What color is your pill-achute?
How a radical leftist’s complaint about professionals resonates unexpectedly 20 years later
Jeff Schmidt is a radical professional, and a bit over 20 years ago he wrote a book about professionals: what they are, how they are formed, and how to be a radical (leftist) one. I’ve chosen to review his book, Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System That Shapes Their Lives, because while I disagree mightily with both Schmidt’s political assumptions and goals, his theory about the relationship between professionals and institutions can serve as a fruitful entrypoint to the current ideological turmoil in many workplaces. As you will see, the world has been turned upside down in the last twenty years, but as the expression goes, la plus ça change, la plus c’est le même chose.
In Schmidt’s analysis, the difference between a nonprofessional, a professional, and a manager can be summed up in terms of her relationship to ideology: a nonprofessional is neither allowed nor expected to be creative in her job; a professional is required to be, but within “strict political limits”; a manager is the one hiring, managing, and firing the professionals as well as establishing the ideological interests the professionals serve.
Anyone older than say, 35, who has worked (or studied) in an institutional environment will probably not be surprised to learn that the professional’s talents are only valuable to the extent that they serve the given institution’s interests. That said, I agree with Schmidt that the rhetoric around professional qualifications has always been a false one: under the pretense of neutral expertise, professional trainings have always included an ideological component. Many, many students pursue professional training in the belief that their future success will depend on how well they acquire additional technical knowledge or skills. But sooner or later, they will realize that their success in the field really depends on their willingness to conform to the given ideological expectations of the profession they have chosen.
It is this prioritization of ideological training that explains, for instance, why law school does not prepare students to pass the bar; they prepare for that after all their course work is complete by taking a bar review course. (And note they most often have secured jobs before they pass the bar.)
This emphasis on ideological skills in law school is precisely what the powerful corporate law firms want, because the high-stakes legal battles they fight defending big business and wealthy clients are paramountly political. The simple ability to recite the law does not qualify one to do this work. Representing powerful clients requires lawyers who can make creative arguments about the intent of the law, who can find ways to argue that the public interest would be served by a favorable ruling, and who can sway public opinion in high-profile cases, where this opinion influences the outcome. Settling losing cases out of court is political work, too. Lawyers for the powerful must know, for example, to give high priority to negotiating clauses that keep the terms of the settlement secret, this to protect the corporation’s or rich person’s public image and to avoid setting a precedent that would help other wronged parties to obtain justice. Thus the big law firms aren’t primarily interested in the technical skills of the law school graduates they hire. Those skills are easily picked up on the job; an ideologically disciplined mind is not. (42-3)
If you are getting the feeling that Schmidt doesn’t care for professionals who serve the interests of rich people, you would be correct. In particular, he seems to have taken it quite hard to discover, during the course of getting his PhD in Physics, that the vast majority of the jobs in that field are funded by, and thus subservient to the interests of, the military and other defense-related departments of the United States government. While I’m no fan of the military-industrial complex, it strikes me as blindingly naive for Schmidt to have expected any differently. Military and weapons research is a long-established field, and there is really no reason to assume that these industries will not continue to be able to find scientists who, knowingly or not, conform their interests to the interests of the institutions paying their salaries and funding their labs.
Indeed, I’ve been to graduate school, albeit in the humanities, and initially I, too, believed that the goal was the pursuit of knowledge for its own pleasure. I certainly discovered otherwise, and the discovery was as shocking as it was unpleasant. But whereas I view this discovery as merely the process of maturation from the idealism of youth to the realism of adulthood, Schmidt sees a grand conspiracy of ideological corruption typical of a leftist political viewpoint, in which mean hierarchies thwart democratic ideals and thereby oppress the masses, the so-called “underrepresented majority” (109).
The crux of Schmidt’s argument rests on the permanent (at least until, one infers, the revolution) stranglehold that professionalizing institutions hold on society. One way in which they fulfill their mission to recruit and mold obedient members of the ideological laboring class is to simply refuse admission—under a false guise of meritocratic qualifications—to those who would be unlikely to conform to the desired status quo. The purpose of affirmative action, in Schmidt’s view, is specifically to allow people who will work against the status quo into the system. If one accepts that the qualifications are really just false proxies for political leanings, then the way one finds the appropriate candidates (by his measure) is precisely to admit them on the basis of relaxed standards:
What all this means is that the standard criteria at their best—that is, when equal opportunity is enforced—select more carefully for politically orientation than for socio-economic background. The result is that professionals with working-class backgrounds are no more likely than others to maintain a working-class orientation in their work. Affirmative action, on the other hand, does benefit workers, minorities and women, because it admits them on a different basis—through a relaxed version of the standard criteria—leading to graduates who are more likely to be oriented toward serving the underrepresented majority through their work. (110)
Although Schmidt—unlike in today’s prevailing KenDiAngelism, where melanin content is the chief determiner of victim status—resists viewing race as a proxy for victim status, he absolutely believes that experiences with discrimination is what produces a left-of-center tendency among “minorities as a group” (109). Given that it is these same minorities who are more likely to be denied or ejected from the professionalizing institutions, the stranglehold of these institutions is essentially unassailable.
It makes for a neat argument, at least in 2000. But in 2022, there is clearly something amiss. Here’s a wonderful passage that any contemporary reader cannot help but shake her head at:
Let’s look at another example of writing between the lines, again from the front page of the New York Times. This is the lead sentence of a news report on a 4 July 1992 parade of tall ships: “Majestic in a gray morning mist, the world’s largest gathering of tall ships in this century sailed out of the past and up the great amphitheater of New York Harbor yesterday in a stately salute to Independence Day and the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s voyage of discovery to the New World.” The reporter’s attempt here to write between the lines is rather transparent, despite his flowery language. The phrase that stands out a bit more than it’s supposed to is, of course, “voyage of discovery.” This clever formulation is modest enough to pass political scrutiny yet still manages to conjure up the old elementary-school-textbook image of Christopher Columbus as the discoverer of America—a European rather than a Native American image. Having planted this point of view in the mind of the reader, the Times story then seems perfectly reasonable as it goes ahead and celebrates Columbus in the old-fashioned way, without reservation. It is hard to imagine a nonprofessional coming up with a devious phrase like this—or even wanting to. (44)
Now, as you and I know, but of course Schmidt could not at the time of writing, is that the Times is no longer in the business of offering up the “elementary-school-textbook image of Christopher Columbus”; indeed, it’s literally in the business of writing textbooks with the goal of making Columbus out to be American’s first White Male Oppressor. Far from eschewing leftists in its newsroom, the Times has become a place where progressive ideology is enforced with the full power of a Slack pile-on; just ask Bari Weiss.
But this is what makes the initial chapters of Schmidt’s book so damn interesting. Because what if, even if the Times is superficially the exact opposite of what Schmidt saw it as twenty years ago, his analysis of professional conformity is still bang on?
Allow me to elaborate.
Earlier in this same chapter, Schmidt makes clear that the difference between the NY Times and the Wall Street Journal (which I started to subscribe to last year) is the nature of their respective readership:
The Times is written for a readership of professionals, who need ideological direction and reassurance of the system’s strength. The Journal is written for bosses—business owners and executives—who give direction and do not need to be reminded where their interests lie. Among Journal subscribers, mangers outnumber professionals more than three to one. Among Times readers, professionals outnumber managers three to two. (44)
In the year 2000, Schmidt identifies the Times as the paper of record for professionals, namely, for the segment of the population that is charged with enforcing the ideological interests of their bosses. As Schmidt is a leftist, it goes without saying (although he says so plenty) that the interests of these bosses is that of capitalist self-interest. Therefore, any notion that professionals as a group are “liberals” is the result of a misunderstanding of how professionals actually influence society (in Schmidt’s definition, “the set of relationships among… the collection of individuals who happen to live within the national boundaries”). While public opinion polls do show that “professionals are more liberal than non-professionals on many social issues, such as civil liberties, personal morality and cultural issues” (13), the fact is that they are not actually liberal where it counts, namely, on the job:
If, for example, you were given the power to dictate the outlook that governs the day-in day-out decision-making of a professional at work, and I were given the power to dictate the outlook that governs what that professional does inside the voting booth once every four years, then your power to shape society would be vastly greater than mine. (12-3)
Here is where it is tantalizing to begin to read Schmidt against the grain: clearly, in 2000, he was describing a situation in which supposedly liberal professionals were actually still quite conservative where it mattered: their own position in the political and economic system. Perhaps he had the Wall Street-reconciled Democrats of Bill Clinton in mind, who knows:
Professionals… tend to be very conservative on a long-standing issue of much greater importance to society: democracy. Discuss politics with a liberal professional and you will hear not a word in favor of a more democratic distribution of power in society, perhaps because in the professional’s view ignorant nonprofessionals make up the large majority of the population. Even the most liberal professionals tend toward authoritarianism in their social visions… Professionals are liberal on distant social issues, issues over which they have no authority at work and no influence outside of work. (12-13)
In 2022, a year when the Times is actively attempting to refashion both school curricula and general public opinion in the direction of overtly progressive politics, Schmidt’s qualification that professionals are only liberal on distant social issues now invites the reader to ponder what, in fact, has changed. Is the Times now a mouthpiece for professionals who are liberal on proximate social issues; has it become a paper of the revolution? Or is the Times still what it always was: a paper that tells professionals what they need to hear in order to keep their position within the system.
Although my feelings about hierarchy are in the Jordan Peterson rather than the Karl Marx camp, I nonetheless agree that, as David Rieff observes, the wokification of the New York Times and countless other professional workplaces nonetheless leaves Schmidt’s dreaded “system” intact:
Wokeness has almost nothing to say about the economy, and, more crucially, the more we see Woke in action in the larger world outside academe, the clearer it becomes that Woke is perfectly compatible with the current economic ideology—that is to say, with capitalism.
I’m kinda sorta on record as loathing the woke conditions of my workplace. Since I wrote that piece, my rage has only increased, as it is now clear that I’m working for a company that is quite literally aiming to promote what I think is a disaster for confused young women: aggressive “gender-affirming” care. (This is where, instead of helping female adolescents work through issues of anxiety, depression, body discomfort, self-loathing, etc., they are encouraged to think that pretending to become a male will solve all their problems. Many such women have had their healthy breasts removed before realizing that testosterone and surgeries didn’t help.) It is impossible for me to know whether this is being pursued for political or profit reasons, if not some familiar combination of the two. As Upton Sinclair might have said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
I am seriously contemplating resigning on the basis of this moral conflict (as soon as I can find another job, that is). But, surprisingly, it is Schmidt’s last chapter that has given me a new angle on this issue. He maintains, not unconvincingly, that the more appropriate response is to become, as he did, a radical professional within the system:
When individuals fail to get reform-oriented jobs and instead join the staffs of establishment organizations… they often identify with the opposition less and less as time goes by, because they feel they are not a part of it. They fail to see that although it would be personally pleasant to work for a flawless outfit, a willingness to struggle to make an imperfect one better might do the world more good.
The irony, of course, is that just as I can take this lesson from a motivated leftist, so can the trans rights activists. As they have. I mean, how do you think all these institutions got captured by the Woke to begin with? So in some real sense, we are all radical professionals now—and I think it’s awful. As much as I’d love to see leadership of the company I work for not blindly encouraging the removal of healthy tissues in service of an identity narrative I can only describe as religious in nature, obviously this reversal would not actually create workplace harmony.
Honestly, I don’t know how harmony might be achieved without a wholesale reimagining of functional disagreement in the workplace. As it stands now, the current stalemate leaves no one satisfied: the trans activists are still aggrieved (no concession is enough, it seems) while the people who dismiss pronouns as nonsense and can define the word woman (adult human female) are silently, anonymously seething.
Schmidt, good leftist that he is, sees the need to resist as grounded in the dignity of the individual: “At stake is not only the nature of the workplace and society, but your own nature as well—your very identity” (280). In this version of personhood, who you are is defined by how you resist the system. In this paradigm, resistance is never futile, because not to resist is to accept “a far deadlier course for your individual identity”. In short, not to fight is to submit to personal annihilation.
Call me a bigot (and you will), but that doesn’t sound like social progress to me.