Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
Plato was a philosopher. He neither “sowed nor reaped.” Instead, he made his place in the world by thinking and talking persuasively. In “The Republic” he turned his intellect to the question of creating the perfect society. He thought about the matter very hard and discovered that the best people to govern society were philosophers, i.e., people just like Plato.
Imagine his surprise.
Lead and Gold excerpted a very interesting article by Michael Kelly, the Atlantic editor who was killed during the early days of the Iraq war. In the article, published in February of 2002, Kelly draws a distinction between knowledge and knowingness;:
Knowingness, of course, is not knowledge—indeed, is the rebuttal of knowledge. Knowledge was what squares had, or thought they had, and they thought that it was the secret of life. Knowingness is a celebration of the conceit that what the squares knew, or thought they knew, was worthless.
(go read the entire excerpt)
It strikes me that many trends in today’s society–especially in academia but by no means limited to it–are at least partly about enabling the attitude of knowingness.
The pursuit of an independent foreign policy by House speaker Nancy Pelosi is obviously a bad idea no matter what one’s political persuasion.
Yet the Democrats’ abrogation of powers and roles comes as no surprise to students of the modern Left. Pelosi is merely the last instance of a long evolution by the Left away from the Rule of Law and towards the rule of men.
I think an old parable explains why the professional subcultures of articulate intellectuals, such as academics in the humanities, artists and journalists, all experience such enormous pressures to conform to the same viewpoint.
In the parable, a king wants to buy some clocks and travels to the Bavarian village were the ten best clockmakers in the world keep their shops all along one street.
[Note: This is one of my long comments at another site that I thought I would post here.]
I think our economic lives profoundly influence how we think about broader issues. The degree to which any individual can disagree with one’s superiors and peers without suffering harm to one’s career varies significantly from field to field. In turn, the degree to which mere human opinion plays a role in an individual’s success within a field determines how conformist to common opinion within a field an individual must be to succeed.