- Sowell, Thomas.
Intellectuals and Society.
New York: Basic Books, 2009.
ISBN 978-0-465-01948-9.
-
What does it mean to be an intellectual in today's society? Well,
certainly one expects intellectuals to engage in work which is
mentally demanding, which many do, particularly within their
own narrow specialities. But many other people perform work which
is just as cognitively demanding: chess grandmasters, musical
prodigies, physicists, engineers, and entrepreneurs, yet we rarely
consider them “intellectuals” (unless they become
“public intellectuals”, discussed below), and indeed
“real” intellectuals often disdain their concern with
the grubby details of reality.
In this book, the author identifies intellectuals as the class of
people whose output consists exclusively of ideas, and
whose work is evaluated solely upon the esteem in which it is held
by other intellectuals. A chess player who loses
consistently, a composer whose works summon vegetables from the
audience, an engineer whose aircraft designs fall out of the sky
are distinguished from intellectuals in that they produce objective
results which succeed or fail on their own merits, and it is
this reality check which determines the reputation
of their creators.
Intellectuals, on the other hand, are evaluated and, in many cases,
hired, funded, and promoted solely upon the basis of peer review,
whether formal as in selection for publication, grant applications, or
awarding of tenure, or informal: the estimation of colleagues and
their citing of an individual's work. To anybody with the slightest
sense of incentives, this seems a prescription for groupthink, and it
is no surprise that the results confirm that supposition. If
intellectuals were simply high-performance independent thinkers, you'd
expect their opinions to vary all over the landscape (as is often the
case among members of other mentally demanding professions). But in
the case of intellectuals, as defined here, there is an overwhelming
acceptance of the nostrums of the political left which appears to be
unshakable regardless of how many times and how definitively they
have been falsified and discredited by real world experience. But why
should it be otherwise? Intellectuals themselves are not
evaluated by the real world outcomes of their ideas, so it's only
natural they're inclined to ignore the demonstrated pernicious
consequences of the policies they advocate and bask instead in the
admiration of their like-thinking peers. You don't find chemists still
working with the phlogiston theory or astronomers fine-tuning
geocentric models of the solar system, yet intellectuals
elaborating Marxist theories are everywhere in the humanities and
social sciences.
With the emergence of mass media in the 20th century, the “public
intellectual” came into increasing prominence. These are
people with distinguished credentials in a specialised field
who proceed to pronounce upon a broad variety of topics in which
their professional expertise provides them no competence or
authority whatsoever. The accomplishments of Bertrand Russell in
mathematics and philosophy, of Noam Chomsky in linguistics, or
of Paul Erlich in entomology are beyond dispute. But when they
walk onto the public stage and begin to expound upon disarmament,
colonialism, and human population and resources, almost nobody in
the media or political communities stops to ask just why their
opinion should be weighed more highly than that of anybody else
without specific expertise in the topic under discussion. And
further, few go back and verify their past predictions against
what actually happened. As long as the message is congenial to the
audience, it seems like public intellectuals can get a career-long
pass from checking their predictions against outcomes, even when
the discrepancies are so great they would have caused a physical
scientist to be laughed out of the field or an investor to have
gone bankrupt. As biographer Roy Harrod wrote of eminent economist
and public intellectual John Maynard Keynes:
He held forth on a great range of topics, on some of
which he was thoroughly expert, but on others of which
he may have derived his views from the few pages of a
book at which he happened to glance. The air of authority
was the same in both cases.
As was, of course, the attention paid by his audience.
Intellectuals, even when pronouncing within their area of
specialisation, encounter the same “knowledge problem”
Hayek identified in conjunction with central planning of
economies. While the expert, or the central planning bureau,
may know more about the problem domain than 99% of individual participants
in the area, in many cases that expertise constitutes less than 1%
of the total information distributed among all participants
and expressed in their individual preferences and choices. A free
market economy can be thought of as a massively parallel cloud
computer for setting prices and allocating scarce resources. Its
information is in the totality of the system, not in any particular
place or transaction, and any attempt to extract that information by
aggregating data and working on bulk measurements is doomed to
failure both because of the inherent loss of information in making
the aggregations and also because any such measure will be out of
date long before it is computed and delivered to the would-be planner.
Intellectuals have the same conceit: because they believe they
know far more about a topic than the average person involved with it
(and in this they may be right), they conclude that they know much
more about the topic than everybody put together, and that if people
would only heed their sage counsel much better policies would be put
in place. In this, as with central planning, they are almost always
wrong, and the sorry history of expert-guided policy should be
adequate testament to its folly.
But it never is, of course. The modern administrative state and
the intelligentsia are joined at the hip. Both seek to concentrate
power, sucking it out from individuals acting at their own
discretion in their own perceived interest, and centralising it
in order to implement the enlightened policies of the “experts”.
That this always ends badly doesn't deter them, because it's power
they're ultimately interested in, not good outcomes. In a section
titled “The Propagation of the Vision”, Sowell
presents a bill of particulars as damning as that against King
George III in the Declaration of Independence, and argues that
modern-day intellectuals, burrowed within the institutions of
academia, government, and media, are a corrosive force etching away
the underpinnings of a free society. He concludes:
Just as a physical body can continue to live, despite containing a
certain amount of microorganisms whose prevalence would destroy
it, so a society can survive a certain amount of forces of
disintegration within it. But that is very different from saying
that there is no limit to the amount, audacity and ferocity of
those disintegrative forces which a society can survive, without
at least the will to resist.
In the past century, it has mostly been authoritarian tyrannies which
have “cleaned out the universities” and sent their
effete intellectual classes off to seek gainful employment in
the productive sector, for example doing some of those “jobs
Americans won't do”. Will free societies, whose citizens
fund the intellectual class through their taxes, muster the
backbone to do the same before intellectuals deliver them to
poverty and tyranny? Until that day, you might want to install
my
“Monkeying
with the Mainstream Media”,
whose
Red Meat
edition translates “expert” to “idiot”,
“analyst” to “moron”, and
“specialist” to “nitwit” in Web pages
you read.
An extended
video interview with the author about the issues discussed
in this book is available, along with a
complete
transcript.
July 2010 