Truth Really Matters

We live in a nasty, uncivil culture, don’t we?  Reason, logic, and evidence have become irrelevant in public policy, subordinated to whatever it takes to gain and to hold power.  If you have been slammed by cancel culture, there is no point in apologizing for your supposed offense – forgiveness is not available.

We find ourselves, perhaps, at the end of cultural history, where critical theory, including specific branches like critical race theory, permeate the educational, entertainment, political, and even business power centers.  Critical theory, of course, is all about tearing down long-held principles and institutions, including the family, rule by law, freedom of speech, sexual morality, and everything associated with biblical Christianity.

Karl Marx laid much groundwork for the present chaos.  This was his doctrine for the use of criticism:  “Its essential sentiment is indignation; its essential activity is denunciation.”  How enthusiastically has our present generation embraced this doctrine!  Why go to the trouble of weaving evidence and logic to make your point when you can simply vilify and cancel those you disagree with?  The lockdowns and vaccine mandates in recent years were well-greased with indignation and denunciation.  This is how tyranny works.

Tyrants, therefore, need not be intelligent, but merely find it useful to be unconstrained by anything resembling biblical morality.  The elites know best, so whatever it takes to control the masses, that’s good.  Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the 18^th century French ‘intellectual,’ likened the masses of the people to “a stupid, pusillanimous invalid.”  Karl Marx insisted, “The working class is revolutionary or it is nothing.”  Namely, they only mattered if they fulfilled his communist vision.  George Bernard Shaw suggested the working classes were “detestable people” who “have no right to live.”  Recall that Hillary Clinton called us “deplorables.”

Mussolini, a darling of the left and its ‘intellectuals’ until well into the 1930s, opined, “The mass will simply follow and submit.”  Only after Mussolini invaded Ethiopia and teamed up with Adolf Hitler, did the left disavow Mussolini and labeled him as on “the right.”

These last few examples are cited by Thomas Sowell in his wonderful 2011 book, Intellectuals and Society.  Here’s a hint:  he doesn’t like intellectuals.  He applies the T.S. Eliot quote:  “Half of the harm that is done in the world is due to people who want to feel important.  They don’t mean to do harm – but the harm does not interest them.  Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.”

Sowell describes the consequences of the environmental crusade to outlaw use of DDT because of the potential danger to the eggs of some songbirds.  During the 1940s, 50s, and early 60s, DDT had drastically reduced the mosquito populations that fostered malaria.  Banning DDT then produced a resurgence of malaria that cost millions of lives, “even in countries where the disease had been all but eradicated.  Rachel Carson may have been responsible for more deaths of human beings than anyone without an army.  Yet she remains a revered figure among environmental crusaders.”

What is an intellectual?  Sowell defines this as someone whose occupation deals primarily with ideas – “writers, academics, and the like.”  Not brain surgeons or engineers, despite the training and demanding mental skills involved.  Surgeons, engineers, physicists, and other such professionals apply their mental skills to discover how things work, or to actually make things work.  Intellectuals don’t have to live with the consequences of the ideas they promote.

Intellectuals, notes Sowell, desire power regardless of how little knowledge or accomplishment they can demonstrate.  Effectively, they want to transfer decision-making from the masses to themselves.  Recent examples include our government’s war on fossil fuels, mandates to replace ICEs with EVs, and establishing speech codes on campuses and within workplaces.  An impressive historical example Sowell cites is the case of the Soviet Union’s central planners, who set prices for 24 million goods and services, without any possible understanding of the relative scarcities or costs.  While impossible for central planners to avoid disasters in exercising such authority, the task is quite manageable for market economies in which millions of individuals are experts in tracking and evaluating the relatively few prices important to them.

In brief, the masses of a market economy are far wiser than the intellectuals at the top of a socialist scheme.

To be fair, Sowell admits, “Intellectuals are often extraordinary within their own specialties – but so too are chess grandmasters, musical prodigies, and many others.”  Yet these other ‘specialists’ would not dare to imagine that they should pontificate to or direct a whole society.

Sowell:  “Everything from economic central planning to environmentalism epitomizes the belief that third party elites know best and should be empowered to over-ride the decisions of others.”

Sowell relates the obvious when he writes that the most knowledgeable person on Earth has less that one percent of a society’s useful knowledge.  A member of the intellectual elite may have more knowledge per capita, which tempts some to demand the right to lead or to direct others.  But “the population at large may have vastly more total knowledge – in the mundane sense – than the elites, even if that knowledge is scattered in individually unimpressive fragments among vast numbers of people.”

The free market idea and its practice is akin to a vast analog computer, running ‘simulations’ continuously to discover what works best for billions of real people.  Free markets are quick, adaptable, resilient, and efficient.  Top-down planned economies run by arrogant intellectuals (forgive the redundancy) are not.

He mentions the particular arrogance of philosopher Simone deBeauvoir, who said, “No woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children.  Society should be totally different.  Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.”  I don’t know if deBeauvoir ever laid out the specifics on how to restructure families and societies and how that might work out.

The track record of intellectuals who have had their way is dismal indeed.   New and “innovative” and “exciting” educational theories in the 1960s resulted in substantially lower test scores despite much increased spending per student.  New theories on crime produced new crime waves.  (Consider in recent years how defund-the-police-and-replace-them-with-social-workers programs have destroyed urban America.)  For generations now, welfare policies supposedly intended to help black communities, have destroyed families and produced multi-generational dependence on the state.

Surgeons and engineers are judged by external standards, Sowell observes.  If the patient lives and recovers, the surgeon is good.  If the computer works efficiently or the satellite achieves orbit, the engineer is competent.  The intellectual, though – the leftist / Marxist pundit – has no external standard.  He is successful or esteemed if his fellow Marxists admire his ideas or phraseology.  If his writing is elegant or interesting, he is respected.  This was Lenin’s pedigree, by the way.  He only had a real job briefly, once in his early life.  He didn’t like it. But he loved to write progaganda rags and make speeches.

Vince Lombardi’s ideas about playing football were tested on the field.  If his teams had not won, his name would be unknown and his career would have been short.  Einstein’s ideas on relativity were not accepted based on plausibility or aesthetics.  They were validated in the laboratory.  But the ideas of Marx, Lenin, Hitler, and Mao “had enormous – and often lethal – impact on millions of people,” regardless of their evil or denial of reality or rejection by anyone with the freedom to do so.

Alternatively, the teachings of Jesus Christ have been tested and proven by the multitudes of those delivered from the bondage of sin, and the transformation of lives from selfishness and wickedness to virtue and benevolence.  Of course, biblical teachings are true because God wired reality and told us what truth is.  But Jesus also told us, “Ye shall know them by their fruits.”

Public policies across the spectrum are influenced or dictated by intellectuals who acquire power.  Pundits or politicians may express outrage at the number of shots fired by police in a confrontation with criminals, “even if many of these intellectuals have never fired a gun in their lives, much less faced life-and-death dangers requiring split-second decisions.”

A  New York City Police Dept. study found that half the shots fired by police miss completely . . . within a range of six feet!  From 50 to 75 feet, about the distance from 1^st base to 2^nd base on a Little League field, only 14% of shots hit the target.

An example from microeconomics on the cost of financial services in low-income neighborhoods:  Personal loans are often tied to short-term needs, facilitating “payday loan” businesses, which may charge $15 interest per $100 loaned . . . until payday.  On an annual basis, this interest rate is astronomical, prompting the intelligentsia to cry for an end to “exploitative” and “unconscionable” interest rates.  Accordingly, Oregon capped the annual interest rate on loans, and 75% of loan businesses closed down.  If you can charge only $1.50 for a 2-week loan of $100, you can’t make any profit, much less accept the risk of making such loans.  And so the “oppressed poor” don’t even have the opportunity for tide-over loans.

But the intellectuals feel good about themselves.

Socialists / communists tend to see economics as a zero-sum game.  Somebody has to decide how to divide the fixed pie.  But capitalism and free markets are about cooperation between capital and labor, with innovation to create wealth that would not exist otherwise.  Biblical teachings are completely consistent with the notions of private property, limited government, innovation derived from God’s gifts to individuals, and honest cooperation.

When I was a child in the 1950s and 60s, only the rich had color TVs, fat monstrosities that failed quickly; few had air conditioning, order Ivermectin none had the internet, MRIs, electric toothbrushes, smart phones, or tablets.  How did our modern tech world come to be?  Innovation, protection of intellectual property, cooperation between sources of capital and labor, and free markets were certainly essential to progress.

What is deemed poverty now in the West would have been considered prosperity, even opulence, to previous generations.  Communist nations, on the drastically other hand, simply do not work to reduce poverty; their goal is control – violently, if required, as it often is.

Sowell cites historian Paul Johnson who notes that violence often walks hand-in-hand with the intellectual elite.  Mussolini was popular with many intellectuals, and not just Italian ones.  Hitler was singularly successful on campus, drawing votes from students at a higher rate than from the general population.  Intellectuals were drawn frequently into the upper echelons of the Nazi Party.  Stalin, Mao, and Castro had legions of intellectual admirers.  The killing fields of Cambodia were sourced in a group of French intellectuals, including teachers, a professor, a civil servant, and an economist.  In recent times, American intellectuals were quite supportive of the violent riots fostered by BLM and ANTIFA.

Interventions by ‘intellectuals’ among politicians, judges, or bureaucrats to “insure fairness” typically harm or destroy enterprise.  For example, minimum wage laws usually produce higher unemployment rates and rent control laws reduce the available housing.  There are no personal consequences for the 3^rd party intellectuals who contrive simplistic policies on how the world ‘should be.’ People directly involved in free market transactions can more easily decide what they want at what price and that influences the sellers who must work to please those desires.

Sowell contrasts the “vision of the anointed” with the “tragic vision.”  Jean-Jacques Rousseau declared, “Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains.”  Accordingly, the  problems in society are solvable by the morally anointed intellectual elites.  Sowell cites Thucydides on the tragic vision of human nature . . . “a human race that escaped chaos and barbarism by preserving with difficulty a thin layer of civilization,” based on “moderation and prudence” derived from experience.

I’d rather take the biblical position that we live in a sinfully fallen world and are accountable to God and His laws.  Accordingly, our institutions and policies should account for man’s sinfulness / selfishness / etc., by dispersing power and rewarding virtue.  The founding fathers were quite mindful of the biblical worldview when they established a tripartite government, along with state / federal distinctives, with a Constitution that constrained the power of government and rulers in vital ways.

Sowell writes that in the tragic vision, social and legal contrivances seek to restrict bad behavior, but these restrictions themselves cause a certain amount of unhappiness.  Professor Richard A. Epstein (U. of Chicago):  “The study of human institutions is always a search for the most tolerable imperfections.”

In the tragic vision public policymaking always requires tradeoffs.  In the anointed vision, man is perfectable and can solve all of his problems.  (Replace police with social workers and decline to prosecute criminals because ‘man’ is good at heart and you will get more crime, lots more crime.)

One result is a perverted moral stance from the two camps.  Joseph Epstein (NY Times Magazine, 1985):  “Disagree with someone on the right and he is likely to think you obtuse, wrong, foolish, a dope.  Disagree with someone on the left and he is more likely to think you selfish, a sell-out, insensitive, possibly evil.”

It is ironic that a generation ago, the postmodern leftists largely abhorred moral judgments, but now the woke crowd is viciously judgmental and unforgiving.  My take on Epstein’s summary is that both stereotypical camps are wrong.  The woke / communist / leftist crowd is, in fact, definitely evil, anti-Christian, anti-reality, openly antagonistic to God, the family, the Constitution, rule by law, freedom of speech . . . everything that enables physical and moral prosperity.  The conservative / ‘right’ / Republican crowd is wrong in that their opponents are not merely making pragmatic mistakes, but rather are opposing the way God wired physical and moral reality.

Testing the fruits of opposing worldviews, studies have shown that conservatives (in contrast with ‘liberals’) donate more to charity (although the average conservative income is less), donate more time as volunteers, and donate far more blood.  This result is surprising to the intelligentsia.  Anecdotally, but notably, Ronald Reagan donated more of his income to charity than did Ted Kennedy or Franklin D. Roosevelt.

What is called social justice is often about correcting the imbalances of fate, or life in a fallen world.  Sowell considers mental aptitude or scholastic qualification tests, which have long been under attack for not being ‘fair.’  Rather, Sowell suggests, “The tests are not unfair.  Life is unfair and the tests measure the results.”  There is a fundamental difference, Sowell reminds us, “between conveying a difference that already exists and causing a difference to exist.”  If you fail to understand this – and it seems that the intellentsia routinely do – then you cannot possibly find the root causes and help the people who suffer.

The triumph of Western civilization, especially the prosperity and freedom enjoyed over the last couple of centuries in the English speaking world, is due in part, not to social justice, but formal justice, equality before the law and “a government of laws, not of men.”  Sowell notes that formal justice has taken centuries of struggle to achieve, and cost many lives.  Formal justice is foundationally a biblical concept, grounded in God’s laws written in stone for the Israelites.

If some social justice crusade were implemented by people who actually cared to improve lives, there would be analysis and investigations to insure that negative unintended consequences do not make life worse.  As before, if minimum wage laws destroyed entry level jobs or if rent controls grossly diminished housing availability, such policies would be reversed and lessons learned would be publicized.  But if the crusade is merely to proclaim the elite on the side of the angels, then there will be no interest in evaluation; rather, investigations will be ignored or even prevented.  (Note, for example, the enormous international efforts to cover up the dangerous side effects of COVID vaccines.)

Hypocritically, and sadly, success by means other than what revolutionaries promote is despised.  Prosperity and the relative uniformity of comfortable economic benefits has been achieved in the West over the last century by means of free markets and the other attributes of Western civilization.  But Marxists give no credit, rather doubling down on efforts to magnify the power of the State and to restrict the freedom of individuals.

The intelligentsia routinely misjudge their opponents.  Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was vilified in his confirmation hearings; afterward his enemies in the media wrote of him as “Washington’s most famous recluse,” apparently a friend only to his wife, the couple’s life described as “one of shared, brooding isolation.”

The reality is that Thomas is probably the most accessible and personable Justice in history.  He will notice a group of schoolchildren visiting the Court and invite them to his chambers.  He and his wife travel the country in an RV, visiting small towns and striking up conversations with all kinds of people.  He made a point of getting to know “every employee of the Court, from cafeteria cooks to the nighttime janitors.  He played hoops with the marshals and security guards . . . Thomas had an uncanny ability to recall details of an employee’s personal life.”  A prominent lawyer calls him “the most real person” among all the Justices.

Sowell has a significant chapter on how intellectuals have perverted the law; for example, as far back as 1908 the Dean of the Harvard Law School wrote of the desirability of “a living constitution by judicial interpretation.”  Dean Roscoe Pound insisted that law should reflect “social justice” (without defining it), and despite the prevailing morality of the people.  Louis Brandeis believed that judges are best suited to be the arbiters of social needs, and also used the term “social justice” without defining it.

On war, Sowell considers American President Woodrow Wilson, a lifelong academic who helped sow the seeds of World War 2, by redrawing the map of eastern Europe at the end of WW1.  He mandated the breakup of the old empires into small countries so that people could have their own homeland . . . ignoring vital elements of history, economics, demography, and military security.  His idea of rescuing oppressed minorities ignored the reality of human nature, that when they became rulers themselves, they were sure to begin oppressing other minorities.

Wilson’s famous declaration, “The world must be made safe for democracy” — Sound familiar? – generated unworkable policies that led to brutal totalitarian regimes in command of Russia, Italy, and Germany.  Wilson, along with his British counterparts, helped undermine the interim revolutionary government that replaced the Czar in Russia, leaving the field open for the Bolsheviks (Lenin, Stalin), for which the whole world suffers to this present day.

Intellectuals were largely responsible for the growth of pacifism between the wars, which enabled Germany, Japan, and Italy to get the jump on the rest of the world.  The New Statesman characterized Winston Churchill in 1931 as a mind “confined in a militaristic mould,” because he wanted to maintain the French Army and the British Navy at full strength.  Editor Kingsley Martin concluded that anyone who disagreed with the virtues of pacifism had psychological defects.

The French teachers’ unions promoted pacifism between the wars, objecting to textbooks that favorably described the French soldiers who had shed their blood to defend their homeland.  The ‘intellectual’ position was that nationalism was bad and a cause for war, but internationalism and ‘impartiality’ were good.  Nothing has changed since then.

When France surrendered to the German army in 1940, Charles Degaulle and other leaders blamed a lack of national will and general moral decay for their humiliating collapse.  Thank you, intellectuals.  Hitler, by the way, drove his nation to war against the recommendations of his generals, who knew that France had significant more military strength than did Germany.  But Hitler had analyzed the French people, and knew they would cave quickly.  Particularly, Hitler perceived that France lacked patriotism and a sense of national honor.  At that point he was more in touch with reality, enabling a shocking military victory.

The British PM, Neville Chamberlain, was criticized (before the war) by John Maynard Keynes, who said, “. . . our statesmen have lost the capacity to appear formidable.  It is in that loss that our greatest danger lies . . . our power to avoid a war depends not less than on our recovering that capacity to appear formidable, which is a quality of will and demeanour.”  Sowell goes on to describe how Ronald Reagan won the Cold War and effectively broke up the Soviet Union without firing a shot.  Both Reagan and British PM Margaret Thatcher were formidable in the eyes of the Soviets.

Intellectuals who gain political power are responsible, Sowell explains, for the usual asymmetry between democratic and autocratic governments over the last century.  The intelligentsia often create a climate of opinion eager for treaties while uncritical of their specifics.  In this week’s news (as I draft this), once again there are moves by the U.S. government to establish a nuclear weapons deal with Iran, despite decades of deceit and untrustworthiness on the other side.  Sowell cites many other examples, including the cease-fire negotiated to supposedly end the Vietnam War, which was used by the Communists to complete their conquest.

Sowell, in this book, and in many other writings, has much to say about race.  He reports how the intellectuals of the early 20^th century were the driving forces behind eugenics . . . “as late as 1928, there were 376 courses devoted to eugenics” in the universities.  He quotes Professor Henry Seager of Columbia:  “We must courageously cut off lines of heredity that have proved to be undesirable,” even if that requires “isolation or sterilization.”  Today, it is the same type of people, namely ‘intellectuals,’ who are behind Critical Race Theory, gender ideology, and trans surgeries for children.

I’ll close with one of Sowell’s most notable historical analyses.  The successful development, both technologically and economically, of 19^th century Japan and 18^th century Scotland, resulted from building tangible skills in engineering and medicine, for example.  In contrast, the 20^th century saw a host of 3^rd world leaders who went to college in the West to study sociology and Marxist-friendly ideologies.  The countries they went back to and led to independence then suffered economic stagnation (or worse), along with internal polarization, with politics aimed at pitting group against group.  A startling current example is the utter degradation in South Africa under the ruling party’s Marxist leaders.

So . . . ideas matter.  Worldview matters.  Truth really matters.  This world would experience enormous peace and prosperity if its people and its leaders worked to embrace biblical principles, even if they didn’t embrace the Gospel itself.  Because God wired reality, because He designed human nature and the physical environment in which we live, it simply makes sense, even for selfish reasons, to follow God’s laws . . . foster freedom, work hard, be honest and kind, treat others how you want to be treated yourself, obey lawful authorities, exercise careful stewardship over Earth’s resources, and constrain evil.  None of this is complicated, as we will find out by demonstration during the coming Millennium under the Lordship of Jesus Christ.

• drdave@truthreallymatters.com