Conservative intellectual Thomas Sowell explains that the popular belief that Obama and his top advisers are such a “brainy bunch” may not be such a good thing after all:

It was, after all, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s brilliant “brains trust” advisers whose policies are now increasingly recognized as having prolonged the Great Depression of the 1930s, while claiming credit for ending it. The Great Depression ended only when the Second World War put an end to many New Deal policies.

FDR himself said that “Dr. New Deal” had been replaced by “Dr. Win-the-War.” But those today who are for big spending like to credit wartime big spending for bringing the Great Depression to an end. They never ask the question as to why previous depressions had always ended on their own, much faster than the one under FDR, and without government intervention or massive government spending.

Brainy folks were also present in Lyndon Johnson’s administration, especially in the Pentagon, where Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s brilliant “whiz kids” tried to micro-manage the Vietnam war, with disastrous results.

There is usually only a limited amount of damage that can be done by dull or stupid people. For creating a truly monumental disaster, you need people with high IQs.

Although that’s certainly true (and dangerous), Sowell explains that the real problem runs even deeper: “Such people have been told all their lives how brilliant they are, until finally they feel forced to admit it, with all due modesty. But they not only tend to over-estimate their own brilliance, more fundamentally they tend to over-estimate how important brilliance itself is when dealing with real world problems.”

You see, Sowell explains, not all things can be understood by ‘intelligence’ alone. Experience is just as and often even more important. As Sowell puts it: “Many crucial things in life are learned from experience, rather than from clever thoughts or clever words.”

The main weakness of those who consider themselves to be extremely intelligent if not brilliant is that they overrate intelligence and reason and undervalue traditions, culture and experience. For them only intelligence matters. There is no limit to what government can do as long as they are in charge of it.

History has taught us that there are limits and that brilliant men often end up destroying the good in a vain pursuit of the perfect.

It’s progressivism’s main weakness; it is inherently unrealistic – no matter how ‘brilliant’ its adherents may believe themselves to be.