Pun Salad

Here's what became painfully obvious to me while reading this book. This blogger, and just about any blogger, could significantly increase blog quality by buying a whole bunch of Thomas Sowell books. Then, daily:

1. Pick a book at random;
2. Pick a page from that book at random;
3. Type in a couple paragraphs into your blog, verbatim;
4. There is no step four.

Here, Professor Sowell simmers "intellectuals" over a low flame for 317 pages. By "intellectuals", he means mainly lefties. (In paragraph 2 he dismisses "atypical" intellectuals like Milton Friedman and and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn from the discussion.) The book is very much a continuation of the analysis he started in 1987's A Conflict of Visions, and continued in The Vision of the Anointed and The Quest for Cosmic Justice. This book stands on its own, though.

"An intellectual's work begins and ends with ideas," Sowell says. Although intellectuals are "smart", they don't use that intelligence to build bridges, run businesses, design spacecraft, or write computer programs. Disconnected from the concrete, enraptured by the inner beauty of their abstractions, they tend to believe that the sheer power of intellect can be brought to bear on "problems", and produce needed "solutions." And if problems go "unsolved", it only means that stupid or evil people were in charge. Arrogance and close-mindedness are nearly inevitable. They don't argue against contrary views; they ignore or deride them, with well-designed dismissive quips. They disparage the tacit practical knowledge of the experienced, and underestimate the coordinative power inherent in unplanned activities of self-interested individuals.

In other words: President Obama, this is your life.

Sowell shows how all this has played out through history in various arenas: war and foreign policy, economics, the justice system, academia, and the media. Let me take my own advice. Here's Sowell on the "verifiability" of the deconstructionist intellectuals' trade:

The standards by which engineers and financiers are judged are external standards, beyond the realm of ideas and beyond the control of their peers. An engineer whose bridges or buildings collapse is ruined, as is a financier who goes broke. However plausible or admirable their ideas might have seemed initially to their fellow engineers or fellow financiers, the proof of the pudding is ultimately in the eating. Their failure may well be registered in the declining esteem in their respective professions, but that is an effect, not a cause. Conversely, ides which might have seemed unpromising to their fellow engineers or fellow financiers can come to be accepted among those peers if the empirical success of the ideas becomes manifest. The same is true of scientists and athletic coaches. But the ultimate test of a deconstructionist's ideas is whether other deconstructionists find those ideas interesting, original, persuasive, elegant or ingenious. There is no external test.

Like so many other nice-sounding notions, the multicultural ideology does not distinguish between an arbitrary definition and a verifiable proposition. That is, it does not distinguish between how one chooses to use words within one's own mind and the empirical validity of those words outside in the real world. Yet consequences, for both individuals and society, follow from mundane facts in the real world, not from definitions inside people's heads. Empirically, the question whether or not cultures are equal becomes: Equal in what demonstrable way? That question is seldom, if ever, asked, much less answered, by most of the intelligentsia.