Posted on by Bonald

In my decade of working in academia, I have never met a conservative at the faculty or post-doctoral level. Not one. Furthermore, I have never met a professor or postdoc who was not an adamantly committed liberal. In fact, in informal gatherings among faculty, postdocs, or graduate students, I have never encounted any ideological diversity whatsoever. (I keep my mouth shut, of course, but I’m the only one.) So I am not at all surprised by the findings reported on Arts and Letters Daily today that liberals are on average much smarter than conservatives. The question is, what does it mean?

Suppose there were an ideology that said that left-handed people should rule over right-handed people. Suppose someone did a survey to see how acceptance or rejection of this belief correlated with a person’s chirality (his left- or right-handedness). What do you think the results of this study would be? Obviously, being left-handed would be positively correlated with accepting this belief. The desire for power would attract some lefties to it. Even if lefties were split 50-50, the correlation would still be found if (as one would expect) righties strongly rejected the left-hander-domination ideology.

Now it so happens that there is an ideology called “liberalism” which more-or-less amounts to the claim that smart people should rule over stupid people. Of course, it doesn’t claim this explicitly, but that is its inevitable outcome. What liberalism explicitly claims is 1) that society is a means to the end of satisfying the private desires of the populace, and 2) that society should therefore be organized rationally in order to maximize the satisfaction of these desires and to arrange that desire-satisfaction is distributed in an equitable way. Now premise 2 practically demands political centralization and bureaucratic rationalization. Assigning positions by qualification is a key feature of bureacracy, as Weber recognized. So, in a liberal (bureaucratically rationalized) society, the smartest people hold all the top positions in government and industry. Under such organizations, smart people fare far better than under traditional or charismatic organization. Furthermore, the centralized bodies that the smart people control are much more powerful than the comparable organs of power in a traditional society, because liberalism gives the state a licence to remake society from the top down to make sure people get what they want equally and maximally. Basically, liberalism tells the experts, “You should be allowed to take charge and fix things.” It’s not surprising that anyone who is an expert, or likes to think of himself as such, will find this message attractive.

Now, there are two main criticisms of the liberal mandate. Both are called “conservative”, but they are as radically distinct from each other as they are from the thing they criticize. The first position, the free-market/classical-liberal position associated with Hayek and others, is to accept premise 1 but deny premise 2. Society is far too complicated for effective top-down management, they say. The price mechanism is able to utilize the vast collective knowledge (practical and particular, not theoretical, knowledge) of millions of people in a way that is simply not possible for a centralized agency, no matter how smart the people are who are running it.

The second critique, the properly conservative one, denies premise 1. Rather than a means to private ends, the authoritative bodies of society are a necessary context for making authentically ethical and meaningful lives possible. Family, civil society, and the state give concrete form to our duties and rights. To take our family/neighborhood/traditional duties and give them to the state is to take away the things that integrate us into society and give our lives meaning. This position was layed our by Hegel in the 19th century and taken up by MacIntyre and Scruton in the 20th.

Neither the “economic conservative” nor the “social conservative” can give the intellect (at least in its means-ends problem-solving capability) as exalted a place as the liberal does. According to the economic conservative, the generalizations needed to see the big picture leave too much out for the remaining picture to be a reliable guide. According to the social conservative, certain ways of doing things, and the fact that certain people do them, has value in itself, so there is often little room for rationalistic tinkering. Of course, it is possible for a smart person to be a conservative, but it means that he must regard his particular talent as no more valuable than a host of others. He must accept that intelligence is great, but things like loyalty and piety are better.

So I’m not surprised that most smart people are liberals. I think that this fact leads people to an erroneous conclusion, namely that liberal ideas are more complicated or subtle than conservative ideas. Presumably, people are conservative because they’re just not smart enough to understand the liberal position or the arguments that prove it. I don’t think this is true at all. I don’t see how liberal ideas like neutrality towards competing comprehensive ethical theories, consequentialism, Marxism, and so forth are more difficult to understand than the conservative ideal of organic, traditional community.

The article linked above has a different explanation for intelligence-liberalism correlation. He claims that smart people are more likely to defy the conventions of their community, and so they are more likely to end up antitraditional and antireligious. (He points out that the correllation will still hold even if the majority of intelligent people do not so rebel, because dumb people presumably never do.) Given the uniformity of opinion in the university, I strongly doubt this. In fact, in my experience, smart people are far more conformist in their attitudes than their less-bright counterparts. High intelligence just means being very good at accepting the established opinion and working out its full implications. Honestly, where in America is it intellectually bold to defy tradition? Where are school children being taught to honor their ancestors and strive to carry forth the traditions they have inherited? On the other hand, what child is not being drilled on the need to “think for himself” and to fix the world his parents gave him? Is there anywhere one can escape from hearing about the glories of freedom, equality, diversity, progress, innovation, breaking with the “old”, “outdated”, “narrow-minded” ways of tradition? No, it takes real intellectual courage, a real defiance of all group pressure, to reject the ideal of “thinking for oneself” (which always ends up meaning “let the media and the universities tell you what to think, rather than your parents or your church”.)

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