Monday.....Miscellaneous.....Intellectuals and Society (5)

The BBC reported that U.S. President Barack Obama is planning "dramatic reductions" in the country's nuclear arsenal. According to the article, this will be done to prevent the spread of atomic weapons. Also according to the article, the world needs powerful evidence that the US is taking its disarmament responsibilities seriously. Medvedev is pleased! This is lunacy of the intellectual. I have been reviewing, chapter by chapter, Thomas Sowell's new book Intellectuals And Society and today's offering is Optional Reality in the Media and Academia. The vision of the anointed is how Sowell describes the ambitions of these people. He quotes J. A. Schumpeter in that the first thing a man will do for his ideals is lie. This is what we saw in the global warming fiasco but Sowell points out that filtering does just as good a job. He takes on the media in this chapter but in fact there are many books that have recently taken the media to task. Check out Bernie Goldberg's books on this as they are written through the eyes of an insider. Sowell points out various methods that might be used; they (the media) often simply feature the stories they want to feature. They report only what they want to report. They compare only groups in ways that further their cause. They sanitize when necessary. They suppress facts when necessary. They omit data if they find it helpful to do so. For instance, we have all heard how Britain has gun laws and lower gun crimes but we are never told that countries like Russia or Brazil have even tougher gun laws and higher murder rates. They filter things like this out. Sowell then zooms in on what he calls the creation of fictitious people and gives Herbert Hoover as an example of a generous and caring individual whose character was distorted during his presidency and that maligned reputation as a do-nothing president lasted for decades and persists even today. The concept of a non-nuclear world is utterly ridiculous and the failure to see how those who do not like us, beat this drum solely to get us to lower our defenses, is suicidal. Only the intellectual elite who are so enamored with their own personal achievements that they have long since let common sense drift away in the fog of relativity, could calmly and confidently come up with such peace initiatives. Previous to this book I thought that Mark Levin's Liberty and Tyranny was the most important political science book to be read but Sowell tackles a topic that has to be brought out in the open, that being a class of intellectuals in America who take short cuts in stead of doing hard work and even fudge those statistics and yet stand before us with no humility claiming to be of such advanced thinking that their ruling of us should be welcomed. I want to repeat a few sentences of Sowell in the last part of this chapter for they are profound; A sense of superiority is not an incidental happenstance, for superiority has been essential to getting intellectuals where they are. They are in fact often very superior within the narrow band of human concerns with which they deal. But so too are not only chess grandmasters and musical prodigies but also computer software engineers, professional athletes and people in many mundane occupations whose complexities can only be appreciated by those who have had to master to master them. (Here is the key to this discourse) The fatal misstep of many among the intelligentsia is in generalizing from their mastery of a certain kind of knowledge to a general wisdom in the affairs of the world. And again a few sentences later; Many intellectuals are so preoccupied with the notion that their own special knowledge exceeds the average special knowledge of millions of other people that they overlook the often far more consequential fact that their mundane knowledge is not even one-tenth of the total mundane knowledge of those millions.