What
follows is a review of Thomas Sowell’s masterpiece “The Vision of The Anointed”.
The review was written in 1995 by Dr. Robert
P. George who at that time was an associate professor of politics at Princeton
University.
WHY do liberals and
conservatives assess the same social facts so differently? The answer, Thomas
Sowell suggests, is that liberals and conservatives differ in their perception
of the facts. The difference, in other words, is one of vision.
"The crucial role of vision," Sowell
argues, "is that it enables a vast range of beliefs to be regarded as
presumptively true until definitively disproved by unchallengeable
evidence." Liberals --or, to use Sowell's disparaging label, "the
anointed" -- view the world as "a very tidy place," where
"prescient politicians can 'invest' tax dollars in 'the industries of the
future,' where criminals can be 'rehabilitated,' irresponsible mothers taught
'parenting skills,' and where all sorts of other social problems can be
'solved."' All this is possible, as liberals see things, because human
nature, as a "social construct," is far more malleable than most
people imagine. Thus, in the vision of the anointed, "there is obviously a
very expansive role for government and for the anointed in prescribing what
government should do."
Sowell contrasts the vision of the anointed with
"the tragic vision" of conservatives. What is "tragic"
about this vision is that it assumes that problems such as crime, poverty, and
irresponsibility cannot finally be "solved." Conservatives,
recognizing that "there are no solutions, only trade-offs," do not go
in for grand schemes to put an end to poverty, for example, or make health care
a fundamental right, or pursue what Sowell derisively calls "cosmic
justice." It is not that conservatives are happy that some people are
poor, or without health insurance, or whatever. Nor, for that matter, are they
complacent about it. Rather, they realize that liberal schemes to eradicate
these evils a) never work, and b) inevitably impose huge social costs of their
own.
Thus, conservatives are skeptical of large-scale
government programs and bureaucracies and are inclined to rely instead on
institutions of civil society, such as families, churches, and neighborhood
associations, to accomplish what can be accomplished in the areas of health,
education, and welfare. Conservatives are hostile to big government not only
because it fails to accomplish its utopian goals, but also because it
compromises or displaces religious and other subsidiary institutions which have
at least some hope of helping people to escape from poverty, rehabilitate
themselves from a life of crime, or improve themselves in other ways. Those,
like Sowell, with the tragic vision fault those with the vision of the anointed
for making the unattainable ideal "the enemy of the good."
Sowell understands the contest of visions to be a
longstanding one in Western culture. Godwin, Condorcet, and Mill all shared the
vision of the anointed. Burke and the American Founders possessed the tragic
vision. Sowell notes that in our own day "most of the leading contemporary
opponents of the prevailing vision were themselves formerly within its
orbit." He begins the list with Milton Friedman, F. A. von Hayek, Karl
Popper, Edward Banfield, Irving Kristol, and Norman Podhoretz. One notable
difference between those with the vision of the anointed and those with the
tragic vision is that it tends to be the latter who recognize the role of
vision in the first place. "To the anointed, their vision and reality are
one and the same. Yet the world inside their mind has few of the harsh
constraints of the world inhabited by millions of other human beings."
Sowell's account of vision and its role in
political life and the creation of social policy helps to explain the tendency
of contemporary elites to shift power from the people and their elected
representatives to electorally unaccountable bureaucrats and judges. In the
vision of the anointed, most people, in as much as they fail to share that
vision, are more or less benighted. As such, they simply cannot be trusted to
exercise political power justly or, for that matter, to judge accurately their
own interests.
