The Danger of Intellectual Vanity

Part 1 of 2

The eminent economist Thomas Sowell once said, “It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.” It was an admirable statement of epistemological modesty, one that all members of the intellectual class should take to heart.

In a recent post at The Moral Imagination, Michael Matheson Miller helpfully offers “Ten Habits of Mind to Avoid Ideological Thinking.” One of these habits is to “cultivate intellectual humility.” “Even when we think we understand something,” Miller reminds us, “there is more to learn and refine.” Similarly, in a reflection on “How Arrogance Threatens Freedom,” economist Barry Brownstein contends that humility improves our grasp of reality and as a result helps to protect liberty: “We see how ignorant we are, how limited is our useful knowledge.” Lacking humility, “people disdain spontaneous order. They believe in masterminds. They believe their projects are especially deserving and, through the political process, aim to achieve rewards they would not otherwise gain.”

It is perhaps an occupational hazard of practitioners in the knowledge professions—scientists, professors, think thank scholars—to fall into intellectual pride. This is not merely the temptation to think that our intelligence is superior to others’ or that our educational attainments furnish an inherent advantage in understanding the world accurately. Rather, this species of vanity consists in believing that we have the capacity to know with a high level of certainty things that by their nature cannot be thus known.

This temptation is somewhat difficult to discern because it is so closely related to practices that are virtuous. Human persons have a natural desire to learn and know about the world around them, and this desire is a beneficial one. Neglecting the intellect— refusing to learn about the world, about its Creator, or about those around us—is a vice, a form of sloth. But the virtue of devotion to rational inquiry, like other virtues, can turn into a vice when taken to an extreme. In the Summa, Thomas Aquinas identified “studiousness” as a virtue—the pursuit of knowledge—but it is one that must be moderated by temperance. He went on to warn of the related vice of “curiosity,” which might be manifested in using knowledge to commit sin, or in taking “pride in knowing the truth.”

There is yet another variation of intellectual avarice, which is presuming to know more than we actually do. Aristotle was less enthusiastic than Aquinas about humility; the Greek philosopher perceived it to be a failure to accurately appreciate one’s own value. Even for Aristotle, though, there was a kind of pride—he called it vanity—that was to be avoided: “He who thinks himself worthy of great things, being unworthy of them, is vain.” Put another way, the one who exaggerates his capabilities is guilty of a harmful pride. Overestimating our capacity to know is the intellectual pride that is our target here.

This temptation is especially dangerous to a mind that has succumbed to scientism, an embrace of empirical method at the expense of all other modes of knowing. A constant consciousness of the presence of God—the omniscient being whose ways transcend our capacity to comprehend them—and of the corollary reality of mystery is a guard against excessive confidence in our capacity to understand the world fully. In contrast, the scientistic mindset holds that truth arrived at empirically is the most certain of truth, and that once something has been established empirically, there is no gainsaying it. This approach errs in its misapprehension of the knowledge process. To be sure, empirical investigation and the scientific method have enormous roles to play in human exploration of creation, and human beings have reaped enormous gains from employing them. But empirical methods usually do not establish certainty. The universe of scientific investigation—whether in the physical sciences or in the social sciences—is subject to prejudice, bias, and blindness, just as every field of human endeavor is.

Aquinas’s Latin term for pride was superbia. It was so called, he noted, because “a man thereby aims higher [supra] than he is.” (Here in rural Ohio, farmers express the same idea in idiomatic form when someone has “gotten too big for his britches.”) Thomas went on to quote Augustine, who wrote in City of God that pride is the “desire for inordinate exaltation,” that it “imitates God inordinately: for it hath equality of fellowship under Him, and wishes to usurp His dominion over our fellow-creatures.” This is an apt description of the purposes of intellectual pride. By pretending—intentionally or incidentally—to more certainty than our knowledge actually merits, we aspire to reach equality with God (who understands perfectly) and to win the admiration of and gain influence over others (who understand less perfectly).