Wednesday.....Culture.....Intellectuals And Society (1)

Thomas Sowell is a scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and author of numerous books. He's an economist whose works were very influential and a social philosopher who has the admiration of people such as Rush Limbaugh and historian Paul Johnson. His syndicated columns appear in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes and Fortune and numerous other media outlets. By his own admission, he was a Marxist in his 20s. He is Black and was born to a poor family in the South. A high school dropout due to financial reasons, he went on to graduate magna cum laude from Harvard and received a Doctor of Philosophy in economics from the University of Chicago. It is his latest book, Intellectuals and Society (isbn 978-0-465-01948-9) that I would like to write about piecemeal because of the importance of each chapter. According to Sowell, this is an age like no other, in being influenced by intellectuals, who he describes as those who deal with ideas where there is generally no external test to determine whether those ideas are right or wrong. He stresses that intellect itself is not wisdom, pointing out the obviously incorrect belief by Marx that labor...is the source of wealth. He quotes George Orwell in "Some ideas are so foolish only an intellectual could believe them." What is needed, according to Sowell, to go along with intellect is knowledge, experience and judgement. His answer to his own question of whether a financial genius would be considered an intellectual is a resounding No because they, along with engineers and even football coaches, are held to external standards. He points out that intellectuals, generally, do not administer the programs their ideas lead to. Thus the importance of this book for the essence of many of the ideas that we struggle with in American politics, ideas that would restructure America and jettison its heritage, have originated with intellectuals, who according to Sowell, are unaccountable to the outside world. The author also points out that many of these ideas garner excitement in this culture and need validation only from those who tend to have these beliefs in the first place. An example might be(my thought here) the Cap and Trade initiative that is generally accepted only by those who might benefit from it intellectually or financially, and this in spite of evidence that its research was faulty at best and falsified at worst. Sowell concludes the first chapter of his book with examples of intellectuals whose theories were proven wrong, yet their reputations were enhanced. Lest on thinks that this book is simply an anti-intellectual diatribe, it is the opposite. Sowell is one of those intellectuals who combine other attributes that culminate in wisdom. His later chapters enter into the areas of law, war, economics and social visions and I hope to comment on them in due time.