Liberalism flows significantly, but not entirely, from intellectual
and moral elitism. The idea is that we, a certain bunch
which defines itself by subscribing to a certain menu
of views, are smarter and more caring than those
who disagree. It’s natural that highly educated people,
who are competing to be smarter than other highly
educated people, won’t want to be grouped with
their intellectual inferiors. Ergo there is a great deal
of liberalism among intellectual elites, which means
highly educated people.
Because it’s driven by elitism, which involves the
conviction that there are no arguments worth
considering on the other side,
liberalism has a tendency not to reality test
and people often subscribe to views because
otherwise they’ll be ranked among the dodos.
As I’ve moved about, I found people’s political
and social views becoming odder as I moved to
better universities; by the time I got to Harvard
and MIT, people were virtually psycho. If one is
detemined to define oneself as smarter than
everybody else, one must hold remarkable views
on important issues. As ordinary folks have scouted
out the sane positions, little remains but to
hold bizarre views, easy enough to do
if one routinely dismisses the other side
as stupid and corrupt.
This egoism goes some distance toward explaining
the great attraction of Marxism for intellectuals.
The intellectual, through sheer brilliance
and penetrating insight, discerns the laws of history
which enables him to lead the working class
to the new millenium. Way cool!
I think this helps explain why university faculty
are mostly left-wing, and also why the political
track record of intellectuals in the last century
was so very poor. Of course it hardly follows that
liberal positions are mistaken–these must be
judged on their merits. Or that liberals never
see the truth on some issue better than anybody else.
If I may zig to the hiring thing, a true story:
a senior colleague of mine, a woman philosopher of
considerable accomplishment, was retiring.
The last person we interviewed to take her place
was a woman, a feminist philosopher of science.
We asked all sorts of questions; she seemed not bad
to me. Two of my male colleagues are feminist philosophers,
so the Chair asked them what they thought of her.
‘Dreadful! The worst!’ they exclaimed. ‘She doesn’t know
feminism, she doesn’t know philosophy of science!’
‘Very well,’ the Chair said. ‘To whom shall we offer the job?’
‘Her! Her!’ they said. ‘We need to hire a woman. It doesn’t
matter that she’s incompetent.’
We almost hired her. I wouldn’t have been able to stop them,
and the Chair was also a feminist. What saved us
was my retiring colleague; she argued that she wanted
to be replaced by somebody good at philosophy,
somebody who could contribute to the intellectual
life of the university. They listened to her; she was,
after all, a woman.
By the way, Wombat, respect for arguments, the idea
that we grade for the ability to clearly present and
then support a view, whatever it is, doesn’t necessarily
extend beyond philosophy departments. Certainly
there are people in American universities who think the goal
of education is political transformation, and that
there are no objective standards: what matters
is results. Best
