Professor Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit has started a Substack. In a recent post, he talks about the lack of intellectual diversity in our ruling class:
Thoughts on our ruling class monocultureOur modern ruling class is peculiar. One of its many peculiarities is its penchant for fads, and what can only be called mass hysteria. Repeatedly, we see waves in which something that nobody much cared about suddenly comes to dominate ruling class discourse. Almost in synchrony, a wide range of institutions begin to talk about it, and to be preoccupied by it, even as every leading figure virtue-signals regarding this subject which, only a month or two previously, hardly any of them even knew about, much less cared about.There are several factors behind this, but one of the most important, I think, is that our ruling class is a monoculture.In agriculture, a monoculture exists when just a single variety dominates a crop. “Monoculture has its benefits. The entire system is standard, so there are rarely new production and maintenance processes, and everything is compatible and familiar to users. On the other hand, as banana farmers learned, in a monoculture, all instances are prone to the same set of attacks. If someone or something figures out how to affect just one, the entire system is put at risk.”In a monoculture, if one plant is vulnerable to a disease or an insect, they all are. Thus diseases or pests can rip through it like nobody’s business. (As John Scalzi observes in one of his books, it’s also why clone armies, popular in science fiction, are a bad idea in reality, as they would be highly vulnerable to engineered diseases.) A uniform population is a high-value target.This is also why nature fosters genetic diversity. Sexual reproduction is a lot of trouble compared to, say, fission or budding, or even parthenogenesis. Despite its undoubted pleasures, it’s resource-expensive, requiring a search for a mate, possibly competition to mate at all, and risks like sexually transmitted diseases and childbirth, all for a paltry 50% (average) genetic pass-on. Unlike asexual reproduction, which produces a copy of what is, by definition, a successfully reproducing individual, sexual reproduction produces a genetically unique offspring who may turn out to be worse-adapted to the environment than either parent.
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