Intellectuals and
Society
By Thomas Sowell
(Basic Books, 398 pages, $29.95)
IRVING KRISTOL ONCE DEFINED an intellectual as someone who
“knows a little bit about everything.” And, as he was quick to add,
he did not mean that disparagingly.
Thomas Sowell, who knows quite a lot about many things, is much
more disdainful of intellectuals. He’s now written a whole volume
trying to explain why they are so troublesome. The illustrations of
his argument are quite compelling. But at the risk of sounding like
a special pleader, I’d register some skepticism about his
explanation of why intellectuals are that way.
But first the fun part. If you like Sowell’s columns, you will
enjoy most of the material in this book. Sowell takes aim at the
fatuousness so often displayed by professorial pundits and public
intellectuals. He doesn’t just offer a string of contemptuous
snorts at their delusions. He offers clear, patient expositions,
demonstrating why the only reasonable response is… a contemptuous
snort.
As Sowell was trained as an economist, the chapter on
intellectuals and the economy is, naturally, among the most
illuminating. So, for example, commentators have repeatedly told us
in recent years that the gap between rich and poor has been
widening. It is true, if you compare the income of those in the top
fifth of earners with the income of those in the bottom fifth, that
the spread between them increased between 1996 and 2005. But, as
Sowell points out, this frequently cited figure is not counting the
same people. If you look at individual taxpayers, Sowell notes,
those who happened to be in the bottom fifth in 1996 saw their
incomes nearly double over the decade, while those who happened to
be in the top fifth in 1995 saw gains of only 10 percent on average
and those in the top 5 percent actually experienced decline in
their incomes. Similar distortions are perpetrated by those
bewailing “stagnation” in average household incomes — without
taking into account that households have been getting smaller, as
rising wealth allows people to move out of large family homes.
Sometimes the distortion seems to be deliberate. Sowell gives
the example of an ABC news report in the 1980s focusing on five
states where “unemployment is most severe” — without mentioning
that unemployment was actually declining in all the other 45
states. Sometimes there seems to be willful incomprehension.
Journalists have earnestly reported that “prisons are ineffective”
because two-thirds of prisoners are rearrested within three years
of their release. As Sowell comments: “By this kind of reasoning,
food is ineffective as a response to hunger because it is only a
matter of time after eating before you get hungry again. Like many
other things, incarceration only works when it is done.”
So why do intellectuals often seem so lacking in common sense?
Sowell thinks it goes with the job-literally: He defines
“intellectuals” as “an occupational category [Sowell’s
emphasis], people whose occupations deal primarily with ideas —
writers, academics and the like.” Medical researchers or engineers
or even “financial wizards” may apply specialized knowledge in ways
that require great intellectual skill, but that does not make them
“intellectuals,” in Sowell’s view: “An intellectual’s work
begins and ends with ideas [Sowell’s emphasis].” So an
engineer “is ruined” if his bridges or buildings collapse and so
with a financier who “goes broke… the proof of the pudding is
ultimately in the eating…. but the ultimate test of a [literary]
deconstructionist’s ideas is whether other deconstructionists find
those ideas interesting, original, persuasive, elegant or
ingenious. There is no external test.” The ideas dispensed by
intellectuals aren’t subject to “external” checks or exposed to the
test of “verifiability” (apart from what “like-minded individuals”
find “plausible”) and so intellectuals are not really “accountable”
in the same way as people in other occupations.
I’m happy to stipulate that many practitioners of literary
deconstruction are fools (if I can generalize from the ones I’ve
known). But I’m skeptical that the world is divided between
professors of comparative literature talking only to themselves and
real people, facing the test of the market.
We have a whole lot of middle managers in large corporations (as
in nonprofit organizations and government agencies) who spend most
of their time reading and writing memos. Is it true that these
people are accountable for the opinions that guide their decisions?
How many of them actually make decisions — as opposed to murmuring
concerns, admonitions, considerations, and covering their own
backsides in their endless stream of e-mail traffic? Corporations
may face market discipline, but that doesn’t mean every manager
(let alone every employee) has to focus on how to improve
sales.
On the other hand, it is not quite true, even among tenured
professors in the humanities, that idea-mongers can entirely ignore
“external” checks. Even academics want to be respectable, which
means they can’t entirely ignore the realities that others notice.
There were lots of academics talking about the achievements of
socialism in the 1970s (I can remember them) but very few talking
that way after China and Russia repudiated these fantasies.
Sowell offers two chapters on the prattling of intellectuals
about foreign policy — first in the 1930s, when they undermined
the will to resist Fascist aggression, and then in the 1960s, when
they undermined the will to win the war in Vietnam. He shows that
many of the same arguments reappeared in the 1960s as if they were
new insights. But the fact is that people who spouted antiwar
rhetoric in 1935 were either much more hesitant by 1940 or much
less heeded. More than two decades had to pass, after the end of
the Second World War, before their arguments could regain
respectability.
THE MOST DISTORTING ASPECT of Sowell’s account is that, in
focusing so much on the delusions of intellectuals, he leaves us
more confused about what motivates the rest of society. In a
characteristic passage, Sowell protests that “intellectuals…have
sought to replace the groups into which people have sorted
themselves with groupings created and imposed by the
intelligentsia. Ties of family, religion, and patriotism, for
example, have long been rated as suspect or detrimental by the
intelligentsia, and new ties that intellectuals have created, such
as class — and more recently ‘gender’ — have been projected as
either more real or more important.”
There’s no disputing the claim that most “intellectuals” —
surely most professors in the humanities-are down on “patriotism”
and “religion” and probably even “family.” But how did people get
to be patriotic and religious in the first place? In Sowell’s
account, they just “sorted themselves” — as if by the invisible
hand of the market.
Let’s put aside all the violence and intimidation that went into
building so many nations and so many faiths in the past. What is
it, even today, that makes people revere this country (or some
other); what makes people adhere to a particular faith or church?
Don’t inspiring words often move people? And those who arrange
these words — aren’t they doing something similar to what Sowell
says intellectuals do? Is it really true, when it comes to
embracing national or religious loyalties, that “the proof of the
pudding is in the eating”?
Even when it comes to commercial products, people don’t always
want to be guided by mundane considerations of reliable
performance. People like glamour, prestige, associations between
the product and things they otherwise admire. That’s why companies
spend so much on advertising. And that’s part of the reason people
are willing to pay more for brand names — to enjoy the
associations generated by advertising. Even advertising plays on
assumptions about what is admirable and enticing-assumptions that
may change from decade to decade, as background opinions change.
How many products now flaunt themselves as “green” — and how many
did so 20 years ago?
If we could somehow prohibit advertising, would people not care
about glamour or style or intangible associations? If we closed
down universities and stopped subsidizing intellectual
publications, would people really judge every proposed policy by
external results? Intellectuals tend to see what they expect to
see, as Sowell’s examples show — but that’s true of almost
everyone. We have background notions about how the world works that
help us make sense of what we experience. We might have distorted
and confused notions, but we don’t just perceive isolated facts.
People can improve in their understanding, developing background
understandings that are more defined or more reliable. That’s part
of what makes people interested in the ideas of intellectuals —
the hope of improving their own understanding.
On Sowell’s account, we wouldn’t need the contributions of a
Friedrich Hayek — or a Thomas Sowell — if we didn’t have so many
intellectuals peddling so many wrong-headed ideas. But the
wealthier the society, the more it liberates individuals to make
different choices and the more it can afford to indulge even
wasteful or foolish choices. I’d say that means not that we have
less need of intellectuals, but more need of better ones.
