Thomas Sowell and his two Visions

 

________________

Saturday

August 28, 2010

________________

 

Tony Downing’s

Opinion Page:

 

Thomas Sowell and his

Two Visions

 

In his book A Conflict of Visions, Sowell presents us with two philosophies for looking at public policy and social engineering: the unconstrained vision and the constrained vision. This analysis is fascinating and rewarding, and makes one feel that there is a new and unique way to view these things. One sets oneself the task of deciding where one stands on this, and then one is enabled to trace all one’s opinions in politics back to that paradigm. To say that Sowell has given us a helpful schematic is an understatement.

The unconstrained vision is represented by, among other things, Plato’s philosophy, the French Revolution, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Condorcet, William Godwin (the father of Mary Shelley), and liberals in general; the constrained vision is represented by Aristotle, Thomas Hobbes, the American Revolution and US Constitution, Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek, and conservatives in general.

The unconstrained vision believes that human nature is malleable, and can be indefinitely improved – but the constrained vision, on the other hand, believes human morality is unchangeable, and is not to be trusted. The former believes history has a destiny to reach, the latter does not, and that that is a positively dangerous idea anyway.

You see already how easy it is to find out where you stand. It’s interesting to note that the constrained vision has a bit of a disadvantage nowadays in attracting people to its ken: it has a tendency to assert unflattering things about the morality of the human race, and therefore about you, too. The unconstrained vision, alternatively, asserts quite a few nice things about you. One can see its attractiveness.

But I am a staunch believer in the constrained vision. I believe it faces reality and the grim standards thereof, and that the sooner we face this reality, the sooner we will be able to handle its various difficulties. The unconstrained vision is a fantasy world that keeps us in moral childhood. The welfare state of the present time is an example. How much weaker we are now than when we first became a nation, and wanted nothing more than just to have the right to pull our own weight!

So how do you feel about it? Unconstrained or constrained?

 

______________________________

 

 

 

 

 

Book Review: “Intellectuals and Society” by Thomas Sowell

————————————————————————————————————

————————————————————————————————————

     
 

Tuesday

April 13, 2010

     
 

 

     
 

Book Review:

       
 

Intellectuals and Society

by

Thomas Sowell

       
 

Published 2009

398 pages with references and index

Thomas Sowell is a Senior Fellow

of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

       
 

 

     
 

 

 

Intellectuals and Society

       
 

 

This magnificent book is the product
of a lifetime of learning, dedication to truth, and passion for rectitude. It is an absolutely devastating account of the political left, the intelligentsia, that is, and the Ivory Tower of self-congratulation in which it lives.

       
 

Sowell’s task in this book is to illustrate the ideological conflict of visions in our intellectual world and to demonstrate the deleterious effect that one side in that conflict renders to society. He names the two sides by their chief characteristic: the Left is governed by “the vision of the anointed,” and Conservatives by “the tragic vision.”

       
 

He posits that the Left cannot see antecedents, and practices a “one day at a time rationalism.” The problem here, for Sowell, is that the past is never a guide to the present, and consequently blindness rules the faculty of judgment. The result is quite destructive. An example in this is the attitude of Neville Chamberlain and other intellectuals in the 1930s (such as Bertrand Russell, H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, John Dewey, and more), about Hitler. War-weary Europe would not consider the possibility of seeing him as he was until it was too late.

       
 

The tragic vision, on the other hand, sees human nature as fallen fundamentally, and that we need to assume that fallenness in our judgments. The U.S. Constitution, for example, is well-informed by this attitude, and rightly so. The tragic vision might be called Hobbesian, in that Thomas Hobbes, in Leviathan, asserts that man will engage in “a war of all against all,” if not prevented. But the vision of the anointed would advance the proposition, with Leon Blum, that “disarming leads to a moral prestige which renders a nation invulnerable to attack.” This is, of course, crazy. The differences with the tragic vision are obvious. In reality, aggressor nations will have a field day with the pacifist intelligentsia, which will not change its opinion, even if experience counsels strongly so to do. The vision of the anointed amounts to an eschewal of the responsibilities of statesmanship.

     
 

For Sowell, intellectuals are people the ideas of whom are validated only by the approval of their peers, and not by empirical tests. The world “must present a tableau” matching the preconceptions of intellectuals, or else something is wrong with the world, in Sowell’s summation of their mistaken view. Their theories can’t be questioned, in other words. They represent axioms to be followed rather than hypotheses to test. Sowell convicts the Left here of malpractice.

     
 

Sowell has given us the definitive biography of leftist intellectuals and of the danger there is in their penchant to visions that have little or nothing to do with the exigencies of reality. In other words, one of the problems with leftist political philosophy is that it is based on axioms. The Believer then is under the impression that these axioms are infallible, and no matter how much the school of reality teaches differently, the Believer will not give up the axioms. Thus the damage of this political philosophy.

   
 

In the end, this valuable book will have stood the test of time, I’m sure, since the observations in it are appropriate as descriptions of even some of the ancient thinkers. When ideologues impose their theories on civilization, trouble is sure to ensue – they wish to obtain the glamorous cachet of fixing the world, but merely succeed in harming it.

     
 

     
 

     
 

     
 

     
 

     
 

     
 

       
 

       
 

     

Book Review: Advice to War Presidents, By Angelo M. Codevilla

     
 

Sunday

February 21, 2010  

     
 

_________________________________________________________________________

Book Review:

 

Advice

to

War Presidents

 
 

by Angelo M. Codevilla

   316 pgs. with notes and index 

published 2009

(Angelo Codevilla, a Senior Fellow at

The Claremont Institute,

is a former naval officer

and is now a professor of

International Relations at Boston University)

________________________________________________________________________

     
 

 

     
 

This book is an informative, tightly argued, detailed, and passionate indictment of the misguided American foreign policy of the twentieth century. The book also takes to task precisely the elite and academic international affairs culture persisting in Washington which produced the mistaken policies.

     
 

In the overarching structure of this book, Codevilla parses our last one hundred years of international relations by dividing the relevant schools of thought that have finally emerged into three: Liberal Internationalists, who believe uncritically in the virtues of international organizations such as the UN, then Realists, who believe in seeking out “moderates” in other countries to forge detente-style truces, and, last but not least, Neoconservatives, who believe somewhat more in the use of force than the other two, and who seek to spread democracy far and wide in order to ensure the freedom of Americans all the better.

   
 

Now, Codevilla argues against all three of these twentieth century schools. He believes that the foreign policy of America’s first century of existence is the best rule of thumb for us in international affairs today, largely because that older style does not evince the “global meliorism,” the “global betterment,” so characteristic of our policies at present. Our diplomats in this era, consequently, in the haze of their mistakes, have become more concerned with pleasing foreigners than with pleasing Americans, and we have needlessly lost much blood and treasure for this — we have actually been more at war this way than if we had just pursued self-interest normally.

     
 

Within the present system, consequently, we are constantly at war. We should, on the contrary, Codevilla argues, give up global meliorism, stop worrying about making the globe ”safe for democracy,” and just get back to basics. There’s a reason that the League of Nations failed, and a similar reason why the UN is a witches’ brew of corruption: international organizations don’t have a chance of working. All nations have their own particular self-interest, and if you put all these scattered paradigms together, it’s just hopeless. Too many of these nations will simply use the international organization in question to pursue various self-interested, nefarious designs, making a mockery of the organization. Nothing can stop that eventuality.

     
 

But, back in the day, in the eighteenth century, that is, our American diplomats, who were wiser, more grounded men, only worried about making peace our way, in our immediate self-interest, and only used “engagement,” as it’s called today, as a last resort. To utilize endless negotiation as an official policy was not in their nature, and negotiations as ends in themselves were unheard of. But today they are the norm, exasperatingly. We accept peace at any price today, to our shame. For Codevilla, on the other hand, diplomacy fundamentally is the quiet art of simply informing your opponent what will happen to him if he does not cease and desist. And in foreign policy, by the way, if you don’t mean it, “you better shut up.”  No empty rhetoric has a place in competent diplomacy, no idle threats, no moral posturing: just mean what you say, and go through with it. Codevilla sums up by stating, in a wonderful phrase, that “competent diplomats don’t threaten, they warn.”

     
 

Ever since the Progressive Era of the early twentieth century, Codevilla continues, we have been influenced in our international relations by made-up concepts about foreign people’s desires, about America’s global role, and about, most of all, what the wider world is really like. All this has passed for wisdom. Liberal Internationalists think you can administer and bureaucratize the world into peace, Realists that you can find all the moderates until all the extremists are gone, and Neocons that the world is a titanic contest between totalitarian governments and the global populace of democracy lovers, such that everyone, everywhere, infallibly wants American-style democracy.

     
 

But none of this is true, for Codevilla. Our diplomats today have unfortunately set aside real diplomacy in favor of an imaginary diplomacy in which all the people of the world want the same thing, a world in which, essentially, there are no foreigners. Codevilla definitely sees all three schools as being guilty of these misconceptions. We have given up true “statecraft,” the pursuit of our immediate, national self-interest, and taken up the fantasy that we can “renovate the world.” Not good. We have experienced endless trouble because of this, and we should stop the needless, impossibly futile, destructive policies that are based on this fiction.

   
 

Codevilla has written an immensely convincing, compelling book. To say it repays the effort of reading it is a major understatement. And its goal is ambitious — to change America’s present way of conducting itself in international affairs. I, for one, hope the book succeeds in this.

     
 

Book Review: Why Are Jews Liberals? By Norman Podhoretz

   
 

 
 

January 21, 2010

   
 

 
 

Why are Jews liberals?

   
 

 
 

By Norman Podhoretz

   
 

 
 

Podhoretz attempts to explain in this book why Jews adhere to what has been called “the Torah of Liberalism,” against what he sees as their own self-interest. Today’s Jews, he asserts, have transferred the religious fervor that premodern Jews possessed for the Torah of Judaism to secular, leftist politics, with the attendant affirmative action, anti-Americanism, sexual promiscuity, and end of merit-based policies thereof. Approval of none of these things would be expected from traditional Jewish values, but it has happened. Why should this be so?

 
 

Podhoretz starts from Christianity, showing how the early Church became an enemy of the Jews, and thus how Christian anti-Semitism came into being. That is, when Christianity emerged from Judaism, no longer as merely a minority sect but as a religion in its own right, it proclaimed its book — the New Testament – as the Word of God, and proclaimed its people — the Christians — as the Chosen People of God. Sound familiar? Indeed, big, historical problem: the Jews did not convert to Christianity, nor did they feel that they, or their book, the Hebrew Bible, had been superseded as the Chosen People and Word of God. Hence, from this situation anti-Semitism arose in the Church, and the Jews likewise came to feel that the Medieval Church was their most implacable enemy.

 
 

Next, Podhoretz takes us to the French Revolution, which famously introduced the terms “right” and “left” into political discourse. Now, the problem here for the Jews was that both sides in the conflict were anti-Semitic: the old order of Kings and Queens, the ancien regime, as well as the new order of Liberty, Equality, and Brotherhood, were thoroughly steeped in traditional Christian anti-Semitism. This, then, was a primordial moment for the Jews, this choice of an ally in the modern world that still determines their political loyalty to this day. They chose the Left, again famously, because the Left in France at this time, for its own reasons, was in favor of full civil rights for Jews. That is, the Enlightenment figures who led the way here, such as Voltaire, wanted these civil rights for Jews only because they believed it would make the Jews into assimilated Europeans, thereby relieving Christian Europe in general of the “Jewishness” of the Jews. And the Jews simply swept the anti-Semitism of these Enlightenment figures under the rug.

 
 

Many Jews then became secularized, and came to embrace Marxism in the nineteenth century as if it were a religion. Here we see that transference of the religious fervor mentioned above from the Torah of Judaism to liberal politics, to the supposedly rationalistic science of social justice. But the problem for Podhoretz is that Jews today remain loyal to a liberalism that is hostile to Jews, and that is not the liberalism of decades ago. In other words, radicals took over the banner of liberal politics in the 1960s, and turned liberalism into the marginal stance it is today, with its anti-Zionism and all the rest. Before this happened, however, liberalism was not hostile to Israel, as it is today, with its veiled anti-Semitism in the charge that Israel is an apartheid state.

 
 

So, surprisingly, it is actually the conservatives of today who are by far the more sympathetic ones to Israel, turning the tables on political history. For Podhoretz, the Christian Church has freed itself of anti-Semitism, and so has the broader conservative political culture in America. And not for their own reasons, either: Christians value Israel as the Holy Land and as the rightful, historical home of the Jews, and political conservatives value it as a bastion of democracy in a region of tyranny. Both these see Israel also as a necessary response to the Holocaust and to anti-Semitism.

 
 

But why, then, Podhoretz asks, do Jews remain paradoxically liberal? We know, of course, how they became liberal and leftist: first Medieval Church persecution and then the alliance of that Church with the rightist ancient regime against the French Revolution. But Podhoretz wants to know why do not Jews today “break free of their political delusion?” He explains that we must return for the answer to the forebears of today’s Jews, to the premodern Jews for whom the Torah of Judaism was an all-abiding faith. Those Jews of long-ago gave “steadfast devotion and scrupulous obedience” to their Torah. And likewise, today’s Jews, the “supposed secularists,” that is, the liberals, socialists, Marxists, and radicals populating their number, have similarly given an obedience to the “Torah of Liberalism” of today, like Abraham obeying God’s order to kill his son, Isaac. We see here that transference of fervor and that proclivity to obey an infallible book which have kept modern Jews in the leftist camp. But Podhoretz believes this obedience to the new Torah of Liberalism is “at variance with the most basic of all Jewish interests – the survival of the Jewish people.”