Elites in the Anglo-sphere

From JK:
Here's a comment which I feel should become a post, partly because it echoes some of the very perceptive comments from others to date but also because I've never heard of 'the tropes of the Anglo-sphere before' and it sounds like just the sort of elitist term that Prospect readers might relish using to trope the bejaysus out of someone at a dinner party. It may or may not be good blogging etiquette, but I fancy spotlighting comments and promoting them to posts when I feel so inclined. How do people feel how this blog is evolving? Should we be posting more/less and should I/we formally reply by commenting on your comments? Anyway, back to Daniel . . .

Daniel Taghioff:

Elitism is a difficult issue where it impacts on the broadness of the debate.  The problem with Elites is not that they think, but that they operate within cosy sets of unquestioned assumptions that allow them to appear to think without really doing much to shift the terms of debate.

I enjoy Prospect, I use it as an interesting centrist foil personally.  It also gives me an insight into the current pre-occupations of the English "Elite." In that sense it is also a nice piece of Anthropology.

The problem is that "Elite" debates in the world have tended to become dominated by the governance tropes of the Anglo-sphere.  The "elite" educational establishments around the world subscribe to such a "liberal intelligensia" type of view, which is reflected in international law in terms of the primacy of the individual, and the primacy of formal individual political rights over substantive rights, and collective rights.

What Prospect does not seem to do is venture far beyond the debates of the Liberal Elite Anglosphere (although the Hutton-Desai debate was a very tame move in that direction.)

Would Prospect consider monitoring the non-English Language media, and do more to draw in intellectuals from all over the world, in order to go for a more truly global debate?

The ethics of liberal-democratic universalism you are claiming in your vision do rather imply you having a go, even if in practice this is no mean feat. 

Also you might upset your audience by operating outside thier terms of reference.

See: http://www.soas.ac.uk/soaslit/Issue4a/taghiofffinal.pdf

for further reading on the limits of the Anglosphere.

Comments

[Chris Dixon]

As far as the Anglo-sphere goes, I'll have to speak as an American (because that's what I am). Given the Iraq debacle, I think the Anglo-phone (and Anglo-affected) world--with the U.S. and the U.K. at its center--needs a publication like Prospect to debate who we are as a globally dispersed culture (with outposts on every continent) and what our role in the world should be. Only then will we be ready to engage the rest of the world effectively.

We can't go on pretending that we are just updated versions of what we were in the time of Churchill and FDR. Blair and Bush have shown that we aren't. America might have economic and military brawn, but England is still the keeper of the Anglo intellectual flame. This is proven by the fact that the Prospect employs Michael Lind, America's best progressive political thinker since John Dewey.

The Anglo-affected world is still a vitally important (though loosely affiliated) "family" of nations and will continue to be for some time to come. Let's not shy away, assuming that this notion is purely the product of nostalgia. If we do, we will abdicate the direction of important world events to romantic Anglo-American conservatives.

[Daniel Taghioff]

Angel Bacon said:

"If it ain't broke (are we broke ? accepting drinks from strange females sounds ominous ) why fold and let the qualitative market research meddlers in at all ? "

Since I work partly as a qualitative market researcher I can answer this one.

It is perceptive of the writer to pick up on the link to qualitative research. Quantification is interesting becuase it massifies people: You see only averages and normals rather than faces, it is like being lost in a crowd.

Prospect offers the possibility of recognition, by engaging in specific debate where people can recognise their views, or problems with their views.

And every such public arena needs some definition, or it dissolves into formless carnival.

But we aspire to democratic ideals, and that means we must seek to extend our publics where possible. This is not just a subjective nicety (it is interesting how the subjective is linked to a strange and suspicious woman in the post, seductive and dangerous, in the ilk of film noir.

But the subjective does not exist: because the objective does not either. Practice consists of both: The social is composed of ideas in action, and that is what makes up the real both in a expereintial and a material sense.

To take a concrete example, we face climate change as an emerging crisis. It is a global crisis, where the consumption and production habits of the many are key.

We can legislate in the Anglosphere, but that is not enough. In order to solve this we need to understand how the rest of the world ticks. Stern is advising India, and the Indian government is coming back and saying "our people are poor and want to develop."

So suddenly the 'populist' views of the many are a central issue in world events. So is it then a refined and "elite" debates that does not extend itself to understand such things.

Is that what the "poor masses" of India want or is the picture more complicated? Can we afford to ignore that complexity? The last Indian government did and got kicked out of office.

If we celebrate India as the world's largest democracy (with the world's largest print press, largely not in English,) then unfortunately for those that dislike populism , that implies trying to understand something of how its general population thinks.

[George Hamilton-Meikle]

It is very difficult to know who is of the 'Elite'. Is it driven by vanity, or envy, or power? Probably it always needs precise definition and seldom gets one.

[Angel Bacon]

If it ain't broke (are we broke ? accepting drinks from strange females sounds ominous ) why fold and let the qualitative market research meddlers in at all ? Look what happened to Swissair..

While the concept of more globally sourced debate is always welcome, (albeit branding the English language itself as elitist ), do we risk the new people's Prospect being bullied into hiring ' gobby ' populist game show contestants as hip to hop reviewers of le courrierinternational.com ?

Prospect is most certainly not exclusively for posh folks - it is soft porn for hard thinking folks - having a lovely time 'finding it's own space and doing it's own thing ' . Long may it continue to brighten up our bubble baths ...

[Marco Rossi]

The way a second language is learned and therefore the ensuing accent that entails speaking with, does that qualify being "elitist"?
To what extent a foreign accent is hidden and the native interlocutor is able to perceive it as "distant" as it were, but nevertheless willing either forcibly or not to interact?
And frankly, and "elite" is it the result of what-we-were-30-years-ago and now consider ourselves an elite? To that end the struggles for better education and intellectual stimuli were put in place politically as to try to reach the ones who could not afford them, what of being on the fields from dawn to dusk or in the factories to a very grinding task; now we have the blogosphere virtual, impalpable, and yet free-for-all soon to get our neuronal network trapped regardless of our accents, Anglo-centric notwithstanding.

[Daniel Taghioff]

Someone is exercising their sense of humour.

Scientists once sent an entry to a social science journal compsed of words that were generated at random, and got it passed.

But social science is not all terminology. Just look at the Shilpa Shetty affair. The non English speaking world is rising, and taking the micky out of social scientists is not going to make that go away.

We probably need to start extending ourselves a bit, and learning to understand others, rather than just insisting on speaking our own language.

[Steve Sailer]

To get back to the subject of elites, elitism in a magazine magazine is fine if its articles are most appealing to the highly intelligent (as long as they are no more obscure in language than is absolutely necessary). Elitism is bad if it limits the list of potential contributors to the same old, same old.

This decade has seen a flourishing of brilliant new writers on the Internet, but only a handful have crossed over to the established paying press. For example, the War Nerd, Gary Brecher, of the Moscow eXile is funnier and more insightful about war in the contemporary world than anybody else writing in the English language today, but the only printed magazine that has made use of his services is The American Conservative.

[Steve Sailer]

To change the subject to this blog's form, I think your new blog would be better off with the latest posting appearing at the top. It's an unnatural order to follow, I grant you, but blog readers are novelty junkies and they expect to see new postings frequently when they first arrive, not after they page down.

[Michael Kerjman]

What is "elite"?

Using a non-elitist language skills could on broad merits simply defy this pattern as a circle of over-occupied with marks and features for this circle having only in-common been established.

Therefore, for instance, speaking a particular accent in Australia as understood recently supposed to ground a very legitimate precondition for being granted a local citizenship, effectively creating an "under-elite" with all politico-economical consequences.

How do possibilities to publish works in Prospect meet such a criterion?
Are articles targeting folks from different walks of life or?
Is a form of presentation comprehensible, lacking of acquaintance with from university shelves dust-covered foliants concluding unusable by 99.99% even native speakers wording?

At least this being answered might sustain an opinion of magazine's elitism, perhaps.