Understanding Thomas Sowell by Richard Patterson

Author:Richard Patterson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: libertarian, free market, hayek, liberal, sowell, political rhetoric, systemic rationality
Publisher: Richard Patterson

Rationality and Rhetoric: Strategies of the Anointed

The Vision of the Anointed has two major themes: 1) policies based on the prevailing vision since the 1960s have backfired and 2) those failed policies have not been abandoned or corrected because of the rhetorical strategies with which the intellectual / liberal elite suppress evidence of failure. If Sowell had been content just to debate the success or failure of specific policies, I would never have attempted to analyze his philosophical or sociological assumptions, although I might have occasionally read what he had to say about policies that particularly concerned me. I shall make no attempt here to evaluate the statistical or anecdotal evidence Sowell provides to show how various policies have failed. Others are far more qualified to do that. [6.1] I am more interested in the context of that debate and whether Sowell sheds light on the obstacles to substantive debate that seem at times to have become insurmountable.

For 20 or 30 years Sowell has been sounding the alarm about the direction in which our society seems to be headed. His efforts to find the underlying causes for the changes he saw led him to his theory of “visions” which produce ideological differences. The “unconstrained vision” (aka “the vision of the anointed”) became the prevailing vision and has been guiding policy for 50 years.

After the vision of the anointed was given increasing scope in the education and public policy of the United States and other Western societies during the decades beginning with the 1960s, the social degeneration became palpable, documented beyond issue, and immense across a wide spectrum of social phenomena – declining educational standards, rising crime rates, broken homes, soaring rates of teenage pregnancy, growing drug usage, and unprecedented levels of suicide among adolescents. This social devastation was not due to poverty, for the material standard of living was rising substantially during this time. It was not due to repression, for an unprecedented variety of new “rights” emerged from the courts and legislatures to liberate people from the constraints of the law while they were being liberated from social constraints by the spread of “nonjudgmental” attitudes. Neither was the social degeneration due to the disruptions of war or natural catastrophes, for it was an unusually long period of peace, and science conquered many diseases that had plagued the human race for centuries, as well as providing better ways of protecting people from earthquakes and other destructive acts of nature. It was instead an era of self-inflicted wounds. [6.2]

The dominance of the unconstrained vision is something that needs to be explained if it is responsible for this social degeneration. As we have seen Sowell’s concept of a vision is such that it should be capable of being validated. A vision can be transformed into theories, which in turn can yield hypotheses to be tested. Empirical data will then reveal whether the theory is valid or not. This has not happened and, to the extent that social policies based on the prevailing vision are failing, the evidence against the vision is simply being ignored.

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