Jim Sleeper: Yale’s Real Social Network
[Jim Sleeper is a lecturer in political science at Yale.]
At the turn of the 18th century, Yale was founded to stop a Harvard-based “social network” from diverting its holy Puritan mission toward one emphasizing worldly “works” and wealth in a society connected, but flattened, by commerce.
The world isn’t flat, Yale’s founders insisted. It has abysses, and students need a faith that can plumb them: one that can defy worldly power in the name of a Higher one. Harvard was losing that faith and turning society into a slippery swamp of contracts and deals. Yale, sanctimonious and inward-turning, produced Jonathan Edwards 1720, Nathan Hale 1773 and other dissenters, up through Yale chaplain William Sloane Coffin Jr. ’49, Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau ’70, Howard Dean ’71 and, maybe, you....
The drive for fame and power also troubled a News editorialist in 1955, during the Cold War, as he pondered another Yalie’s advice on the Opinion page. “The man who clocks his business mind out with his time card at night should not enter the sales end of the brokerage business,” his classmate argued. “You have to eat, drink, play and perhaps even more, with your customers without seeming commercial about it.”
But now, things are different. Yale teaches that the world is flat, thanks to globalized engines of wealth creation, driven by rational investors and consumers and guided by grand strategists. “One thing the Cold War did accomplish was to vindicate democracy and capitalism,” wrote professor John Lewis Gaddis in 1999. “These institutions are now sufficiently deeply rooted that we can view the future with confidence. The only people who doubt this reality lack the power to do anything about it.”...
But Yale’s economic-determinist confidence in materialism would horrify our founders, Adam Smith and even Marx, whose materialism has indeed invaded Wall Street and “The Social Network.” The real “social network” is collapsing along with millions of American homes and jobs amid road rage; lethal store-opening rampages; extreme or “cage” fighting; TV shows that gloat over others’ humiliation; rising crime in New Haven; and rising Christine O’Donnells and Linda McMahons, who bypass Americans’ brains and hearts on the way to our lower viscera, wallets and post-republican despair.
Yale’s founders and the 1955 News editorialist are warning those who can hear them that this can’t last and that, when an emperor has no clothes, we need enough faith to say so and to stop giving him false drapery. Fortunately, Yale has a long tradition of Truth-telling from which to draw.
Read entire article at Yale Daily News
At the turn of the 18th century, Yale was founded to stop a Harvard-based “social network” from diverting its holy Puritan mission toward one emphasizing worldly “works” and wealth in a society connected, but flattened, by commerce.
The world isn’t flat, Yale’s founders insisted. It has abysses, and students need a faith that can plumb them: one that can defy worldly power in the name of a Higher one. Harvard was losing that faith and turning society into a slippery swamp of contracts and deals. Yale, sanctimonious and inward-turning, produced Jonathan Edwards 1720, Nathan Hale 1773 and other dissenters, up through Yale chaplain William Sloane Coffin Jr. ’49, Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau ’70, Howard Dean ’71 and, maybe, you....
The drive for fame and power also troubled a News editorialist in 1955, during the Cold War, as he pondered another Yalie’s advice on the Opinion page. “The man who clocks his business mind out with his time card at night should not enter the sales end of the brokerage business,” his classmate argued. “You have to eat, drink, play and perhaps even more, with your customers without seeming commercial about it.”
But now, things are different. Yale teaches that the world is flat, thanks to globalized engines of wealth creation, driven by rational investors and consumers and guided by grand strategists. “One thing the Cold War did accomplish was to vindicate democracy and capitalism,” wrote professor John Lewis Gaddis in 1999. “These institutions are now sufficiently deeply rooted that we can view the future with confidence. The only people who doubt this reality lack the power to do anything about it.”...
But Yale’s economic-determinist confidence in materialism would horrify our founders, Adam Smith and even Marx, whose materialism has indeed invaded Wall Street and “The Social Network.” The real “social network” is collapsing along with millions of American homes and jobs amid road rage; lethal store-opening rampages; extreme or “cage” fighting; TV shows that gloat over others’ humiliation; rising crime in New Haven; and rising Christine O’Donnells and Linda McMahons, who bypass Americans’ brains and hearts on the way to our lower viscera, wallets and post-republican despair.
Yale’s founders and the 1955 News editorialist are warning those who can hear them that this can’t last and that, when an emperor has no clothes, we need enough faith to say so and to stop giving him false drapery. Fortunately, Yale has a long tradition of Truth-telling from which to draw.