Joseph Schumpeter once explained that many Marxists and Keynesians never read a line of Marx or Keynes. According to Thomas Sowell, "They have gotten their ideas second- or third-hand from the intelligentsia." One might say that Marxism and Keynesianism bear a resemblance to disease. If Bubonic plague is carried by flea-infested rats, Marxism and Keynesianism are carried by intellectuals. In the first instance, we are dealing with dangerous bacteria; in the second instance, we are dealing with dangerous ideas.
It was Richard Weaver who wrote Ideas Have Consequences, warning that bad ideas were unsafe at any speed; especially those that rejected universal truth and/or universal morality. Such a rejection, he explained, encouraged men to become morally ambivalent materialists or anarchists. Without universal principles, hierarchy and noble aspiration could not be defended. Order would be undermined and all mankind would sink into hellish egalitarianism. The interior world of man would be shattered. What would come in its place? A system based on "suspicion, hostility, and lack of trust and loyalty."
In a recent book titled Intellectuals and Society, Thomas Sowell offers a detailed examination of those who carry today's ideological equivalent of the Black Death. He defines the term "intellectual" as referring to those teachers and writers who chiefly deal in ideas, and are paid - by the media or the state - for batting ideas around. By focusing on intellectuals who are paid for intellectualizing, he is able to make a series of observations about their ideological tendencies, their lack of accountability, and their tendency to live outside the "real world." It is not their fault that intellectuals are what they are, and not all of them are plague carrying vermin. It is one of those sociological tragedies that intellectuals act as if "their special kind of knowledge of generalities can and should substitute for, and override, the mundane specific knowledge of others." The intellectuals, as a class, tend to reject the first-hand knowledge of non-intellectuals as "prejudice" or "stereotypes." Abstract formulas, adopted by the intelligentsia as dogma, are advanced as some kind of superior wisdom and used to undergird insane government policies that fly in the face of common sense. How else, indeed, has our Republic arrived at its present state?
Once established, the intellectual class continues to feed politicians and bureaucrats with ideas that point toward one solution: big government, interventionism, wealth redistribution, and other egalitarian absurdities. The country is pushed, inch by inch, toward an unnamed catastrophe. Who will name it? Who will stop the pushing? The intellectuals are feeding at the public trough, and they are entrenched. It seems that the rest of society is helpless to stop them.
To decry their push for "judicial activism" avails us nothing. If you stop them in the Supreme Court they will infect popular opinion and a new Congress will be elected. If they don't elect Congress, they will elect a president. If they cannot act politically, they will take over the universities and bring out a generation of politically correct drones. Here we are not dealing with a particular set of abuses that can be fixed with appeals to democracy, Christianity, or legal reform. Here we are dealing with thousands of writers and professors who have, through some mysterious process, arisen from the lower depths, from the inner hell of a confused though fashionable relativism. The welfare state is their brainchild, and economic calamity is also theirs.
It is worth repeating the following point: The intellectual, as defined by Sowell, is someone who works with ideas for a living. He is generally a teacher or writer. As society is currently organized, teachers and writers are judged by their peers according to "purely internal criteria" that leaves them "sealed off from feedback from the external world of reality and remain circular in their methods of validation." What is accepted, under such circumstances, is in accordance with the existing groupthink of the hour. Intellectual consensus is the end-all and be-all. The empirical validity of an idea is not fully checked. It incubates within the intelligentsia and, according to Sowell, bleeds through to the external world. "The ideas of Lenin, Hitler, and Mao had enormous - often lethal - impact ... however little validity those ideas had in themselves or in the eyes of others beyond the circle of like-minded followers and subordinate power-wielders."
This statement may appear incredible, but it is true. Many casual readers will pass this by, undervaluing its significance. It has been assumed, all too often, that everyone must accept an idea before it can become powerful or affect our lives. But political outcomes are determined by minorities who may or may not be in touch with reality. History tells of regimes, and elites, whose ideas were insane.
In the first line of his book, Sowell warns his reader: "Intellect is not wisdom." Only the good are wise, and goodness is rare. "Wisdom is the rarest quality of all," wrote Sowell - "the ability to combine intellect, knowledge, experience, and judgment in a way to produce coherent understanding." He also wrote that wisdom requires self-discipline and self-limitation. Totalitarian ideologies, embraced by leading intellectuals, are self-indulgent and self-expansive. The temptation to power, and ego-aggrandizement, may be hard to resist.
The success of an intellectual idea is not determined by an objective, external test. Success is determined by whether intellectuals find an idea "interesting, original, persuasive, elegant, or ingenious." In other words, a specific class of persons, paid to write or teach or think about such ideas, decide among themselves what is "interesting," and therefore they decide what has legs. If intellectuals have been corrupted by the prospect of power, the prospect of government money, or an envious attitude toward the rich, one might expect the gradual emergence of an irresistible totalitarian tendency.
The demand for intellectuals and intellectual ideas is self-created, self-sustaining, and self-replicating. "The general public contributes to the income of intellectuals in a variety of ways involuntarily as taxpayers who support schools, colleges, and various other institutions and programs subsidizing intellectual and artistic endeavors." In other words, the people who are wrecking our civilization are paid by the rest of us to do their work. We have nurtured them, raised them up, and fostered their conceits with our own cash contributions. In other words, we have paid for our own destruction up front.
Copyright © 2010 Jeffrey R. Nyquist
Jeffrey R. Nyquist Email
www.jrnyquist.com
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