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January 10, 2010
"Brilliant" Thinkers Making Life Worse for Us
Posted by The MaryHunter at January 10, 2010 5:25 PM
So-called "intellectuals" pepper us from the left and the right with their wit and wisdom. That's fine -- you can generally take it or leave it as an individual. However, watch out when the ideas of those "intellectuals" are elevated to prominence through socio-political forces. Thomas Sowell points out in his new book Intellectuals and Society that, on balance, the Intelligentsia and the ideas they espouse could well have done more harm than good, especially throughout recent history.
Intellectuals generate ideas and ideas matter, whether those ideas are right or wrong, and they matter far beyond the small segment of society who are intellectuals. Ideas affect the fate of whole nations and civilizations. Nowhere is that more true than in our own times, when some people make suicidal attacks to kill strangers who have done nothing to them, as on Sept. 11, 2001, because the attackers are consumed with a set of ideas - a vision - and driven by the emotions generated by those ideas and that vision.
Sowell offers Karl Marx as a prime example of someone whose ideas were not only pushed well beyond their original intent by despotic dictators, but also perpetuated by the aloof elitist intelligentsia of the day -- all with dire consequences.
The ideas that Karl Marx created in the 19th century dominated the course of events over wide portions of the world in the 20th century. Whole generations suffered, and millions were killed, as a result of those ideas. This was not Marx's intention, nor the intentions of many supporters of Marxist ideas in countries around the world. But it is what happened.
Some of the most distinguished intellectuals in the Western world in the 1930s gave ringing praise to the Soviet Union, while millions of people there were literally starved to death and vast numbers of others were being shipped off to slave labor camps.
Many of those same distinguished intellectuals of the 1930s were urging their own countries to disarm while Hitler was rapidly arming Germany for wars of conquest that would have, among other things, put many of those intellectuals in concentration camps - slated for extermination - if he had succeeded.
The 1930s were by no means unique. In too many other eras - including our own today - intellectuals of unquestionable brilliance have advocated similarly childish and dangerous notions. How and why such patterns have existed among intellectuals is a challenging question, whose answer can determine the fate of millions of other people.
Indeed, addressing the "how" and "why" appears to be the aim of Sowell's latest effort.
Think back to those valiant thinkers who gave birth to a tiny nation through a bold dream, a brazen idea that they were willing to fight to the death for -- an idea that was eventually realized as the greatest nation on earth. Woe are we who bear witness to the decimation of the Founders' dream by countless progressives (Democrat and Republican) who, inspired by "brilliant intellectuals," promulgate their own twisted notions of social democracy through social, economic and environmental statism.
