In 2011 Sam Harris found the one thing his readers would not forgive. He could call the world’s religions “cesspools of confusion and bigotry”, deny free will, even defend torture, he wrote, and keep his audience. Then he suggested that billionaires pay more tax. “Nothing will rile and winnow your audience” like that, he reported afterward. He called the reaction a “quasi-religious abhorrence of ‘wealth redistribution’”.
I see a quieter version among thinkers I admire. Steven Pinker argues in Enlightenment Now that economic inequality “is not itself a dimension of human wellbeing”. That is a position, not a motive. This is only my impression: remedies that touch big money face a higher bar of proof among such thinkers than other ideas do.
Some of that bar is sound. Chesterton’s fence says not to tear down what you do not understand, and rocking the boat of a working economy can make things far worse. Some of it is ordinary bias. Psychologists call the pull toward the existing state of affairs status quo bias, and the urge to defend existing arrangements system justification.
I am not wise enough to draw the exact line between the two. What I can say is that timing matters. In February 1933, 25 German industrialists met Hitler and gave about two million Reichsmarks to his campaign. I wonder how that year would have gone if more people of their standing had said no. Dwight Eisenhower, a general and no radical, did speak up on his way out, warning against “unwarranted influence” by the “military-industrial complex”. Who We Thank follows that warning to the ballpark.
So those who respect the fence still ought to speak a little louder when the moment looks consequential. That asks public thinkers to read a crystal ball, which may not be fair. But I agree with Chomsky that intellectuals “are in a position to expose the lies of governments”, and that the position carries a duty. I would only ask for more diplomacy than he usually shows.