The Vision of the Anointed

 

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.

Fast Forwarding

 

Patience has never been one of my virtues.  I continue to work on it and have gotten better with age.  But I still don’t do well standing in long-lines or being stuck in a traffic jam or waiting for some dawdling gate attendant to move the ramp up to the plane so I can move on to the baggage claim area and wait some more. I also have no patience for boring speeches.  If you have something important to say, get to the point.  And if it’s not important, don’t waste my time.

 

I have come to believe that my lack of patience and overall sense of urgency are the result of being an only child as well as genetics.  An only child tends to march to the beat of their own drum. And if left alone and given enough personal freedom, they often grow up to have little patience when things don’t go their way.  Mea Culpa.

 

At one point back in the day, I pretty much gave up on watching television. The commercials were just too much of an interruption and waste of time.  If it was a really good 30-minute sit-com, I might suffer through the commercials.  Other shows might get recorded and played back later.  I could watch sports if it was an important game or my favorite team was playing.  But most of my television time was spent watching movie rentals from Blockbuster. 

 

And then came digital recording and streaming services.  It’s just too easy to record a football game and then watch it in less than an hour by fast forwarding through the commercials and half time. And if one is willing to fast forward between plays, rewinding if something big happens, one can watch a game in less than 30 minutes.  It’s even better with the sound off so one isn’t forced to listen to the play-by-play and those annoying comments by some former player or coach. With Prime, Netflix and Apple TV, I have even more choices.  I can watch what I want, when I want and how I want.  I don’t even have to fast forward through it.  And then there is You Tube which has something for everyone and it all moves along at a good pace.  If not, you can just fast forward through it or switch to something else. 

 

Now I find myself spending too much time watching television or on the internet. These days I seldom read a book until bedtime. Then I get sleepy.  So, it can take a month or more for me to get through a book. I have started listening to audiobooks while walking the dog, but it’s not the same as reading. I miss reading books.  Maybe I’ll try fast forward reading.  Read the first and last sentence of a paragraph. If it doesn’t seem to be consequential to the story, just move on to the next paragraph. I’m sure the author would not appreciate someone skipping over their thoughtful, well-crafted words.  But they will just have to settle for the fact that I did buy their book.

 

One of these days perhaps I will stop fast forwarding.  Maybe I will come to realize that I’m just rushing to the end and so much of what I’ve seen and done since the beginning didn’t really matter all that much.

Gone, Gone the Damage Done

The financial costs of hurricanes Helene and Milton will exceed anything we’ve experienced in a single hurricane season.  The loss of lives is also significant and still counting. For many survivors, their world has been turned upside down and may never recover.  This would certainly be the case in many mountain communities in Western North Carolina.  The devastation there is almost unimaginable.  Parts of the Florida Gulf Coast have been transformed.  Some residents have had enough and will move inland or out of the state.  Hurricanes are a reality for Florida and there will be more.

 

The politics of hurricanes and hurricane relief are in full swing.  The Right is pointing fingers at what they claim is a poor response.  That poor response being the result of federal agency incompetence along with too much money spent on immigrants and other nations.  The Left’s response is they are doing a good job and those who claim otherwise are misinformed or worse, spreading that misinformation.  The Left is also seizing on these disasters to once again make their case that human caused global warming, largely caused by fossil fuel, is the real problem.

 

At the risk of being labeled a “climate change denier”, it’s worth pointing to the data. This is a link to some very interesting data from the NOAA National Hurricane Center U.S. Hurricane Strikes by Decade (noaa.gov).  You can read it for yourself and reach your own conclusions, but I would draw your attention to the note just below the data records.

There are two sides to the hurricane story.  The mainstream version claims that even IF we are not having more hurricanes, we are having more major hurricanes. Again, the data to support that claim is questionable at best.  One thing is certain. Hurricanes are doing more damage now than in the past.  The same can be said of tornadoes and hailstorms and wildfires. Today there are simply more people and more structures in places where hurricanes (and tornadoes and hailstorms and wildfires) are most likely to hit.

The questions we must answer:

_1 How much has human activity contributed to climate change?

_2 How much can humans do now to change the climate to something more favorable?

_3 Should we spend more money trying to change the earth’s climate or spend more money preparing to live with the earth’s climate?

_4 And of course the most pressing question: What can we do for the folks who lost so much to Helene and Milton?

                                                             Galveston, Texas 1900

The Experts Can Be Wrong. (Perhaps more often than not).

 

A lot has been said and written about how the “experts” got things wrong about Covid.  Experts being wrong is not all that unusual.  In recent history the “experts” have been wrong about quite a few things.  For over 100 years the experts have been saying the world would soon run out of oil.  Eventually, we will…but it’s yet to happen “soon”.  The experts gave us the “food pyramid” back in the 1950’s and now the new experts are saying the old experts were wrong.  In the early 20^th century the experts were confident that eugenics was the path to a better, healthier, more intelligent human race.  That path only ended up in global war and genocide.  For over 100 years the experts have come up with various ideas on how to “fix” the Middle East.  Thus far they’ve only made it worse.  And I can remember when the experts just knew it was bad for players to drink water during August two-a-day football practices.

 

As one grows older one is likely to deal with a more “medical experts”.  Fortunately, they tend to be right most of the time.  Unfortunately, when they are wrong it can really hurt.  A case in point, in the summer of 2022 I was having some pain in my right hip.  We were looking forward to a trip to Italy in September, so I decided to go to my orthopedic doctor and get it checked out.  Maybe he could give me a shot.  Or perhaps he would tell me the hip was arthritic and would most likely need to be replaced within a year or two.  I was prepared for the worst but then got good news. After he X-rayed my hip, he concluded that I just had tight hamstrings and glutes.  So, he sent me to another expert, a Physical Therapist, who gave me a stretching routine and some tips on improving my posture.  Go now and be well.

 

Dutifully I did the stretching and worked on posture.  My hip responded by getting worse.  So, I doubled down on the stretching and good posture discipline.  My hip got worse and soon my entire leg started to hurt.  A week before we were to leave for Italy I could no longer stand or walk for more than 5 minutes.  So that trip was cancelled, at no small expense.

 

I went back to my ortho doctor and he took X-rays of my back this time and said there was a problem.  So, I ended up with a back and spine specialist.  More X-rays and an MRI revealed a slipped disc in my lower back along with stenosis.  Serious but not necessarily serious enough to justify surgery just yet.  So back to the Physical Therapist and some new exercises.  With rest and some light exercises there was improvement.  We added more exercises and it immediately got worse.

 

My wife criticizes me for going to the internet for medical advice, but sometimes it pays off.  I discovered that one of the exercises the PT had me doing was exactly what I should not be doing with a slipped disc.  So, I stopped going to the PT.  I continued with some of the other exercises avoiding the bad one or anything that resembled the bad one and quickly got better.

 

For two years I’ve been ok and continued with the stretching that the “experts”, including those on the internet, recommended.  But recently after two weeks in Alaska, my hip and leg began hurting again.  So, I did even more stretching of the leg and hip muscles.  And it got worse. 

 

Then I stumbled across another internet “expert”.   Based on his information, it just confirmed that this was sciatica caused by the back problem, even though my back did not hurt.  NO surprise there.  But, to my surprise, this “expert” advised that stretching the hamstring and hip muscles was a bad idea.  The stretches might feel good in the moment, but only served to irritate the sciatic nerve.  He advised a different routine focused more on strengthening the glutes and lower abs.  Within a week, my pain eased up considerably and I am back on the road to recovery.

 

Bottom line, for over two years I have been doing what the experts advised.  And after some adjustments I was doing ok, until I wasn’t.  I’m pretty sure some of our Alaskan adventures fired up the sciatica and all my efforts to calm it down only made it worse.  At some point I may need surgery to fix the slipped disc.  But for the time being I have found a better way to deal with it.  The experts might know a lot about what has worked or could work, but remember they can just as easily be wrong.   

Another Installment of My Two Cents Worth…Election Edition

_J.D. Vance clearly won the debate vs Tim Walz but count on Trump to undo whatever positive momentum Vance’s performance may have generated.

 

_Democrats have been in full reset mode since the Biden debate meltdown. Tighten up the borders, increase support for Israel, cut interest rates, release more oil from critical reserves, keep Joe Biden out of the public spotlight as much as possible and promote Kamala Harris as an Obama-like transformational leader who will bring joy and good tidings along with hope and change.

 

_Whatever the real story is about Lt. Gov Mark Robinson’s alleged porn posts, North Carolina has gone from a toss-up or slightly red, to leaning blue.  Trump needs to win North Carolina and that might not happen now.  The election comes down to AZ, NV, GA, WI, MI, PA and North Carolina.  These represent 93 electoral votes.  Trump needs at least 51 of those.  But PA is the key.  Assuming he wins AZ, NV, GA and NC he’s still 2 votes short of the necessary 270 to win.  If he were to lose NC, but capture PA, he could still win. 

 

_The economy, the border, the Middle East and Russia/Ukraine are all negatives for the Democrats. And depending how long it goes on; the East Coast Longshoremen’s Strike could turn things against them.  But the Democrats have two big things in their favor: Trump and abortion.  Trump-hate alone may be enough to push them over the line.  Throw in the abortion issue which is probably 60-40 in the Democrats favor and it’s likely enough to keep them in the White House.

 

_The sad truth is when you look at Trump/Vance, Harris/Wolz; three of those four could not even fill a high-level leadership role in a major corporation.  Vance is probably the only competent one in the bunch.  America must do better when it comes to developing and selecting government leaders.

CONSEQUENCES

 

“I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.” – The Apostle Paul, Romans 7:15

In the context of Paul’s letter to the Christians in Rome, I certainly agree and can relate to what he’s saying here.  We must battle the world, the flesh and the devil if we are to follow Christ as He expects us to follow.  But when I consider what Paul says in this verse, I would amend it just a bit.  Indeed, people do what they may hate to do, but only after they’ve done it.  In the moment people do exactly what they want to do…or they wouldn’t do it.

 

You may argue that people do what they don’t want to do all the time because they have no choice.  But, people always have a choice.  Therefore, people often do what they don’t want to do even though they do have a choice. Your spouse asks you to take out the garbage.  You may not want to do it, but you have a choice…nonetheless, you better do it.  The alarm goes off Monday morning and you don’t want to get up and go to work. You want to stay in bed.  You have a choice.  What do you want more? To keep your job or stay in bed?  Ultimately you will do what you want to do in that moment.  That’s why some people don’t get up and some do.  In either case, the person is doing what they want to do.

 

People do what they want to do even when it’s not in their long-term best interest.  You say you don’t really want that second bowl of ice cream, but you’re lying to yourself.  You eat that second bowl because you want to eat it, and in that moment, you’re not seriously thinking about what’s best for you in the long-term.

 

People do all sorts of self-destructive things because they want to do it.  Drug addicts use drugs because they want to.  They want to because they are addicted.  They may hate what they are doing, but they are doing what they want to do.  And they have a choice.  It’s a hard, painful choice, but they do have a choice.  Young men join gangs and do bad things even though they may say they really didn’t want to.  No, they had choices.  None of those choices may be all that great or easy to make.  But they did what they wanted to do in the moment.

 

In today’s world we have made the mistake of telling people to make decisions based on their feelings.  You do you.  Live your truth.  What a crock.  There is right and there is wrong and if you don’t believe that, at least believe there are consequences.  You feel like taking out student loans to get a degree with little or no monetary value?  There are consequences.  A kid puts all their efforts into trying to become a highly paid professional athlete because that’s what they want to do and they choose not to get an education or have a plan B.  But things don't work out.  There are consequences.  A young girl wants to be loved and gets pregnant? Consequences.

 

You want people to do better? Make sure they understand the consequences of their actions.  The “Universe” doesn’t care what you feel like doing.  Go on “you be you”, “live your truth”.  But know that life is not fair.  Don’t make it worse for yourself.  There are always consequences.

Alaska, Home of the Tall One

 

Denali:  Kuyokan Athabascan word meaning The High One or the Tall One.

My wife and I just spent 11 days in Alaska, not on a cruise either.  The original plan was to travel entirely by train and shuttle vans.  But I prefer to be in control, do not like crowds or being forced to spend untold hours with random strangers.  So, it’s best for me and other travelers that I rent a car.

We flew into Anchorage.  Took one guided tour from there to an abandoned mine site an hour or so northeast of Anchorage.  It was pretty much a “meh” day and my wife and I were regretting that we had not just gone back to Montana one more time.  

The next day we headed north toward Talkeetna on our own.   The first 50-60 miles was more “meh” and left us hoping it would get better.  And it did.  Finally, the mountains started to impress.  Fall colors were more vibrant as we drove farther north.  We arrived at the little tourist town of Talkeetna had lunch and then headed out for some dryland dog-sledding.  We were transported to Dallas Seavey’s Kennels. Seavey, six-time Iditarod champion, was not there but his team and his dogs were.  Seavey has a lot of dogs.  We got to meet most of them, which was great.  The handlers hitched four dogs up to a wheeled sled, showed us how to steer it and brake as needed and off we went.  It was a hoot and I highly recommend it if you’re ever in Alaska.

The next morning we took an airplane ride over Denali National Park and the clouds cleared enough that we flew over the summit of Mount Denali.  Definitely worth the time and a considerable amount of money.  That afternoon we drove north to the Denali Borough and the scenery did not disappoint.  The mountains are impressive, and it truly is a wilderness.   Few people and very little traffic.  My kind of place.  When we arrived at the park, there were more people but nothing like you would encounter at a big-name national park in the lower 48.

The following day we were on a bus tour of the park.  You can only drive personal vehicles a certain distance into the park and from there it’s hike or take one of the park’s hop-on/hop-off shuttle buses.  Had we known about that option, we would not have taken the bus tour.  After announcing that she would not talk too much, the tour bus driver/guide proceeded to talk non-stop for the next 5 hours.  She was particularly fascinated by Arctic Ground Squirrels, so at least half of her ramblings were about those little critters.  The scenery was great, we saw Dall Sheep and Moose.  But, on a scale of 1-10, I’d only give it a 5.  Could have been an 8 or 9 with a less talking from the driver.

The next day, Saturday, we headed back south toward Girdwood which is about 35 miles the other side of Anchorage.  We stayed at the Alyeska Resort and I would definitely recommend it. 

Sunday morning we took a helicopter ride into the mountains and made two landings on glaciers.  It was my first time in a helicopter and it was great.  We got to see things you could only see from a helicopter and the glacier landings were an unforgettable experience.  Again, it cost some money but was well worth it.

We finished up our trip in Seward with a cruise around the Kenai Fjords National Park. It ranked up there with the dog-sledding and airplane ride, but the helicopter ride was the best.  Then it was back to Anchorage the next day and an early flight out the following morning.

Alaska was on our bucket list and I am glad we went.  We had a great time.  But Alaska is one and done for us.  It’s definitely worth seeing if you can afford the airplane and helicopter rides and if you’re up to handling as dog sled.  If not, then I would suggest taking an Alaska cruise.  I’m not a cruiser, but I would think it’s the best way for most folks to see Alaska.

Alaska would be a tough place to live.  The long winters and limited sunshine would get to me.  Unless you’re a big-time hunter or fisherman, I couldn’t see much reason for living up there.  It’s definitely not a place for everyone.  We lived in Montana and loved it.  But Alaska is a whole other world.  Even in my prime, I don’t think I would have enjoyed it much.  But I could say the same thing about most major cities in the lower 48, so maybe I’m just too picky.