The No Kool Aid Zone

Book Recommendation: The Vision of the Anointed

Posted by Byron October 25, 2005 at 10:28 pm
Filed Under Conservative/Libertarian Politics | Leave a Comment |

You ought to read this book. You really, really ought to read this book. If you have liberal friends—and we all do—you especially need to read this book. It took me ten years to read it, and that was ten years too long. Go now, and read this book.

Now, let me tell you about it just a little. Thomas Sowell is an extremely intelligent individual who makes a clear case against the silliness of contemporary liberal thought, but he does so as a gentleman. He does not engage in name-calling or gratuitious pot-shotting (and let’s face it: people on both sides of the spectrum are pretty good at that). Rather, he calmly explains why the “solutions” offered by the left typically are so sorely misguided; how their approaches usually misstate the problem, misunderstand human nature, and miserably fail. Those at the top of the liberal food chain he labels “the anointed”, and describes their modus operandi in the subtitle of the book: “Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy”. Though he doesn’t mention her by name, Hillary Clinton is the quintessential “anointed”, the poster child for the better-than-thou.

The book is a treasure trove of well-reasoned analysis. He begins, in a chapter called “The Pattern”, by using several liberal “causes” (the “war on poverty”, sex education, and criminal justice), and traces the pattern of how liberals manufacture “problems” that do not exist (“The Crisis”), propose fixes that run counter to common sense (“The Solution”), fail terribly in their outcomes (“The Result”), and then obfuscate the truth in order to cover up their shenanigans (“The Response”). This chapter alone is worth the price of the book (well, I found it for a buck in a used bookstore).

He moves on to catalog the fast-and-loose ways that liberals manipulate statistics to “prove” their claims (“By the Numbers”), and how objective analysis plays little part in the rationale of many liberals (“The Irrelevance of Evidence”). But the next chapter hit it out of the park for me, when Sowell, in a chapter entitled “The Anointed versus the Benighted”, explains dispassionately the two very different worldviews that are pitted against one another. The nugget that I gained from this chapter was that liberals speak in terms of “solutions” to problems, whereas conservatives understand “trade-offs”. “Solutions” sounds sleek and sexy, and makes for great rhetoric on the campaign trail (and it’s used by people on both sides of the fence), but the fact of the matter is that life is about trade-offs, and liberals do not seem to grasp this. For instance, I intend soon to respond to an article I recently read entitled “Wasn’t Jesus a Liberal?” The answer, of course, is “no”, but I’ll save that for later. At one point, though, the author, a pastor, made the statement that liberals are for “universal health care”. Nice sentiment! Utterly meaningless as well! Why? Because conservatives understand the way the real world works, which is to say that we understand that the question to ask, when someone says, “I believe in universal health care!”, is “In place of what?” In other words, what are you willing to sacrifice (trade-off) in order to fulfill this utopian dream? HillaryCare was rightly rejected a few years back when we came to understand that the answer to that question was, “a loss of freedom (which is always an entailment of socialism)”. One might as soon say, “I believe in universal millionaire status for all Americans!” It could be achieved easily enough, of course—but at what cost? Conservatives understand trade-offs, which are part and parcel of human nature.

I could go on, but I’m going to end with a passage from Sowell himself, from his summary at the end of the book:

After the vision of the anointed was given increasing scope in the education and public policy of the United States and other Western societies during the decades beginning with the 1960′s, the social degeneration became palpable, documented beyond issue, and immense across a wide spectrum of social phenomena—declining educational standards, rising crime rates, broken homes, soaring rates of teenage pregnancy, growing drug usage, and unprecedented levels of suicide among adolescents. This social devastation was not due to poverty, for the material standard of living was rising substantially during the time. It was not due to repression, for an unprecedented variety of new “rights” emerged from the courts and legislatures to liberate people from the constraints of the law while they were being liberated from social constraints by the spread of “nonjudgmental” attitudes. Neither was this social degeneration due to the disruptions of war or natural catastrophes, for it was an unusually long period of peace, and science conquered many diseases that had plagued the human race for centuries, as well as providing better ways of protecting people from earthquakes and other destructive acts of nature. It was instead an era of self-inflicted wounds…In the anointed we find a whole class of supposedly “thinking people” who do remarkably little thinking about substance and a great deal of verbal expression. In order that this relatively small group of people can believe themselves wiser and nobler than the common herd, we have adopted policies which impose heavy costs on millions of other human beings, not only in taxes but also in lost jobs, social disintegration, and a loss of personal safety. Sledom have so few cost so much to so many.