Whaddya mean, "Officer Class"??

Enumerating the jargon

Obligatory image of Philip Rieff that everyone uses because there’s about four photos of him online.

Over the last few weeks, as I’ve been assembling my next longform essay I've come to the realization that I use the term “officer class” far too much not to define exactly what I mean by it. First the term itself- that I got from the sociologist (and exegete of Sigmund Freud) Philip Rieff, who uses it (in fact derives a title from it!) in his difficult and oracular late work to describe a group in society whose purpose he saw (as I understand said late work, which is maybe not enough) as being to sustain and perpetuate the sacred order he saw as vital to the maintenance of a healthy culture.¹ At an earlier stage, in perhaps his most famous (solo) work The Triumph of the Therapeutic, Rieff had described the as-yet unnamed class as such:

those intellectuals, whether of the left or right, whose historic function it has been to assert the authority of a culture organized in terms of communal purpose, through the agency of congregations of the faithful.

This is without a doubt an elitist way of looking at the world, but it’s one that’s with variations so ubiquitously found in many of the thinkers I’ve been engaging with and writing about recently that it seems necessary to lay down my own very loose theory of this so-called class.

By Officer Class I mean something between and beyond what was in the 20th century called the New Class of intellectuals and what Barbera and John Ehrenreich influentially called the Professional-Managerial-Class. Officers are the thinking-doing class or classes, distinct from those below them who move and act and those above who simply issue commands downward. Low ranking administrators, intellectuals, clerisy secular and sacred, doctors, lawyers teachers, custodians of knowledge etc. Writing in the mid 1960s, the historian Christopher Lasch described the New Class as a fundamentally new development stemming from the dissolution of the old social order:

Intellectuals have existed in all literate societies, but they have only recently come to constitute a kind of subculture. In fact, the word “intellectual” does not seem to have found its way into American usage much before the turn of the century. Before that most intellectuals belonged to the middle class, and though they may sometimes have felt themselves at odds with the rest if the community, they did not yet conceive of themselves as a class apart. The modern intellectual, even when he chooses to throw himself into the service of his country or attempts to embrace the common life about him, gives himself away by the very self-consciousness of his gestures. He agonizes endlessly over the “role of the intellectuals.” A hundred years ago these discussions and the passion with which they are conducted would have been incomprehensible.

while both Reiff and the “renegade sociologist” Alvin Gouldner seemed to understand it as a new iteration of an immemorial cultural elite common to western civilization. I’d contend that the internet, social media and a general turn toward exoteric anti-elitism have blurred the lines beyond what Lasch describes, such that the New Class is in the 2020s perhaps not discernable as a distinct class in anything but a broadly subcultural sense. If you’re reading this essay you’re probably either already there or aspiring to the ranks. Officers aren’t necessarilly intellectuals-it might rather be more accurate to say that they’re the sort of people who think of themselves as intellectuals, plus the genuine article and some other types of person. Gouldner, writing about this in the late 1970s described the bifurcation as follows:

There are at least two elites within the New Class: (1) intelligentsia whose intellectual interests are fundamentally “technical” and (2) intellectuals whose interests are primarily critical, emancipatory, hermeneutic and hence often political.

The accessibility of texts and ideas via internet and the general decay in this century of the institutions within which someone like Philip Rieff could sequester himself and teach have beyond the shadow of a doubt broadened the parameters of this class. Both boundaries as described by Gouldner have been transgressed and inundated by the free flow of information, memes, and mannerism cascading through the wires and the wifi. A similarly-minded associate who I frequently bounce things off suggested recently that almost every regular user of the website formerly known as Twitter has “officer brain”- it’s a culture that has since the middle of the 20th century been universalized in a way nearly unthinkable to the critics from whom I adapt much of my analysis.² The promise of what Rieff and Sontag describe in Freud: The Mind of a Moralist, in which “the psychoanalytic view transforms all men into poets—incurable symbolists betraying unknown secrets with every word” has assimilated beyond what either would have recognized. We are all thinkers and analysts today-even as the subjects of our analysis have diminished with time. Social media cuts two ways though: an underrated aspect of why twitter was so deleterious is that it made journalists and writers-people with real jobs, people with real clout if only cultural-want to post and act like the most nihilist, most disturbed person on FYAD or /B/ circa 2010.

The officer class holds a great deal-maybe even the majority-of cultural clout but lacks (especially in current American democracy) the kind of political power that allows for world-historical transformations or even the implementation of substantive policy. As such they suffer from a political alienation out of sync with the kind of cultural and often economic authority they wield as a class. The New Left of the 1960s and the vulgar left of the 2010s were both in a sense fundamentally officer class movements borne out of the frustrations and alienation that come from this contradictory position.³ In his 1979 work The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class Gouldner argued that marxism itself was an iteration of this process, a claim I’m largely agnostic about but nonetheless find compelling, and that this alienation of the thinking classes represented a perennial force in western societies:

The New Class believes its high culture represents the greatest achievement of the human race, the deepest ancient wisdom and the most advanced scientific knowledge. It believes that these contribute to the welfare and wealth of the race, and that they should receive correspondingly greater rewards. The New Class believes that the world should be governed by those possessing superior competence, wisdom and science—that is, themselves. The Platonic Complex, the dream of the philosopher king with which Western Philosophy begins, is the deepest wish-fulfilling fantasy of the New Class. But they look around and see that the men who employ them do not begin to understand the simplest aspects of their technical specialties, and the politicians who rule them are, in Edmund Wilson’s words, “unique in having managed to be corrupt, uncultivated, and incompetent all at once.”

There’s a certain kind of repressing civility that seems endemic to this class as well, greater in those raised within it but still often present in its more arriviste representatives. In order to navigate the world of the educated, thinking classes an enormous amount of aggression and anger must be put away, a repression that finds its outlet in things like purity testing and denunciation and the circular firing squad dynamics that tend to occur in activist and political movements.⁴ This is basically my theory of how social media cancellation works and worked, and why René Girard has gotten so big amongst the more contrarian parts of the rightist thinking classes in the last few years (the periodic rediscovery and mangling of Nietzsche to fit the flavor of the age is more like an eternal return than a definite social phenomenon that can be tied to any period or specific societal developments.)

Again, this isn’t an ironclad theory of social relations in my view so much as a way of naming an idea so ubiquitous amongst certain relevant thinkers that it demands a label if I’m going to talk about them. I by no means hold the idea of an Officer Class as a dogmatic concept, but Irving Kristol arguably did, and my next essay is heavily engaging with his thought, so it seemed necessary to enumerate the jargon, as it were.⁵ I confess to finding it a useful idea myself, even if I largely reject the medieval-classical framework of neat hierarchies and defined sacred order most proponents seemed to hold as the natural and highest state of human civilization. There has not been such a society in the United States within the lifetime of any living person, not since the end of the Civil war, and arguably not even before that, since our idealized colonial gentlemen-sages were as much rapacious businessmen and pioneers as nomothetes in a classical sense. The desire for such an order is in my view a manifestation of a certain perennial cultural cringe to which the American intellectual is often susceptible, a yearning for an imagined political-cultural-religious unity of Old World ordered hierarchy before the Atlantic crossing, before the Fall. A way to ignore the fundamental reality that ours is an unsettled, plural society with a high degree of social mobility baked into the basic assumptions of the culture itself.

Some would argue that the very existence of an officer class endangers the genius of that culture, gums up the proper social flow with a gatekeeping technocratic class, and I have a certain sympathy to those claims. On the other hand there is at this remove probably no way not to have a technocratic class of knowing thinkers or to “de-officiate” those minds that have been inculcated into the mores of the officer class. The dream of many anti-officer thinkers of the midcentury was always a reduction in the number of college degrees being issued-a dream you still see today on the right-but the internet has made the cordoning off of officer-knowledge an impossibility, were we even to find that goal desirable. The task would perhaps be more constructively to enlighten them, to remove their illusions about their role and interests in the world, whatever that may mean. To retrain, to reorient them toward if not the highest good, at least the possibility of a highest good.⁶

1. This part of Rieff I’ll admit a certain skepticism to: it strikes me as the signature dream of a philosopher and intellectual in modernity, a yearning to have a world once again entirely enclosed inside some organizing idea, everything in its right place from to to bottom. The world in this view must inevitably fall out of order and into chaos without a defining orthodoxy like Christianity, Judaism, or from the other side, orthodox Marxism.

2. Amusingly a recent Freddie DeBoer essay makes basically this argument:

Indeed, for a decade or so it served as an essential staging ground for debates between elites, and more importantly, where people absorbed elite values. For complicated reasons, while Twitter was host to a large conservative bloc and had all kinds of weird little political avenues, its most influential users skewed heavily to the left. (For one thing, most of Twitter’s employees, and particularly those in charge of content moderation, were elite college graduates with the politics common to those environs.) And on Twitter, these elites were forever setting the political and cultural agenda for people who aspired to have elite status.

Social media cancellations as a phenomena are I suspect more closely related to officer culture and moreover the actual mechanisms of twitter itself than has mostly been acknowledged by those who blame “wokeness” or “successor ideology” or anything of that nature.

3. It is of course worth noting that the proletarianization of this class and the dissemination via the internet of so-called “officer brain” to masses outside of the traditional economic-cultural classes that made up the clerisy/New Class complicate this analysis enormously, but I suspect that it is in broad strokes true.

4. Again it should be stressed that one may think of these things as leftist or progressive phenomena, but they can be found in the corresponding class on the right as well, and in fact may be in some regards more common.

5. It’s a phrase that has escaped containment into my own daily conversations about culture and mass movements with other interested parties-I recently found myself at a party with a teacher, a medical student and a Harvard grad explaining some of my theories all the while periodically apologizing for using such an idiosyncratically jargonic term.

6. I worry that I sound a bit like a Struassian or even a Chris Rufo type here, but if we must have a semi-priestly intermediate cultural class, perhaps they might be a bit more… adult in their interests. I’m not saying you all have to study the Scholastics and Hegel or construct a Plotinian-Tillichian-Butlerian synthesis, just that it’s probably not good for any of us to have a thinking class whose idea of the best culture has to offer is The Simpsons, even classic-era Simpsons, as good as it was.