American Mandarins and Joseph Nye’s Immoral Diplomacy
I see a many articles in the Mainstream Media by academics with impressive degrees and awards and long lists of publications.
Some are good when they are writing in their field in areas that have impact on modern life. Dr. Robin Dunbar, the anthropologist who came up with the “Dunbar Limit” and play theorist, Dr. Peter Gray, and Franz de Waal, the primatologist are examples.
Despite impressive credentials, others, however, offer nothing better than an intelligent high school student might deliver.
These people are usually just trading on the social status conferred by his/her/its credentials from a “name” school such as Harvard or Princeton or Oxford — usually a tenured position . Writing outside your area and pretending you know something you don’t is a a kind of “academic adultery’.
“Credentialism” is one of the most pernicious problems of modern society to the extent that it undermines the integrity of education itself. Does an MBA make someone a better businessman or promote entrepreneurship? I think not. Studies show that people in some fields such as economics and political science graduate with lower critical thinking skills than when they entered.
Could Socrates get a job teaching at a college these days/ Nope. No degree.
The Media are big on “credentialism”. Maybe because a lot of them graduate from schools of “journalism” which teach anything but. Editors and also TV producers don’t care what someone says so long as they look like some kind of “authority” and say something that does not contradict the narrative popular with the ruling elites, who pay their salaries.
A good example is Stephen Pinker who has made millions of dollars writing mostly about things that he really knows little about, such as history, human evolution, general psychology, paleontology and anthropology — oh, and common sense, not that commonsense is an academic discipline.
While his writings are full of obvious errors, even in his own field, as when he writes on Whorf/ Sapir, he is popular with the media and people like Bill Gates. Pinker is a “linguist” — of a kind — who believes in the Universal Grammar concept conceived by Chomsky back in the 60s — a concept that has never been proven, and has never shown any practicality in education or language acquisition. Pinker says it’s “science — but it has as much ‘science” in it as Scientology.
Pinker’s most recent books are written as an “evolutionary biologist”, which he is not. He argues that human are nasty, Hobbseian brutes, very gradually evolving towards a more pacific nature thanks to people like Bill Gates and neoliberal capitalism.
His is an intellectual con. But a profitable one — Pinker gets enormous support from a fawning media and academia despite having the scholarly depth of a sidewalk puddle left by Jordan Peterson’s poodle. (Sometimes I think Pinker IS the poodle!).
This tells us something about academics as a mandarin class. In China, it was thought that a grounding in the Confucian classics was necessary to inform political decision in government. To a certain extent this was true because the texts of Confucius and Mencius argued that all men were good and the government had to be optimized to help them express that natural goodness. There were tests, with success depending on merit, rather than wealth or family connection. The people who passed the test became mandarins.
Unlike Harvard, there was no legacy system, at least for the first few hundred years.
Of course, the Chinese system ossified and became corrupt and narrow.
The Western academic system is rather less meritocratic — at least in the social sciences (sic). Your entry into the Mandarin class depends on wealth or birth or sucking up to the right people. If you are lucky you get tenure. Most people get PhDs to drive taxis.
The worst offenders in this obscene game are probably political scientists (sic) .
In the US, part of the responsibility goes to Joseph Nye, who started a little academic cottage industry by coining the terms” hard power” and “soft power“ to describe the method used by governments to “influence” (coerce) other governments and public opinion. He called this “public diplomacy” . More recently, it is called “nation branding” ,borrowing from MBA vocabulary.
There is really not much difference between what the Mafia does and the US government in terms of “coercion”. Like the US government, the Mafia uses force only when it has to — and then with overwhelming effect. Like the US government, the Mafia are all about “business” so they employ “soft coercion” — aka “soft power” — playing on greed, encouraging addictions ( their specialized versions of consumerism), using bribery and blackmail, encouraging debt and “gaming” people with various kinds of “con”.
Like Mafia lawyers, “mainstream” political scientists, like Nye, keep their hands clean. Their “clients” are the neoliberal system that underwrites academic institutions. They don’t like to talk about the evil that the American Empire does; rather they advocate for its “positive” side. Joseph Nye has Kissinger’s old office.
Joe Nye is has now published a book about american “moral diplomacy”, which ignores the 20 million people killed in American wars, the support for authoritarian governments worldwide, and American attack on democratic movement. It does, however, criticize Johnson, Nixon and Kissinger for prolonging the Vietnam war — but only in terms of the extra 20,000 or so American lives lost. Their is virtually no mention of the millions of non-American lives during this period in IndoChina and elsewhere.
In other words, this book is not about morality in foreign policy but rather about how to dress up the aims of empire as having some kind of ethical base. This is what all “successful” sociopaths do — mimicking empathy to get their way.
Joseph Nye is one thing. But there are thousands of mini-Nyes out there, trying to cash in on a PhD, a teaching job and a few books that say little of consequence and which no one reads.
With the New Cold War on China, these mini-Nyes do their part by commenting on China and Asia generally, despite having never studied Asian history and culture. Where they get their ideas? From the Mainstream Media, of course. or maybe Facebook. It’s a circle jerk. and it of course perpetuates the Mainstream Media’s dominant narratives. All very PC.
The more you appear in the Mainstream Media — the more status you have, with those in power.It is profitable. But really it is usually about status more than money.
But these Modern Mandarins are to Western Society as the Chinese Mandarins were to China in the late 19th Century: they have nothing to offer today, even if they once did.
