Knowledge And Decisions

Political intellectuals attempt to supersede not only political processes but also cognitive processes. Although they may specialize in cognitive skills, the impersonal or “objective” nature of this skill makes it politically unreliable at any given juncture. What is far more reliable is to use the intellectuals’ general superiority in cognitive matters as a reason for dismissing — rather than arguing with — opposing views on a particular matter. Terman did not in any substantive sense argue with Walter Lippman over the issue of racially innate intelligence. Rather he used his position as an “expert” in the field to dismiss Lippman’s ideas as “sentiment and opinion,” contrasted with his own “quantitative methods” — which he referred to but in no way exhibited. Keynes, in a book devoted to comparing capitalism and communism, sweepingly dismissed Marxism as a doctrine “which I know to be not only scientifically erroneous but without interest or application for the modern world²²⁴ — without ever telling us why it was wrong, or even offering a hint. James Baldwin similarly asserted that Americans are “the most dishonorable and violent people in the world,”²²⁵ without any reference to others whose claim to that title included the wholesale extermination of more people than were denied civil rights in the United States. More generally, intellectuals’ personal preferences and beliefs tend to become axioms rather than hypotheses. The notion that minority progress can only occur through governmental intervention is a typical such axiom — even though (1) low-income American Indians have long had much government involvement, while more financially successful groups such as Orientals and Jews have had little government involvement in their rise from poverty to affluence, (2) the very existence of northern urban black communities is due almost exclusively to private transfers of property through market mechanisms, and (3) the education of black youngsters was initially almost solely nongovernmental (or even antigovernmental, in defiance of laws against their education in the antebellum South), and it was 1916 before the number of black youngsters educated in public high schools equalled the number educated privately.²²⁶ The point is not that these particular facts are determining as far as the relative importance of contemporary political and nonpolitical alternatives. Rather, the point is that opposite facts have been arbitrarily postulated or implicitly assumed, as if they were determining.

Intellectuals’ attempts to depict the less fortunate as victims of some competing elite — especially businessmen — is likewise seldom subject to any empirical test or even specification of alternative hypotheses. If low-paid workers were exploited, for example, we might expect to find their employers unusually prosperous rather than finding, as we generally do, high rates of bankruptcy among low-wage firms. The point is not that this particular test has not been used, but that the whole discussion avoided any test, and relied instead on axioms. It is ideological rather than cognitive thinking: “When we discover that certain ideas about man, history and society seem, to those who believe in them, to be either self-evident or so manifestly correct that opposing them is a mark of stupidity or malice, then we may be fairly sure we are dealing with an ideology and ideological thinking.”²²⁷

The intellectual vision of victimhood makes the Third World the source of the wealth of the industrial countries, when in fact the bulk of American investments, for example, are in other industrial countries rather than the poorer nations. The rhetoric of victimhood extends even to those who prosper from so-called “underground” publications which are sold openly everywhere, including in government buildings. Often the nonempirical assertions assume the camouflage of empirical statements by the use of modifying words which reduce their meaningfulness “immeasureably,” “invariably,” “profoundly,” etc. — which simply “indicates that the writer has no data, has done no research, and has merely transmuted perceptions into ‘facts.’”²²⁸

Sometimes this transmuting of notions into “facts” includes an exaggeration of the advancement of foreign totalitarians rather than a denigration of that of democratic nations. For example, the supposed economic triumphs of the Bolsheviks are often based on the belief that czarist Russia had advanced unusually slowly, when in fact it had become one of the fastest growing economies in Europe. The military might of the U.S.S.R. is not proportional to its economic development, but to the ability of its government to appropriate a higher share of its output for military purposes.