THE CASE FOR SELF-ORGANIZATION.  Walter Russell Mead compares and contrasts the masses and the elites.

The American people have never been as religiously tolerant as they are today, as concerned about the environment, or more willing to make sacrifices around the world to promote the peace and well being of humanity as a whole.

By contrast, we have never had an Establishment that was so ill-equipped to lead.  It is the Establishment, not the people, that is falling down on the job.

Here in the early years of the twenty-first century, the American elite is a walking disaster and is in every way less capable than its predecessors.  It is less in touch with American history and culture, less personally honest, less productive, less forward looking, less effective at and less committed to child rearing, less freedom loving, less sacrificially patriotic and less entrepreneurial than predecessor generations.  Its sense of entitlement and snobbery is greater than at any time since the American Revolution; its addiction to privilege is greater than during the Gilded Age and its ability to raise its young to be productive and courageous leaders of society has largely collapsed.

Do your own thing might be the morality of the hippie commune, but it's not a morality conducive to sustaining trust among people whose prosperity depends on sufficient trust to sustain a complex division of labor.

Take Wall Street.  (Please!)  Our corrupt financial and corporate establishment has by and large lost its concern for the well being of the American state and the American people.  Raj Rajaratnam’s conviction on 14 counts of insider trading is only the latest of a string of scandals, blunders and crimes that demonstrate the moral vacuity of the best and the brightest in the United States.  Matt Taibbi’s article in Rolling Stone may be a little over the top for some tastes, but even if the Goldman Sachs executives he describes did nothing illegal, it is painfully clear that a great American financial institution has lost its moral compass. There is a dangerous moral vacuum at the heart of the American Financial Establishment.

We have had financial scandals before and we have had waves of corporate crime.  We have had pirates and robber barons.  But we have never seen a collapse of ordinary morality in the corporate suites on the scale of the last twenty years.  We have never seen naked money grubbing among our politicians akin to the way some recent figures in both parties have cashed in.  Human nature hasn’t changed, but a kind of moral grade inflation has set in and key segments of the American Establishment are increasingly accepting the unacceptable as OK.  Investment banks betray their clients; robo-signers essentially forge mortgage documents day after day and month after month; insider traders are lionized.   Free markets actually require a certain basic level of honesty to work; if we can’t be more honest than this neither our markets nor we ourselves will remain free for very long.

Many problems troubling America today are rooted in the poor performance of our elite educational institutions, the moral and social collapse of our ‘best’ families and the culture of narcissism and entitlement that has transformed the American elite into a flabby minded, strategically inept and morally confused parody of itself.  Probably the best depiction of our elite in popular culture is the petulantly narcissistic Prince Charming in Shrek 2; our educational institutions are like the Fairy Godmother, weaving shoddy, cheap, feel-good illusions into a gossamer tissue of flattering lies.

Professor Mead expands on the gains and losses from entrusting meritocracy to improve the institutional structure for that division of labor.

The deeper problem, however, is that the gatekeepers for the meritocracy decided to question the notion of meritocracy itself.

Steven Knapp, president of George Washington, outlined a lingering tension between the things academics say about cultural objects and the way people admire those objects.

“What matters to the public is Shakespeare,” he observed, “not ‘the logic of theatrical representation.’ What matters is the story of America, not ‘the ideological structure of American essentialism.’ ” He went so far as to chide the high-cachet schools of deconstruction, Marxism, feminism, and anticolonialism because they “took a critical turn against culturally prestigious objects.” Knapp left the implication unstated: Humanities professors disrespected great works, so naturally the public turned around and disrespected them.

It's not yet the end of the world, and yet we can see it.

Princeton philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah regretted the threat to “works of the past” in a utilitarian, scientistic culture, adding, “I don’t think that our civilization is so degraded that we have to defend giving attention to what is excellent.”

Higher education is failing the market test all the same.

The economics of the university have raised the stakes to actual survival, making provocative and radical positions look irresponsible. A new sobriety and realism have set in, and if more meetings repeat the tenor and content of the [symposium], the humanities might regain some prestige and climb back to their proper, essential place in higher education.

That is, if the vocationalism doesn't turn the universities into residential high schools first.