I've encountered a few more posts and essays about "intellectuals" lately, a subject I've had a whack at before, and will do so again. I've lost the chain of links, so there is a break in attribution, but I'd ended up here, Why Do Intellectuals Oppose the Military?, which in turn led to this old Nozick essay, Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism?

By intellectuals, I do not mean all people of intelligence or of a certain level of education, but those who, in their vocation, deal with ideas as expressed in words, shaping the word flow others receive. These wordsmiths include poets, novelists, literary critics, newspaper and magazine journalists, and many professors. It does not include those who primarily produce and transmit quantitatively or mathematically formulated information (the numbersmiths) or those working in visual media, painters, sculptors, cameramen. Unlike the wordsmiths, people in these occupations do not disproportionately oppose capitalism. The wordsmiths are concentrated in certain occupational sites: academia, the media, government bureaucracy. . .

Intellectuals now expect to be the most highly valued people in a society, those with the most prestige and power, those with the greatest rewards. Intellectuals feel entitled to this. But, by and large, a capitalist society does not honor its intellectuals. . .

Why then do contemporary intellectuals feel entitled to the highest rewards their society has to offer and resentful when they do not receive this? Intellectuals feel they are the most valuable people, the ones with the highest merit, and that society should reward people in accordance with their value and merit. But a capitalist society does not satisfy the principle of distribution "to each according to his merit or value." Apart from the gifts, inheritances, and gambling winnings that occur in a free society, the market distributes to those who satisfy the perceived market-expressed demands of others, and how much it so distributes depends on how much is demanded and how great the alternative supply is. Unsuccessful businessmen and workers do not have the same animus against the capitalist system as do the wordsmith intellectuals. Only the sense of unrecognized superiority, of entitlement betrayed, produces that animus. . .

Why do wordsmith intellectuals think they are most valuable, and why do they think distribution should be in accordance with value? . . .

From the beginnings of recorded thought, intellectuals have told us their activity is most valuable. Plato valued the rational faculty above courage and the appetites and deemed that philosophers should rule; Aristotle held that intellectual contemplation was the highest activity. It is not surprising that surviving texts record this high evaluation of intellectual activity. The people who formulated evaluations, who wrote them down with reasons to back them up, were intellectuals, after all. They were praising themselves. . .

What factor produced feelings of superior value on the part of intellectuals? I want to focus on one institution in particular: schools. . . Schools became the major institution outside of the family to shape the attitudes of young people, and almost all those who later became intellectuals went through schools. There they were successful. They were judged against others and deemed superior. They were praised and rewarded, the teacher's favorites. How could they fail to see themselves as superior? Daily, they experienced differences in facility with ideas, in quick-wittedness. The schools told them, and showed them, they were better. The schools, too, exhibited and thereby taught the principle of reward in accordance with (intellectual) merit. To the intellectually meritorious went the praise, the teacher's smiles, and the highest grades. In the currency the schools had to offer, the smartest constituted the upper class. Though not part of the official curricula, in the schools the intellectuals learned the lessons of their own greater value in comparison with the others, and of how this greater value entitled them to greater rewards.

The wider market society, however, taught a different lesson.

It seems odd that any of this needs to be argued or that anyone would dispute it. It seems odd that schools do not explicitly teach this lesson in order to improve the character of their prize pupils and increase their possibility of making useful contributions to society. The failure to understand these basic facts of society is intellectually crippling.

In this most depressing of times, these are some of the issues I want to press not to depress the reader but to press ahead, to redirect our meager capacities as fast as possible. To prove my point, I have not exactly facts rather tiny cues, nagging doubts, disturbing telltale signs. What has become of critique, I wonder, when the New York Times runs the following story?

Most scientists believe that [global] warming is caused largely by manmade pollutants that require strict regulation. Mr. Luntz [a lobbyist for the Republicans] seems to acknowledge as much when he says that "the scientific debate is closing against us." His advice, however, is to emphasize that the evidence is not complete. "Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled," he writes, "their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue."2

Fancy that? An artificially maintained scientific controversy to favor a "brown backlash" as Paul Ehrlich would say.3 Do you see why I am worried? I myself have spent sometimes in the past trying to show the "lack of scientific certainty" inherent in the construction of facts. I too made it a "primary issue." But I did not exactly aim at fooling the public by obscuring the certainty of a closed argument–or did I? After all, I have been accused of just that sin. Still, I'd like to believe that, on the contrary, I intended to emancipate the public from a prematurely naturalized objectified fact. Was I foolishly mistaken?

Yes, of course. Worse, the disease persists and this is a recent expression of it. There are no closed arguments. All knowledge is pragmatic, provisional and subject to later correction. It is simple good sense to explicitly maintain this basic tenet of science itself.

The practitioners of critique never had this understanding, they just played word games to advance their oppositional views. And they never grasped Nozick's simple truth: "The wider market society, however, taught a different lesson." That lesson might be explained by the saying that "the street finds its uses". Whatever tools and techniques are available will be used by various groups to advance their purposes, often in opposition to one another. This shouldn't be so difficult to grasp since this is also how it works in the academy.

[A]cademia is no more about making useful intellectual progress than advertising is about informing consumers. Professors seek prestigious careers, while funders and students seek prestige by association. Academics talk and write primarily to signal their impressive mental abilities, such as their mastery of words, math, machines, or vast detail. Yes, contributing to useful intellectual progress can sometimes appear impressive, but the correlation is weak, and it is often hard to see who really contributed how much. Progress happens, but largely as a side effect.

It seems that in the last analysis there is very little if any net value to the work of intellectuals. The benefits of the work are consumed by the costs of their confusions. This isn't a necessary defect, it's an anachronism. As I see it poets, novelists, literary critics, newspaper and magazine journalists, professors and politicians will have to adapt to the new world of ICT which hugely increases the number of wordsmiths. Knowledge and expressions of knowledge are being democratized. Anyone who chooses to do so can be a producer as well as a consumer. As libraries and journals become more widely accessible the monopolies will be broken and there will be a far larger pool of talent to compete with. That pool will include many who are as bright or brighter but who lacked the personality and character attributes to prosper in school. It seems doubtful those those attributes were in fact helpful in the pursuit of knowledge or its expression, so they may even have an advantage in the world wide market of ideas.

Perhaps there will be some convergence. A capitalist society of this sort might in fact honor its intellectuals since those that prosper will have shown their mettle in unambiguous ways. If so, and I realize that this is speculative, society will greatly benefit.