Archives for June 2018

Thomas Sowell: Intellectuals and Society. New York: Basic Books, 2009.

Originally published in Social Science and Modern Society. Volume 47, Number 6, November/December 2010.

 

The respected conservative economist Thomas Sowell writes too gracefully and, well, economically to offer a more precise title for this book, such as Modern Intellectuals and Modern Democratic Regimes. But that’s his topic.

By “intellect” Sowell means “the capacity to grasp and manipulate complex ideas.” Intellect forms only part of “intelligence,” a term encompassing “judgment and care in selecting relevant explanatory facts and in establishing empirical tests of any theory that emerges.” A bright college sophomore’s intellect ought to metamorphose into intelligence by the time he starts his doctoral dissertation. He probably has a way to go before he achieves “wisdom”—”the rarest quality of all,” combining intelligence with experience and self-discipline. With wisdom he will understand the limitations of his “own experience and of reason itself.” If, however, our sophomore goes wrong he may come to use his capacity to manipulate ideas cynically, in which case he will turn out a sophist or, if gifted with oratorical flair, a demagogue. Quite as likely he may let his wishes be horses, in which case he will be a fairly typical specimen of the intellectual in modern democracy.

“Intellectuals” grasp and manipulate complex ideas. Their work “begins and ends with ideas”; they produce ideas instead of material goods (an economist would usually say ‘widgets’) or actions (‘services’ in econo-speak). Being “intellectuals,” “Adam Smith never ran a business, and Karl Marx never administered a gulag.” The concrete objects intellectuals do produce—manuscripts—serve merely as vehicles for their primary products.

The “penumbra” surrounding intellectuals consists of purveyors of the ideas intellectuals produce: teachers, journalists, social activists, political aides, judges’ clerks. Along with intellectuals themselves, these comprise the “intelligentsia.” Although Sowell claims that “the demand for public intellectuals is largely manufactured by themselves,” this strikes me as improbable. Human beings have wanted explanations of the world for a long time. (The Bible will serve as empirical evidence of this, and I can see social-scientific heads nodding in nearly universal agreement with my methodology.) What is more, rulers have usually wanted justifications of their rule. Intellectuals aspire to the functions of the ancient prophet, priest, or sage. Sowell is right to say that widespread literacy and education generally, along with mass media—all features of the regime of modern democracy—have increased the audience for intellectual services. Modern bureaucracies—impersonal, scientistic if not exactly scientific—also augment demand. Both the characteristic modern regimes—democratic republicanism and democratic despotism—and the characteristic modern political organization—the Machiavellian/Hobbesian centralized state—afford intellectuals heady opportunities for prestige and authority.

The associations of intellectuals with ruling, with political life, leads to difficulties well known to Socrates and his enemies. But these difficulties take a new direction in modern regimes because modern regimes valorize ideas, abstractions, more than they esteem such personal relationships as reverence and deference. Unlike material products and services, Sowell, observes, “no external test” can validate an ideational product. This leaves the producers of ideas vulnerable to circularity of thought or even to outright solecism. The conservative politician Newt Gingrich has decried the fact that social democrats persist in their socialism despite socialism’s real-world failures; Sowell would answer that real-world failure does not exactly disporove an idea in the mind of him who lovingly holds it. Like Brooklyn Dodgers fans of old, the intellectual can always recur to his battle-cry, “Wait till next year.”

Insulated politically by the freedom of speech and academic freedom of modern liberal democracy, intellectuals fortify their never-say-die persistence with the social and political armature of status. At best tenured and at least unmolested by outraged bearers of hemlock, intellectuals form a sort of aristocracy within democracy. With that measure of the acerb he has cultivated over the years, Sowell calls them “the anointed.” Their heads drip with the soothing balm of security from serious harm, no matter what they say or write, and no matter what they say or write about one another. This confidence easily overextends to the habit of ranging outside their field of knowledge, as literary critics pronounce on the latest war and sociologists ‘deconstruct’ literature. (I exempt my fellow political scientists from this stricture, inasmuch as Aristotle rightly describes politics as the architectonic art, but I hesitate to claim that Sowell would concur.)

Intellectuals thus test the limits of human knowledge but have few if any empirical constraints on that test. Given the obvious limits of human knowledge, however, “the population at large may have vastly more total knowledge” than the new aristocrats. This becomes clear when intellectuals propose, and bureaucrats attempt, the governance of vast economic markets characteristic of the revenue-hungry modern state. No amount of rational planning can match the massive, daily, empirical operations of a relatively free market, with its “innumerable features on which no given individual can possibly be expert.” Should this not put practical limits on the rule of intellectuals through the bureaucracies and bureaucrats that adopt and adapt their ideas?

Unfortunately not, Sowell observes. “Modern, expansive government—the centralized, administrative state—”tends to magnify the influence of the intelligentsia, since government as a decision-making institution means essentially legislators, judges, executives and bureaucrats, non of whom is constrained to stay within the area of their own competence in making decisions.” Although the American Founders took care to separate and balance the powers of the central government and also to establish a federal state that would keep most governing decisions in municipalities, counties, and states, the centralizing state-builders of the twentieth century—beginning with the Progressives and continued by the New Dealers and their progeny—deliberately compromised these institutional/structural boundaries in the name of attaining desired economic and social goals. Animated by “a vision of themselves as a self-anointed vanguard, leading toward that better world”—”a huge investment of ego in a particular set of opinions”—members of the intellectual-political complex effectively re-founded the American regime. What had been a commercial and federal republic now incorporates a permanent if non-hereditary aristocracy. Unlike the aristocrats of feudalism, the new aristocrats inhabit a centralized state dedicated both to leveling all other social groups and to dividing those groups into newly-invented social categories—famously, ‘race,’ ‘class,’ and ‘gender’—the better to rule the new ‘multicultural’ society.

Sowell substantiates his critique with chapters describing the arguments the new aristocrats make in defense of their claims to rule. He groups these arguments into five policy areas: economics, social relations, the information and opinion industries (the media, academia), law, and foreign relations (particularly as they relate to war).

Not surprisingly, one of Sowell’s most trenchant chapters addresses intellectuals’ characteristic economic fallacies. For example, intellectuals make much of the widening income gap between rich and poor, a Marxist theme that renews itself periodically, lending weight to calls for the political authority to redress injustice. True in itself, this claim ignores the fact that the actual members of the several economic classes constantly change, as does the relative prosperity of all classes. So, for example, a 22-year-old college graduate may begin her working life as a low-income worker, but likely will not remain one for more than a few years. “Low-income” is itself a relative term, as the poor of 2010 in the United States enjoy better lives than the poor of 1960.

These facts notwithstanding, the ‘income gap’ performs usefully when described as a social problem that cries out for a solution. As one might expect, the solution does not involve the workings of a free market so much as economic and social planning conceived by the intellectuals and carried out by the intelligentsia—neo-aristocrats armed by intellect supplemented with compassion. To the question, ‘So what?’ Sowell replies: “The crucial distinction between market transactions and collective decision-making is that in the market people are rewarded according to the value of their goods and services to those particular individuals who receive those goods and services, and who have every incentive to seek alternative sources, so as to minimize their costs, just as sellers of goods and services have every incentive to seek the highest bids for what they have to offer. But collective decision-making by third parties allows those third parties to superimpose their preferences on others at no cost to themselves, and to become the arbiters of other people’s economic fate without accountability for the consequences.”

Planners in a government bureaucracy differ from planners in a corporate bureaucracy because they have far less responsibility for ‘making the payroll’; if the government’s numbers don’t add up, they raise taxes, inflate the currency, blame the banks. Insulated from the consequences of their actions more than their counterparts in the market, they need not know, and may not want to know, how difficult running a business is.

As an economist, Sowell has always avoided that simplistic abstraction, Homo economicus. He unfailingly points to social customs, habits of mind and heart that shape the economic choices of individuals. This makes him alert to the repercussions of the intellectuals’ “social vision,” as he calls it. Following a line of thought as old as the Enlightenment, intellectuals assume the malleability of social customs and institutions. Born free but everywhere in chains, with no intractable natural flaws or original sins, mankind can and should break their mind-forged manacles. Social visionaries “are in a sense defending their very souls” as perfectible by the reform of social institutions, a reform movement they step up to lead.

Accurate so far as it goes, Sowell’s account of social visionaries overlooks the historicism of social visionaries ‘Left’ and ‘Right.’ Rousseau’s teaching on the malleability of society and indeed of human nature itself served as a mere prelude to the relocation of moral and political authority from God and nature to the ‘march of history,’ which such thinkers as Hegel and Marx took to be a course of dialectical progress toward a perfected end state. This usefully allowed the intelligentsia to define as ‘reactionary’ any one and any thing that impeded progress, as defined and guided by the progressives—i.e., themselves. Because he overlooks this major refinement of the intellectuals’ line of attack, Sowell can praise Oliver Wendell Holmes, whose supposed realism and pragmatism merely underwrite yet another exercise in the social-historicist construction of truth. Sowell writes, “The exceptional facility of intellectuals with abstractions does not eliminate the difference between those abstractions and the real world.” True enough, but that’s the problem historicism, whether in ‘idealist’ or ‘realist’ mode, was designed to solve, and failed to solve. Historicism attempts to make the real ideal and the ideal real; might is right, and vice-versa. On this, there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between Holmes and someone like Woodrow Wilson, and a world of difference between either of them and Washington or Lincoln.

Sowell puts his most important chapter squarely in the middle of the book. Apparently a discussion of the intellectuals’ doings in academia and the media, it really addresses the fundamental problem of epistemology. No mean analyst of statistics, Sowell shows how the intellectuals avoid serious criticism of their projects by “filtering out information contrary to their conception of how the world is or ought to be.” Sometimes this gets done crudely, as when Stalinist or Maoist genocides simply proceed unreported. More subtly, an intellectual might select statistics that support his argument and ignore the others, as when numbers on violent crime are manipulated to ‘prove’ that gun control cuts homicide rates. On the verbal level, re-labeling can sanitize a soiled term; thus did self-described ‘progressives’ start calling themselves ‘liberals’ in the 1920s, when Wilsonianism lost its luster, then went back to being ‘progressives’ in the early 2000s, after ‘liberalism’ got loaded, courtesy of conservative radio talk show hosts.

Sowell remarks the limits of such manipulation of knowledge. The truth cannot be subjective, he observes, or else no one would survive very long. Yes, a goldfinch perceives reality differently than humans do, but members of both species demonstrably make mistakes due to misperception of their surroundings. The principle of radical subjectivism, supporting moral and cultural relativism, must be wrong.

Sophistry impedes perception of reality (for humans, at any rate). Media and academic deployment of melodrama, conspiracy theories, and ‘just-so’ stories—appeals to satisfying but delusive emotions—supply the energy for what might otherwise strike most people as rather dry theories cooked up by geeky scribblers and policy wonks. The true appeal of historicist progressivism (one might add) is the universal lure of the happy ending at the end of all our hardships and sorrows.

In the modern world intellectuals claimed the law as their domain early on. Sowell argues that when judges stop saying ‘what the law is’ in the sense of saying what the language of the law in front of them meant to the lawmakers, and when they start saying what the law is in the sense of making the law themselves, they effectively contravene the Constitutional prohibition against ex post facto laws. By becoming legislators they make the characteristic modern-intellectuals’ move: “going beyond one’s expertise.” Following a number of scholars, Sowell takes note of such phrases as “the elastic Constitution” (Wilson) and “the living Constitution” (Roscoe Pound)—wide roadways through which many a pseudo-interpretive truck may be driven. Such formulations serve “the sociological jurist”: the member of “a progressive and enlightened caste whose conceptions are in advance of the public and whose leadership is bringing popular thought to a higher level,” as Pound put it in 1907. Judges so styled look to effect a result instead of applying the law to a case. Having no training in social analysis, they frequently get their sociology wrong, too.

War is a topic quite far from the expertise of an economist. Unlike many economists in the liberal camp—liberal in the Bright-and-Cobden sense, not in the progressives’—Sowell looks at war with a steady gaze, never supposing that peaceful economic competition will entirely replace it. He makes good sport of deflating the unthinking rhetorical antics of many pacifist intellectuals. In his two chapters on intellectuals’ pronouncements on war, Sowell does best when he avails himself of the writings of a statesman long experienced in war: Winston Churchill. Using Churchill as his guide, he recalls the follies of the 1930s intellectuals who, mixing their fears with hope, called Hitler a moderate while espousing a doctrinaire pacifism that the Nazi leader never professed to share. Sowell also does well on the Vietnam War, relying in large measure on the writings of Korean War veteran and experienced war correspondent Peter Braestrup. He goes off the rails on the First World War, precisely because he does not consult his favorite Churchill or (to give but one example) Charles de Gaulle’s brilliant and pity first book, The Enemy’s House Divided. As a result, he criticizes Wilson for entering the war at all, arguing that the “ostensible cause” of Wilson’s action, German submarine attacks on American shipping, served merely as a cloak for that inveterate intellectual’s “ideological aggrandizement.”

Sowell’s argument here is worth unpacking, and refuting, in more detail, not the least for its illustration of one of his own principal theses—the danger of intellectuals ranging beyond their area of expertise—but mostly because he misses a subtler dimension of the intellectuals’ influence upon the intelligentsia, a dimension that adds resonance to his own insights. The Germans, he begins, sank passenger ships with Americans on board. “But these were ships entering a war zone in which both the British and the Germans were maintaining naval blockades, the former with surface ships and the latter with submarines—and each with the intention of denying the other both war materiel and food.” The Lusitania “was, years later, revealed to have been secretly carrying military supplies.” Further, submarines simply cannot “give warnings and pauses to let crews and passengers disembark before sinking passenger ships.” To Sowell, the fault lies not with the Germans in deploying a class of warships utterly wrong for the task assigned them, but with Wilson, for asserting “a right of Americans to sail safely into blockaded ports during wartime.” But maybe he wanted to court murderous attack in order to fight to make the world safe for democracy.

As I have often asked myself while contemplating a large pizza, where to begin? The war supplies in question, listed on the ship’s manifest and therefore no remarkable secret at all, consisted mostly of rifle ammunition and other items allowed under U. S. law at the time. American statesmen had claimed the right to undertake neutral shipping in wartime since the founding. If the Germans had wanted to exercise the right to block military supplies to their enemies, they needed to deploy the surface ships that would have enabled them to board and inspect the ships of the neutral powers. If they lacked such ships, they had two decent options: to forego the blockade, treating it as a handicap in fighting that particular war; or, better still, to refuse to fight the war in the first place, to avoid signaling Austria to move against Serbia. That would have saved everyone, including Wilson, a great deal of trouble.

As Churchill and de Gaulle show, the German military commanders and civilian rulers understood that unrestrained submarine warfare—attacks on commercial vessels—could very well bring the Americans into the war. Wilson got in only after some two years of such attacks—the Lusitania having been sunk in 1915; during those two year, the Germans themselves ratcheted the submarine attacks up and down, as the internal debate raged—a debate fundamentally centered on the character of the German regime itself, and in particular whether it would be ruled by civilians or soldiers. Wilson described his reluctance to make war not in ideological terms but in light of his memories of the Civil War; his father, a Presbyterian pastor, had opened his churchyard in Augusta for use as a field hospital, and the boy saw the wounded soldiers there. There were very few Americans who did not regard the repeated German depredations, taken together, as a casus belli. Wilson didn’t lead public opinion this time, he followed it. As far as making the world safe for democracy went, Wilson merely responded to one of the principal war aims of the German militarists, namely, to make the world unsafe for democracy. This had been the aim of the Holy Alliance powers in the previous century, as well. The fact that those militarists tried again, two decades later, speaks not against the war but against the peace settlement—Churchill’s point in his great book, The Aftermath.

As de Gaulle shows, it was not so much Wilson but the Germans who were in the thrall of ideology during the war. Considering the military chieftains who finally ruled Germany, de Gaulle writes, “Perhaps one finds in their proceedings the imprint of the theories of Nietzsche on the Elite and the Superman”—theories valorizing “the will to power, the taste for risk, the contempt for others that one sees in Zarathustra, who appeared to these impassioned ambitieux as the ideal to which they should aspire.” In his excellent introduction to his English translation of de Gaulle’s book, Robert Eden explains that Nietzsche did not give the German warriors a doctrine—one might search a long time for a usable war plan in the philosopher’s writings—but rather generated a climate of opinion and sentiment that made such rashness as they exhibited seem admirable, a sign of vitality, a path to domination, to nobility. Reading Nietzsche, breathing in the moral atmosphere Nietzsche and his intellectual epigoni fostered, a generation of spirited warriors learned not to moderate and discipline their spiritedness but to let it run free—disastrously, for themselves, their country, and for Europe. An instance of intellectuals’ unwisdom, indeed.

One thus concludes that Sowell is often right even when he is wrong—that is, more right than he knows. And he very well knows the most important thing about his life’s work: In the end he is an economist who looks beyond the often-dismal science to an economy of the spirit.