In The Vision of the Anointed, Stanford University fellow Thomas Sowell exposes the rhetorical garbage of the liberal elite intelligentsia.
It sounds like an insightful work, and I'll put it on my reading list. It does seem a bit slanted though, since it looks to me that the same could be said for the conservative elite intelligentsia. The general problem is trying to make reality serve dogma, as opposed to dealing with reality effectively, by developing and testing hypothesis.
Thanks for the tip.
yeah, I don't agree with labels like leftist or elite or intelligentsia that the summary used -- I think sowell's analysis can be usefully applied beyond such categories, as it provides a description of how policy-making is informed by self-defining, self-congratulatory thinking. we can certainly see evidence of that in a lot of arenas, national, international, and, most relevant, locally. I think, as one reviewer puts it, that sowell's book can help us understand the mindset of the statists who dominate politics, the media, and academe.
as another summary puts it:
The meat of the book is a careful empirical analysis of dozens of politically-correct policies and theories, from the "war on poverty" to crime, environmentalism, the public school monopoly, affirmative action, and many others. In each case, Sowell shows how the anointed simply ignore evidence (and common sense), invent vocabulary designed to preempt issues rather than debate them, and persistently declare their moral superiority over those who would disagree with them.
Those who maintain this vision tend to be power-hungry egomaniacs who prefer that their own personal preferences "supersede the preferences of everyone else." Government dictates are to supersede both democracy and markets in order to impose "solutions based on their [the anointed's] own presumably superior knowledge and virtue."
it's interesting to see, since the time the book was written (1995), how things have progressed, especially locally. to the point where it's not just 'government' that enacts this vision at the expense of democracy and markets, but also local entities and institutions behaving like governments.
......... laserbeam [aka ray]
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