Can anyone else imagine members of the political and diplomatic elite writing thick books, studying complex writings and thinking about strategies? Those who didn’t write books must have at least read them, understood them, and been able to discuss them.
How enormously this has changed! Can you imagine today’s Czech Foreign Minister Lipavsky quoting Thucydides? That Harris or Biden would quote Enlightenment philosophers or at least the Founding Fathers? That one of them would write a visionary book? Donald Trump is no better.
It’s hard to find a more pronounced sign of civilizational decline. The mental level has dropped so much that the new generation is incapable of even understanding what the old one did. And it’s not because it’s not needed. The tasks are very similar, but the older ones could do them and the new ones can’t. They just console each other that it is impossible to master them.
And mind you, it’s not a question of the difference between Metternich and Lipavsky. Just one or two decades ago, there were educated people in Czech politics. They went to school under the communist regime, so they knew the ancient classics, Renaissance philosophy, classical German philosophy, knew a lot of history, etc. Even when foreigners, mostly with lousy educations, were pushed into Czech politics, they were forced to pretend to be educated. Today, there is no pretending. If a top politician appeared today quoting Voltaire or the old Czech philosopher Palacký, he would be a revelation.
This is not a problem of democracy. Voters do not demand that a politician be a primitive. It’s a question of how elites are formed. If the existing members of the elite are educated, they protect their investment in education and are reluctant to let someone in who has not invested thousands of hours in study. Or if they are people whose only asset is their ability to scheme and for whom the arrival of educated people would be more of a complication. In that sense, it was very fortunate that the communists took over the intellectual elite from the regime that preceded them, because that elite was motivated to keep their standards up.
Incidentally, it would have been logical if, after the political-diplomatic sphere, the universities had undergone the same change.