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 Location : Ether-Sphere
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Humor : Über Serious
 |  Subject: The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy  Tue Aug 03, 2010 5:55 am | |
| In this broadside against the received wisdom of America's elite liberal intelligentsia, noted conservative Sowell, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, offers some strenuous arguments as well as fuzzy generalizations. Thus, his attacks on the war on poverty, sex education and criminal justice policies forged in the 1960s counter some slippery rhetoric by their defenders, yet his suggestion that these policies exacerbated things is questionable.
Sowell deconstructs how statistics can be distorted to prove assumptions (that lack of prenatal care is the cause of black infant mortality) and gleefully skewers "Teflon prophets" such as John Kenneth Galbraith (who said that big companies are immune from the market) and Paul Ehrlich (who said starvation loomed). While "the anointed" favor explanations that exempt individuals from personal responsibility and seek painless solutions, those with the "tragic vision" see policies as trade-offs. Sowell scores his targets for disdaining their opponents, but this book also invokes caricature-these days, many of "the anointed" are less unreconstructed than he assumes.
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Ever wonder why liberals are so emotionally in favor of gun control even though it's a conclusive fact that gun control doesn't reduce gun violence? Or why they support the bilingual education programs that do so much damage to immigrant children? Or why they favor rent controls that make housing unavailable to the poor people for whom they supposedly have so much sympathy? Or why they want to make it illegal for a person to be employed if (s)he lacks the skills to do more than $7 worth of work every hour?
If the motives of liberals were truly what they say they are, then these positions would never gather the support that they now enjoy from the liberal community. Liberals are not uninformed; they read the same books, newspapers and academic journals as conservatives or libertarians. So why do they so consistently advocate policies whose results are demonstrably contrary to the results they claim to want?
Sowell explains the answer in this wonderful book. The reason, he says, is that the real motives of liberals have nothing to do with the welfare of other people. Instead, they have two related goals: first, to establish themselves as morally and intellectually superior to the rather distasteful population of common people, and second, to gather as much power as possible to tell those distasteful common people how they must live their lives. If a policy moves them closer to those two goals, they will find a reason to advocate it, regardless of how harmful the consequences of that policy may be.
Once you read this book, the dishonest posturing of liberals becomes far more understandable. They engage in a preposterous circular argument: They are wiser and more moral than others because they "understand" the need for the policies they advocate. In turn, those policies are the correct policies because they are advocated by the wiser and more moral members of society!
Many of Sowell's conclusions have become clear to me from personal experience. I recall attending a town meeting with a congressman in the early 80's, at which a pompous ass stood up and delivered a long diatribe on American policy in Nicaragua, ending with a rhetorical question about what "people of conscience" were going to do about those terrible policies. "People of conscience", by his definition, were the people who agreed with his beliefs regarding Nicaraguan policy. (Apparently the Nicaraguans themselves had no conscience, since at the first available opportunity they threw out the Sandinista government that he so fervently supported.)
When participating in a debate about gun control, the self-anointed liberals will assume without question that it is only the people who agree with their positions who care about children or violence. They assume without question that only narrow-minded chauvinists oppose bilingual education. They assume without question that only racists oppose racial discrimination (which they have renamed "affirmative action"). They assume without question that the people who feed and clothe them, who build their homes and cure their diseases, are engaged in a process of greed and exploitation - but that people who make their living by telling others what to do, and who get paid for doing so with money confiscated forcibly from those who earned it, are engaged in "public service".
Few liberals will read Sowell's book, because almost all liberals lack the moral and intellectual courage to confront their own motivations. But those few who read it by mistake will find themselves deeply pierced. Liberals are so accustomed to being able to bully their opponents with name-calling and preemption of the entire vocabulary of debate, that they scream with fury when their pretenses are stripped away.
Having said all that, I have to admit that a couple of previous reviewers are right when they accuse Sowell of ignoring the propensity of conservatives to sometimes engage in the same kind of sloppy thinking and self-serving prejudice which he attributes only to liberals. That criticism is fair; Sowell is a conscious partisan. It is only Libertarians (like me, of course! :-) ) who consistently stick to principle.
http://www.amazon.com/Vision-Anointed-Self-Congratulation-Social-Policy/dp/046508995X/ref=pd_sim_b_6 |
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