Intellectuals and Society,

Thomas Sowell, “Intellectuals and Society,” Basic Books, 2009, 317 pp plus 59 pgs of notes.

The author mostly suspects experts (intellectuals) when they present ideas to the public that are out of their area of expertise or ideas in their area of expertise but not tested by experience. For example, Marx was allegedly one of the most knowledgeable economist of his time but his ideas were untainted by experience; time has proven him very wrong.

I found this book to be a difficult but worthwhile; it certainly presents a libertarian’s point of view. The author describes two visions that impact society: the anointed vision of the Intellectuals and the tragic vision. In the anointed vision, the vision mostly opposed by the author, intellectuals are perceived by the public to be especially equipped to provide answers, by virtue of their greater knowledge and insight, as well as their not having vested economic interests to bias them in favor of the existing order (P. 77). Intellectuals are those whose end products are ideas, as distinguished from tangible creations such as those of engineers, or services such as those of physicians and pilots. Intellectuals are mostly found on campuses, think-tanks, and as media pundits. The tragic vision, on the other hand, sees the tragedy of the human condition as being due to constraints inherent in human beings. Efforts at determining solutions using this vision are based on actual experience, not on exciting new theories. This is a natural selection vision and is more of an evolutionary process.

Intellectuals were very much in the forefront in leading the U.S. into participating in WWI and ‘making the world safe for democracy’ as well as dividing the world into a maze of small countries defined by so-called self-determination (Countries Hitler found easy to pick of one-by-one). WWI and the peace settlement led to WWII, a war it was very necessary for us to participate in. However, the Intellectuals had now switched sides and very nearly caused our defeat by their opposition to any sensible maintenance of a credible defensive military preparedness.

Thomas Sowell has taught economics at Cornell, UCLA, Amherst, and other academic institutions, and his Basic Economics has been translated into six languages. He is currently a scholar in residence at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He has published in both academic journals and such popular media as the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and Fortune, and he writes a syndicated column that appears in newspapers across the country.

My Notes:
Pg. 1: Sheer brainpower—intellect, the capacity to grasp and manipulate complex concepts and ideas—can be put at the service of concepts and ideas that lead to mistaken conclusions and unwise actions…

Pg. 2: In this book, intellectual refers to an occupational category, people whose occupations deal primarily with ideas—writers, academics, and the like.

Pg. 29: The intellectuals’ exaltation of “reason” often comes at the expense of experience, allowing them to have sweeping confidence about things in which they have little or no knowledge or experience. They also have the idea that what they don’t know isn’t knowledge.

Pg. 37: Many discussions of intellectuals are phrased in terms of people but the actual empirical evidence cited has been about what has been happening over time to statistical categories—and that turns out to be the direct opposite of what has happened over time to flesh-and-blood human beings, most of whom move from one category to another over time.

Pg. 39: Only by focusing on the income brackets, instead of the actual people moving between those brackets, have the intelligentsia been able to verbally create a problem for which a solution is necessary. They have created a powerful vision of classes with disparities and inequities in income caused by barriers created by society. But the routine rise of millions of people out of the lowest quintile over time makes a mockery of the barriers assumed by many o the intelligentsia.

Pg. 40: The reason for the large discrepancy between growth rate trend in household income and growth rate trends in individual income is very straightforward: The number of persons per household has been declining over the years. As of 1966, for example, the U.S. Bureau of the Census reported that the number of households was increasing faster than the number of people and concluded: “The main reason for the more rapid rate of household formation is the increased tendency, particularly among unrelated individuals, to maintain their own homes or apartments rather than live with relatives or move into existing households as roomers, lodgers, and so forth.” Increasing individual incomes made this possible.

Pg. 71: The unemployment rate went up following the 1929 market crash but it never went as high as 10 percent for any month during the 12 months following the October crash. But the rate in the wake of subsequent government interventions in the economy never fell below 20 percent for any month over a period of 35 consecutive months. In short, tough the stock market crash has been conceived of as the ‘problem’ and government intervention as the ‘solution,’ in reality the unemployment rate following the economic problem was less than half of the unemployment rate following the political solution. One of the few things on which people across the ideological spectrum are agreed upon today is that the Federal Reserve System mishandled its job during the Great Depression. For example, as the country’s money supply declined by one-third in the wake of massive bank failures, the Federal Reserve raised the interest rate, creating further deflationary pressures.

Pg 71: In order to try to save American jobs by limiting imports that competed with American-made goods, Congress in 1930 passed the Smoot-Hawley tariffs, the highest in more than a century, despite a public appeal signed by more than thousand economists and a warning from them as to the consequences. Other nations retaliated, as the economists had warned.

Pg. 91: The usual image of the political spectrum among the intelligentsia extends from the Communists on the extreme left to less extreme left-wing radicals, more moderate liberals, centrists, conservatives, hard right-wingers, and ultimately Fascists. When we turn to specifics, there is remarkably little difference between Communists and Fascists. Communism is socialism with and international focus and totalitarian methods. The most prominent feature of the Nazis—racism in general and anti-Jewish racism in particular—was not inherent in the Fascist vision, but was an obsession of Hitler’s party, not shared by the Fascist government of Mussolini in Italy or that of Franco in Spain. What distinguished Fascist movements in general from Communist movements was that Communists were officially committed to government ownership of the means of production, while Fascists permitted private ownership of the means of production, so long as government directed the private owners’ decisions and limited what profit rates they could receive. Both were totalitarian dictatorships but Communists were officially internationalist while Fascists were officially nationalist. However, Stalin’s proclaimed policy of ‘socialism in one country’ was not very different from the Fascists’ proclaimed policy of national socialism.

Pg. 165: The culmination of the Progressives’ conception of property rights came in 2005, when the Supreme Court in Kelo v. New London decreed that politicians could seize private property—typically the homes and businesses of working class and middle class people—and turn it over to other private parties, typically developers who would build things for more upscale people, who would pay more in taxes into coffers controlled by politicians. Now the Constitution’s provision that private property could be taken for ‘public use’ was expanded to mean that such property could be taken for a ‘public purpose.’ While a public use would include such things as the government’s building a reservoir, a bridge or some other such facility, ‘public purpose’ could mean almost anything—and in the Kelo case it meant confiscating people’s homes to turn the property over to developers who would build various upscale facilities.

Pg. 221: The view of war itself, rather than other nations, as the enemy began shortly after the end of the First World War, as did the idea that patriotism must be superseded by internationalism, in the interests of peace. The teacher’s unions in France began organized campaigns in the 1920s, objecting to postwar textbooks favorably depicting the French soldiers who had defended their country against German invaders. Such textbooks were called ‘bellicose’—a verbal tactic still common among those with the vision of the anointed, of reducing views different from their own to mere emotions. Leaders of the drive to rewrite history textbooks called their goal ‘moral disarmament’ to match the military disarmament which many regarded as another key to peace. The once epic story of French soldiers’ heroic defense at Verdun, despite the massive casualties they suffered, was now transformed into a story of horrible suffering by all soldiers at Verdun.

Pg. 238: Intellectuals played a major role in bringing both Britain and the U.S. to a desperate unpreparedness between the two World Wars with a steady drumbeat of pacifist, anti-national-defense efforts. Within democratic nations, Intellectuals played a major role in creating the atmosphere of both military weakness and political irresolution. Neglect of history has allowed us today to forget how narrowly the Western democracies as a whole escaped the ultimate catastrophe of a victory by Hitler and his allies. The Intelligentsia has paid no price for their role in our near disastrous disarmament.

Pg. 246: In modern democratic nations, the intelligentsia does not have to directly influence decision makers such as government officials. They can have decisive influence by creating a general climate of opinion in which it becomes politically impossible for the wielders of power to do what they believe needs to be done. For example, Stanley Baldwin—by his own later admission—dared not tell the British public that Germany was rearming in 193 for fear of losing that year’s election because he knew that any attempt on his part to sound the alarm about impending dangers from Germany would bring to power the opposition Labor Party, which was totally opposed to military preparedness and would make the nation even more vulnerable than it was. FDR faced this same opposition.

Pg. 255: The Intellectuals maintain that ‘war solves nothing.’ This, again, has less to do with any empirical evidence than with its consonance with the vision of the anointed. Had the battle of Lepanto in 1571 or the battle of Waterloo in 1815 gone the other way, this could be a very different world today. Had the desperate fighting at Stalingrad and on the beaches at Normandy gone the other way during the Second World War, life might not be worth living for millions of human beings today. There have, of course, been futile wars; WWI comes to mind.

Pg. 296: It is hard to think of any decade within the past century when the intelligentsia was not embarked on some urgent crusade to save the world from some great danger to which ordinary folk were considered to be oblivious. In the early twentieth century, it was eugenics to prevent the national intelligence from declining as a result of higher birth rates among people with lower IQs, though in fact national scores on IQ tests rose substantially during that century. In the 1920s, the crusade du jour was the promotion of disarmament and international treaties renouncing war; in the 1930s, there were too many crusades to count, as there were in the postwar world.

Pg. 308: Slavery has been a pervasive evil around the world for thousands of years but the U.S. educational system depicts it as if it were a peculiarity of white people against black people. No one dreams of demanding reparations from North Africans for all the Europeans brought there as slaves by Barbary Coast pirates, even though these European slaves greatly outnumbered the African slaves brought to the U.S. In the case of slavery, what was peculiar about the West was that it was the first civilization to turn against slavery, beginning in the eighteenth century, and that it destroyed slavery around the world, beginning in the nineteenth century, not only within its own societies but also in non-Western societies it controlled, influenced or threatened.