I am reading Thomas Sowell’s new updated and expanded book Intellectuals and Society that includes new chapters on intellectuals and race, and other revisions that make the updated book extremely easy to read and understand. His first chapter on “Intellect and Intellectuals” got me thinking about how we define intellectuals in our society.
Sowell points out that intellect is not wisdom; there can be “unwise intellect:”
Brilliance–even genius–is no guarantee that consequential factors have not been left out or misconceived. Intelligence minus judgment equals intellect. Wisdom is the rarest quality of all–the ability to combine intellect, knowledge, experience, and judgment in a way to produce a coherent understanding…Wisdom requires self-discipline and an understanding of the realities of the world, including the limitations of one’s own experience and of reason itself. The opposite of high intellect is dullness or slowness, but the opposite of wisdom is foolishness, which is far more dangerous.
One of the interesting things that Sowell discusses is the tendency for intellectuals to think that because they are brilliant in one area, that they are brilliant in all areas. They make asinine predictions–think global warming etc.–and are ultimately unaccountable to the external world should their ideas be found to be wrong.
If an engineer or surgeon made a similar mistake, there would be hell to pay. For today’s intellectuals, there is a shrug of the shoulders and they continue without repercussions in their ivory towers while being awarded grants and honors. Without consequences, it’s no wonder they rarely think about what they say, or the effect it has on the public.
However, the public has started to discount what they say and with the internet and other technology, has started to understand that without judgment and wisdom, the intellectuals are often not so smart after all. Of course, they are called rubes for their understanding, but the more I hear that word, the more I realize that the masses are waking up to the stupidity of those who mistakenly think of themselves as wise.
Good judgment mainly arises from intelligent attention to the way the world really works. It takes years, sometimes lifetimes, to get one’s preconceptions beaten out of one’s head — and then only if one is willing to concede that his preconceptions were exactly that.
The intellectual arises from the existence of a pseudo-ecological survival niche, in which one’s preconceptions never need endure any abrasion from reality. The old term for this was “the ivory tower,” a reference to academia. However, there are more varieties of this sort of niche today than just colleges and universities — and as the Nanny State swells, their “graduates” grow ever more numerous among us.
Oftentimes wisdom and judgement elude even the intellectuals long in tooth, Francis. Just look at Chomsky, Hobsbaum and Foner for glaring examples. As Lear’s fool suggested, these men need to be beaten for being old before they were wise.
That is a great quote.
Wisdom is the rarest quality of all–the ability to combine intellect, knowledge, experience, and judgment in a way to produce a coherent understanding…Wisdom requires self-discipline and an understanding of the realities of the world, including the limitations of one’s own experience and of reason itself.
This is one of the finest definitions for wisdom that I’ve ever read. Wisdom should be our goal in life, not merely intellect or knowledge. Age itself doesn’t make one wise but it gives perspective and the opportunity of experience. One of my brothers-in-law (he is 76) is quite wise about life. I’m uncertain if he even graduated high school but he has given me a great deal of excellent advice over the years.
Lack of experience is one reason why it is very rare to meet young people who are wise. They may be highly intelligent and knowledgeable but without experience, they’re unlikely to have good judgment. Aviation if full of pithy sayings. One is that “judgment come from experience and experience comes from bad judgment.” It means that we learn from our mistakes and more importantly from the mistakes of others. So long as we don’t commit any unrecoverable mistakes, our experience and judgment grows.
Exactly. Wise people understand that while you can imagine anything you want, you can’t have everything you imagine.
My favorite aviation quip:
Any landing you walk away from is a good landing. (Much about life there.)
Any landing where you walk away AND you can still use the airplane afterwards was a great landing. And if you can you use the airplane without making major repairs that was a spectacular landing.
Much of the above applies to many situations you face in life.
The reason being is “intellectuals” are increasingly isolated from reality. They have not practical experience and have never done useful work. In the past, many intellectuals rose from the farm or other trade. Their knowledge tempered by practicality to produce wisdom, or “common sense.” Our founding fathers were such men. Men with experience in practical matters that counseled their intellectual studies. As we’ve progressed, fewer and fewer “intellectuals” come from a background of manual work, increasingly they come from a background of no work at all until their appointment upon their paper laurels.
The solution is some experience with producing something useful for others by use of mind and hand.
Walter Matthau demonstrates the intellectual in ‘Fail Safe’. Here is the political scientist versus the general from that movie. The opening scene of the movie of a dinner party discussing who would survive a nuclear war is even more telling.
Well said. Intellectuals are people who are good at holding large numbers of concepts in their minds and making logical, self-consistent, often interesting, and occassionally useful patterns out of them. They are idea-wranglers. They build systems of ideas. There is absolutely no requirement that the idea systems be a) limited by the well-understood constraints imposed by reality or b) capable of integrating successfully with reality. Attempts to apply these systems directly to the real world often result in disaster – see Marxism.
Better outcomes occur when wise, practical people merely take inspiration from the “ideal” systems concoted by the intellectuals. Then you get something that, while not as pure as the original vision, at least works after a fashion. The Founding Fathers were inspired by the ideas of intellectuals. So were the architects of the modern European Union/Welfare State. As always, YMMV.
No discussion of intellectuals would be complete without this classic quote:
“There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.”
― George Orwell
A better quote is this one, from one of Orwell’s contemporaries:
“The course of every intellectual, if he pursues his journey long and unflinchingly enough, ends in the obvious, from which the non-intellectuals have never stirred.
-Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point
It’s better because it gets to the real point: our intellectuals are not honest, especially about what they do and do not know. They do not pursue the journey unflinchingly. They pursue it only enough to make themselves appear to be the smartest person in the room. They are, in fact, poseurs and dilettantes.
I think there may be a central core of powerful intellects surrounded by multiple layers of poseurs and dilletantes. Not all intellectuals are called to the life. Most of them are simply manufactured by certain university departments because that’s what those departments get paid do. How much original, valuable work to most of these people do? How much of their work is just an elaboration of Marxist thought?
Bugs: “I think there may be a central core of powerful intellects …”
Absolutely. The best way I’ve ever heard it put comes from a documentary on the British decoding of the Enigma machines. Alan Turing lead that project. One of the people who worked with Turing described his solution for breaking the German code in the following manner:
“There are two kinds of geniuses in the world. There are those who come up with a solution and everyone else looks at it and says ‘yes, given enough time I could have come up with that.’ Then there are those geniuses whose solutions are so off-the-wall, out-of-the-blue, that you know, never in a million years could you have come up with that. Turing,” he concluded, “was the second kind of genius.”
Around that second kind there are many of the first kind, and then the crowd thins out. But in every field in every time there are really only a few people that matter in the sense they are the ones at the crux of the most important debates and often, though not always, on opposite sides (like Plato or Aristotle in philosophy, Einstein or Bohr in physics, or Barth or von Balthasar in Theology.) And the trick is finding out who those true scholars, the really good men and women of intellect (as opposed to Intellectuals,) are.
It can take a long time to figure out because usually they are not political / ideological, and are toiling in obscurity (as opposed to those who pretend to be.)
@Langenbahn: True. The trick for us non-intellectuals is often trying to figure out which intellectuals to listen to. That can be difficult, especially since intellectuals tend to celebrate each other based on standards that THEY came up with. The greatest breakthrough in thought may be absolute rubbish when applied to the “real” world. But it still percolates into the larger culture – often with awful consequences. And people are reluctant to call BS on them because their peers swear their ideas are very, very important. That’s one reason the culture has been awash in warmed-over Marxism for the last eighty years or so.
Don’t gloat, folks, and assume that those “intellectuals” are other people. If you’re here reading these web pages, you’re more an intellectual type yourself than not.
The late (I hate saying that), great Joel Rosenberg had a bit in one of his early books about the difference between intelligence and wisdom. Consider Richard Nixon and Edith Bunker. Nixon was brilliant, but not wise. Edith, wise, but not brilliant.
Hated it when Cullinane shot that bag of grenades.
A good man and a great writer.
I like this topic. I’ve tried articulating this idea that Dr Sowell explains so very well.
Recently, in a reply to a comment, the reply stated this other person doesn’t apply the Laws of Logic. While the Laws of logic are useful, without the Law of Discernment, the course the logic follows very well may be flawed.
Agreed. In the context of blog comments, I’d say the Laws of Logic are nothing but rhetorical tools – ways to win the argument fair and square. That doesn’t mean that applying them will necessarily bring forth The Truth. Most of the arguments I’ve read for AGW are pretty logical. However, they do not pass the gut test.
Yeah, I started to assign a name to the comment but thought better of it.
Maybe I should have, I’m not sure, I didn’t want it to be interpreted as an attack.
Now that you’ve stated that, I’m compelled to evaluate agw consciously and maybe subconsciously too, that’s the power of suggestion…
I think we all evaluate arguments that way. Even the so-called “logical” people who believe the science is settled have criteria other than the science. At some level, the arguments either feel right or they don’t. To me, at 51 years of age and having witnessed the failure of so many other vast predictions, the AGW disaster scenario definitely doesn’t feel right. The gut tells me it’s not that simple. Other people’s guts tell them it is. There’s more psychology than physics at work in the AGW debate. And there’s nothing we can do about it.
Re: Logic
G.K. Chesterton is such a font of common sense, everyone should know something of him even if one is not Catholic or any kind of Christian. Once again, I can’t recommend this bit of his work highly enough …
http://www.basicincome.com/bp/youcanonly.htm
… nor its highly quotable conclusion: “Briefly, you can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.”
The very notion of science being settled is an oxymoron on the magnitude of “political science”, “government worker” or “civil war.”
@Langenbahn: From “Orthodoxy” by Chesterton.
“Every one who has had the misfortune to talk with people in the heart or on the edge of mental disorder, knows that their most sinister quality is a horrible clarity of detail; a connecting of one thing with another in a map more elaborate than a maze. If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment…The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.”
Sounds a little like arguing with a hard-core intellectual.
It’s something that I realized when making the skeptical argument to one of my AGW-believing acquaintances.
We can go ’round and ’round about the logic of the argument, dueling with sources, but the root of my objection to the theory is that its proponents don’t act like they believe it themselves.
They’re like poker players holding a pair of eights who’ve just realized that the hand isn’t really that good.
I would say it’s more appropriate to say intelligence minus information is intellect because without the info there is still judgement used, just badly. For example it’s common for bloggers to comment on foreign affairs in an authoritative manner even about countries they’ve never been to. The idea is that intellect plus judgement trumps experience or at equals it. It is never stipulated why a prospective person actually in the country the blogger may disagree with is not as intelligent or in possession of equally worthy instincts.
Instead, to level out the playing field, words like “useful idiot” are strewn about to make the cake. It’s a Catch-22 for bloggers: the more they work the more they don’t go outside and one quickly runs out of things you have direct experience with unless you are Indiana Jones at 70. If I listened to bloggers I’d believe 90% of women in Cairo are veiled like The Shadow and that tear-gassed dogs strew the streets until date palms grow out of them.
Good point. On pressing issues, dangerous developments, we often feel that we MUST have an opinion, we MUST decide where we stand, whether we have adequate information or not. Once we have an opinion, we feel we must defend it – sometimes even from people who are in a position to know better than we do. Hanging on to opinions is a way of managing change. Letting go of opinions can be disorienting.
What the hell *is* going on in Egypt, anyway? Is it being taken over by Islamists or what? Everybody has a different story. So just pick one and hang on to it for dear life. Otherwise, where will you be?
What’s happening in Egypt is the last story everyone wants to hear: an Egyptian form of Democracy has broken out. The preferred scenario is Iran/Nazi Germany one-vote-one-time.
No there’s no Bill of Rights for gays, Christians and women but they have avoided the wholesale slaughter of The Terror in revolutionary France or diddling with slavery in America in 1776.
It’s a story that will take perhaps decades to play out, as it did in America and France and no one knows what will happen; there are just too many variables.
There’s no Bill of Rights for men qua men, either. The only one we have in America is for persons.
Failure to recognize the difference is a typically feminist intellectual #REALITYFAIL.
DemocracyMob rule has broken out in Egypt? Well, surprise surprise!And the whole idea of slicing and dicing a Bill of Rights into one for queers, one for feminists, one for horses and so forth is something only an intellectual could imagine.
Here in America there’s no Bill of Rights for men, either. The only one we’ve got just speaks of persons.
Fail Burton, you insult others (unknown) for a lack of knowledge and then expose your own lack of knowledge. Heh, heh. Thanks for a good chuckle, Chucklehead.
I was looking for a picture of egg-head to post, but couldn’t find the one I was looking for. As an aside, Elmer Fudd started as an egg-head, but morphed into a redneck. And I stumbled on these two articles. The left is really sensitive to the egg-head label, as it is a bit too true to be funny. For anyone interested, enjoy these two articles side by side.
http://www.lewleadbeater.com/Obama%20egghead.htm
http://www.thedaily.com/page/2011/09/29/092911-opinions-column-intellectual-dalmia-1-3/
History does serve to inform one’s prognostications. If only on speculative grounds, one were to predict(bet) what type of governance/culture will arise in an Ialamist dominant Egypt, my money is on a system that history has informed us is INEVITABLE in Muslim societies, Islamist theocracy v military dictatorship. I could be wrong, never having been to Egypt, but I would take that wager! Obviously, no one can “know” the future, but come on FB, this one is a gimmie.
I’ve found that to be successful the most important thing you can know is what you don’t know.
“There are known knowns; there are things we know we know.
We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know we don’t know.”
—United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
One of the first steps to wisdom is realizing the magnitude of our ignorance. As Will Rogers said, “Everyone is ignorant, only on different subjects.”
Fortunately, ignorance on any given subject can be cured if one is willing to make the effort.
This is a great point: “One of the interesting things that Sowell discusses is the tendency for intellectuals to think that because they are brilliant in one area, that they are brilliant in all areas.” When I was working towards my Ph.D at the University of Michigan many years ago, several of my professors gave us grad students this advice:
“Whenever you’re asked to give advice to the general public, remember which hat you are wearing, your Ph.D hat or your ordinary citizen hat. Your Ph.D gives you expertise in one area and one area only. If somebody asks for you advice outside that area, you are no smarter than anybody else.”
Apparently Ph.D candidates at other universities never get that advice.
A Ph.D, That’s great! What field is it in?
I didn’t know I liked being educated because I got very little of it when I was in school. I recall a few classes when the teacher started talking everybody was engrossed, and they weren’t [even] talking about sex.
I’m still working on my Bachelors in life, the down side is I’ll never receive a diploma and I’m not looking forward to class letting out…
I don’t think wisdom is particularly valued by the current care takers of knowledge and culture. It’s not much talked about and when it is, it is with some embarrassment and a quick change of topic. Methods of achieving it are not taught and it’s rarely the point of learning something.
Perhaps, there is fear of making critical judgements. That’s simply not fashionable, plus it takes hard work and courage which may simply above the pay grade of most thinkers-for-pay.
The self-esteem movement which permeates our culture would seem to work directly against achieving any sort of wisdom.
How about the fact that a lot of the so called intellects are nothing more than educated idiots. If one assumes education equals intelligence then you have to conclude a talking parrot actually knows what it is saying?
I love Sowell and will try to get to the book as soon as I can. I am sure it’s filled with the excellent and nuanced insights one expects from him. However, as a warm-up to that I cannot recommend this review by the Brothers Judd Blog highly enough:
http://www.brothersjudd.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/reviews.detail/book_id/530/Anti-Intelle.htm
It is a review of Richard Hofstader’s Anti-intellectualism in American Life. The money quote that sums up the issue nicely is this:
“[Hofstader's] fuzziness [about the definition of intellectual] is such that while he acknowledges the American love affair with inventors and other men of practical intelligence, he quite mistakenly groups scientists generally into the category of Intellectuals. In fact, there is a fairly simple definition of the term intellectual that will clear up much of the confusion: an “intellectual” is someone who deals in pure ideas, that is ideas untested by reality. The term “Intellectual” in turn has come to denote anyone who believes that these untested ideas should be tried out upon society. Once we accept these fairly simple definitions, it becomes pretty obvious why America has an anti-intellectual tradition and why members of the American Left are so troubled by it.
As even his own feeble definition provides, it is the nature of “intellect” to oppose the existing order. But in a democracy, it is the great public majority which determines that order in the first place; those who wish to “manipulate, re-order, adjust” are seeking to impose the ideas of an elite few on a system that has been founded, built and maintained by the many. The very structure of the government bequeathed to us in the Constitution is intended to thwart just such manipulations. The carefully wrought system of checks and balances was put in place in order to make it as difficult as possible to make the types of changes that Intellectuals tend to dream up.”
Interesting. I’ve never read the book so I’m wondering – why is it in the nature of “intellect” to oppose the existing order? What does Hofstader mean by that? I always assumed “intellect” had a wider range of action than merely opposing whatever happens to exist. Analyze, yes. Criticize, yes. Oppose? Why?
Not sure. It’s Hofstader’s definition, and the reviewer of his book rightly points out that a) in a democracy, we the people create the existing order, so to be an intellectual is to, in some fashion, be anti-Democratic, and b) that the definition is fuzzy, to put it charitably. I think intellect should “oppose the existing order” only on moral grounds, and in “good” times, it should affirm it. The pernicious nature of Hofstadter’s definition is no where more apparent than in the way it has poisoned the arts, though there are plenty of other places we could, I am sure, think of.
Bugs: “True. The trick for us non-intellectuals is often trying to figure out which intellectuals to listen to. That can be difficult …”
Agreed, though I think it is possible. Honesty is one trait to look for, especially when it comes to admitting you are wrong.
Charity is another. It is one thing to criticize, but if you do not love what you criticize it does not matter much if you are right or wrong. People can sense it.
Another would be what Chesterton called “The test of imaginative fairness.” Does the critic make a straw man argument of the beliefs he opposes, or has he taken the time to understand what the opposition thinks and how they might reasonably have come to believe it. One of the most hateful things about the fringes and especially the left is their complete inability to attribute the beliefs of their opponents to anything other than the result of irrational causes (1994 was the “Year of the ANGRY white male, and such.)
The last is admittedly a most difficult thing. I can understand why President Eisenhower’s motto (from “At Ease: Stories I tell my friends”) was “The wise man is saying nothing, until he sees (for himself.)”
“If an engineer or surgeon made a similar mistake, there would be hell to pay.”
You can ignore an intellectual. You can’t ignore the bridge or heart bypass.
Both the engineer and surgeon are playing active roles, not just being mouths and, like psychics, intellectuals are just mouths spouting. That society gives them any due at all is society’s fault.
If someone does not have skin in the game, why in hell would you give their words any more credence than as an opinion to discard if you disagree?
Engineers and surgeons are intelligent people who are constrained by reality. If either of them do their jobs poorly, people die.
Intellectuals are seldom bound by reality. This allows them to think the high thoughts that in the real world seldom work. They can believe communism, Marxism and socialism are great ideas if only “the right people are in charge” (meaning themselves, of course) despite all of the historical and economic evidence that proves otherwise. It’s like someone waxing poetic about pigs having wings. When you point out the obvious fact that pigs don’t have wings, they say “but wouldn’t it be cool if they did?” No, not really.
Because Marxism is a system of thought that really does have massive explanatory power. It explains literally everything about the world. That the explanation is wrong makes no difference to intellectuals. They are not required to test it against reality. It works in the realm of ideas – that’s what matters.
And when you think about it, Marxists/Communists/Socialists have probably killed far more people in the 20th century alone than all the worst engineers and surgeons have in all recorded history.
An idea is a very powerful thing. A really bad idea (Marxism) can have devastating consequences.
Some day Thomas Sowell will be recognized for the brilliant thinker he is. It can’t happen too soon!
Mr. Paul Krugman, society economist for the New York Times, old gray lady Miss Haversahm, comes to mind.
There is nothing so stupid as an educated man, if you get him off the thing he was educated in.
-Will Rogers
Heh, excellent. It reminds of the first of Conquest’s Three Laws of Politics; 1) everyone is conservative about what he knows best.
(The other two are: 2) Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing, and 3) The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies. But I digress.)
They used to call them egg-heads.
An intellectual is someone who thinks that because a rose smells better than a cabbage, it will make better soup.
H.L.Mencken
Hmmm, has Mencken ever reported on the actual taste of rose soup or was he simply demonstrating a bigotry of his (he had so many of ‘em!) against intellectuals?
G K Chesterton ” The Secret people” extract:
And a new people takes the land, and still it is not we
They have given us into the hand of new unhappy lords
Lords without anger and honour, who dare not carry their swords
They fight by shuffling papers, they have bright dead alien eyes
They look at our labour and laughter as a tired man looks at flies
And the load of their loveless pity is worse than the ancient wrongs
Their doors are shut in the evening, and they know no songs
We hear men speaking for us of new laws strong and sweet
Yet is there no man speaketh as we speak in the street
It may be we shall rise the last as Frenchmen rose the first
Our wrath come after Russia’s wrath and our wrath be the worst
It may be we are meant to mark with our riot and our rest
God’s scorn for all men governing. It may be beer is best
But we are the people of England, and we have not spoken yet
Smile at us, pay us, pass us, but do not quite forget
A wise man once said something about people “knowing so much that ain’t so”
If the intellect is a computer, then things go according to the old adage: garbage in, garbage out.
As Mr. Sowell says, whether the intellectual’s output is worthwhile depends on whether his “input” is reality or something else. Unfortunately, obtaining an accurate grasp of a broad swath of reality takes humility, patience, and that most precious faculty: perception.
Gotta be careful about this one, folks. Some define the word like this: Until you realize that you’re the biggest fool who ever came down the road, you haven’t learned anything about wisdom.
No, Im not the biggest fool I’ve ever met, but I’ve come close a time or two…
Talking about how wise or foolish the other guy is? I need to figger on that one a bit. Doesn’t sound like wisdom to me. (motes, timbers, and that sort of thing.)
…but what do I know, eh? I’m just another damn fool.
(Personally, the only way today’s world makes sense is by comparing it to “The Lord of the Flies.” My question is: Where are the adults?)
In the past few years, brilliance, intellect, genius, wisdom have all been reduced to the level of physical height.
Watch any Tom Cruise movie and you’ll find it difficult to determine just how short Tom is. So Tom surrounds himself with people shorter than he and he becomes tall. But when the time comes to play basketball, Tom fails.
I recall that when Obama was elected president, an acquaintance of mine gushed over how we had, at last, “elected an intellectual”. We see how that turned out, don’t we?
“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction” Albert Einstein
“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication” Leonardo Di Vinci
Intellect without courage makes an “intellectual” a fool. Your Inner Voice
Courage admits error honestly and forges ahead decisively upon corrected information. I would prefer to associate with someone courageously honest and counted “foolish” by intellectuals, than those who would call themselves “intellectuals”. My experience is that those concerning themselves with their own “intellect” get about 1% accomplishment to those who couldn’t even define the term (and are too busy on working their next goal to bother trying) getting about 90%, and everyone else falling somewhere between. People who are always able to find and traverse the straightest line between Point A and Point B are the geniuses to me.
Sowell’s formulation is completely wrong. One can have intelligence without intellect and one can have intellect without great intelligence. Intellect is nearly synonymous with culture: it consists of cultivated, articulate knowledge– the kind of knowledge that would make suitable material for conversation. Thus, history and philosophy are intellectual subjects; the sciences much less so; engineering, not at all. Contrary to Sowell, the opposite of intellect is not slowness: one can possess a high intellect and yet seem “slow” and even “dull” (especially to those who are themselves without intellect).
Micha Elyi: “Don’t gloat, folks, and assume that those “intellectuals” are other people. If you’re here reading these web pages, you’re more an intellectual type yourself than not.”
Them’s fightin’ words!
I am not an intellectual, but I am, or I should say, I *hope* someday to be a man of intellect.
” … intellectuals to think that because they are brilliant in one area, that they are brilliant in all areas.” We need look no further that Obama’s Nobel Prize-winning (physics) Sec of Energy, Steven Chu, who has been foolishly funneling our tax dollars as handouts to billionaire Obama supporters who are pushing the Green Energy scam. Solyndra, Beacon Power, Ener1, Nevada Geothermal Power–all are bankrupt, and there is a long line behind them awaiting bankruptcy.
The opposite of high intellect is dullness or slowness, but the opposite of wisdom is foolishness, which is far more dangerous.
That’s the key sentence for me, not the empty intellect, that’s a bit problematic.
If an engineer or surgeon made a similar mistake, there would be hell to pay. For today’s intellectuals, there is a shrug of the shoulders and they continue without repercussions in their ivory towers while being awarded grants and honors. Without consequences, it’s no wonder they rarely think about what they say, or the effect it has on the public.
This is yet ANOTHER dimension, and possibly more important than Sowell’s.
In rightly despising leftist intellictuals that do not have wisdom though, we should be careful to not despise all intellectuals. Many intellectuals are wise in their own specialty and only get unwise when they leave it. For example, many scientists, engineers, and mathmeticians, are very good within their own specialty, but are adrift outside it. And even in the areas where intellectuals can be at their worste, recommending on public policy, there are also conservative intellectuals, and even a few leftist ones (Daniel Patrick Moynihan comes to mind) who have very good ideas.