In case you are just joining in:

My post “Any of This Could Be Argued” discussed the connection between intellectual authority and intellectual progress.

My post “The Grackle Syndrome” discussed what happens when intellectual authority is rejected.  Alexis de Tocqueville got this partly right and partly wrong.  He grasped that when this happens, the motor driving movements of opinion is the urge to conform to others, and he grasped that these movements are unstable.  However, he failed to distinguish between the individual’s conformity to the majority and his conformity to people like himself.  I think that if conformity to the majority were the motor, we should expect not instability of opinion, but monolithic blocs of opinion which are resistant to change.   But if conformity to people like myself is the motor, then we should expect chaotic movements of opinion, like the kaleidoscopic shifting, dividing, rejoining, and redividing that we see in large masses of airborne grackles, in which each bird imitates its near neighbors.  And this is closer to the truth.

Obviously the Grackle Syndrome couldn’t be the whole story, because public opinion is not quite that chaotic.  Beginning with “Why Intellectuals Are So Conformist” and “Why Intellectuals Lean Left,” I’ve tried to show that the urge to conform is not the only motive in operation.  This doesn’t mean that there isn’t a Grackle Syndrome; it means that additional patterns are superimposed on it.  Intellectuals in our kind of social system are motivated to favor technocratic political arrangements which preserve and increase their own influence.  So although opinion among intellectuals is still rather chaotic and faddish, its chaotic movements are confined mostly to the left.

In Monday’s post, “The Flocking Behavior of Journalists,” I’ll offer another example of how patterns can be superimposed on the Grackle Syndrome.

Human beings naturally desire to know the truth.  I don’t think this longing can be eradicated, but in the short run it may be far from obvious, just because all sorts of other longings compete with it and may at any given moment be stronger.  Even so, reality has ways of revenging itself upon beliefs that contradict it.  But these wheels too grind slowly, and in the short run false beliefs may even seem to have conquered reality itself.

Some of the motives which act upon the mind are not so much opposed to truth as indifferent to it.  One such motive is intellectual vanity; I may love my ideas just because they are mine, and resist any challenge to them.  In my last post I commented on another, the sheer craving of intellectuals for the approval of other intellectuals.  One may think these two motives would be in opposition.  Far from it.  When the vanity of the individual is engulfed by the vanity of the group, when every “I” is desperate to be one of “us,” the two motives work together.  So strongly do these two motives operate in people of my profession that we invest enormous amounts of energy to convince ourselves that the evidence supports the main outlines of the consensus views, even when it actually contradicts them.  Dissent rarely goes beyond the details.

But none of these motives explains the peculiar tendency of intellectual opinion in our times to bunch together at the leftward end of the political spectrum.  What accounts for that?  If in the short run we tend to conform to each other, then bunching is not hard to explain, but why don’t we bunch more often in other places too?  After all, intellectuals are not drawn leftward under all social orders.  In a social order in which intellectuals depend on the patronage of an aristocracy, they are not usually strong critics of their patrons.

But in our own social order, things stand differently.  Though we still call ourselves a republic, we are actually a technocracy in which the real rulers are a vast and invisible mass of experts.  One kind of expertise resides in the administrative agencies, since legislators these days do not so much enact laws as enact guidelines and objectives, which are converted into enforceable rules by functionaries.  Another kind resides in the courts, which may seem an altogether different thing, but it really isn’t.  For the courts, which act as unelected superlegislatures, crank out norms in much the same fashion in which elected legislatures do, not so much saying what is to be done as establishing “tests” which require various “interests” to be “balanced.”  The real meaning of these tests does not gel until they have passed into the hands of administrative functionaries, so we are back to the experts.

Now under such a state of affairs, intellectuals do not rule in their own right, and may even posture as critics of the state.  Yet the cause of their self-importance is virtually indistinguishable from the cause of the technocracy itself, for it is they who educate the experts and provide them with their intellectual formation.  With just a few exceptions, the more massive and important the state is, the more important intellectuals feel themselves to be, and the more massive their own self-regard.  The party of the state is the party of the left, and so that is the direction in which they lean.

On almost every public issue, intellectuals incline toward just those doubts and just those certainties which strengthen reliance on expert-driven governmental action.  Regarding the view that marriage is a natural institution ordained to unchangeable ends, they incline toward doubt, because it entails that state action should be limited.  But regarding the view that unregulated human activity is causing harmful global climate change, they incline toward certainty, because it entails that state action should be expanded.  Regarding the view that the most effective antipoverty program is to get married and stay married, they incline toward doubt, because this makes morality more important than social engineering.  But regarding the view that the best way to help the poor is to marry them to the government itself, they incline toward certainty, because this makes social engineering more important than morality.

What about the Grackle Syndrome, the chaotic movement of opinion which I discussed in a previous post?  It still operates, but the leftward lean of the intelligentsia is superimposed upon it.  Intellectuals are driven by fads which bloom into transitory existence, fade, dissolve, recombine, and bloom again.  But the fads are all at one end of the spectrum, as though the grackles were all flocking on one side of the sky.

I take heart, because the movements of the grackles are not a Fate.  Remember those slowly turning wheels; in the long run not only ideas, but even social orders are accountable to reality.  Moreover, competing with all the transient motives for hiding from this particular truth, or that particular truth, is the deep, slow, inexpungeable longing for truth as such.

Why are intellectuals such conformists?

What, you didn’t know that they were conformists?  That’s not surprising.  The scholar of our time preens himself as an independent thinker, and works hard to project that image to others as well.  In his view, the non-intellectuals are the conformists, and he and his fellow intellectuals are the exceptions, free minds and spirits who stand apart from the herd.

Superficially, there is something to it.  It’s true that his views are different than those of non-intellectuals.  He may even hold their views in scorn.  A student, seeing that his professor thinks differently than his parents do, may be forgiven for considering his professor an independent thinker.  But the truth is merely that his parents are not the sorts of people to whom his professor conforms.

Scholars conform to each other.  Consensus is achieved not so much by following the evidence wherever it leads, as by talking oneself into viewing the evidence in such a way that one is never in danger of falling too far out of line with how other scholars think.

We admit that this sort of thing has taken place in the recent past.  Once upon a time geologists “knew” that the earth’s crust is stationary, penologists “knew” that prisons rehabilitate, neuroscientists “knew” that male and female brains are identical except for the regions which regulate sexual hormones and behaviors, psychologists “knew” that sexual abusers who have undergone therapy are no longer dangerous to children, political economists “knew” that the transfer of wealth from the governments of rich nations to the governments of poor nations makes the poor people in those nations richer, and climatologists “knew” that the earth was about to enter a new ice age.

Though we like to think we are above all that today, the fear of deviating from what the smart people think is as strong as ever.  Atmospheric scientists “know” that human activity is causing the earth to become warmer, biologists “know” that nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of random variation and natural selection, sociologists “know” that children raised by same-sex couples thrive just as well as children raised by their mothers and fathers, political scientists “know” that diversity of color is crucial to intellectual debate but that diversity of opinion is not, university administrators “know” that differences in the intellectual fields preferred by men and women are due to discrimination, and intellectuals in general “know” that although there might be a God, there couldn’t be one whose existence would make any difference.

So what is my thesis?  That the impulse to conform is just as powerful among intellectuals as among people in general?  No, I think it is much more powerful.

There are probably many reasons, but allow me to suggest just two of them. 

One reason is fiscal and organizational.  Laboratory research and survey research are expensive, and even when scholars pursue lines of research which don’t cost anything, they are often under pressure from those who decide on their salaries and promotion to bring money to the university in the form of research grants.  Who doles out these grants?  Increasingly, the government doles them out.  Who decides who receives them?  Committees of scholars decide.  Which scholars tend to get onto these committees?  The sort who hold the conventional views.  What kinds of research do such people tend to support?  The kinds that don’t challenge these views.

Although the fiscal and organizational explanation is a strong one, there is a certain mystery about it.  For why do intellectuals put up with such regimentation?  Why don’t they rebel? At least part of the answer lies in how we grew up.

Most of us were nerds.  We were good at things other children didn’t care about, and poor at things other children admired.  Understandably, the other kids found us strange.  To compensate, many of us cultivated a sense of superiority.  “I don’t need those dumb kids; I am one of the smart ones.”

But “smart kids” too are social beings.   A child who “doesn’t need” the approval of the “dumb kids” depends all the more on the approval of the "smart ones" to whom he is desperate to belong.  And the fact of the matter is that strangeness isn’t valued by the “smart ones” either; they merely have different criteria of what is strange.  The entrance ticket to the smart club isn’t just to be smart, but to think the way kids think who are already considered smart.  As we age, the pressure to stay on good terms with the club grows only stronger.

I am less distressed by all this than one might think.  There is nothing wrong with intellectual authority; the problem is that we hew to the worst kind of it, the authority of the intellectual mob.  Working within an intellectual tradition is actually a good thing; the problem is that instead of working within traditions, we work within fads.

Could the intellectual culture be different?  Of course.  It is not a permanent feature of reality; there have been many intellectual cultures.  Then how might it change?  That is a good question, but not for today.

I closed last week’s post with the remark that “anything can be argued, yes, but at some point the guns should fall silent.”  At some point the argument should rest. 

This is when people usually ask, “Who gets to say when the argument should rest?”  The question is both rhetorical and sarcastic.  What it means is that no one gets to say when the argument should rest, and that all intelligent modern people know this.  We are expected to understand that although there may be such things as political authority and legal authority, there is no such thing as intellectual authority.

But is this true?  I think it is quite wrong.  Not only is there such a thing as intellectual authority, but there are several kinds of intellectual authority.  Expert authority, for example.  Suppose we are discussing how to solve differential equations.  I can’t remember my calculus, but you are a calculus teacher.  If I have any sense, I will defer to your authority.

At the moment, though, we are discussing a somewhat different kind of intellectual authority, which might be called presiding authority.  The Catholic Church calls it Magisterium.  This means the authority to say when the argument should rest -- at least for those who accept the authority.

Carefully delimited, cautiously exercised, voluntarily accepted presiding authority seems to be a prerequisite of intellectual progress.  Without knowing more about the particular Magisterium in question and the grounds of its claims (the Catholic Church?  The Westminster Assembly?), we cannot say whether progress will be deeper into truth or more profoundly into error.  But at least one has a chance of progressing somewhere besides round and round in circles. 

If one can only settle that God has disclosed Himself in Christ, then one can go on to ask about the meaning of this remarkable self-disclosure.  If one can only settle that marriage is a permanent union of a man and woman with a view toward procreation, then we can go on to ask other interesting questions about marriage.  But if nothing can be settled, nothing can be built on that foundation.

Someone who rejects the concept of intellectual authority may think that he has no intellectual authority and so he is free.  But not having an intellectual authority would require him to work out everything to believe for himself, a task too massive even for a superintellect.  Whatever beliefs we cannot work out for ourselves, we inevitably borrow from another source we consider reliable.  This is why he who explicitly rejects intellectual submission ends up tacitly submitting himself to authorities whose dominion he does not recognize.  He has not become more free, but less.  Because he is unaware of his masters, their dominion over him is unlimited.

Alexis de Tocqueville argued that in a society with no inherited statuses, the unrecognized, despotic authority is usually the majority.  This is close to the truth, but a bit too simple, because the process is chaotic, and the majority itself is divided.  Everyone responds to the people in his own milieu, but his milieu keeps changing, just because each of the other people in his milieu is doing the same thing.  I like to call this the Grackle Syndrome.

Grackles are a raucous and ill-mannered variety of blackbird common in Austin, Texas.  When I first began teaching at the University, the campus was plagued by several hundred thousand of these feathered creatures.  At a certain time every evening, they filled the skies.  One evening I watched.

The heavens presented the appearance of a vast kaleidoscope of shrieking birds, swirling through the air in a long-protracted, writhing pandemonium.  There were no flocks per se.  One group of several hundred grackles might suddenly change course.  Perhaps most of the birds would follow the new course, but others, disoriented, would split off to continue the old one.  In a few more seconds, those which were following the old course might fuse with yet a third group, and those which were following the new course might be absorbed into yet a fourth.  And so the drama was repeated all over the sky, as all those tens of thousands upon tens of thousands of noisy black fowl zigged, divided, recombined, redivided, swooped, zagged, and zigged again.

I am sure each grackle proudly told himself he was following no authority but his own, even though he was merely following his close companions.  If he should ever have happened to spare a glance at more distant grackles, he thought “They are on the wrong side of history.”  If five seconds later his little group was dispersed into fragments and he found himself in a new little group, he followed his new close companions.  Since grackles have no historical memory, he now told himself that those other ones were on the wrong side of history, not remembering that but a few moments before he had been flying by their side.  And so it goes with us.

“Any of this could be argued,” he said.  And of course he was right.

I had just been giving a little talk about the natural moral law.  Among my illustrations had been the wrong of murder and theft, the rightness of marital faithfulness, the rightness of honor to parents.  In passing I had said something about the superiority of monogamy over polygamy.  That was the point that bothered him.

He was a decent man.  It wasn’t that he wanted four wives.  Nor was the problem with my arguments.

He didn’t deny that polygamy is worse for the children.  He didn’t dispute that it is worse for the union of the spouses.  He didn’t even object to the suggestion that in a polygamous society, since the rich are the ones who have multiple wives, poor men may find it difficult to win wives at all.

His only objection was that theoretically, each of these points could be argued.

The solution of the difficulty, a common one, is that there are two kinds of skepticism.  One kind destroys rationality; the other is crucial to its health.

The bad kind counsels that if anything can be doubted – in this case, monogamy -- we must not believe in it.  The problem is that everything can be doubted.  So by this rule, we should not believe in anything.  And if we suppose that we are following the rule, we will imagine that we really don’t believe in anything.

Now the plot thickens.  Practically speaking, not believing in anything is impossible.  In order to make decisions at all, we have to trust certain realities, and these are our real commitments, whether or not we realize that we hold them.  So the only thing the bad kind of skepticism accomplishes is that it keeps us from putting our commitments to the test.

The good kind of skepticism proceeds differently.  Instead of asking whether something can be doubted, it asks whether it ought to be.  Are the best reasons for it or against it?  This is the kind of skepticism Chesterton had in mind when he wrote “The object of opening the mind as of opening the mouth is to shut it again on something solid.”

Anything can be argued, yes, but at some point the guns should fall silent.

Now this fact leads to another difficulty, which I will take up next week.