Has solicited some positive response.
Just in case it isn't obvious, the point of it isn't to make some observation about la belle epoque but about right now. The intended implication is that today's college-educated elites may be headed for the same sort of meltdown and seem equally incapable of changing.
You might be right. As I understand it, part of the reason the elites in Europe pre-WWI failed so miserably was because they couldn't adapt to or even understand the profound social changes that were going on around them. As a result, they continued to live in their very insular world and were ill-equipped to respond to these changes and avert the catastrophe. This is not unlike what we see happening today--on a much smaller scale--in the Roman Catholic Church. Church leaders could never have imagined what the repercussions of their inept and deceptive handling of the sexual abuse of minors by priests would be.
ReplyDeleteCharles Murray wrote a book several years ago where he predicted that the graduates of the elite American schools who assumed positions of power and authority would universalize their experience and be so out of touch with the "real world" that they would not be able to effectively deal with the issues that face us. This is what concerns me about President Obama's latest Supreme Court appointment--assuming she is confirmed, there will be only one sitting Justice who did not graduate from Yale or Harvard, and I don't think that's a good thing.