Bo Winegard has written an intelligent defence of intellectuals in Aporia, appropriately titled "Against Anti-intellectualism." His basic proposition is difficult to dispute. Smarter people are, on average, better at many forms of reasoning. They possess greater capacity to manipulate complicated information, suppress misleading intuitions and understand relationships that less intelligent people may miss. Research on forecasting, cognitive reflection and discrimination between true and false information gives some support to the proposition that cognitive ability is associated with epistemic competence. So far, so good. But this does not establish the conclusion that worries the anti-intellectual.
The serious case for anti-intellectualism has never been that stupidity is superior to intelligence. Nobody wants the village idiot designing a nuclear reactor, performing brain surgery or calculating whether a bridge will remain standing. The question is quite different: should societies grant exceptional epistemic and political authority to a self-conscious intellectual class because its members are clever, educated and credentialled? Here history gives us considerably less reason for confidence.
Winegard begins with William F. Buckley's famous preference for government by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory over government by the faculty of Harvard University. Winegard thinks Buckley was wrong. Put 2,000 elite professors and 2,000 randomly selected people on separate islands, he argues, and the professors would almost certainly construct the more successful society. Perhaps; yet given the lack of practical skills of academics, I doubt it. But islands are not the problem. Give the professors control over the institutions, newspapers, universities and bureaucracy of an actual country and something else enters the equation: ideology, status, conformity, ambition and power. Intelligence does not eliminate any of them. Indeed, intelligence can make them more dangerous.
Winegard himself comes close to conceding this. Intelligent people possess the mental machinery required to construct complicated representations of reality. Usually that is enormously valuable. But the same machinery allows them to construct extraordinarily complicated representations of things that are not true. An ordinary fool can believe something foolish. An intellectual can build a theory around it, give the theory specialised terminology, embed it within an academic literature, publish papers defending it, teach it to students and construct an entire professional community in which disagreement becomes evidence that the dissenter simply does not understand the sophistication of the theory. like Leftism, for example. That is a different order of epistemic danger.
History supplies some magnificent wreckage. Consider the Western intellectual fascination with the Soviet Union. During the interwar period, prominent Western writers and intellectuals travelled to Stalin's Soviet Union and returned with extraordinarily favourable impressions of the great socialist experiment. Among the famous fellow-travellers were George Bernard Shaw, Sidney and Beatrice Webb and Romain Rolland. These were not stupid people. That is precisely the point.
Sidney and Beatrice Webb were formidable intellectuals. Yet they came to praise Stalin's Soviet experiment and produced Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation? The question mark famously disappeared from the title of a later edition. Meanwhile Stalinism was demonstrating what happens when ideology acquires both intellectual respectability and state power.
The problem was not confined to politics. Soviet biology produced one of the twentieth century's great warnings about the corruption of expertise. Trofim Lysenko's politically favoured biological doctrines displaced legitimate genetics. Scientists who resisted faced professional and sometimes much worse consequences, and Soviet biology suffered for decades. Here intellectual authority did not protect science from ideology. Ideological power corrupted the institutions that were supposed to distinguish science from nonsense.
Maoism provides another warning. Mao's Great Leap Forward produced catastrophic famine, while the Cultural Revolution devastated institutions of education and scholarship inside China. Yet Maoism became fashionable among sections of the Western radical intelligentsia. My politics tutor back in the early 1970s had his university office done up as a type of shrine to old Chairman Mao. I think he still had it up until the 1980s. Again, intelligence provided no vaccination against ideological enchantment.
This is the difficulty with treating intellectual ability as though it automatically produced wisdom. It does not. Intelligence tells us something about a person's ability to process information. It does not tell us what assumptions he begins with, what incentives surround him, what social group he wishes to impress, what facts he refuses to consider or how willing he will be to admit publicly that the beautiful theory upon which he has built his reputation is wrong.
The last problem may be the most important because intellectuals do not merely have ideas; they acquire investments in ideas. A professor can spend twenty years developing a theory. Publications, promotions, conference invitations, grants and professional status can become attached to it. Eventually asking him to abandon the theory may amount to asking him to reinterpret his life's work as an elaborate mistake. That is difficult for any human being. High intelligence does not abolish ego. It may simply give ego better lawyers.
This is where ordinary people sometimes possess an advantage that cannot easily be measured by an intelligence test. They may have less theoretical sophistication but more immediate exposure to consequences. The farmer discovers very quickly whether the crop grew. The mechanic discovers whether the engine runs. The builder eventually discovers whether the roof leaks. Reality supplies brutally effective peer review.
The intellectual dealing in enormous abstractions can sometimes escape this discipline for decades. If his prediction fails, the theory was insufficiently implemented. If the policy produces the opposite result from that promised, unexpected variables intervened. If ordinary people reject the program, their consciousness has been manipulated. Every failure can generate another theoretical explanation protecting the original intellectual structure.
This does not mean that ordinary people possess mystical "common sense" that always defeats expertise. Common sense can be catastrophically wrong. Folk medicine, financial manias, rumours and conspiracy theories demonstrate that readily enough. The sensible anti-intellectual position therefore cannot be experts bad, ordinary people good. It is something much less crude: expertise should be treated as specialised evidence, not universal authority.
If I need heart surgery, I want the cardiac surgeon rather than 2,000 names from the telephone directory. But the surgeon's expertise in coronary arteries does not establish his authority on economics, foreign policy, education, ethics or how everyone else should live. Modern societies repeatedly blur this distinction. Academic achievement produces prestige. Prestige migrates from the field in which it was earned into fields where its owner may possess no special competence whatsoever. Eventually "experts say" becomes an argument in itself.
That is where healthy anti-intellectualism becomes necessary. It asks awkward questions. What did you predict last time? Were you right? When you were wrong, did you acknowledge it? What evidence would cause you to abandon your position? Are dissenting specialists permitted to challenge the consensus without professional punishment? Does your theory survive contact with the people who actually experience the consequences of the policies you recommend? Most importantly: what happens if you are wrong?
That last question separates intellectual games from political reality. An academic can propose a grand social experiment and move on to another paper. Ordinary people live inside the experiment. This asymmetry deserves far more attention than it receives. Intellectuals disproportionately manufacture abstractions; politicians and bureaucracies can then convert abstractions into institutions; millions of other people discover whether those abstractions work.
When they fail, responsibility becomes strangely diffuse. Nobody intended the disaster. Nobody individually caused it. The consensus at the time was reasonable. Lessons will be learned. Then the intellectual class moves confidently towards its next consensus.
That is why the history of intellectual enthusiasm for catastrophically mistaken political systems matters. It does not prove that intellectuals are usually wrong. Winegard may well be correct that intelligence correlates, on average, with greater epistemic competence. But averages are not enough when mistakes are amplified by institutional power.
If my neighbour believes something ridiculous, I can ignore him. If a brilliant intellectual believes something ridiculous, constructs an elegant theory around it, persuades other brilliant intellectuals to accept it, teaches it to the next generation, embeds it within institutions and convinces governments to act upon it, I have a problem.
Winegard compares intelligence to a Ferrari: it normally performs better than an ordinary car, but its crashes can be spectacular. That metaphor deserves to be taken more seriously than he perhaps intends. The question is not whether the Ferrari is faster. It obviously is. The question is whether we should give its driver control of the entire road system.
The best defence of anti-intellectualism is therefore not hostility to intelligence. It is hostility to intellectual hubris. We need scientists, scholars, philosophers, engineers and experts. Civilisation could not function without them. But we also need institutionalised scepticism towards them, genuine intellectual pluralism, memory of their failures and a culture in which saying "I was wrong" increases rather than destroys intellectual credibility.
Above all, we should reject the dangerous inference that because somebody is exceptionally clever, he therefore deserves exceptional authority over other people's lives. The twentieth century supplied enough evidence against that proposition. The intellectual's great strength is that he can see possibilities ordinary people cannot. His great weakness is exactly the same. Sometimes he sees a magnificent theoretical world that does not exist, becomes emotionally attached to it, and dismisses the ordinary people pointing towards the wreckage outside his window.
That is not an argument against intelligence. It is an argument for something intelligence cannot guarantee: humility.
https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/against-anti-intellectualism