Knowledge And Decisions

Because the great majority of intellectuals are liberal, it is essentially liberals who define what is meant by the term “conservative.” In the liberal vision, conservatives are people who want to either preserve the status quo or go back to some earlier and “simpler” times. However politically effective such conceptions may be, in putting alternatives out of court, there are great cognitive difficulties with such characterizations. For example, there is not a speck of evidence that earlier times were in fact “simpler,” though of course our knowledge of such times may be cruder. Moreover, the status quo in the United States and throughout much of Western Europe is a liberal-left status quo, entrenched for at least a generation. Alternatives to this are arbitrarily called “going back,” even when these alternatives refer to social arrangements that have never existed (the monetary proposals of Chicago economists, for example), while proposals to continue or accelerate existing political-economic trends are called “innovative” or even “radical.” Conservers of liberal or socialist institutions are never called by the pejorative term, “conservative.” Neither are those who espouse the ideals, or repeat the very phrases, of 1789 France. In the broad sweep of history, the systemic advantages of decentralized decision making are a far more recent conception than the idea that salvation lies in concentrating power in the hands of the right people with the right principles. Adam Smith came two thousand years after Plato, but contemporary versions of the philosopher-king approach are considered new and revolutionary, while contemporary versions of systemic decentralization are considered “outmoded.” Such expressions are themselves part of a vision in which ideas may be judged temporally rather than cognitively — what was adequate to older and simpler times being inadequate for the complexities of modern life.

The characteristics of the intellectual vision are strikingly similar to the characteristics of totalitarian ideology — especially the localization of evil and of wisdom, and psychic identification with the interests of great masses, whose actual preferences are ignored in favor of the overriding preferences of intellectuals. It is consistent with this that intellectuals have supported and indeed spearheaded the movement toward a centralization of political power in democratic nations and have apologized for foreign despotisms and totalitarianisms which featured like-minded people. Democratic traditions may create either internal ideological conflicts or an external pragmatic need to rhetorically paper over the totalitarian thrust of the intellectual vision. Here intellectual processes — definitional clarity, logical consistency, canons of evidence — are often sacrificed to the intellectual vision or the self-interest of the intellectual class. For example, antidemocratic processes may be described by democratic rhetoric as “participation” or “public” representation. Presumption may be substituted for evidence — past, present, or future — as in numerous arguments that the national I.Q. was declining, or existing evidence may be resolutely disregarded, as in claims that crime rates reflect social “root causes,” or that “innovative” educational methods are more effective, or that sex education reduces the incidence of teenage pregnancy and venereal disease. In short, there is little to suggest that intellectuals’ political positions reflect the intellectual process, and much to suggest that their positions reflect a vision and a set of interests peculiar to the intellectual class.

SUMMARY: EMBATTLED FREEDOM

Freedom has always been embattled, where it has not been wholly crushed. The desire for freedom and for its opposite, power, are as universal as any human attributes. The nuclear age has added a new dimension to the struggle between them. So too has the rise to prominence of intellectuals as a social class with growing political aspirations, influence and/or dominance.