Intellectuals and Society

For a long time now I’ve been meaning to read more of Thomas Sowell. His Basic Economics has long been on my list of things to do, as has Economic Fallacies. As it stands, Intellectuals and Societies is only the second of his books I’ve read (after The Housing Boom and Bust). This book is really a broadside against the people who influence our society with their ideas. It is a book that takes aim at intellectuals, and especially those who deliberately avoid accountability for what they believe and what they teach. The “places to which intellectuals tend to gravitate tend to be places where sheer intellect counts for much and where wisdom is by no means necessary, since there are few consequences to face or prices to be paid for promoting ideas that turn out to be disastrous for society at large.” Of course a book dealing with intellectuals will need to provide a useful definition for this class of person. Here Sowell says simply that an intellectual is a person whose end product is ideas and whose validation process involves only peers. Accountable only to their peers (which is no real accountability at all), intellectuals are free to create outrageous ideas and to influence society with them. And yet they are almost never called to account for these ideas. It is obviously very dangerous to separate ideas from consequences, to allow people to propose and demand whatever they wish but without ever calling those people to account for their influence. And yet this is precisely what happens with intellectuals. Says Sowell, “the ultimate test of a deconstructionist’s ideas is whether other deconstructionists find those ideas interesting, original, persuasive, elegant, or ingenious. There is no external test.”
As the National Review writes, “Sowell takes aim at the class of people who influence our public debate, institutions, and policy. Few of Sowell’s targets are left standing at the end, and those who are stagger back to their corner, bloody and bruised.” In almost every case they deserve the beating they’ve received.
What strikes me as I read Sowell is the profound difference between intellect and wisdom. A man may be utterly brilliant, well-spoken and highly-regarded, the holder of endless academic credentials and acclaim from his peers. And yet he may be a complete fool. And doesn’t the Bible tell us just this? The book of Proverbs tells us with stark clarity that many who consider themselves wise are, in reality, foolish. The book of James ties wisdom to humility. There is little humility in today’s intellectuals and, sadly, very little wisdom. Sowell expends some effort in differentiating between intelligence and wisdom. “Intelligence minus judgment equals intellect. Wisdom is the rarest quality of all—the ability to combine intellect, knowledge, experience, and judgment in a way to produce a coherent understanding.” The harsh reality is that many intellectuals are bankrupt when it comes to wisdom. Too many intellectuals have never learned to be wise. They are foolish at heart and, inevitably, the ideas that define them are just as foolish. And in this book Sowell illustrates this time and time again. It is, I think, the enduring lesson of Intellectuals and Society.
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