‘Intellectuals’ are poseurs
17th November 2008
Thomas Sowell takes a look at our modern Brahmin caste and their claims to authority.
Intellectuals, according to Mr. Kristof, are people who are “interested in ideas and comfortable with complexity,” people who “read the classics.”
It is hard to know whether to laugh or cry.
During the 1930s, some of America’s leading intellectuals condemned our economic system and pointed to the centrally planned Soviet economy as a model – all this at a time when literally millions of people were starving to death in the Soviet Union, from a famine in a country with some of the richest farmland in Europe and historically a large food exporter.
In the 1930s, it was the intellectuals who pooh-poohed the dangers from the rise of Adolf Hitler and urged Western disarmament.