Book Review
Bad Ideas & Their Consequences
Intellectuals and Society by Thomas Sowell
Basic Books, 2009
(398 pages, $29.95, hardcover)
reviewed by J. Daryl Charles
Thomas Sowell’s Intellectuals and Society is a timely and penetrating critique of the “experts” responsible for creating and maintaining the dominating stream of modern cultural ideology. These experts are worthy of intense scrutiny and a calling-to-account because their work is instrumental in creating a climate of opinion in which issues of the day are not only debated but also acted upon by those possessing political power. “Whole nations have already been put at risk and indeed led into disaster” by “a climate of opinion to which the intelligentsia have made major contributions,” writes Sowell. Classic—and at times tragic—examples of these contributions for Sowell are Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, and John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice.
The Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and one of the most trenchant social critics of our time, Sowell is one of the few who could have written the book under review here, at least without the stain of hubris. The breadth of scholarship needed for such an undertaking is immense, while its ideological component requires both an ability to discern the myriad root assumptions that fuel the cultural Zeitgeist and a sure-footed commitment to what T. S. Eliot called “the permanent things.”
Filtered Reality
Sowell observes that constraints that apply in most realms of life do not seem to apply to intellectuals. Many, if not most, of them operate under the implicit assumption that knowledge is concentrated among themselves, and that, for the betterment of society, decision-making power should be distributed only within their narrow band of knowledge-elites. Such thinking typically leads them to dismiss more practical points of view developed from firsthand knowledge. These are held in disdain and called simplistic, unsophisticated, bigoted, or stereotypical.
The cultural influence of this knowledge-elite, disseminated by a servile media, is exercised through vigorous efforts to filter reality by attacking or undermining the concept of objective truth. In service to an “optional” portrait of reality, these elites filter out information that is contrary to their perception of how the world ought to be.
Intellectuals, Sowell reminds his readers, do not simply have a series of isolated opinions on varied subjects. Rather, behind their opinions lodges an overarching conception of the world, i.e., a social vision. He notes that it is not necessary to lie outright in order to deceive. Selectively reporting the facts and adducing atypical samples, or suppressing certain facts altogether, all the while cleansing and transforming language of inconvenient meanings or connotations, can achieve the same results.
Social Arrangements
Sowell embraces a “tragic vision” of the human condition, informed by a moral realism that reckons the flaws of human beings at full value. The contrasting vision, which is by no means new, views human beings as perfectible, and assumes that its “problems” are to be “solved.” According to the tragic vision, however, civilization requires great and constant effort merely to be preserved, because barbarism is always at the gates. The two visions differ radically not only in how they understand human nature but also in what is owed individuals by society through its social arrangements (e.g., “rights,” “social justice,” and respect for personal preferences).
In addition to maintaining their hegemony as cultural gatekeepers through the dissemination of knowledge, intellectuals realize that economics and law are strategic to the implementation of their social vision. A vast project of income distribution (as opposed to wealth creation), which is necessarily implemented and sustained by governmental intervention, is advanced by the creation of a compelling vision of “classes,” “disparities,” and “inequities” that are said to plague society.
J. Daryl Charles is the Acton Institute Affiliated Scholar in Theology & Ethics. He is the author or editor of twenty books, including Retrieving the Natural Law (2008), Natural Law and Religious Freedom (2018), and, most recently, Just War and Christian Traditions (forthcoming). He is also co-editor of Abraham Kuyper, Common Grace: God's Gifts for a Fallen World, Volume 3 (2020). He is a contributing editor to Touchstone.
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