The Social World

Author: Chilton Williamson, Jr.

  • Will members of the intellectual class let AI rot their brains?

    Will members of the intellectual class let AI rot their brains?

    An adage dating at least from my adolescence: “You either use it or lose it.” This bit of folk wisdom, which refers principally – or so I understand – to the male procreative organ, has always been considered so obvious as to hardly need stating. Thus the recent discovery that the same principle goes for another human organ – the brain – should not surprise anyone.

    The fields of science and pedagogy are agreed, for now at least, that humans who shut down their minds, temporarily but with increasing frequency, and substitute artificial intelligence for them, end by weakening their mental capabilities in the areas of cognition, memory and attention span; put more bluntly, they make themselves progressively stupider by a physical and psychic process that the least intellectual of what used to be called “jocks” would have had no difficulty understanding, owing to their own regimen of physical training and endurance.

    Nevertheless, it is a finding that the digital geniuses of Silicon Valley apparently failed to anticipate; or perhaps they did so decades ago but pressed ahead in the expectation that the dumber the human race, the more money it would be eager to shell out for their magical mental crutches as an evolutionary replacement for its primitive cerebellum, cerebrum and brain stem.

    Cynical of them, of course, but entirely logical and far-seeing; prophetical, even. Virtually every invention since the earliest days of the Industrial Revolution has been what came eventually to be called a labor-saving device. The steam locomotive made travel over distance infinitely more comfortable and less demanding than travel by coach and horses. The automobile did the same for travel by horseback. Machinery replaced factory laborers with machine operators. Household gadgetry freed housewives from most physical labor save that of pushing buttons, while leaving them the lion’s part of the day to watch soap operas, go shopping, gossip and have clandestine affairs with the postman.

    It remained only for that most strenuous and unpleasant type of labor, deeply resented by all but the most minuscule portion of humanity – that of the mental kind, also known as thinking – to be made redundant. Now, with the advent of AI, this final Everest standing in the way of the fullest realization of human bliss is, it appears, about to be summited and the flag representing the ultimate stage of industrial and scientific progress planted and unfurled to wave on the alpine winds. Its emblem will depict a fly on a can of garbage on a background of bilious yellow.

    Marx knew what he was about two centuries ago when he defined “workers” as physical laborers, thus intimating that all who make their living by intellectual occupations are society’s drones, members of a pan-cultural Drones’ Club established to exploit the heroic, self-sacrificing “working classes” dedicated to performing civilization’s most strenuous, exhausting and unpleasant tasks. For Marxists, physical labor is by far the most noble type of work, highly deserving of grateful recognition in terms of status and financial reward by the rest of society. (I knew a fellow student at Columbia who argued that a subway driver should make more money than a medical doctor or corporate executive, his job being presumably less pleasant than theirs, though tastes vary of course.)

    The truth is that the opposite is really the case. Compared with the intellectual classes, the laboring masses, who, being unacquainted with the rigors of mental, professional and artistic engagement – that of the mind and of the imagination – do not know what truly arduous work is. The heroic worker rises early in the morning, punches the clock when he gets to the work site, and again when he leaves it, having put in exactly the hours his boss – and his union – specify. He goes from the workplace straight to home, or to his bar, or to his sport, never gets a call from the boss after hours, and needs never give his job a thought until the alarm clock sounds again in the morning. The mental requirements of his job are, typically, nil compared with those imposed by the learned professions, and even by business.

    Granted, a substantial proportion of so-called intellectual work today – in the colleges and universities, in the media, in “entertainment,” and even in the so-called arts – is simply counterfeit work: vacuous, silly, irresponsible and often immoral, requiring little if any talent, effort, or real intelligence to accomplish. Compared to it, the honest labor of an electrician, a carpenter, a commercial fisherman, a cowhand, a roughneck (I know – I’ve worked in the oilpatch), or a lumberjack has a plain and simple heroism about it, in particular where it involves the physical skill and danger that artificial intelligence can never replace.

    Still, the fact remains that for the vast majority of people, manual work is preferable to (being mentally less painful than) work of the intellectual sort, without which the great and complex systems of human imagination, invention and organization that create and perpetuate the jobs that the laboring class depends upon would not exist.

    Artificial intelligence need not affect the blue-collar workforce much, if at all, save to the extent that it replaces human brawn and physical skill with computers and ChatGPT. But it could have devastating consequences for the educated – the so-called intellectual – class by encouraging it to atrophy its oh-so-superior brains by relying on AI to do its work for it; work that only the human brains that created it can, in the final analysis, intelligently do. Intelligence is the engine that has always made the world go round, and always will be – human intelligence, that is, not its artificial substitute.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 24, 2025 World edition.

  • The tyranny of the mass-intellectual

    The tyranny of the mass-intellectual

    In the classical world the question of whether virtue can be taught, or is rather acquired by interior inclination and moral development, was the subject of intense debate by the best Grecian and Roman philosophers. None ever succeeded, however, in agreeing an answer.

    Progressive education along narrow lines is, for liberals, the source of all legitimate moral authority

    Since the second half of the 20th century, academics and intellectuals have seemed to believe that they have answered the question definitively and to their own satisfaction. Virtue, they have decided, can indeed be taught, and liberal democratic education is doing it, in public and private schools and universities alike throughout the western world. A high-school diploma is confirmation that one’s progress toward virtue and the virtuous life has begun; a Bachelor of Arts degree is the equivalent of a certificate of virtue acquired; and a PhD is confirmation that the holder is an adept in virtue, entitled to go forth into the world to rule, transform and perfect it. This explains the self-assurance and self-regard of the liberal governing classes, their smug certainty of their own superiority and their unconcealed disdain for the uneducated and unlettered masses beneath them, the people Hillary Clinton, a graduate of Wellesley College and Yale Law School, calls the “deplorables” – the Republicans, Trump voters and other reactionary ignoramuses, many of whose parents, and their parents before them, voted the Democratic ticket and were rewarded for doing so by the beneficiaries of their votes.

    The result, before the Obama administration was replaced by Trump’s first term in office, can be fairly described as the tyranny of the educated and the intelligent; or, put less politely, the mass-intellectual, a product of the industrialization of liberal education throughout the western world. Sir Francis Bacon understood knowledge as power; power over nature in service to a more comfortable future for humanity. Modern liberals, and now progressives, understand it as their inalienable right to power, conferred by an ideological education that guarantees the promotion of the sole correct way of thinking about politics and society, man and nature, man and his human destiny, that is not merely in itself virtue but the one and only true virtue.

    Thus progressive education along narrow and restrictive lines of thought fixed by the adepts is, for liberals, the source of all legitimate moral authority: the Church of God Without God, recognized as the institution entrusted by them with the privilege of baptizing in its name the present and future members of the new ruling class, endowed with power and the material rewards that come with power – the new Lords Temporal and Spiritual. It is no coincidence that the logo chosen for Tim Cook’s Apple Corporation should be a bitten fruit, symbolizing knowledge acquired through metaphysical rebellion and power as virtue, whether or not acquired by virtuous means and wielded to moral ends. I read only the other day of a team of American scientists who, working with a human egg and a piece of human skin, have succeeded in creating a human embryo, thus realizing, potentially, the ability of two men to sire a “child” that is, indeed, their own and without genetic contribution from what we used to call “Mother” Nature. (The question of what the life of such a freak would be like never – apparently – occurred to them.)

    Scientific “achievements” like this one are the result of the modern worship of narrow intelligence and the complete neglect of what used to be called “intellect,” a word one scarcely hears anymore. Every child for the past three-quarters of a century at least has been subjected to a so-called “intelligence test”; none to what one might call an “intellect test.” Intelligence and intellect are clearly two critically different things. To the extent that intelligence really is susceptible to accurate assessment (a claim of which I am extremely skeptical), it needs to be far better, and more comprehensibly, understood than it is in modern western technocratic society.

    Intelligence tests are designed to measure the mental capacity of a middle, or upper-middle class, person to succeed in the middle-to-upper-class world of business, the law, medicine, the sciences and technology generally. Success in these fields certainly requires intelligence but by no means necessarily intellect, which implies a comprehensive sense of the entirety of human understanding and culture and of the relationship and balance between their separate categories, including theology and philosophy, history, languages and the arts and fine arts. Many of the finest minds in one field or the other have been hopelessly incompetent in, and even ignorant of or blind to, the others. Music is an art with a fundamental relationship to mathematics. Nevertheless, who can say how Bach would have scored on an SAT test that included geometry and the sciences? Or Shakespeare? Or Rembrandt? Or, for that matter, Saints Paul and Augustine and Aquinas?

    However that may be, it is a virtual certainty that none of these men would have seen in modern education anything less than a civilizational, moral and human disaster. Descartes has been famous for nearly five centuries now for his maxim, “Je pense, donc je suis.” Christianity has given the world another, and infinitely deeper, one, though so far as I know it has never been formulated succinctly. That is, “J’aime, donc je suis.” It would take a person of intellect – not necessarily one of high abstract intelligence – fully to recognize the profound human truth of that one.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 27, 2025 World edition.

  • How the Democratic party became the party of the aggrieved

    How the Democratic party became the party of the aggrieved

    A well-known writer in the 1930s – I think John Dos Passos – compared Southern California to the lower-left corner of a board that has been tipped in that direction and into which everything in the rest of the country that is not nailed down slides. In the 21st century the mental, cultural and ideological equivalent of that geographic locality is a venerable and once mighty institution, the national Democratic party, whose name is synonymous with it.

    Throughout the 20th century, the party maintained a strong and consistent identity which accurately and effectively represented its constituency – an alliance that included the working classes, the labor unions, the small farmers, black people, the public educational establishment, colleges and universities, the arts and bohemia. Since, roughly speaking, Barack Obama’s first administration, it has grown steadily less identified with practical interests and concrete policies and more with feelings, attitudes, identities and states of mind, nearly all of them “progressive” or frankly revolutionary. In fact, the most bizarre have no political content or substance at all, being in essence purely existential.

    Today, the Donkey party is the party of the aggrieved, the resentful, the angry, the neurotic, the desperate, the illogical, the delusional, the irrational, the unchurched, the metaphysically uncentered, the unattached and childless, the anti-social, the resentful, the failures and the congenitally rebellious – all those not nailed down or secured to anything, beginning with themselves. They are the product, or rather the detritus, of an anti-traditional, aggressively secular, excessively technological, overly connected, trivialized and wholly commercialized and urbanized society divorced from nature and the direct experience of it that had been basic to human existence until a couple of hundred years ago.

    I have read that the most unhappy people in America today are white, educated, upper-middle-class, liberal women, having in common so many of the characteristics enumerated above. Of course, it would be absurd to suppose that they are the sole cohort in western societies who, in their  mental and emotional confusion, imagine that their misery, and that of the world, is plausibly attributable to such abstract historical bogeys as “imperialism,” “slavery,” “bourgeois capitalist society,” “religion,”  “the patriarchy” and “sexism,” “men” and “white people.” In fact, were it possible to identify any single agency as the party responsible for what Sigmund Freud (in a wholly different context) called the “discontents” of modern civilization, it would be liberals and liberalism itself – though even that would be a gross historical and human generalization, never mind that liberals have been chiefly responsible for the modern tendency to think in abstract, generalized and completely ahistorical terms.

    The Democratic party’s electorate, like its leadership, is heavily comprised of people who can never be happy and satisfied and who are consequently a danger to society, to the political system and to themselves. They are not, however, a majority of the voting citizens of this country; most likely, they never will be, however closely national elections in the United States continue to be run. Nonetheless, the party continues to be critically influential among the sort of people who are best positioned to amplify and extend its power through non- or anti-democratic institutions and organizations that give it a strength a good deal greater than is justified by its support among voters.

    The Donkey party is the party of the aggrieved, the resentful, the angry, the neurotic, the desperate, the illogical

    The imbalance between popularity and power is most obvious among the western democratic nations in Great Britain, which would partially account for the recent assertion (if true) of a columnist for the London Daily Telegraph that Americans view her as being on the path to extinction. To a greater extent even than the US, the UK is ruled, not by representative government, but by lawyers, quangos, NGOs, bureaucracies and the loosely assorted cranks and fanatics whom George Orwell, in the 1930s, described in shorthand as the sandal-wearers and fruit-juice drinkers in the capital city and elsewhere. Such people, as I say, can never be happy anywhere save in the next world (in which they don’t believe), and so they will continue until the crack of doom to agitate, to organize, to demonstrate, to dream up and advocate dangerously absurd legislation, and in other ways make life miserable for the sane democratic majority they hold in contempt and despise.

    On the other side of the Atlantic it is the Democratic party, not the US, that is headed for extinction unless it discovers – and quickly – the means to reimagine, redefine, repurpose and reintroduce itself for the whole of the American public. Failing that, it will go the way of the Whigs in the antebellum era, the Progressive party before the Great War and the Liberal party in Britain immediately following it.

    To judge from accounts of the convocation of the Democratic National Committee in Minnesota at the end of last month, where the committee chairman raged against the “king with swollen ankles” in the White House and another party official spoke of “fascism in a red tie,” it is nowhere close to identifying that means. I think it was the most recently failed former candidate for US vice-president who made reference to “that thing in the White House.”

    The Democrats remain convinced that they lost the election last year not on account of the caliber of their candidates or the content of their policies, but rather through the clumsy presentation of them. Even if they were right about that, they haven’t corrected their “message” yet – and show no signs of understanding how to do so. Critics have called them tone deaf. The truth is, the Democrats are stone deaf, their hearing destroyed by their own high-decibel shouts and screams against the Great Sauron in the White House.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 29, 2025 World edition.

  • The problem of the progressive middle class

    The problem of the progressive middle class

    A month or two ago, Rod Liddle had the audacity to write in The Spectator that the besetting problem of modern civilization is the middle class, while implying that something ought to done about it. Reading the article, I was reminded of an entry made by Harold Nicolson in his diary early in 1939 where he observes, à propos the homogenization of the modern world, “Even revolution is becoming bourgeois.”

    While it is a matter of historical record that most revolutionaries from the early 19th century onward, in France, Russia and elsewhere, have sprung from the middle classes, Nicolson’s readers (if he still has any) in the first quarter of the 21st century will recognize at once what he is complaining of, roughly 100 years after the children of the commercial and industrial middle classes began attending university, for reasons more financial and social than intellectual, whence they depart under the illusion that they are now educated, thinking persons. In fact, they are at best half-educated and unthinking people who reflexively and unhesitatingly adopt the thought, ideas, opinions and language that happen to be fashionable at any given time among the bourgeoisie.

    Directly following World War One, a significant portion of the middle class developed a romantic view of the progressive or revolutionary mind in politics and social thought as well as the arts, and indeed in what it imagined to be intellectualism itself; a disposition it mistook for a credentialed profession and accepted as a badge of sophistication and superior social status.

    For the western (and westernizing) bourgeoisie, the maintenance of cultural health, vigor and what it calls “creativity” is a matter of progressive intellectual and artistic breakthroughs corresponding with technological advances in the scientific, business and industrial worlds. Similarly, what it calls a “vibrant” culture is one whose highest value is novelty for its own sake, conceived as progress toward “truth” as the word is understood in a fully rationalized, secularized and trivialized age.

    “Novel” ceased a century and a half ago to refer to what it did in the 18th century, when the literary form signified by the same word – a fictional prose work at some length – was developed. Today, anything “novel” means something previously unheard of, and even unimagined; unprecedented, startling and preferably shocking. (Flannery O’Connor employed a similar aesthetic in her fiction to opposite ends, for the reason she herself gave when explaining why her characters are so often freaks. To the hard of hearing you have to shout, she said, and for the nearly blind you have to draw large and startling pictures.)

    Inevitably, the desire for relentless novelty promotes the dissemination of the most extreme ideas, theories, creations, absurdities and fantasies, including those claimed by their inventors and proponents to be “scientific” though they are defiantly anti-scientific: for example, the current claim that a biological man endowed with both an X and a Y chromosome can be surgically transformed into a biological woman with two Xes. “La raison a ses principes que le cœur ne doit pas nier.”

    The progressive middle class believes in everything and anything – and thus in nothing at all

    In one of their inimitable films, Laurel and Hardy are handymen summoned to Oxford University to perform various small jobs, among them the repair of a broken window sash. Attempting to secure the upper frame, Laurel inadvertently brings the thing down upon his head. The blow transforms him into a don who spouts academic gibberish until the window strikes him on the head a second time and he reverts to being Stan Laurel once more.

    Analogously, intellectualism untethered from intellect and untempered by wisdom has turned masses of hitherto sensible people, many if not most of them representatives of the professional middle classes, into blithering self-righteous poseurs of the sort that are presently afflicting Great Britain with their highly disruptive and frequently illegal demonstrations on behalf of Just Stop Oil, Palestine Action, “human rights” and numerous other middle-class causes. Orwell, famously, saw it all coming, though foresight was insufficient to cure him of his own socialist sentiments, delusions and beliefs, no matter his innate English common sense. Perhaps, had he lived past middle age, he might have learned better. (Then again, perhaps not, the middle-class disposition toward progressive liberalism being nearly ineradicable.)

    The famous saying often attributed to Chesterton – that the danger for the religious unbeliever is not that he is liable to believe in nothing, but rather that he is likely to believe in anything – comes to mind. Today, the progressive middle class (which is so large a portion of that class) believes, paradoxically, in everything and in anything – and thus in nothing at all. At bottom, it is nihilistic, which is what makes it so dangerous a social and political force. It is indeed, as Liddle perceives, a civilizational menace, and one that needs to be dealt with – starting, perhaps, with the almost wholly unrestrained legal profession that has aligned itself in western countries with the enemies of majority rule, constitutional government and democracy itself.

    Harold Nicolson ended his diary entrance with the simple statement: “I hate it all. I hate it all.” So, one gathers, does Rod Liddle. So do I. And so should we all. “À bas la bourgeoisie!”

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 15, 2025 World edition.