Daniel Drezner’s The Ideas Industry (Oxford, 2017) is an amusing analysis of how ideas spread and pundits become brands. He portrays intellectuals competing for the attention of wealthy benefactors and scathingly takes on affectations like TED videos, which Drezner calls sales pitches: “More than half the TED lectures end with a standing ovation; the reactions are all affirmation without any constructive criticism.”

Becoming a big-time “public intellectual” or “thought leader” requires kissing up, so it may be good that none of the 30 current “intellectual lions” Drezner names are evangelicals, to my knowledge—but the dearth also means the “marketplace of ideas” often lacks a Biblical booth. Readers looking for worldview discussions won’t find much in The Ideas Industry, but its send-ups of quasi-celebrities are hilarious.

For example, Drezner writes, “David Rothkopf has a near-perfect resume to play the part of a foreign policy pundit.” The former Clinton administration official “subsequently worked at all the right consulting firms and affiliated himself with all of the right think tanks [and] writes weekly columns with portentous titles like ‘American Power at a Crossroads.’”

Holders of near-perfect resumés often try hard not to mar their records, which is why Rothkopf’s honesty in 2014 was a surprise: He nailed “the whole TED talks phenomenon, which offers the intellectual equivalent of diets in which someone can lose 10 pounds in two weeks without giving up ice cream sundaes or pizza. In just 18 minutes, a person can be exposed to breathlessly earnest genius—a slickly marketed brand of chicken nuggets for the brain.”

Ouch—but the column got him an invitation to speak at TED2015, which he called “an exceptional event attended by remarkable people. … Listening to some of the scientists and technologists … I was actually moved to near tears. … The attendees were as much a part of the event’s appeal as the speakers. … The sidebar discussions and discussions over meals were as energized and enlightening as the panels.” I could have danced all night. Such oozing should give him a lifetime ticket.

Drezner has a good eye for arrogance. Here’s New York Times liberal columnist Paul Krugman: “Some have asked if there aren’t conservative sites I read regularly. Well, no. … I don’t know of any economics or politics sites on that side that regularly provide analysis or information I need to take seriously. I know we’re supposed to pretend that both sides always have a point; but the truth is that most of the time they don’t.”

Drezner also quotes Peter Thiel, the high-tech guru who sees our university system “like the Catholic Church circa 1514. … You have this priestly class of professors that doesn’t do very much work. People are buying indulgences in the form of amassing enormous debt for the sort of secular salvation that a diploma represents.” Professors and students who yearn for influence should hear Canadian political scientist Janice Stein’s warning: “We will be seduced by the proximity to power and shade what we say in order to retain access.”

BOOKMARKS

John Stonestreet and Brett Kunkle’s A Practical Guide to Culture (David C. Cook, 2017) has easy-to-read chapters on pornography, the hookup culture, sexual orientation, gender identity, and other problems and issues that did not concern parents and youth leaders in the 1950s.

Bob Goudzwaard and Craig Bartholomew’s harder-to-read Beyond the Modern Age (IVP, 2017) includes on page 229 a good chart showing problems of modernity: For example, we want love, but we get pornography and suffer from loneliness. The authors tend to blame capitalism rather than sin and write about how Karl Marx “remains a source of inspiration for many people today who [are] silently hoping that one day capitalism will not be able to survive the problems and tensions it itself has created.” If that happens, what will replace it is worse. —M.O.