by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
Tribune Media Services<\/p>\n
In classical Athens, public life became dominated by clever and smart-sounding sophists. These mellifluous “really wise guys” made money and gained influence by their rhetorical boasts to “prove” the most amazing “thinkery” that belied common sense.<\/p>\n
We are living in a new age of sophism \u2014 but without a modern equivalent of Socrates to remind the public just how silly our highly credentialed and privileged new rhetoricians can often sound.<\/p>\n
Take California, which is struggling with a near-record wet and snowy winter. Flooding spreads in the lowlands; snow piles up in the Sierras.<\/p>\n
In February 2009, Nobel Laureate and Energy Secretary Steven Chu pontificated without evidence that California farms would dry up and blow away, inasmuch as 90 percent of the annual Sierra snowpack would disappear. Yet long-term studies of the central Sierra snowpack show average snow levels unchanged over the last 90 years. Many California farms are drying up \u2014 but from government’s, not nature’s, irrigation cutoffs.<\/p>\n
England is freezing and snowy. But that’s odd, since global warming experts assured that the end of English snow was on the horizon. Australia is now flooding \u2014 despite predictions that its impending new droughts meant it could not sustain its present population. The New York Times just published an op-ed assuring the public that the current record cold and snow are proof of global warming. In theory, they could be, but one wonders: what, then, would record winter heat and drought prove?<\/p>\n
In response to these unexpected symptoms of blizzards and deluges, climate physicians offer changing diagnoses. “Global change” has superseded “global warming.” After these radically cold winters, the next replacement appears to be “climate chaos.” Yet if next December is neither too hot nor too cold, expect to hear about the doldrum dangers of “climate calm.”<\/p>\n
In 2009, brilliant economists in the Obama administration \u2014 Peter Orszag, Larry Summers and Christina Romer \u2014 assured us that record trillion-plus budget defects were critical to prevent stalled growth and 10 percent unemployment. For nearly two years we have experienced both, but now with an additional $3 trillion in national debt. All three have quietly either returned to academia or Wall Street.<\/p>\n
There is also a new generation of young, sophistic bloggers who offer their wisdom from the New York-Washington corridor. They are usually graduates of America’s elite colleges and navigate in an upscale urban landscape. One, the Washington Post’s 26-year-old Ezra Klein, recently scoffed to his readers that a bothersome U.S. Constitution was “100 years old” and had “no binding power on anything.”<\/p>\n
One constant here is equating wisdom with a certificate of graduation from a prestigious school. If, in the fashion of the sophist Protagoras, one writes that record cold proves record heat, or that record borrowing and printing money will create jobs and sustained economic growth, or that a 223-year-old Constitution is 100 years old and largely irrelevant, then credibility can be claimed only in the title or the credentials \u2014 but not the logic \u2014 of the writer.<\/p>\n
America is huge and diverse, but the world of our credentialed experts is quite small, warped and monotonous \u2014 circumscribed largely by the prestigious university and an office in the incestuous Washington-New York corridor. There are plenty of prizes, honors and degrees among our policy setters and experts, but very little experience in running a business in Oklahoma, raising a large family in Kansas, or working on an assembly line in Michigan, a military base in Texas, a boat in Alaska or a ranch in Idaho.<\/p>\n
In classical sophistic fashion, rhetoric is never far from personal profit. Multimillionaire Al Gore convinced the governments of the Western world that they were facing a global-warming Armageddon, then hired out his services to address the hysteria that he helped create.<\/p>\n
How many climate Cassandras have well-funded research positions predicated on grants and subsidies that depend on convincing the pubic and government of impending disasters that they then can be hired to monitor and address? Are there no green antitrust laws? In contrast, how many of our climate theorists run irrigated farms and energy-intensive businesses at the mercy of new regulations that emanate from distant theorizing?<\/p>\n
The public might have better believed the deficit nostrums of former budget director Peter Orzag had he not retired after less than two years on the job to position himself for a multimillion-dollar billet at Citigroup \u2014 itself a recent recipient of some $25 billion in government bailout funds.<\/p>\n
Are we to wonder why an angry, grassroots Tea Party spread \u2014 or why it was instantly derided by our experts and technocrats as ill-informed or worse?<\/p>\n
\u00a92011 Tribune Media Services<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services In classical Athens, public life became dominated by clever and smart-sounding sophists. These mellifluous “really wise guys” made money and gained influence by their rhetorical boasts to “prove” the most amazing “thinkery” that belied common sense.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[208,546],"tags":[56,176,1014,1057,291,405,219],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-148","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":3405,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/a-man-made-energy-crisis\/","url_meta":{"origin":4100,"position":0},"title":"A Man-Made Energy Crisis","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 28, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Gas is well over $4 a gallon in most places in California \u2014 and soaring elsewhere as well. But are such high energy prices good or bad? That should be a stupid question. Yet it is not, when the Obama administration has stopped\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Energy"","block_context":{"text":"Energy","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/energy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10113,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/apocalyptic-progressivism\/","url_meta":{"origin":4100,"position":1},"title":"Apocalyptic Progressivism","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 24, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson\/\/ National Review Instead of overcoming challenges, progressive politicians exploit them to expand government. Shortly after the 2008 election, President Obama\u2019s soon-to-be chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, infamously declared, \u201cYou never let a serious crisis go to waste.\u201d He elaborated: \u201cWhat I mean by that [is] it\u2019s\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Water"","block_context":{"text":"Water","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/water\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1181,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/2011-out-with-a-whimper-not-a-bang\/","url_meta":{"origin":4100,"position":2},"title":"2011: Out with a Whimper, Not a Bang","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 9, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services It proved as hard to break up the bankrupt European Union as it was to create it. For all the hundreds of stories predicting the imminent end of the union, insolvent Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain still hung in. Apparently if these debtors\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "The EU"","block_context":{"text":"The EU","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/europe\/the-eu\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":407,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/bankrupt-california\/","url_meta":{"origin":4100,"position":3},"title":"Bankrupt California","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 12, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online I\u00a0thought of my fellow Californian Energy Secretary Steven Chu last week, when I paid $4.89 a gallon in Gilroy for regular gas \u2014 and had to wait in line to get it. The customers were in near revolt, but I wondered against what\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "California"","block_context":{"text":"California","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/california\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":794,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/cabinets-gone-wild\/","url_meta":{"origin":4100,"position":4},"title":"Cabinets Gone Wild","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 11, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services We've had some unusual Cabinet secretaries in past administrations \u2014 Earl Butz, John Mitchell and James Watt come to mind \u2014 but never anything quite like the present bunch. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has overseen some $5 trillion in new debt. To help\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Punditry"","block_context":{"text":"Punditry","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/opinion\/punditry\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":739,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/secretaries-gone-wild\/","url_meta":{"origin":4100,"position":5},"title":"Secretaries Gone Wild","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 30, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson NRO's\u00a0The Corner We\u2019ve had some unusual cabinet secretaries in past administrations \u2014 Earl Butz, John Mitchell, and James Watt come to mind \u2014 but never anything quite like the present bunch. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has overseen some $5 trillion in new debt. 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