Thomas Sowell is high on my list of respected and courageous men. A Black man willing to stand up to left wing “Uncle Tom” insanity is a profile in courage.
I’ve read most of his books and will be transferring my reviews of them to Substack “sometime”.
His description of the purpose of this book:
This book is written for those readers who are willing to join with me in a search for some understanding of a distinct segment of the population whose activities can have, and have had, momentous implications for nations and civilizations.
Who are “intellectuals”?
“intellectuals” refers to an occupational category, people whose occupations deal primarily with ideas—writers, academics, and the like.
I discovered this book as I was reading Richard Posner’s “Public Intellectuals”. I much prefer Sowell’s book as having more linkage to the ancient history of intellectuals as well as a wider scope on the effects of public intellectuals in our age of instant mass communication, to both wide and narrow audiences.
What todays public intellectuals often end up doing is validating the worldview of the people who follow them because they validate their worldview. I suspect that is often their intent as they realize that in our increasingly disconnected virtual existence (seeing our food coming from the supermarket rather than farms, our electricity coming from a plug rather than a complex grid, etc.) it makes sense for the producer of intellectual goods to provide content that is popular, and thus more lucrative.
” Give the people what they want” … say more sugar, less exercise for example can be harmful,
Intellectuals give people who have the handicap of poverty the further handicap of a sense of victimhood.
Some terms from Sowell’s thought in all of his writing need to be understood":
The Anointed - “the elite”, especially those who claim some form of academic credentials, often not in the area they are commenting on.
The Tragic Vision - “The tragic vision is a vision of trade-offs, rather than solutions, and a vision of wisdom distilled from the experiences of the many, rather than the brilliance of a few.”
The Vision of the Anointed - “To those with the vision of the anointed, it is such evils as poverty, crime, war, and injustice which require explanation. To those with the tragic vision, however, it is prosperity, law, peace, and such justice as we have achieved, which require not only explanation but constant efforts, trade-offs, and sacrifices, just to maintain them at their existing levels, much less promote their enhancement over time.
Intellectuals work in abstractions rather than reality, so they tend to believe that utopia is rather easily reachable if the masses would just follow their vision, As the managerial and technical higher ups in my IBM career often thought, many difficult new operating system features were just a SMOP (Small Matter of Programming). As I moved from being an actual programmer to being a “Software Architect”, I too fell prey to such illusions. Far too easy to see colored boxes on a whiteboard with some simple descriptions of function as something easily realized in working software.
The book is excellent, well written, and profusely sourced. I recommend it for those with some reading endurance. For the rest, it may be advisable to go to some of his other works. “A Conflict of Visions” would be a good choice.