Pieces of:
The vision of the anointed
(self congratulation as a basis for social policy)
Thomas Sowell
BasicBooks
1995
My comments in red text.
Pgs. 104 - 118
Chapter 5
The anointed VS the benighted
What kind of world exists inside the minds of the contemporary anointed, and what kind of individual and social causation activates that world ? The question here is not about what kind of world they wish to create, but what kind of world they think already exists.
Just a note. These anointed ones he writes about are todays liberals.
The vision of the anointed may stand out in sharper relief when it is contrasted with
the opposing vision, a vision whose reasoning begins with the tragedy of the human condition.
The two visions differ in their respective conceptions of the nature of man, the nature of the world, and the nature of causation, knowledge, power, and justice.
Tragic vision
Knowledge: Consists largely of the unarticulated experiences of the many.
Decision making mechanism preferred: Systemic processes that convey the experiences and revealed preferences of the many.
Kinds of decisions preferred: Incremental
Vision of the anointed
Knowledge: Consists largely of the articulated intelligence of the more educated few.
Decision making mechanism preferred: Deliberate plans that utilize the special talents and more advanced veiws of the few.
Kinds of decisions preferred: Categorical
These differences are not random happenstances. They are systematic differences that follow logically from fundamental differences in underlying assumptions, beginning with assumptions about the nature of human beings and the range of possibilities open to them.
The more ambitious definitions of freedom and of justice, for example, in the vision of the anointed are consistent with the expansive sweep of human capabilities they assume.
It is not merely that the engineer cannot perform surgery,
the judge in his decisions cannot venture very far beyond his narrow expertise in the law without precipitating disasters when he attempts to become a social philosopher who can make the law the instrument of some grander vision of the world.
The conflicts between those with the tragic vision and those with the vision of the anointed are virtually inevitable.
Clearly, those who assume a larger set of options are unlikely to be satisfied with results deriving from a smaller set of options. Thus, those with the vision of the anointed, who assume an expansive range of choices, repeatedly find themselves in conflict with those who have the tragic vision and who consequently assume a smaller set of choices. While these conflicts pervade contemporary ideological politics, they are not peculiar to our times. Both visions have a long history, encompassing many individuals of historic stature.
Those with the vision of the anointed are particularly prone to think of their own philosophy as new, and therefore as adapted to contemporary society, but their framework of assumptions goes back at least two centuries - as does the framework of those with the tragic vision.
What ? The philosophies sold to us by liberal "progressives" AREN'T new ? Or is that just a nice way to frame it to sell it to people who are unwilling or unable to make good judgement ?
Both visions also have internal coherence. Those who follow the assumptions of a particular vision as regards law tend also to follow that vision as regards economics. Thus Judge David L. Bazelon, whose role and philosophy as regards expanding criminals' rights have already been noted in chapter 2, believed in the socioeconomic sphere that "inequality of riches in our affluent society" was one of "a host of inequities" { David L. Bazelon, questioning authority: justice and criminal law(New York: Knopf, 1988), pp. 196-197 } that government should provide people's "basic needs as rights," that income, education, and medical care should be "matters of right, not of grace" { David L. Bazelon, questioning authority: justice and criminal law (New York: Knopf, 1988), pp. 295 } Conversely, Adam Smith not only had opposite views from Judge Bazelon on governments role in the economy, but also on the application of criminal law. For Smith, "mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent." { Adam Smith, The theory of moral sentiments (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1976), p. 170}
As a contemporary writer has noted:
Liberalism in America and worldwide has great faith in modifying human behaviour by adjusting "underlying social conditions" to make people desire the right thing instead of the wrong thing. In its clearest form, this is the response to crime control by liberals, who are not much interested in tougher sentences, improved security devices, better-armed and equipped police, more escape-proof prisons -
they seek to change society or the malefactors, so that people will not want to commit crime.
This is also the form of the liberal solution to most foreign policy problems - we should behave in a better manner and reorder the world so that the urge to war will be reduced, and mankind will live in better harmony. { B. Bruce-Briggs, The War against the Automobile(New York: E.P. Hutton, 1977), p. 125}
Not only today, but for more than two centuries, both crime and war have been seen, by those with the vision of the anointed, as things to be deterred by changing peoples dispositions rather than by confronting them with retaliatory capabilities that provide incentives against crime or war. William Godwins 1793 treatise, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, remains one of the most systematic elaborations of the vision of the anointed and in it crime and war are approached in precisely the same way as among 1960s liberals and their later followers. Dispositions and understanding are seen by the anointed as the key to crime control, for example: "It is impossible that a man would perpetrate a crime, in the moment when he sees it in all its enormity," {William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justiceand its influence on morals and happines(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969) Vol. I, p. 276} According to Godwin, just as Ramsey Clark was to say in the twentieth century, "healthy, rational people will not injure others." {Ramsey Clark, Crime in America: observations on its nature, causes, prevention and control (Simon & Schuster, 1970), p. 220}
In both cases, it is the failure of "society" that causes crime, with the criminal being the victim of circumstances.
Similarly with war. The way for a country to avoid war, according to Godwin, is to behave with "inoffensiveness and neutrality" toward other countries and to avoid the kind of "misunderstanding" that leads to war. {William Godwin, Enquiry concerning Political Justice and its influence on morals and happiness (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1946),Vol. II, pp. 144-145} Nearly a century and a half later, this same theory was being expounded and put into practice by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who repeatedly blamed such subjective factors as fears, suspicions and misunderstandings for war {Neville Chamberlain, In Search of Peace (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1939)pp. 14, 34, 50, 52, 74, 97, 105, 106, 133, 210, 234, 252} and who therefore put great weight on "personal contacts" {Ibid., pp. 34, 40, 120, 209, 210, 216, 230, 240, 242, 250, 271 }
Many latter day adherents to the vision of the anointed urged neutrality in the face of soviet backed insurgencies around the world, practiced moral equivalence, resisted defense buildups, and were euphoric over "personal contacts" that were now called "summit meetings." Half a century after Chamberlain, New York Times columnnist Tom Wicker attributed Soviet - American conflicts to the fact that "both sides" had a "dangerous hostility" toward one another in the 1950's {Tom Wicker, "Plenty of credit," New York Times, Dec. 5, 1989, p. A35 }
One of the most important questions about any proposed course of action is whether we know how to-do it. Policy A may be better than policy B, but that does not matter if we simply do not know how to do, policy A. Perhaps it would be better to rehabilitate criminals, rather than punish them, if we knew how to do it. Rewarding merit might be better than rewarding results if we knew how to do it. But
one of the crucial differences between those with the tragic vision and those with the vision of the anointed is in what they respectively assume that we know how to do. Those with the vision of the anointed are seldom deterred by any question as to whether anyone has the knowledge required to do what they are attempting. As we have already seen, when President Lyndon Johnson spoke of addressing the conditions that breed urban violence, he said:
All of us know what those conditions are: ignorance, discrimination, slums, poverty, disease, not enough jobs, [excerpts from Lyndon B. Johnson's address to the nation on civil disorders, July 27, 1967," Report of the National Advisory Committee on Civil Disorders, March 1, 1968 p. 297; "Transcript of Johnson's TV Address on the Riots," New York Times, July 28, 1968, p. A11]
Similarly, when the New York Times editorially expressed dismay at statistics on high infant mortality rates in the United States, it declared: "America already knows how to make the rate drop again, ["More Babies Are Dying, New York Times, Aug. 9, 1990, p. A22"], With these and innumerable other issues the question for the anointed is not knowledge but compassion, commitment, and other such subjective factors which supposedly differentiate themselves from other people.
The refrain of the anointed is we already know the answers, there's no need for more studies, and the kinds of questions raised by those with other views are just stalling and obstructing progress. "Solutions" are out there waiting to be found, like eggs at an Easter egg hunt. Intractable problems with painful trade-offs are simply not part of the vision of the anointed.
Problems exist only because other people are not as wise or as caring, or not as imaginative and bold, as the anointed. If there was one defining moment of the 1960s, it might well have been at the judicial conference in 1965 when Justices Brennan and Warren roared with laughter as a law professor poured scorn and ridicule on the concerns of a former police commissioner about the effects of recent judicial rulings on law enforcement and public safety. [ Sidney E. Zion, "Attack on Court Heard by Warren," New York Times, Sept. 10, 1965, pp.1ff ] It was the anointed in their classic role of disdaining the benighted - and dismissing the very possibility that the unintended ramifications of morally inspired decisions might make matters worse on net balance. Far more important than particular reckless policies, even those with such deadly consequences as weakening the criminal law, is
a whole mind-set in which omnicompetence is implicitly assumed and unhappy social phenomena are presumed to be unjustified morally and remediable intellectually and politically. Inherent constraints of circumstances or people are brushed aside; as are alternative policy approaches which offer no special role for the anointed. The burden of proof is not put on their vision, but on existing institutions.
The notion that "society" must justify itself before the bar of "reason" presupposes that there is some individual or group capable of such encyclopedic knowledge and such mastery of the structured principles of so many disciplines as to make such judgments across a broad spectrum and at a speed that would fit all these judgments into one lifetime.
Those with sweeping schemes for "reconstructing society" seldom pause to ask about the sufficiency of anyone's knowledge for such a task.
For the anointed,
traditions are likely to be seen as the dead hand of the past, relics of a less enlightened age, and not as the distilled experience of millions who faced similar human vicissitudes before. Moreover, the applicability of past experience is further discounted in the vision of the anointed, because of the great changes that have taken place since "earlier and simpler times."
Another writer who very clearly defines the mental disorder known as liberalism. It always WAS a mental disorder and always will BE a mental disorder. Don't let these crazy people convince you that they know whats best for us and our society. 
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