Intellectual Authority

In many ways this episode illustrates far more general characteristics of intellectual-political "relevance": (1) the casual ease with which vast expansions of the amount and scope of government power were called for by intellectuals to be used against their fellow citizens and fellow human beings, for purposes of implementing the intellectuals' vision, (2) the automatic presumption that differences between the current views of the relevant intellectuals ("experts") and the views of others reflect only the misguided ignorance of the latter, who are to be either "educated," dismissed, or discredited, rather than being argued with directly in terms of cognitive substance (that is, the intellectual process was involved primarily in giving one side sufficient reputation not to have to engage in it with non-"experts"), (3) the confidence with which predictions were made, without reference to any prior record of correct predictions nor to any monitoring processes to confirm the future validity of current predictions, (4) the moral as well as intellectual superiority that accompanied the implicit faith that the current views of the "experts" represented the objective, inescapable conclusions of scientific evidence and logic, and their direct applicability for the public good, rather than either the vogues or the professional self-interest of these "experts," and (5) a focus on determining the most likely alternative conclusions rather than whether any of the conclusions had sufficient basis to go beyond tentative cognitive results to sweeping policy prescription. It illustrates a general characteristic of socially and politically "relevant" intellectual activity—an unwillingness or inability to say, "we don't know," or even to admit that conclusions are tentative. Such admissions would be wholly consonant with intellectual processes but not with the interests of intellectuals as a social class. Politicians often proceed as if intellectuals have no self-interests involved but act solely on cognitive bases or in the policy interest of society at large. —Thomas Sowell, Knowledge and Decisions, 1980, writing of the American eugenics of the 1920s.