A New Generation Discovers Thomas Sowell

 

Because he is both black and conservative and has spent a career testing and disproving the axiomatic claims made by welfare-state advocates and the conjectural arguments of so-called leaders of racial minorities, Thomas Sowell is, to borrow a phrase from J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter novels, "He Who Must Not Be Named."  His work is dangerous enough to the Marxian march through U.S. institutions that it is better not to expose students to that work.

 A New Generation Discovers Thomas Sowell

. . ."Foremost among the lessons the new students of Sowell will learn is the thesis Sowell lays out in his book A Conflict of Visions — that, broadly speaking, modern Westerners tend to argue past one another on our views about the perfectibility of man.  Sowell distinguishes between what he calls the constrained and unconstrained vision, or the tragic view of man and the utopian view of man.

"The constrained vision, he will learn, is rooted in the Judeo-Christian belief in the inherent fallibility of man.  That is, despite all his best efforts to attain the true, the good, and the beautiful, either individually or collectively, man is often his own foil.  In this view, history and tradition serve to make men and women suspicious of the motives and schemes of their fellows.  Knowing that others can be knaves as well as knights, sinners as well as saints, each of us looks to his own self-interest over the interests of others.  There being no solution to this standoff, we are all necessarily forced to make compromises to ensure that the greater self-interest of each is preserved in some sort of civil society.

"Of the unconstrained vision, the new students of Sowell will learn that it is not man who is inherently fallible, but rather society itself, and it is an abstraction called society that corrupts.  As Jean-Jacques Rousseau argues in his famous dictum, "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains."  Stated differently, man is good, and he is made not good, or merely mediocre, only by the limitations placed on him by large, impersonal institutions or the forces of history and tradition.  Remove these stultifying constraints, and anything is possible for man to achieve; he is better still.  Social problems no longer constitute challenges to be adjudicated in a system of law and order, of checks and balances.". . .