Knowledge And Decisions

This is nowhere better illustrated than in John Rawls’ Justice, which speaks of having a society somehow “arrange”⁸⁵ social results according to a given conception of justice — the bland and innocuous word “arrange” covering a pervasive exercise of power necessary to supersede innumerable individual decisions throughout the society by sufficient force or threat of force to make people stop doing what they want to do and do instead what some given principle imposes. Even Rawls’ principle of restricting “economic and social inequalities to those in everyone’s interests”⁸⁶ requires forcible intervention in all transactions, quite aside from the difficulties of the principle as a principle. On a sinking ship with fewer life preservers than passengers, the only just solution is for everyone to drown. Yet virtually anyone would prefer to save lives, even if those saved had no more just claim to such preference than anyone else. This example is extreme only in the starkness of the alternatives. More generally, social decisions are not a zero-sum process, so the “distribution” of benefits (“justice”) cannot be categorically more important than the benefits themselves, as Rawls’ central thesis suggests. There must be some prior value to the things distributed in order to have their distribution mean anything. No one cares if we each leave the beach with different numbers of grains of sand in our hair.

THE POLITICAL ROLE OF INTELLECTUALS

One of the fundamental problems in any analysis of intellectuals is to define the group in such a way as to distinguish a class of people from a qualitative judgment about cognitive activity. Intellectuals will be defined here as the social class of persons whose economic output consists of generalized ideas, and whose economic rewards come from the transmission of those generalized ideas. This in no way implies any qualitative cognitive judgment concerning the originality, creativity, intelligence, or authenticity of the ideas transmitted. Intellectuals are simply defined in a sociological sense, and a transmitter of shallow, confused, or wholly unsubstantiated ideas is as much of an intellectual in this sense as Einstein. It is an occupational description. Just as an ineffective, corrupt, or otherwise counterproductive policeman is still regarded as having the same occupational duties and authority as the finest policeman on the force, so the inept or confused intellectuals cannot be arbitrarily reclassified as a “pseudo-intellectual” in an occupational sense, however much he might deserve that classification in a qualitative cognitive sense. Qualitative questions about the intellectual process are another matter entirely, and will also be considered — but separately.

The distinction between the intellectual class and the intellectual process is crucial. One might, for example, be anti-intellectual in the sense of opposing the social views of that particular class of people, and yet be very intellectual in the sense of having exacting standards in the cognitive process. Conversely, a totalitarian dictator might be anti-intellectual in the sense of disdaining and discrediting cognitive processes that would otherwise undermine the ideological mind conditioning that is central to totalitarianism, and yet provide unprecedented political power and/or economic rewards to those intellectuals willing to serve the regime. Lysenko achieved a degree of prominence and dominance under Stalin that no contemporary geneticist could achieve in a free society.

The hoped-for results of the intellectual occupation — creativity, objectivity, authenticated knowledge, or penetrating intelligence — cannot be incorporated into the very definition of the occupation. Whether or to what degree they in fact exist in the occupation are empirical questions. One definition of intellectuals is that they are “professional second-hand dealers in ideas”⁸⁷ — incorporating a negative assessment of their creativity in the very definition. Truly creative intellectuals may in fact be rare, but empirical results of whatever sort do not belong in the definition itself. Intellectuals may choose to believe that they are purveyors of knowledge, but there is no reason to assume that the bulk of what they say or write consists of ideas sufficiently authenticated in either empirical or analytic terms to qualify as “knowledge.” Such a general assumption would itself be cognitively unsubstantiated, and (as social policy) politically dangerous.