Financial Times political columnist Janan Ganesh has often sought to be provocative in his various opinions, and in most cases met at least minimal standards of rationality and attention to reality. But in his latest column ('The Age of the Clever Fool') he appears to have gone off the rails by way of overthinking.
In the lengthy subheader we see he scribbles: "Tech bros, woke theorists, psychobabblers - George Orwell endures because his plainness is relief from all".
Adding: "The problem traverses the ideological spectrum. The movement known as woke could only have been incubated and hatched on campuses. Few places have so much intellectual potential. Few places have so little, well, I am going to call it “lived experience”.
His thesis based on these preliminaries is basically that the explosion of bunkum across the ideological spectrum - from Covid and vaccine denial, to climate denial, to climate doomism to mindless political populism (Trumpism), to general conspiracy ideations - hatched from QAnon or RFK - are all of a piece, namely neural glitches in the modern world. They boil down to fads, conspiracies, psychobabble, self-help mumbo- jumbo etc. all of which "might be explained as surplus mental capacity casting restlessly around for some outlet. "
Basically, noting that scientist Peter Turchin "has argued that underemployed graduates are potential social trouble". But what about the millions of kooks and conspiracy freaks - like Alex Jones - who aren't college grads? How come they exert so much power given they have minimal surplus mental capacity? Ganesh has no answers because it's much easier to just invent a facile trope and try to embellish it to the point some may be snookered.
Yes, a fair number of university -educated people did fall for the promises of the likes of Sam Bankman-Fried with his crypto investment offers, and Elizabeth Holmes with her "thumb prick" blood drop tests. Hell, I even fell - somewhat - for the latter, or at least hoped there was some ballast to the idea, given I was in the midst of multiple rounds of blood tests (psa, testosterone, alkaline phosphatase) concerned with my cancer. But it was not to be, and I quickly realized I'd been had so had to stiffen myself to submit to future rounds of blood tests of the regular kind. So Ganesh is correct up to a point. But he over-generalizes and exaggerates.
Admittedly, he identifies mucho bunkum and just a fraction is enough to enrage the confirmed rationalist. Like the "effective altriusm" thrust which purports to help others up to a point and which purpose is embodied in the principles of its website:
CEA's Guiding Principles | Centre For Effective Altruism
Then there is Elon Musk's own program to help multiply the super-gifted by selective reproduction: namely his own. E.g.
We need to talk about Elon Musk's breeding program (inverse.com)
You can't get much more top heavy with crank-hood than that. But close to it is the nest of longevity research cranks and kooks who believe human life can be endlessly extended and also it is worth it to do such, e.g.
Transhumanism : Another Cockeyed Concept Destined To Fail From Human Hubris
As I noted in that post:
Where Ganesh runs into trouble is when he over-extends the basis of his perspective on "clever fools" and their "surplus mental capacity" to examples where these need not apply. As when he writes:
"When the cultural left makes contact with that less credentialed but longer-in-the-tooth movement called the electorate, see how it struggles.
Those dupes in turn can point to the mass market for amateur psychotherapy and self-help mumbo jumbo. And so the carousel of eloquent, educated naïveté goes round. There have always been clever fools: Cambridge spies, eugenics-smitten Fabians, Hitler appeasers with All Souls fellowships. During his leadership of the Pentagon, Robert McNamara, the ultimate genius/sucker, fought the Vietnam war as a hedge fund quant might. The problem existed in pockets back then, however, because so few people went to university. Now it is almost ambient."
But can we lay all of that at the feet of university education? What about the millions who've graduated - from thousands of universities globally the past 50 years- and aren't caught up in crank conspiracies, New Age psycho-babble, eugenics obsession, vaccine rejection, climate denial or other mental flotsam and jetsam? There has been a substantial mass of graduates - I'd say a preponderance- whose brains haven't been colonized or seeded by such mind viruses because they've been immunized by critical thinking. For that, yes, I have the Jesuits to thank at Loyola University, for opening the Loyola Fieldhouse - in January, 1965, to atheist existentialist Jean -Paul Sartre, e.g.
True, we have lived through a tremendous expansion of cognitive training (via university education) and we're told the current knowledge - just in science doubles ever 3 years. Look at the explosion of just astronomical journal papers, only a minuscule fraction of which actually get read. To get an idea of the sheer expanse of pure research- merely in astrophysics - check out the papers in the link to this Astrophysical Journal issue below:
But in critical thinking application the discipline of thought is a prerequisite so one does not "go off the rails". But this is what's missing in most university education now. Ganesh in his essay points to the absence of "a commensurate increase in that unteachable trait known as our judgment". But this is part and parcel of what I call disciplined thought editing in critical thinking application. It is what, indeed, cannot be taught though it can be assimilated through much arduous trial and error. In time, then, one becomes a rigorous editor of one's own thoughts and recognizes which fit in a coherent milieu and which do not. But if one is overpowered, say by any kind of new knowledge, this may not be feasible.
In that case, yes, the "law of unintended consequences forever applies". Then Peter Turchin could argue that "underemployed graduates are potential social trouble." Why? Because they are generally ensconced in work or other environments (FOX News) wherein neither critical thinking or disciplined thought is required. So anything goes.
Why would that situation be much less true of the most successful graduates? To embrace a dangerous dogma, whatever it is, probably takes some resentment, but it definitely takes some grounding in conceptual thought. I suppose I embraced Sartre's atheistic existentialism after Loyola, and yeah, maybe resentment at my Catholic upbringing played a role. But the grounding in conceptual critical thought that Loyola's Jesuits provided me, allowed me to coherently develop my atheism leading to my series of atheist books:
Ganesh insists a "vast minority of the public now has it" (surplus mental capacity), which is true. But I dispute that vast minority has the necessary critical thinking skills and discipline of thought to manage that cognitive surplus capacity. Else they would actually DO something constructive with it.
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