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The Character Thing
| Article
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20327 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1992 |
3,353 Words |
| Author
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Charles J. Sykes
Charles J. Sykes is the author of The Hollow Men: Politics and
Corruption in Higher Education and ProfScam: Professors and
the Demise of Higher Education. His most recent project was
the National Review College Guide, which he coedited with Brad
Miner. |
ON CHARACTER
James Q. Wilson
Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute Press, 1991
230 pp., $24.95
Social myths can have tragic consequences. Being wrong about the source of society's problems is only the start.
In the mid-1980s sociologist Eva Etzione-Halevy broke ranks to challenge the most cherished orthodoxies of her colleagues in the social sciences. If the knowledge elite--and by this she meant not merely social scientists but Western intellectuals in general--really understood so much about social change and human nature, she asked, why were they so often wrong? Why was it that despite the explosion in studies, research papers, books, and symposia in recent years none of this had led to better policy decisions? And why had they contributed so little to the moral, economic, psychological, or social betterment of society? "On the contrary," she suggested, "although no causality can be shown, it is nevertheless worth nothing that the years in which the influence of the social scientists on policy has been growing have also been the years in which policy failures have been rife and in which a variety of formidable social problems have been multiplying."
Her conclusion was that the West's knowledge elite were "prophets who have failed," not because their advice had been ignored, but rather because when "their ideas have been put to the test of actual practice and the necessary ensuring compromises, they have frequently proved disappointing." In fact, their advice, she wrote, has itself created problems for society. What struck Etzione-Halevy was the consequences of this failure. Despite being wrong so often, she noted, "intellectuals … continue to act as if nothing has happened. They continue to be more adamant than ever in their belief in the fruitfulness of their knowledge, in the soundness of the advice emanating from that knowledge and in the salutary effects of policy emanating from that advice." Because they must continue to justify their grants, privileges, and their right to nag and cajole society, they must never under any circumstances admit their "stunned helplessness" in the face of crises they neither foresaw nor understood.
Thus the failure of predictions, Etzione-Halevy noted, "has frequently been followed by an even firmer conviction of their truthfulness. The failures have been rationalized away, new evidence has been looked for and existing evidence has been
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