Knowledge And Decisions

Articulated rationality as a process and the delegation of decision making to “experts” have become the central features of the intellectuals’ vision of political and social decision making. Where there is no compellingly articulated rationality, then there is irrationality, from this viewpoint. The experiential, systemic, traditional, or other forms of authentication are not even considered. Thus “Americans have an irrational commitment to private ownership”²²⁹ to which they are “addicted”²³⁰ and social goals are built into the very definition of “rational” policy,²³¹ in the approach of two well-known scholars who unsurprisingly declare: “Delegation to experts has become an indispensable aid to rational calculation in modern life.”²³² To them bureaucracy “is a method for bringing scientific judgments to bear on policy decisions,”²³³ and a “triumph for the deliberate, calculated, conscious attempt to adapt means to ends in the most rational manner.”²³⁴ Like Max Weber’s assertion of the “indubitable technical superiority” of bureaucracy²³⁵ and Thorstein Veblen’s assertions of the supposed efficiency of a technocratic economy,²³⁶ this argument ignores the fact that there is no such thing as efficiency independent of values. Processes are efficient or inefficient at reaching specified values — e.g., an engine in moving a car forward, rather than dissipating its power in random shaking. No amount of bureaucratic or technological expertise can produce “efficiency” by numerous and disparate individual standards, however much they may facilitate the substitution of other standards by “experts” to whom power has been delegated.

Perhaps the most important policy question is not how or why intellectuals have sought power but how and why others have granted them as much power and influence as they have. It has seldom been because of any demonstrated success. Crime rates have soared as the theories of criminologists were put into practice; educational test scores have plummeted as new educational theories were tried. Indeed, no small part of the intellectuals’ achievement has been in keeping empirical verification processes off the agenda. Moreover, those who are more essentially intellectual in occupation — primarily producers of ideas — have been both more avid and more favored in power terms than those who produce tangible benefits in verifiable form. It is not the agronomists, physicians, or engineers who have risen to power, but the sociologists, psychologists, and legal theorists. It is the latter groups who have transformed the political and social landscape of the United States and much of the Western world. Not only is much of their cognitive output inherently unverifiable empirically; they have by various definitions and axiomatic procedures made their output even less susceptible of authentication than it would be otherwise. The jargon alone in these fields makes their substance largely inaccessible to outsiders. Transitionism explains away all disastrous consequences as the short-run price for a long-run triumph. They have conquered by faith rather than works. This is hardly surprising in the light of similar achievements by religious intellectuals who preceded them by centuries. Whatever has made human beings eager to hear those who claim to know the future has worked for modern as well as ancient intellectuals.