From Free Life No 24, December 1995

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. Return to Free Life No 24 contents page.

Among many other revealing works by Thomas Sowell was A Conflict of Visions (William Marrow, New York, 1987). There he started from the observation that, even where the issues in dispute are not intrinsically connected, "the same familiar faces can be found glaring at each other from opposite sides of the political fence, again and again." Members of the opposing parties "are reasoning from fundamentally different premises... They have different visions of how the world works" [p.13].

Dr Sowell proceeded to distinguish the constrained from the unconstrained vision. The former is displayed most clearly in the writings of Adam Smith and of the Founding Fathers of the American Republic. Thus in The Federalist Papers we read: "It is the lot of all human institutions, even those of the most perfect kind, to have defects as well as excellencies - ill as well as good propensities. This results from the imperfection of the Institutor, Man." Those guided by this vision recognise that there are and can be no perfect institutions and no ideal policies, that there always have to be trade-offs, and costs which have to be accepted as the price of benefits. They also realise that human beings are not always environmentally necessitated to behave as they do behave but instead are members of a kind of organisms which can and cannot but make choices. If, therefore, these choices are to be made in socially desirable senses, then there have to be effective incentives to the desirable and disincentives to the undesirable.

The present book explicates the opposing vision, the vision of the anointed, and examines the catastrophic consequences produced in the USA during the last thirty or forty years by the enormously influential ‚lite which has been and is misguided by that unconstrained vision. The warrant for describing these people as the anointed is that they see themselves and expect to be seen as established residents of the moral high ground, abusing and dismissing all opponents as basely motivated enemies of the manifestly good. But the most damaging characteristic of this vision is its power to inhibit the admission of evidence showing the failure of the policies of the anointed to produce the results promised.

Dr Sowell develops this argument through examinations of three major cases: the war on poverty launched by President Johnson; the drive for sex education and contraceptive supply in schools; and various measures directed against punishment and against those alleged true causes of crime which supposedly lie outside the criminals. (Did I hear some reactionary mischief-maker quoting Mr Blair's "Tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime"?)

In none of these three cases did the critical problem which the measures favoured by the anointed were supposed to be going to solve actually exist. For in the decades preceding the nineteen sixties - the decade in which these measures were adopted - the indices of poverty, of teenage pregnancy and unmarried motherhood, and of crime and especially of the crime of murder, had all in fact been not just static but actually declining.

Subsequent to the taking of the various measures promoted by the anointed the relevant indices in all these three cases began an ascent which is still continuing. Some people less disillusioned than the present reviewer might have hoped - especially since the anointed tend to be well above average in both IQ and educational level - that those undisputed facts would have induced some substantial fraction of the anointed to have second thoughts about the soundness of these policies.

Dr Sowell, however, shows that such hopes would have been disappointed. He quotes, for instance, a Director of an Institute for Research on Poverty who simply asserts, without seeing any need to cite evidence, that absent all the anti-poverty programmes the indices would have been higher still. Dr Sowell then sums up: "In short, no matter what happens, the vision of the anointed always succeeds, if not by the original criteria, then by criteria extemporised later - and if not by empirical criteria, then by criteria sufficiently subjective to escape even the possibility of refutation. Evidence becomes irrelevant" [p.18].

Dr Sowell is concerned primarily with the impact of the vision of the anointed in US affairs. Indeed, although Basic Books is an imprint of Harper-Collins they are not even trying to sell this book in the UK. (Readers of Free Life wanting copies will have to approach Laissez Faire Books in Los Angeles). But of course this book, like all Dr Sowell's books, contains much which is interesting and relevant to us in the UK. For most writers and true-believing readers of The Guardian are misguided and themselves misguide by the vision of the anointed. And nearly all the same statistical malpractices and the same buzz words substituting for argument are fully employed on both sides of the Atlantic.

The Vision of the Anointed is a treasury of exposures of the falsehoods and fallacies which are the stock in trade of - to borrow the phrase General Lee employed to describe Union armies - "those people". For instance: hypostatized Society has allegedly mistreated a certain set of people "who are to be rescued by the anointed." Their own behaviour is "by the presumptive phrase `blaming the victim'" dismissed as irrelevant [p.243]. Again, Dr Sowell deploys case after case in which a given series of numbers is wrongly assumed to refer to a set with a constant membership. For instance, the sets of those enjoying the lowest or the highest incomes may and in the US certainly do have substantially different membership in successive years [pp.43-54]. They are by no means all, as the poverty lobbies would have us believe, either permanently mired in direst poverty, or, equally permanently enjoying enviably enormous incomes.

A speciality of the house if the deployment of evidence and argument showing how utterly wrong it is to assume that, absent hostile discrimination, every racially or culturally defined subset should be expected to be proportionately represented in every category of employment, or whatever else, within a total population. In the present book, Dr Sowell provides a delightfully varied list of examples "in which it is by virtually impossible to claim that the statistical differences in question are due to discrimination" [pp.35-6].

In his earlier Ethnic America (Basic Books, New York, 1981) he showed how the very different track records of its different immigrant groups are explicable only by reference to the different cultures from and with which they came. We must not conclude without mentioning the significant fact that neither this nor any of Dr Sowell's other very relevant works were at the latest time of asking to be found in the Library of the Commission for Racial Equality. This fact though it may scandalise should not surprise. For, where everyone has an interest in having more racist discrimination to combat, who would want to find less?

Antony Flew