intelligentsia” There are some who are officer class simply because they were born into it, or because they went to college and joined the PMC, and then there are people who are in some sense “cultured.” What I mean by this is not so much the mid-20th century U of C “read every Great Book and understand how the Great Men teach you how to be a good statesman and officer-guardian” ideal but rather some intellectual curiosity, level of critical comprehension, and sense that there might be a world beyond one’s twitter feed and the next episode of whatever prestige drama is in at the moment. These people are the Clerisy (which I mercifully don’t have to define because it’s already a term that exists) Humanities academics, critics, lay readers and writers, enthusiasts, etc. It’s a little thing, a tiny piece of nuance, but one arguably as vital to the argument I’m going to make about the subject of the next piece as defining “officer class” itself. After all, clerisy are officers but officers are not clerisy, and a certain consequential chafing as a result of this seems to be a central feature of the kind of anti-officer officer class politics to which our postwar, post-60s American democracy seems uniquely predisposed.

If the officer class as a whole underestimate their power as a group, the opposite is true for the clerisy, who imagine that nothing at all happens in culture without their say so. Humanities academics and public intellectuals tend to be the worst about this, but it seems characteristic of the entire class, a certain incorrigible idealism that centers their minds and their education as the locus of all that happens in the world. You see this today on this very website, in the contemporary center and right clerisy’s attempts over the last five or so years to procure a genealogy for the umbrella of ideas that made up the various pop social justice movements of the 2010s, always trying to chase the lineage back to this or that French theorist or Western Marxist, when everybody who’s ever really looked into it knows that ultimately to be a false lead. “Woke” doesn’t come from the academy, it doesn’t even really come from the clerisy at all. It came from fandom, from teenagers and young adults on the internet in the aughts and the early tens interacting with the denatured products of the educated and downwardly mobile. It was the seemingly unwashed, those AFAB fanfic writers and enthusiasts of YA who took the terms and ideas they thought fit and constructed these systems which then themselves looped back into the officially-sanctioned clerisy and became orthodoxy. Likewise the system of vernacular quasi-maoist dunkism that I’ve called the Vulgar Left was not the product of renegade intellectuals peddling academic lore to the rubes, but rather emerged from various species of failed comedians and edgelords-turned Bernie supporters on Twitter picking and choosing from doctrines, aphorisms, misunderstood headlines and urban legends to suit whatever felt right to them.¹

In earlier civilizations and earlier iterations of our own civilization the clerisy were openly religious and philosophical; today the cleric might be someone who enjoys nineteenth century novels, twentieth century film or an enthusiast of late antique Platonism.² Unless a member of the increasiniastgly small and irrelevant tenurati or officially sanctioned literary or ecclesiastic culture, they are essentially without a social role. Thus every resentment ascribed to the officer class generally in late/post/meta-modernity is present in the cleric to an even higher order. This is why the clerisy are always dreaming in some way of seizing the polis and ruling it, be they Marxists, Straussians, or even aesthetes ranting about the preponderance of middlebrow fiction from big publishers.

The overall turn in this century against the idea of a high or even middle culture, against the idea of cultural self-improvement as opposed to economic or self-optimization has further exacerbated this. The “nerd” is arguably a cleric to whom something like an intellectual version of Freud’s theory of sexual deviance as a stunted growth applies.³ Poptimism and all its related currents strand the unbelieving clerisy on little islands of culture-so-called from which they launch their jeremiads against the masses, priests of a religion which no longer proselytizes and may no longer remember how. Or maybe just reading Iamblichus for fun.

1. This is how you wound up with takes like “nobody will work after the revolution” and some of the more maximalist antipolice dogma about antisocial crime not being real.

2. I’m pretty sympathetic to the idea that the majority of officer class have always been relatively philistine-they might’ve had a bit more of a grasp of high culture, sure, but people have always rolled their eyes through the classics in school-and the “cultured” whatever that means have always been a subset.

3. I do not actually believe this.