Read before the Election
If you read only one thing between now and the election on November 2, let it be Intellectuals and Society by Thomas Sowell.
Sowell is the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He is a professor of economics, a student of history, culture, and society, and one who speaks and writes not merely with opinions but with clear and powerful reasoning and the facts to back it up. I look forward to other works of his.
Intellectuals and Society offers a hugely important and enlightening series of arguments about the ways in which intelligent but unwise intellectuals influence the general climate of opinion, profoundly affecting our lives through the spread of their often unsubstantiated ideas on economics, social policy, the media, academia, the law, government, foreign policy, and war, even as they escape responsibility for the destructive consequences of those ideas.
Note that by “intellectuals” Sowell does not mean people who use their minds to do difficult and challenging things, like “brain surgeons or engineers” or “financial wizards.” He uses the term to refer “to an occupational category, people whose occupations deal primarily with ideas—writers, academics, and the like,” “dealer[s] in ideas, as such.”
As Sowell notes in Chapter 1, “George Orwell said that some ideas are so foolish that only an intellectual could believe them, for no ordinary man could be such a fool.” After defining what he means by intellectuals, Sowell goes on to apply sweet reason to a host of such ideas, many of which I in the past have taken, and most of the people I know still take, to be self-evident truth. It is a powerful wake-up book.
Though as a teacher of grammar and composition I am subject to some practical measuring of the quality of my work, as a teacher of literature and a writer I fall into the category of “intellectuals” as Sowell defines them, those for whom the only measure of the validity of their ideas is the opinions of other intellectuals. I take some solace from having left behind many of the false ideas Sowell refutes. Nonetheless, I have found the book not only enlightening but challenging and sobering.
The book is not exactly optimistic. Sowell contrasts the vision of intellectuals with a truer vision. About the former, he writes, “At the heart of the social vision prevalent among contemporary intellectuals is the belief that there are ‘problems’ created by existing institutions and that ‘solutions’ to these problems can be excogitated by intellectuals, [who] have seen themselves not simply as an elite . . . but as an anointed elite . . . with a mission to lead others in one way or another to better lives.” The contrasting vision, rooted in traditional wisdom and in reason corrected by facts and experience, he calls “tragic.”
Yet the “tragic” vision involves not despair but honesty about the limits of human perfectibility. No one in despair could write such an illuminating work. In fact it is uplifting to find that a thinker like Sowell exists and is writing, trying to wake us out of our dreams of perfecting the world through wishful thinking that in fact have led to increase of suffering, which might have been prevented had wiser heads, like Sowell’s, prevailed.
Please read this book. If you have cause to refute any of its arguments with valid reasoning and facts, rather than merely unexamined assumptions, I will welcome your comments and try to address them. But I hope you will find, as I did, that Intellectuals and Society offers a powerful cleansing of some of the mental mess left behind by the typical late-twentieth-century education.
Read more about Thomas Sowell (and see some of his remarkable photographs) at http://www.tsowell.com.
P.S. This just in. Here's an interview with Thomas Sowell on the very book.
Sowell is the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He is a professor of economics, a student of history, culture, and society, and one who speaks and writes not merely with opinions but with clear and powerful reasoning and the facts to back it up. I look forward to other works of his.
Intellectuals and Society offers a hugely important and enlightening series of arguments about the ways in which intelligent but unwise intellectuals influence the general climate of opinion, profoundly affecting our lives through the spread of their often unsubstantiated ideas on economics, social policy, the media, academia, the law, government, foreign policy, and war, even as they escape responsibility for the destructive consequences of those ideas.
Note that by “intellectuals” Sowell does not mean people who use their minds to do difficult and challenging things, like “brain surgeons or engineers” or “financial wizards.” He uses the term to refer “to an occupational category, people whose occupations deal primarily with ideas—writers, academics, and the like,” “dealer[s] in ideas, as such.”
As Sowell notes in Chapter 1, “George Orwell said that some ideas are so foolish that only an intellectual could believe them, for no ordinary man could be such a fool.” After defining what he means by intellectuals, Sowell goes on to apply sweet reason to a host of such ideas, many of which I in the past have taken, and most of the people I know still take, to be self-evident truth. It is a powerful wake-up book.
Though as a teacher of grammar and composition I am subject to some practical measuring of the quality of my work, as a teacher of literature and a writer I fall into the category of “intellectuals” as Sowell defines them, those for whom the only measure of the validity of their ideas is the opinions of other intellectuals. I take some solace from having left behind many of the false ideas Sowell refutes. Nonetheless, I have found the book not only enlightening but challenging and sobering.
The book is not exactly optimistic. Sowell contrasts the vision of intellectuals with a truer vision. About the former, he writes, “At the heart of the social vision prevalent among contemporary intellectuals is the belief that there are ‘problems’ created by existing institutions and that ‘solutions’ to these problems can be excogitated by intellectuals, [who] have seen themselves not simply as an elite . . . but as an anointed elite . . . with a mission to lead others in one way or another to better lives.” The contrasting vision, rooted in traditional wisdom and in reason corrected by facts and experience, he calls “tragic.”
Yet the “tragic” vision involves not despair but honesty about the limits of human perfectibility. No one in despair could write such an illuminating work. In fact it is uplifting to find that a thinker like Sowell exists and is writing, trying to wake us out of our dreams of perfecting the world through wishful thinking that in fact have led to increase of suffering, which might have been prevented had wiser heads, like Sowell’s, prevailed.
Please read this book. If you have cause to refute any of its arguments with valid reasoning and facts, rather than merely unexamined assumptions, I will welcome your comments and try to address them. But I hope you will find, as I did, that Intellectuals and Society offers a powerful cleansing of some of the mental mess left behind by the typical late-twentieth-century education.
Read more about Thomas Sowell (and see some of his remarkable photographs) at http://www.tsowell.com.
P.S. This just in. Here's an interview with Thomas Sowell on the very book.
posted by GRap | 12:01 AM
6 Comments:
How does Sowell get out of the obvious performative contradictions? He is both 1) an intellectual, and 2) opining on a complex subject outside of his professional competence. Furthermore, what he is arguing for -- which based on your description sounds like Burkean conservatism -- is hardly something that can be proven by facts.
A second question: how does Sowell's book shape your teaching of the great books? Literary interpretation of whatever sort, after all, is hardly something tethered down by hard facts. So if you are to avoid the mistakes of other intellectuals who float free of the empirical, will you change your approach to teaching, say, Hamlet? Will you try to instill "traditional wisdom"? And how would you go about identifying correct vs incorrect traditional wisdom? After all, "wisdom" is hardly something unitary you can just identify without problem in society.
Anon has obviously not yet read Sowell or he would address Sowell’s ideas, not my brief recommendation of them. I have no idea what a “performative contradiction” is. Sowell would no doubt agree that he is an “intellectual” in his sense. On the other hand, he has worked in business as well, where he produced practical results, and his professional competence is precisely in economics and history, which is what he writes about. Nor is he trying to “prove” Burkean conservatism. He is writing about the specific practical effects of particular ideas which those effects demonstrate to have been wrong. Instead of tilting at chimeras, I wish Anon would just take my suggestion and read Sowell. Then we would have something substantive to talk about.
“How does Sowell’s book shape my teaching of great books?” is a question like “do you still beat your wife?” Since it doesn’t, I am at a loss to say how it does. But if it did, I am sure the influence would be salutary. The assertion that “literary interpretation is hardly tethered down by hard facts” is nonsense. Of course good interpretation is consistent with facts. The idea that interpretation is not so is precisely what has gotten us into the interpretive (deconstructionist, post-modern, ideological, relativistic) mess we’re in. My approach to teaching Hamlet being tethered to the facts of the words of the play in their context in their time, it has not been necessary for me to alter that approach in response to reading Sowell.
Anon is responding to my brief phrases about Sowell in combative defense of some position unstated, for the tone of condescension about the phrase “traditional wisdom” does not constitute a position. And who said anything about wisdom being “unitary”? I’m not even sure what is meant by Anon’s use of the word. Wisdom is always unitary in one sense (that is, all wisdom is of a piece), and never unitary in another (that is, its application to particulars can vary greatly from situation to situation). How Anon concludes from my blog that I was saying anything about wisdom’s being “unitary,” I do not know, any more than I know what he means by the phrase.
To be clear: My remarks were intended as an invitation read Sowell. Since Anon offers no cogent reason for me to alter my opinion of the validity of that invitation, I will, for the time being, stand by it.
"Anon has obviously not yet read Sowell or he would address Sowell’s ideas, not my brief recommendation of them."
You make it sound like you have discovered some revelation when I was very upfront with that fact. And what in the world is wrong with not having read the book? In a way, my questions are asking you whether in fact Sowell is worth reading rather than to merely accept it on your intellectual authority alone. He might be in the awkward position of critiquing a type of thought he himself is draws upon for the critique. To avoid this contradiction, he has to draw upon some principle for differentiating good and bad intellectual work. And that is what I was asking you to summarize.
I did get a chance to glance at his book today, and even on the very first page, in commenting on Rawls, he makes an embarrassing philosophical mistake in analogizing pennies and diamonds to moral categories. Most of us would in fact refuse to see categories of goods as exchangeable. We would not, for instance, brook the enslavement of some for the betterment of the majority. Of course some people might disagree, but the point is that Sowell's point is hardly as obvious as he makes it sound. Perhaps his training in economics and history is not enough for him to comment on philosophy?
Whether Anon was “upfront” about not having read the book I will leave to my readers to decide. Nothing is wrong with not having read the book. To critique the book without having read it seems a bit premature.
Now let me get this straight: Anon.’s questions are asking me whether in fact Sowell is worth reading so that Anon. doesn’t have to accept that it is worth reading on my intellectual authority. (I assume his “it” refers to reading the book rather than to the book’s entire contents.) On what basis besides my “intellectual authority” am I to answer this question? And why ask it of me when I’ve already said why one should read the book? On second thought, I don’t think such a question can be gotten straight. I have already summarized as much as I wished to summarize of Sowell’s book. I want people to read it. (The first step in my “teaching of the great books” is to ask my students to read them.)
What Sowell “might” be in the position of doing when distinguishing between good and bad intellectual work I will leave it to those who do read Sowell to decide. In my opinion he does not get caught in the kind of contradiction Anon. fears, though I recognize that some people do. In Sowell’s case it is an imaginary contradiction, as I believe his readers will agree.
As for the “embarrassing philosophical mistake”— nonsense. Here is the relevant excerpt from Sowell’s first page:
“Intellect is not wisdom. . . . 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, in light of all the factors involved, including factors left out of some of the ingenious constructions of the intellect.
“Karl Marx’s Capital was a classic example of an intellectually masterful elaboration of a fundamental misconception . . . . Similarly with John Rawls’ elaborate and intricate A Theory of Justice, in which justice becomes categorically more important than any other social consideration. But, obviously, if any two things have any value at all, one cannot be categorically more valuable than the other. A diamond may be worth much more than a penny but enough pennies will be worth more than any diamond.”
It will be seen that the point of Sowell’s analogy is not that moral categories are equivalent to pennies and diamonds but that absolute values, being absolute, cannot merely trump one another, as diamonds cannot merely trump pennies without some attention to how many of each we are talking about. Justice and mercy, for example, as we see in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure and many other works, are famously both to be valued without the categorical subordination of one to the other. Similarly with truth and kindness, or love of oneself and love of one’s neighbor. Sowell is not confusing qualities and quantities. He is illustrating the point that intellectual complexity cannot save a fundamentally flawed claim from error.
I am not at the moment competent to defend Sowell’s critique of Rawls, nor is this the place to do so, but neither am I inclined, reviewing the comments above, to accord any validity to Anon.’s mistrust of Sowell’s competence in philosophy.
Finally, Anon.’s use of the “enslavement of some” as an example of a categorical value, which in this context is a red herring, gives me occasion to recommend highly Sowell’s chapter on slavery in Black Rednecks and White Liberals, a book equal to Intellectuals and Society in eye-opening power.
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