Jan

Sophism and “Wonks”

The great Victor Davis Hanson writes today on NRO on the modern day know-it-all [worth quoting at length]:

In classical Athens, public life became dominated by clever and smart-sounding sophists. These mellifluous “really wise guys” made money and gained influence by their rhetorical boasts of having “proved” the most amazing “thinkery” that belied common sense.

We are living in a new age of sophism — but without a modern Socrates to remind the public just how silly our highly credentialed and privileged new rhetoricians can be….

In February 2009, Energy Secretary Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize–winning physicist, pontificated without evidence that California farms would dry up and blow away, because 90 percent of the annual Sierra snowpack would disappear. Yet long-term studies of the central Sierra snowpack show average snow levels unchanged over the last 90 years. Many California farms are drying up — but from government’s, not nature’s, irrigation cutoffs…

In 2009, brilliant economists in the Obama administration — Peter Orszag, Larry Summers, and Christina Romer — assured us that record trillion-plus budget defects were critical to prevent stalled growth and 10 percent unemployment. For nearly two years we have experienced both, but now with an additional $3 trillion in national debt. All three have quietly returned to either academia or Wall Street.

There is also a new generation of young sophistic bloggers who offer their wisdom from the New York–Washington corridor. They usually have degrees from one or more of America’s elite colleges and navigate an upscale urban landscape. One, the Washington Post’s 26-year-old Ezra Klein, recently scoffed on MSNBC that a bothersome U.S. Constitution was “written more than 100 years ago” and has “no binding power on anything.”

One constant here is equating wisdom with a certificate of graduation from a prestigious school. If, in the fashion of the sophist Protagoras, someone writes that record cold proves record heat, or that record borrowing and printing of money will create jobs and sustained economic growth, or that a 223-year-old Constitution is 100 years old and largely irrelevant, then credibility can be claimed only in the title or the credentials — but not the logic — of the writer.

As conservatives we believe in government limited to the scope of its proper functions. Outlining the scope of these functions is why we have written constitutions on the state and federal level. All the other activities of society are left to a free people to determine. There is no charted course, only the aspirations and desires of individuals who work together to achieve definite aims in a peaceful society. That’s how we view things, at least.

To save us from our nondescript, constantly changing ambitions (that is, living our lives to the best of our abilities, trying to find a certain happiness with what we’re given as talents and in opportunity), come the Wonks, the know-it-alls. How do they know it all? Well, they have degrees and credentials from Harvard and Yale, Columbia and Wellesley. And that doesn’t get the point across, and they tell us they know it all.

If you dare disagree with a Wonk on the basis of common sense (like Thomas Sowell does twice a week in his excellent columns), they’ll bombard you with statistics and studies that purport to prove their point. If you attempt to elucidate your position through an analogous historical lesson, you will soon learn that all times are different, and that history teaches us nothing. If you attempt to corner them with classical economic logic as presented by Adam Smith, David Ricardo, or David Hume, empirical evidence will be thrown in your face, to dizzy and confuse you and trip you. If you’re still lucid (a big if), and reconstruct the story told by their empirical data into something coherent and logical, so as to validate the truth of your points in real life, well… then you will be disparaged, or ignored.

Prof. Hanson writes, “[The Tea Party was] instantly derided by our experts and technocrats as ill-informed or worse.” From the perspective of the Wonk, why shouldn’t they be? They’re only grandparents who have raised families, worked at and run businesses, veterans who have served their country abroad, small business owners and blue collar union workers. I bet not 1 in 100 have degrees from our Ivy League. How many write for the Post, the Times, or Newsweek? How many could define “epistemic closure” and wax philosophic their “medieval beliefs” of their intellectual opponents? Most tellingly, who among them would have the perspicacity to look outside the brown parchment of the Constitution for “creative” policy ideas?

Ask a Wonk what to do – in healthcare, financial reform, energy, anything – and they’ll tell you, in great specificity. You will learn, for example, that our Federal government, whose own Post Office is perpetually bankrupt and whose entitlement programs are bankrupting the nation, would be a far more efficient handler of health insurance than private companies; that printing money and handing it to banks makes everybody richer and that shoveling over resources to undeniably corrupt politicians (preferably Liberal Democrats, but occasionally Liberal Republicans) is the proper means of investment; and that, in order to save a warming planet, covered in ice and snow, a new tax must be levied on carbon dioxide. Along the way you’ll have to accept some newer truths, such as “black is white,” “2+2=5,” and “WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, and IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.”

Much has been made about the decline of the the traditional media, and that’s a good thing. The growing, so-called “conservative” media exist to tell people what they already know – to tell them they’re not crazy, and that the people in Washington D.C. do not have an alternate logical scheme, superior and unbounded by ours. This function used to be performed by a free and inquiring, mainstream press. But it appears now that the majority of media interests only promote the view of slick, over-schooled apologists, who make a buck advocating state power over individual lives.

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