A Journal for Western Man-- Issue IX
Dr. Stephen Yates
(3) Learning the rules should teach intellectuals why they must relinquish their need for control. I cannot stress this enough. Most intellectuals see themselves as superior to the masses. But could society do without stockbrokers, forklift operators, truck drivers, auto mechanics, pencil manufacturers and other mostly nonintellectual types? Obviously not. Could intellectuals do without them? No, unless they have mastered all the tasks that these people do in society (and of course they have not).
There is no way to list all the myriad tasks that have to get done in any functional society. Capitalism is not planned—except in the sense that we plan to keep government and those who would use government out of the way. In the end, there just isn't any way to design a planned system, because its architects would have to "see from the inside" every one of these occupations, everyone involved in them, and the constantly changing aims and values of everyone needing their services. This, as both Mises and Hayek have argued, is simply impossible.
Moreover, I have met people who work in fields like real estate, insurance and other such professions. Many have struck me as quite intelligent. Intellectuals should relinquish their contempt for those they see as outside their exclusive clubs and realize that society is a division of labor writ large that includes the intellectual work of education but also much, much more.
The masses may not understand Plato's Myth of the Cave but they usually understand their own vocation quite well, and can do it most competently when not being interfered with by those who do not understand it. Society is too complex to be controlled from a central point. The Platonist philosopher-king simply doesn't exist. He is an intellectual myth.
(4) Similarly, intellectuals should relinquish their contempt for nonintellectuals. This follows from (3). When intellectuals speak or act contemptuously toward nonintellectuals, this invites scorn, especially given that so many intellectuals can sound off on some issue of the day, and a nonintellectual can show that the intellectual does not know what he is talking about. When caught miseducating their children, whether to indoctrinate them into the fictions of political correctness or scare them to death about global warming, intellectuals invite justified resentment that gives all their number a black eye.
(5) Recognize the benefits of freedom for all. This means doing something intellectuals should excel at: seeing the Big Picture. The intellectual class—including intellectuals who have spent their lives practicing hating capitalism—is better off under capitalism than under any other system (to the extent their spokespeople in the political system have allowed capitalism to be practiced in this country).
Capitalism raises standards of living for all who participate, not by taking wealth away from anyone but by creating it. Thus there is more for everyone. Also, capitalism creates a space for the free exchange of ideas as well as goods. Socialists everywhere clamp down on the free exchange of ideas. Intellectuals in our society who want to exempt certain ideas from criticism invite questions like, what are you afraid of? Of course, truth is more likely to emerge from free exchanges of ideas than from thought control.
(6) Recognize further that people are more likely to be generous under capitalism. Libertarian political philosopher Tibor Machan once wrote an article entitled something like, "It Usually Begins With the Poor." The basic idea, which Professor Machan was disputing, is that capitalism inevitably leaves poor people to flounder. Beginning at least with Marx is the idea that capitalism brings out the worst in people, that it encourages greed and indifference to others. The market punishes greed, however (look at Enron).
As for indifference to others, the dichotomy between serving oneself and serving others is a false one. One must serve others in order to serve oneself. So capitalism encourages those who would succeed to find out what others need or want and then supply it: the exact opposite of indifference to others. The resulting transactions, mind you, are peaceful; none are forced. This doesn't necessitate a system that callously casts out the less-well-off and those who for some reason, say infirmity, cannot work. Again, this is cultural and moral, not economic; it involves rejecting indifference to suffering.
But when the successful have more, and are allowed to dispense with the fruits of their labors according to their own choices, as opposed to involuntarily having to fund a privileged caste of politicians and bureaucratic overlords, they are more likely to be generous—since none of us can take the fruits of our labors to our graves, anyway.
(7) Intellectuals need to strengthen, and in some cases, recover, the respect for truth, as opposed to ideology. Postmodernist academic culture has very much undermined respect for truth, replacing it with superstardom and the political agenda. The results are there for all to see. Intellectuals who proclaim their devotion to ideals like tolerance are the first to shout down those who disagree with them. Their "diversity" means a diversity of faces, not ideas. They will pen books that blatantly and transparently further political programs such as militant feminism (Catharine MacKinnon) or gun control (Michael Bellesiles).
Postmodernist intellectuals seem not to believe there is a culture-independent truth—which if true, would be a culture-independent truth (what else could it be?). In this way, postmodernism is destroyed by its own internal logic. Finally, many educational practices—going all the way down to those used on small children—are designed to instill conformity to the group (otherwise known as consensus) rather than such things as a love of reading, a love of learning what is true, and the zest for life I have observed in entrepreneurs. These are the first truths the intellectuals who can hope to contribute something to the future history of ideas need to embrace.
All of this means reversing Marx's statement above, and instead saying something like, "Marxists have only wanted to change the world, first by revolution and then by subversion; the point, however, is to understand the world and the people in it so that we know what changes to make and how to carry them through."
The intellectual class has a job to do involving education. This job is an important one. It ranges from teaching the rules of correct thinking or reasoning to the full range of history, economics, natural sciences, and so on. The students of intellectuals rightly expect not just knowledge but honesty.
Intellectual honesty means, at the very least, acknowledging the facts that are before one's eyes: facts about the superiority of a civilization built around the concepts of individual freedom and responsibility, free enterprise, private property rights, and so on, to one built around central planning schemes that have yet to deliver anything except poverty, slavery and misery. When intellectuals teach the children of nonintellectuals to hate their own civilization and regard its achievements as acts of villainy, they only invite waves of understandable anti-intellectual reaction.
(Reprinted with permission from the Ludwig von Mises Institute.)
Steven Yates, Ph.D., is a Margaret "Peg" Rowley Visiting Fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute where he is writing a book entitled In Defense of Logic: Against Polylogism and Conventionalism in Education, Science, Culture and Life. He is the author of a previous book, Civil Wrongs: What Went Wrong With Affirmative Action (1994) and numerous articles. He is a regular contributor to the news / commentary site LewRockwell.com. Send him MAIL.