Knowledge And Decisions

The coherence of a vision may derive from an accurate depiction of a coherent set of relationships empirically observed in the real world, or from the deduction of various conclusions from a given set of premises without much regard to observed facts. As noted in earlier chapters, many political policies are neither based on hard evidence as to causation nor monitor hard evidence on subsequent effects, and especially not negative effects. Antitrust laws, schools busing, rent control, and minimum wage laws, are all based on their consonance with a general vision of the social process, rather than on empirical tests of their positive and negative effects. That crime is caused by poverty and/or discrimination is also part of the same vision, but the empirical evidence is hardly overwhelming, or even unambiguous, since violent crime declined in the 1930s¹⁸⁵ during the greatest depression in history and skyrocketed during the affluent 1960s. In England, the crime rate rose as unemployment was reduced to the vanishing point. What Earl Warren called “our disturbed society”¹⁸⁶ had a downwardly trending urban murder rate for about twenty years until the 1960s, when it suddenly doubled in less than a decade, as the Warren Court changed the rules of criminal justice. Sex education in the public schools was another part of the same social vision, and was promoted as a means of reducing teenage pregnancy and venereal disease — but no reconsideration of its wisdom or effectiveness has been made in the light of steep increases in both. The percentage of the public disavowing sex education in the public schools has increased,¹⁸⁷ but among intellectuals there is no such reconsideration in the light of evidence. Public support of the death penalty, which was declining prior to the increase in the murder rate in the 1960s, rose again as the murder rate rose. Again, this suggests a public more responsive to empirical evidence than intellectuals — i.e., less ideological. A critic has said of liberal intellectuals that their responses to public issues “are as predictable as the salivation of Pavlovian dogs” and can be predicted “with the same comforting assurance with which you expect the sun to rise tomorrow.”¹⁸⁸ The data show this to be an overstatement — but not otherwise an incorrect statement.

If the existence of the intellectual vision raises questions about whether it is a product of intellectual processes or of intellectuals’ occupational self-interest, the specific contents of the prevailing intellectual vision raise the same question even more sharply. These may be summarized, and to some extent simplified, as follows:

1. There is vast unhappiness (“social problems”) caused by other elites with whom intellectual elites are competing — notably businessmen, the military, and politicians.

2. Those who are empirically less fortunate are morally and causally “victims” of those competing elites, and their salvation lies in more utilization of the services of intellectuals as “educators” (literally or figuratively), as designers of programs (or societies), and as political leaders and decision-making surrogates.

3. Articulated rationality — the occupational characteristic of intellectuals — is the best mode of social decision making.

4. Existing knowledge — whether scattered in fragments through society or collected together in traditions, the Constitution, etc. — is inadequate for decision making, so that “solving” the society’s “problems” depends on the specific fragment of knowledge held by intellectuals.

Egocentric visions of the world do not imply deliberate attempts at deception and self-aggrandizement. The mechanisms of human rationalization are too complex for any attempt here to say how such views emerged. It is enough for present purposes that such views of social organization are concentrated among intellectuals, and the question is how these views compare with ascertainable facts.