The mind of the intellectual

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The following is from Thomas Sowell. Intellectuals and Society. Chap. 21, Incentives and Constraints.

I think the following gives considerable insight into the intellectual mind.

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Ideologically, poll after poll has shown sociologists and scholars in the humanities, for example, to be more liberal or left politically than are engineers or scientists. In addition to such ideological differences, there are more fundamental differences in incentives and constraints between intellectuals in the sense defined here and other academic or non-academic specialists in mentally demanding fields. For one thing, an engineer can become famous for his work as an engineer but the world’s leading authority on French literature or the history of Mayan civilization is unlikely to be known, much less celebrated, beyond the narrow confines of the particular speciality.

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For intellectuals in general, where the primary constraint is peer response, rather than empirical criteria, currently prevailing attitudes among peers may carry more weight than enduring principles or the weight of evidence. This can produce patterns much like those found among another group heavily influenced by their peers — namely adolescents, among whom particular fashions or fads can become virtually obligatory for a given time, and later become rejected as passé, without in either period having been subjected to serious examination, either empirically or analytically.

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Today, when blacks are often treated by the intelligentsia as mascots du jour, black students beating up Asian students in schools in New York and Philadelphia for years is simply not an issue that either the media or academia want to discuss, much less an issue to arouse moral outrage. Had these been Hispanic students, for example, being beaten up by white students, cries of outrage would no doubt have rung out across the land from those in the media, in academia and in politics. There is no principle involved in these inconsistences, but simply the fact that some groups happen to be in vogue among intellectuals at a particular time and other groups out — and that peer consensus carries great weigh, even among individuals with high intellects who consider themselves to be “thinking people.” This peer consensus might be jeopardized by criticizing a group which is currently in vogue for violence against a group not currently in vogue.

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Turning from the incentives that lead to a supply of public intellectuals to the demand for such people, we again find an important distinction between those people with high-level mental skills who are intellectuals in our sense and others who are in mentally demanding fields whose end products are more tangible or more empirically testable. There is a spontaneous demand from the larger society for the end products of engineering, medical, and scientific professions, while whatever demand there is for the end products of sociologists, linguists, or historians comes largely from educational institutions or is created by intellectuals themselves, mostly by stepping outside whatever academic speciality they are in, to operate as “public intellectuals” offering “solutions” to social “problems” or by raising alarms over some dire dangers which they claim to have discovered.

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Intellectuals, defined as people whose work begins and ends with ideas whose validation is peer consensus, work in what are often called “soft” fields — that is, fields with less rigorous standards of validation and fields that are, on the whole, easier to master. Given that these are also fields for which there is no great spontaneous market demand from the population at large, there has been a long concern that there was a chronic over-supply of people trained to work in such fields, relative to demand, leading to disappointed individuals, frustrated in finding occupations, incomes or recognition commensurate with their investments of time, talent and effort, and with the expectations that such investments generate.

These concerns are not peculiar to our time nor even to Western civilization. Studies in Third World countries often find large numbers of educated people without marketable skills, many of them unemployed or under-employed, who are resentful or hostile to others without as much education as themselves but with technical or economic skills that are much more in demand and more highly rewarded. As noted in Chapter 16, the “well-educated but underemployed” Czech young men promoted ethnic identity movements in the nineteenth century Habsburg Empire, as the newly educated class of Latvians did likewise in the “Russian Empire. So did a newly-educated intelligentsia in the Ottoman Empire — and as likewise the soft-subject intelligentsia have promoted polarization, discrimination and violence in a long list of other countries.

Studies have highlighted the role of an over-supply of those with higher education in insurgencies in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Western Hemisphere. In some countries, bureaucracies have been expanded to absorb such people, highly educated but economically superfluous, in order to neutralize the political dangers they pose.

It is not hard to see how an intelligentsia of this sort would be more likely to gravitate toward the vision of the anointed, in which society is perceived as unfair, rather than the tragic vision, in which it is inherent flaws of human nature that underlie much of the unhappiness and frustrations of life, while social institutions seek to mitigate these problems, but necessarily do so imperfectly, since these institutions are themselves products of imperfect human beings. Even intellectuals who end up espousing the tragic vision often begin in their earlier adulthood as believers in the vision of the anointed, whether because of their personal situations or because of the pervasiveness of the vision of the anointed in the institutions in which they were educated.

The most obvious examples in the American context have been leaders of the neo-conservative movement, such as Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol, who began on he left. But many others who ended up as leading “conservatives” in the American sense, including Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, began as ether “liberals” in the American sense (Friedman) or as outright socialists (Hayek). In short, the attraction of the vision of the anointed to intellectuals has extended even to those who later repudiated it and became its strongest opponents.

While bureaucracies, ideological movements and post-doctoral fellowships can absorb much of the surplus of highly educated people whom the market does not absorb, there are few constraints against the continued over-production of such people. Complaints about the over-production of Ph.D.s in the humanities, for example, with vastly more applicants for faculty positions in these fields, than there are appointments available, have continued for generations. But universities have few incentives to reduce the supply, which is often subsidized by government, foundations and individual or corporate donors. Moreover, the availability of graduate students in these fields not only provides professors with research assistants and teaching assistants, the need to teach such students provides a rationale for the employment of as many professors as there are in these fields.

In short, institutional incentives seem unlikely to fit the supply of the intelligentsia to the demand, certainly not the spontaneous demand of the society at large, for whom an over-supply of such people can represent not only a cost but a danger.

A sense of mission

More than career incentives are involved in the behavior of intellectuals. There is also a sense of social mission — perhaps including a sense of personal grievance, growing out of the frustrations inherent in their chronic over-supply — that can long outlast even eventual individual success and renown.

The zeal of many intellectuals with the vision of the anointed to lead others to conclusions that will facilitate the kinds of economic and social changes they prefer, especially as regards to the distribution of wealth, is in sharp contrast with their very limited, or even non-existent, interest in economics in general, and in particular their interest in the question of how wealth has been produced in the first place, and what will facilitate or impede its future production. It is not only tangible wealth whose origin and production the intelligentsia show little interest in. The same is true of human capital — the skills, experience and cultural orientations that enable human beings to produce not only tangible wealth but also large and viable societies, in which they can co-exist with innumerable and disparate strangers without ruinous frictions, and with a degree of mutual accommodation and cooperation.

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Among those with a sense of mission are those who teach the young, whether teachers in the schools or professors in colleges and universities. Those among the academics or school teachers who lack either the inclination or the talent to become public intellectuals can instead vent their opinions in the classroom to a captive audience of students, operating in a smaller arena but in a setting with little chance of serious challenge. In such settings, their aggregate influence on the mindset of a generation may be out of all proportion to their competence — not simply in what they directly impart, but more fundamentally in habituating their students to reaching sweeping conclusions from hearing only one side of an issue and then either venting their emotions or springing into action, whether by writing letters to public officials as part of classroom assignments or taking part in other, more direct, activism. In these cases as well, there are few, if any, constraints beforehand and no accountability for the consequences afterwards.

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In the above Thomas Sowell suggests that intellectuals carry within themselves some inner anger at society. They are malcontents, rebels, troublemakers. I think this inner anger gives great insight into their mind. It explains the lack of rational, objective, dispassionate analysis. Their inner anger warps their thinking.

Back in the autumn of 1972 my wife and I visited Mexico City. While we were there we hired a taxi to take us out to see the Pyramid of the Sun and the Pyramid of the Moon in Teotihuacan, a drive of perhaps an hour or more outside the city. Our taxi driver was a middle aged fellow and we soon learned that he had a PhD degree in history. For the entire trip he talked about Mexican history. He sounded like a bit of a radical and spent a lot of the time railing against the Catholic Church. My impression was that he was an angry, unhappy person. I was thinking that it was very sad that a person with a PhD degree would be forced to drive a taxi for a living. I felt sorry for him. He probably had a family to support, needed to work, and couldn’t find anything better.

I am thinking I am beginning to understand the mind of the intellectual. First their entire training has been in the humanities. They don’t have that background that the mathematician, physicist, or chemist has had with its emphasis on reason, logic, and dispassionate analysis. Their minds work exactly the same as the minds of the common man (the masses of humanity) — in which quick judgments are made — conclusions are reached with little thought and without examination of basic assumptions— and with reasoning much flavored by emotional biases. I now understand how the liberal concludes that if blacks do more poorly than whites in school, then the reason must be racism. (He assumes that if racism were not present they would do equally well. He ignores the role of cultural stamp.)

It does seem to me that the modern liberal intellectual reveals a special antipathy and dislike for the honest, upright, moral, law-abiding, hardworking type of person (who just happens to be the type of person who tends to do well in life) and reveals a special concern and empathy for criminal and morally depraved types (as, for example, homosexuals).

If a person has special antipathy for good people and a special empathy for bad people what does that tell one about that person?

As a consequence of their basic sympathies the liberals favor taking money (in the form of taxes) from moral, hardworking kinds of people and distributing it to lazy, non-working types of people. And they favor all kinds of policies that favor and coddle criminals at the expense of law-abiding types of people (at the expense of decent people who bear the consequences of all of the violence and crime from criminals who are out running free when they should be prison — criminals who have been arrested multiple times and released due to soft-hearted judges).

14 Feb 2024