Mass-intellectual splits are healed by disciplining elites, not elevating masses

Evidence

That the Church has to face up to a problem of the “simple” means precisely that there has been a split in the community of the faithful. This split cannot be healed by raising the simple to the level of the intellectuals (the Church does not even envisage such a task, which is both ideologically and economically beyond its present capacities), but only by imposing an iron discipline on the intellectuals so that they do not exceed certain limits of differentiation and so render the split catastrophic and irreparable. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1193

Categorization

• DEFINE: The mechanism by which a unified intellectual community is preserved: downward discipline on experts rather than upward education of the laity.
• XREF: Directly relevant to how religious orthodoxy and, by analogy, hegemonic worldviews police their own intellectuals — carry into analyses of official Islamic discourse and clerical authority the Islamophobia field studies.
• SEED: Angle for comparing how different institutions — churches, parties, universities — manage split-within-the-faithful crises by disciplining their own most differentiated members.