Elites: Rebelling or Merely Revolting?

ShrinkWrapped has picked up the ball on the relationship of the Elites (scientists, in this case) to Leftism. He suggests:

1) that the immense effort required to master specialized knowledge tends to crowd out a general understanding of politics, history, literature, etc;

2) the lifestyle required is sufficiently "uncommon" as to supplant common sense;

3) that most physicians, neuroscientists, etc. go into their fields with a "do-gooder" desire;

ERGO:

The combination of wishing to do good and social naivety creates a crucial predisposition to Utopianism. Since the intellectual elites are too often not well versed in common sense and have given little thought to political philosophy, they are easily convinced by superficially coherent Utopian ideologies... I suspect very few members of the intellectual class can explain why they are leftists. It takes intellectual work to develop a political philosophy and if all one's time is spent contemplating the ways in which neural networks form and change in response to input, there is not much time and energy left for the mundane tasks of everyday life.

In the comments section, "Judith" responds that such an explanation is too benign, and that leftists are motivated by power: "Their job, as they see it, is to mold, shape and direct. To *manage* -- and we are to be the managed. "

I think that this debate on the motivations of the intellectuals is extremely important for those of us who wish to deprive the left of that power. At a personal level, this topic is important to me for two additional reasons: First, I am increasingly troubled by the response of commenters and private e-mailers, all of whom are uniformly in favor of anonymity for academic conservatives, and express a fear of a truly malign wrath from the predominant intellectual establishment. Second, I would hope to avoid the name-calling and imputation of dark motives that seems to characterize much of the contemporary left's critique of George W. Bush. (Can't we all just get along?)

Hayek might present a compromise view, consistent with both ShrinkWrapped and Judith's surmises. As many readers are probably aware, Hayek argues that a "rationalist error" (the belief that "man is able to shape the world around him according to his wishes") forms a "fatal conceit" at the root of the socialist impulse. Intruigingly, Hayek had a more than passing interest in neuroscience and psychology. His understanding of complexity and self-organizing systems was critical to his view of both society and the individual mind, and has been instrumental in shaping my own worldview.

In passing, I would also like to point out Mark Lilla's thoughts on the political temptations of the intellectuals are relevant in this regard; it is not coincidental that this was the first (nonfiction) book I read after 9/11 . (In brief, Lilla's book describes the embrace of totalitarianisms of the left and right by a number of the leading intellectuals of the 20th Century, including Heidegger, Sartre, and Foucault). It would be an interesting exercise to confront any major university intellectual with a list of the political crimes documented in that book. It is not merely the magnitude of the errors committed, but the uniformity in their totalitarian nature.