Knowledge And Decisions

The dogmatic conclusions about racial inferiority which reigned supreme among “experts” in the 1910s and 1920s were replaced with equally dogmatic conclusions about scientific proof of racial equality in the same field by the 1940s and 1950s. By the 1960s official government agencies could declare it “demonstrable” — without demonstration — that “the talent pool in any one ethnic group is substantially the same as that in any other ethnic group.”¹³³ According to the new dogma, “Intellectual potential is distributed among Negro infants in the same proportion and pattern as among Icelanders or Chinese, or any other group.”¹³⁴ These statements may someday be shown to be true, but that is wholly different from claiming that any such evidence or proof exists today. Both in the earlier and the later dogmatism, the cognitive question is simply not open for discussion, and the ideologically preferred position becomes a moral touchstone rather than a tentative cognitive conclusion. Unlike the earlier period, the present dogmatism has some challenge within the profession — notably by Arthur R. Jensen¹³⁵ — but the efforts to discredit his conclusions (“racist”) rather than confront his analysis, and sometimes to physically prevent his speaking,¹³⁶ indicate that the new dogma is no more willing to treat issues according to intellectual processes than was the old. It is as if beliefs in the psychological field of mental testing have gone through the phases of adolescent fads — fiercely obligatory while in vogue and wholly beyond consideration once the vogue has passed. At least one of the leaders of the older dogmatism — Carl Brigham — later soberly recanted, after the vogue had passed, repudiating the reasoning of the earlier studies and declaring that his own earlier conclusions were “without foundation.”¹³⁷ Not mistaken, exaggerated, or inconsistent, but without foundation.

Both phases of the innate intelligence controversy illustrate a more 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. The distinction must be insisted upon, in part because even otherwise worldly thinkers 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. Even Voltaire could naively say: “The philosophers having no particular interest to defend, can only speak up in favor of reason and the public interest.”¹³⁸ That belief — in their own minds or in the minds of others — is itself one of their greatest assets in furthering their own self-interests under protective coloration.

POWER

Intellectuals have for centuries promoted the abrogation of ordinary people’s freedom, and romanticized despotism. The shocking record of Western intellectuals glorifying Stalinism in the 1930s was no isolated aberration.