The intelligence trap
From commenter “Barry Meislin”:
One might wish to believe otherwise, but intelligence is no guarantee against believing—and holding fast to—the most absurd and pathetic falsehoods. In fact, it seems as though the opposite is the case; i.e., the more intelligent a person, the greater that person’s ability to uber-rationalize all kinds of garbage—while believing that precisely because of his/her intelligence, there’s no way he/she can be wrong.
I believe that Thomas Sowell’s book Intellectuals and Society treats this subject in some depth.
It’s also something on which George Orwell reflected: “Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.”
But now we have a lot more going on than that. Now, education is devoted to inculcating students with such ideas, and in blocking or demonizing other information. I don’t think there’s ever been a society in which the young are being taught that their basic culture is evil, fraudulent, exploitative, and cruel, and that its obvious and evident achievements are somehow evil as well or at least to be discounted. It’s quite the experiment.
Who is more likely to have an opinion completely untethered to reality on such questions as the securing of our southern border, standing up to the CCP, opposing the lunacy of transgender activism, and refusing to accept the pernicious and toxic propaganda of BLM/CRT/1619, a truck driver from Tuscaloosa who failed to finish high school or a tenured member of the faculty at Yale? The most privileged members of the elite managerial class currently running and ruining our republic may well be credentialed and possessed of the imprimatur of the institutions which (mis)educated them, but they are, in fact, completely unfit to rule.
I don’t think there’s ever been a society in which the young are being taught that their basic culture is evil, fraudulent, exploitative, and cruel, and that its obvious and evident achievements are somehow evil as well or at least to be discounted. It’s quite the experiment.
I think that was a bog standard feature of education in Communist countries. All Communist governments (as well as the Spanish Republic and Mexico ca. 1930) were hostile to the Church, and that’s a major part of culture. They were also hostile to social relations not an artifact of the state (see the treatment of the agrarian system in Russia and other Communist countries).
What’s bizarre in our own time is that a segment of the (largely white) bourgeoisie is promoting this at a time of considerable material comfort and going out of its way to abuse and harass dissidents who actually have little influence on a day-to-day basis.
See this remark by Midge Decter in 1997:
“The disarray…is brought about by the fact that the lives we lead are in respect of ease and comfort and confidence and good health simply unprecedented. Never have so many, even the poor among us, had so much. We are disoriented. We do not know whether to laugh or to cry; we do not know whom or what to thank; and we cannot think of what there might be to want next. And so we giggle and preen and complain and forget our debts and keep on seeking for things (and sometimes finding them). In short, there is no merely social cure for what ails us.”
For all that, about half the public has adopted a disposition that is silly in some, sentimental in others, feckless in others, and malicious in others. They assent to the activities of people whose entire object is to play status games, injure other people, and ruin institutions. These creatures have no defensible objects and every rhetorical tool in their kit is a lie.
In one of his lead-ins, J. J. Sefton at Ace put it best, in my opinion:
“Remember, Eichmann didn’t gas or shoot the Jews; he was just damned good at getting them on the trains. The bureaucrats and technocrats who serve their masters running the government and the boardrooms in DC and corporate America have the same education and temperament as those who ran the bureaucracies and Reichsministeriums in Nazi Germany. The goons and draftees may have shot their victims into mass graves or dumped the canisters of Zyklon B into the gas chambers, but those who made the plans and gave the orders were doctors, lawyers, engineers, architects and scientists, some with double or even triple doctorates.”
Dennis Prager likes to say that when people stop believing in God they don’t believe in nothing they believe in anything. That explains the climate religion and the current mask religion that so many oh so smart people worship.
W. F. Buckley said he’d rather be governed by 300 names picked at random from a Boston phonebook, than by the Harvard faculty. The number 300 varied as Buckley quoted himself multiple times. I’m not sure he really meant it.
It is also true that both the population contained in the Boston phonebook and the Harvard faculty has changed a great deal in the last 40 years.
Paul Johnson also wrote a great book on leftist intellectuals. I haven’t read Sowell’s yet, but I highly recommend Johnson’s. He focuses mostly on what truly terrible people they were.
“I don’t think there’s ever been a society in which the young are being taught that their basic culture is evil, fraudulent, exploitative, and cruel, and that its obvious and evident achievements are somehow evil as well or at least to be discounted.” neo
None come to mind that even in the slightest compare.
However, it’s important to remember that the teachings that America is evil, fraudulent, exploitive, etc. come from an external source, one that is itself evil. It is evil because it makes no concession to the incomparable amount of good that America has rendered to the world. It is evil because it accuses the innocent of what the accuser is alone guilty of, it is evil because it has rejected compassion and embraced the hate it falsely accuses others of having. It is evil because it defames those who question its premises and assertions without substantive rebuttal. It is evil because it embraces the meme that the accusation itself is all the proof that is needed to establish fact.
But this is not new, the prophet Isaiah spoke of it; “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.” … Isaiah 5:20
From Midge Decter via Art: “The disarray…is brought about by the fact that the lives we lead are in respect of ease and comfort and confidence and good health simply unprecedented.”
So true. I am continuously amazed by it all. From my childhood in the 1930s I remember hanging the wash out to dry, using wood and coal to cook and heat the house, outhouses, kerosene lamps, ditches dug by hand, cranking the car to get it started, pumping water by hand, crank telephones, party lines, minimal choices of fruits & vegies at the grocery store, wiring houses with conduit pipe, minimal power tools, and much, much more.
140 years ago my grand parents were living in the Midwest where they were traveling by wagon, riding horseback, living in rough built houses, and working hard just to stay fed and housed. In their lifetimes they saw the advent of cars, airplanes, flush toilets, piped water, electricity available to most, and so much more. In my lifetime, I’ve seen our lives go from hard work to most former laborious tasks being done by machines, unbelievable choices of products not only in the grocery stores but everywhere, international travel available to the middle class, and so much more. Never dreamed there would be such an advancement in living standards. And yet it has not solved the problem of happiness or contentment.
I’ve always known there were people who are envious, who will backbite for no good reason, who are not satisfied no matter their circumstance. Have met many of them in my time, but have tried to avoid their thinking. Those kinds of people seem to be attracted to cults, offbeat religions, save the world movements, and the biggest lie – Communism. these sorts of people seem to have proliferated with the rise of social media and more leisure time. It has made it easier for these disaffected thinkers to find and feed off one another. But when they have propagandized children who look to them for education and learning, it becomes a more serious proposition.
It is a war of ideas. We are seeing how a large megaphone such as the MSM coupled with academia, and Hollywood is a major weapon in that war. Conservative ideas are being drowned out. We need more Newsmax Prager U., Epoch Times, a conservative social media platform , and more ways to get our ideas out. When every MSM outlet is characterizing the new election laws in Georgia, Florida, Texas, etc. as being restrictive and racist, how does the truth get to those who rely on the MSM for their news? And the beat goes on. More conservative media outlets are needed.
A+D: “I think that was a bog standard feature of education in Communist countries. All Communist governments (as well as the Spanish Republic and Mexico ca. 1930) were hostile to the Church…They were also hostile to social relations not an artifact of the state…”
Exactly…that “bog standard feature” makes adherents fully dependent on & obedient to the state/authority figure…Works in religio-cultish sects too. Hate your origins (family faith etc…). See any who disagree as “enemy.” (which means you can destroy them if necessary) And suddenly you have 1984, Hunger Games & Elysium as blueprints not as warnings.
AND if you can co-opt the church into blessing your new “faith” (as post-Vatican II Roman Catholicism has by allowing its Liberation Theologians to take the papacy & post-1960’s Protestantism has by abandoning Jesus of the Scriptures for the marxist make-believe jesus of social justice & equity)…well…welcome to 2021.
My granddaughters roll their eyes when I ask what they’re doing in social studies. I tell them their great grampa and his buddies were heroes, fighting to get the bad guys out of countries who didn’t want them.
Occasionally, I mention something good about America, hoping it will stick, and possibly, otoh, triggering some negative response I can deal with.
Richard Aubrey. Ask you grand children if they recite the Pledge of Allegiance?
If they don’t, then there is no real, honest civics in their antisocial studies.
TJ. Good idea. They were unfamiliar with “God Bless America” and “America The Beautiful”.
About the only responses I’ve gotten was one on cave men–we did a video on knapping stone and sharpening a spear plus persistence hunting. My granddaughter got an extra million points for involving a tribal elder. And a report on the quagga mussel and its problems in the lakes.
Followed the Titanic including the errors in construction and failures to respond to the California and too few lifeboats.
Nothing alarming so far.
I find Junior Scholastic is still a thing and I got their pub on Gail Halvorsen, the Candy Bomber. It called him the Chocolate Pilot but gave a decent description of who did what that required the Berlin Airlift. Not sure they’ve read it yet.
Related:
https://orthosphere.wordpress.com/2021/06/01/because-we-cannot-trust-the-media/
“Suggestion 4–prompted by the contemplation of suggestion 3 and resignation to its impracticality: epistemic humility. This is a great treasure, both for intellectual and spiritual growth. The bare realization that acquiring knowledge, having a worthwhile opinion on any matter, is hard. It’s not enough to acknowledge this in words; the full realization comes from two experiences. First, the struggle to master a genuine discipline–Latin, Newtonian physics, geography, computer programming, whatever. Second, the failure to find a shortcut–the unreliability of news and popular exposition, the tendency of these shortcuts to degenerate into gossip over personalities or unthinking partisanship. Why should I think that I can understand what’s going on in, say, France right now if I won’t first make a study of French history and culture and then consult the statements of both sides of whatever the French happen to be currently arguing about? (Even this is optimistic; prior generations would have insisted that I start by learning French.) One might have thought that, while such expertise is helpful, I can have the fruit of it secondhand by reading a newspaper with a French correspondent who is (or, more likely, consults with) experts on France. But it turns out that this only makes me a sucker ripe for manipulation. Shall I shop experts to see whom I should trust? But how can I judge that without becoming an expert myself, so that this is no shortcut at all?
It seems that knowledge does not come cheap. The idea was that experts would descend into the baffling depths of their expertise but then re-emerge with discoveries and conclusions which could be shared and properly understood by the rest of us, even if we could not reproduce the reasoning that supports these conclusions. It was a nice idea, division of labor in the intellectual sphere. Often enough, though, it turns out that experts are like mystics; they can share with us, the vulgar masses, only symbols of what they have learned, the reality of which is inaccessible to us until we follow the mystic’s own path and discipline. I don’t mean to discourage anyone; these symbols can be hints and glimpses of real truths. Only where we have submitted to the requisite intellectual discipline, though, can we grasp these truths directly in themselves.
Luckily, I don’t need to get to the bottom of whatever is agitating the French during this news cycle. I can afford to be agnostic on a great many things. This stuff is seldom relevant to my relationship with God or my duties to my family and students.”
“…epistemic humility…”
Yes, the key to it all (though perhaps, humility “epistemic” or otherwise.)
To understand that there are things we don’t know (or that we are being misinformed or that we’re not getting the WHOLE picture—or that we can NEVER really get the whole picture but have to go with what we have, with the knowledge that it’s by no means complete. With the knowledge that we may well be mistaken. Perhaps…(though maybe that’s expecting a bit too much from us mortals??…). Those “unknown unknowns” that Donald Rumsfeld took a lot of flak for saying, IIRC…..—What is it with all these “Donalds”, anyway?…)
Yes, Orwell did refer to intellectuals, but I believe he was referring to professional intellectuals, more specifically professional Left-wing intellectuals, not the “armchair” intellectuals, as it were. Insofar as I was referring to the “intelligence trap”, it was a reference to the general phenomenon, which is liable to affect everyone of us who has a tendency to be unanchored to, untethered from reality. Or infatuated, even unknowingly, with abstractions.
And it seems to me that one can speak equally of the “compassion trap” or the “humility trap” or the “justice trap” as easily as the “intelligence trap”.
It brings to mind Susan Sontag’s “Reader’s Digest” moment, where she essentially—heroically—burns her bridges by pointing out a most uncomfortable truth….
https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/06/08/becoming-susan-sontag/
FWIW….
An astute observation by Barry Meislin – Aristotle wrote that man is a rational animal. As much as one should hesitate to contradict Aristotle, perhaps it is more accurate to say that man is a rationalizing animal. (And none of us are immune.)
Paradoxically, to be really stupid, you have to be really intelligent.
Shorter Prager, Buckley, Sefton, courtesy of Voltaire:
“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”
JJ, an amazing comment, breathtaking.
Sowell also wrote Vision of the Anointed. Those Anointed, they’re stupid.
The founder of Dubai, Sheikh Rashid, was asked about the future of his country, and he replied, “My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I ride a Mercedes, my son rides a Land Rover, and my grandson is going to ride a Land Rover, but my great-grandson is going to have to ride a camel again.”
Why is that, he was asked? And his reply was:
“Hard times create strong men, strong men create easy times.
Easy times create weak men, weak men create difficult times.
Many will not understand it, but you have to raise warriors, not parasites.”
And add to that the historical reality that all great “empires”…the Persians, the Trojans, the Egyptians, the Greeks, and in later years the British…all rose and perished within 240 years. Each “rotted from within”. America has now passed that 240-year mark and the “rot” is visible all around us and now, accelerating quickly. We are past the Mercedes and Land Rover Years and the camels are in our yards. And 75 million Americans demonstrated last November by voting for Biden that they know nothing of history and/or think we should all be riding camels!”
And add to that the historical reality that all great “empires”…the Persians, the Trojans, the Egyptians, the Greeks, and in later years the British…all rose and perished within 240 years. Each “rotted from within”. America has now passed that 240-year mark and the “rot” is visible all around us and now, accelerating quickly. We are past the Mercedes and Land Rover Years and the camels are in our yards. And 75 million Americans demonstrated last November by voting for Biden that they know nothing of history and/or think we should all be riding camels!”
Britain acquired and lost a mess of overseas dependencies, as did Spain, as did France, as did Portugal, as did the Netherlands, as did Belgium. For the most of the period during which they held such dependencies, those consisted of islands, trading posts, coastal towns, and agricultural estates not far from coastal towns. France had massive land claims in North America, but the actual population of their settlements in New Orleans, on Cap Breton, and along the St. Lawrence river was about 70,000. It was not until 1830 with the beginnings of the conquest of Algeria that France began to assume control of territory in the interior and seven-digit populations. France liquidated the last of such territories in 1962; it’s foray into empire lasted four generations. Portugal did not begin to move inland in Africa until 1865 and liquidated its holdings there in 1975; Portugal’s previous effort at inland settlement (in Brazil) lasted about a century.
All of these countries are still there. France and England emerged as distinct entities in the 9th century. There have been in all that time periods of long-term economic decline in one or the other (in the 9th, 10th, 14th, 15th, and 17th c), but nothing along the lines of replacing motor cars with camels. The same can be said of the other countries named.
Your chronologies are off in other areas. A succession of Persian empires existed for about 1,200 years (600 BC to 600 AD), the Byzantine Empire from the 4th to the 13th c, and Egypt from about 3,000 BC until about 500 BC.
We are not, of course, an empire. We are a national state suffering intramural political fissures.
Art Deco:
In your tome you forgot one point:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/whatever-happened-wild-camels-american-west-180956176/
Been there done that, the dromedary days of old.
Art+Deco
No one is suggesting the countries “disappear”. The countries culture changes and the countries are no longer as they were before. This doesn’t happen suddenly but gradually. We can see it in the EU countries, GB, Russia, Japan, China, and the USA. The resulting culture is ??????.
The countries culture changes and the countries are no longer as they were before.
That’s going to happen whether they’re ’empires’ or not.
Regarding the limitations of intelligent people, Megan McArdle wrote, memorably, about another aspect:
“[C]elebrities are stupid about policy, often breathtakingly so. On the other hand, so is everyone else. You want to hear some really stupid ideas about policy? Grab a group of whip-smart financial wizards, or neurosurgeons, or nuclear physicists, and sit them down for a nice dinner to debate some policy outside their profession. You will find that they are pretty much just as stupid as anyone else, because policy is not about smart. I mean, smart helps. But policy is fundamentally about domain knowledge, and that knowledge is acquired only by spending a great deal of time thinking about a pretty small set of problems. Funnily enough, this is also how one gets good at finance, or neurosurgery, or nuclear physics.”
Paul Nachman – great quote from McArdle.
Cue the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect.
The original is well noted on the internet, so I picked something new that is probably relevant to a lot of the discussions on Neo’s posts.
https://medium.com/@addictiondocMD/a-new-corollary-to-the-gell-mann-amnesia-effect-3578a37ed3e9
By Howard Wetsman, MD, addiction expert 2018-10-13 on coining “the Hunt Assumption Amnesia Corollary to the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect.”
“But policy is fundamentally about domain knowledge….”
OK, but it STILL doesn’t explain the “death of expertise” meme, which has been flying around the blogosphere (or at least the right-of-center blogosphere) for some time now….
JimNorCal @ 9:37am.
Just saw your compliment. Thanks. Even a blind squirrel finds an acorn occasionally. 🙂