Do Intellectuals Hurt Society?

I am not a huge fan of Thomas Sowell, It isn’t that I dislike him particularly, it’s just that he doesn’t give me the warm fuzzies. Sowell apparently has a new book out, however, that raises some issues worth pondering.  Sowell believes that intellectuals are hurting society.  From the a column by Mark Laundsbaum n the Orange County Register:

Thomas Sowell, certainly no fool but clearly an intellectual, has written a book on the subject, titled “Intellectuals and Society.” His bottom line: intellectuals, unlike normal people, are unaccountable for what they do, and as a result are unconstrained when it comes to foolishness. Therefore, he concludes, immeasurable damage is done by intellectuals who pontificate, but avoid the consequences of the tripe they pass off as wisdom from on high.



Sowell narrowly defines an “intellectual” as someone whose “work begins and ends with ideas,” such as folks like himself, holding forth from ivory towers, and folks like yours truly, sounding off from the cozy confines of newspaper editorial offices...Academicians, the opinion-spewing media and other self-professed great thinkers are alike in that they produce ideas, rather than create products or services...

But intellectuals, in Sowell’s sense of the word, are rarely if ever held accountable for the fruits of their labor, no matter how rotten. Forty years ago, environmentalist Paul Ehrlich infamously predicted worldwide food shortages and mass starvation. Instead, as Sowell noted, obesity is epidemic and there are “unsalable agricultural surpluses,” yet Ehrlich continued to receive popular acclaim, honors and grants from prestigious academic institutions.

There does seem to be a star-struck quality to the boosters of people like Ehrlich and Princeton’s Peter Singer—the more subversive and radical the ideas, it seems, the more devoted the acolytes.

More than that, our current crop of intellectuals seem driven to tear down what has come before—even the parts that work— in order to create a new paradigm of their own imagining. We certainly have seen that in bioethics, radical environmentalism, and animal rights, areas of concerted intellectual focus and ideology that have the tremendous potential to harm, and indeed, are harming, real people—particularly the medically vulnerable (bioethics), the destitute (radical environmentalism), the advance of science and prosperity (animal rights and radical environmentalism), and our overarching embrace of  human exceptionalism , the necessary predicate to universal human rights (all three).

But I think Sowell is wrong if he attacks intellectualism generally.  Where would society be without its thinkers?  It’s not intellectualism itself that is the problem, so much, as the current nihilistic fashions of intellectualism.  If that is what Sowell is arguing, he’s right on.  But if he thinks that intellectualism as he defined it is, by definition, harmful, I think he misses the mark.