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Thomas Sowell is high on my list of respected and courageous men. A black man willing to stand up to the left-wing “Uncle Tom” insanity makes him a profile in courage.
I’ve read most of his books and will be transferring my reviews of them to Substack... "sometime."
His description of the purpose of Intellectuals and Society:
This book is written for those readers who are willing to join with me in a search for some understanding of a distinct segment of the population whose activities can have, and have had, momentous implications for nations and civilizations.
Who are the “intellectuals?”
'Intellectuals' refers to an occupational category, people whose occupations deal primarily with ideas—writers, academics, and the like.
I discovered this book as I was reading Richard Posner’s Public Intellectuals. I much prefer Sowell’s book for having more commentary on the ancient history of intellectuals, as well as a wider scope on the effects of public intellectuals in our age of instant, mass communication—to both wide and narrow audiences.
What today's public intellectuals often end up doing is validating the worldview of the people who follow them because thir worldview is validated by the intellectual. I suspect that is often their intent as they realize that in our increasingly disconnected virtual existence (seeing our food coming from the supermarket rather than farms, our electricity coming from a plug rather than a complex grid, etc.), it makes sense for the producer of intellectual goods to provide content that is popular, and thus more lucrative.
"Give the people what they want” … say more sugar, less exercise, for example, can be harmful.
Intellectuals give people who have the handicap of poverty the further handicap of a sense of victimhood.
Some terms from Sowell’s works that need to be understood:
- The Anointed — “the elite,” especially those who can boast impressive academic credentials, often not in the area they are commenting on.
- The Tragic Vision — “a vision of trade-offs, rather than solutions, and a vision of wisdom distilled from the experiences of the many, rather than the brilliance of a few.”
- The Vision of the Anointed — “To those with the vision of the anointed, it is such evils as poverty, crime, war, and injustice which require explanation. To those with the tragic vision, however, it is prosperity, law, peace, and such justice as we have achieved, which require not only explanation but constant efforts, trade-offs, and sacrifices, just to maintain them at their existing levels, much less promote their enhancement over time."
Intellectuals work in abstractions rather than reality. They tend to believe that utopia is rather easily reachable if the masses would just follow their vision. As the managerial and technical higher-ups from my IBM career often thought, many difficult new operating system features were just a SMOP (Small Matter of Programming). As I moved from being an actual programmer to being a “Software Architect,” I too fell prey to such illusions. Far too easy to see colored boxes on a whiteboard with some simple descriptions of function as something easily realized in working software. It is rarely so.
The book is excellent, well written, and profusely sourced. I recommend it for those with some reading endurance. For the rest, it may be advisable to go to some of his other works. A Conflict of Visions would be a good choice.
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Discussion (7)
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Intellectuals work in abstractions rather than reality…
Here is my opinion on that. I think that…
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@MarkCamp
I believe that you are adding a lot of unintended meaning to a simple statement.
Yes, we as humans ONLY deal in abstractions. These words are abstractions, vision is a mentally created abstraction of a combination of a "mental map" of what we "see" with a very limited input of data from optic nerve that is used by the brain to calculate "what changed". We are always living a few milliseconds in the past.
This could engender a long discussion, but I'm not sure it needs to. I believe the disconnect is in failing appreciate levels of abstraction.
"The map is not the territory" is a common statement on the inadequacies of abstractions at significant temporal remove from reality. A lot of things may have changed since the map was produced. It may also be the case that the map was created at a 1:500,000 scale, when you expected a 1:24,000 scale which is typical for a US highway map.
This DOES NOT say that maps, abstractions, etc. are not useful, it just says that it is important to know which is being used, at what level of remove from the "territory", and what are the likely outcomes of using a certain abstraction/model to guide our actions. Testing the map against the territory tells us if the map is an accurate abstraction from the territory.
Your point number 3 seems a reaction to the norms of learning a language, rules of how to interact with your parents, kids on the playground, etc. which is a theme of the book.
Sowell covers is how abstract "cultural norms" affect child development. A Chinese child may be raised in a home with two parents, a high value on respecting parents, grandparents, teachers, culture, learning, achievement, etc.
An inner-city Black child may be raised in a single parent home with little or no connection to extended family, education being seen as "acting white", drug use being a social norm, Blacks being oppressed (thus, why try?) etc.
To decide which child is "brainwashed" depends on one's worldview, especially since in America today, there are very few (any?) "Preferred cultural norms" beyond those of many "tribes". The old Christian set of norms are considered by many to be "brainwashing" today.
Sowell generally does not make a value judgement on what acculturation / education / "brainwashing" is preferable, only that "the anointed" often DO have judgements on which abstract models are "better" -- even though when those models are tested in reality, they often have the opposite effect that the intellectuals claim they will.
For example, pouring more money into schools with the same unions that disconnect results from teacher or administrator performance often LOWERS the objectively measured scores rather than raising them as the abstract view of "more money = better results" assumes.
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I am all for "abstract thinking." I think I do it quite well. One of the skills that served me well in my career (corporate lawyer in intellectual property (inventions and technology)) was my ability to see patterns and parallels. My daughter has similar capabilities (she is a mathematician who works in data analytics for a financial services company). I get frustrated when people fail to see patterns or similarities that to me are quite apparent.
But without a connection to the "real world" abstract thinkers can sometimes forget that not all reality follows the abstract patterns we think we see. I was privileged during my career always to have my office in a company facility that included engineering and manufacturing operations, and I was always working with engineers and scientists who were close to the product going out the door. I enjoyed walking around the plant dodging forklifts and watching trucks being loaded at the dock, and working with engineers who could take me onto (or at least near in the case of semiconductor manufacturing) the factory floor.
At one of those companies I encountered the product (electrical) that, according to the theories applied to the circuit diagram, should not work. But work it did. Many companies have such a product.
At a different company, I was giving a talk to a bunch of higher-up lawyers at corporate headquarters (300 miles from any engineering or manufacturing facility), and realized from their questions that none of them had ever actually touched the product our customers bought, and had no idea of the practical aspects of how the company made money from those products. To them all those products were words on a brochure or data cells on a spreadsheet. No wonder the requests I got from corporate headquarters often made no sense. They were stuck in an entirely abstract world with no way to connect the abstract ideas represented by words on a brochure and numbers on a spreadsheet translated to a world of physical products with human customers who used those physical products.
I have for the last several years considered that disconnect between those who work in nothing but the abstract and those who apply the abstract to the real world to explain some of the nonsense I saw in the town in which our daughter and son-in-law live. The town in which they live is dominated by a research lab whose only real customer is the U.S. federal government. The lab's core expertise is nuclear weapons, though many of the techniques they develop for use in connection with nuclear weapons can be used with other things. So they are expanding their reach. The town has an incredibly high rate of "education." Something like 25% of the town's adult population has a PhD in some field of science or engineering (including our son-in-law). But the residents of the town adopt some really bizarre views on things. Those bizarre views became more apparent during the Covid pandemic. Mrs. Tabby and I attribute the holding bizarre views to the residents' (lab employees) immersion in an almost entirely theoretical world of mathematical equations, chemical formulae, and theoretical physics, all many steps away from the actual material world. We sense a lot of "Well, this is what the theory says should work, so we're going to act on that, despite any "real world" evidence to the contrary."
Especially when looking at abstract ideas that affect human beings, human beings often act quite differently from what abstract theory might predict. So better to maintain some humility and some connection with real people in the real world to check your abstract idea than to assume always that the abstract idea must work in the real world because it makes so much sense.
So I greatly value abstract thinking. But it is critical that abstract thinking look at least on occasion on the "real world"
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The statement that I’m responding to is this:
I take statement to imply that a person can try to find the true answer to a question about events taking place at points in time (in other words, a question about reality, as opposed to a question about logic/mathematics) without working with mental categorical laws (in other words, without working with abstractions).
Did you not mean to imply that?
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