Books we read can have a big impact on our thinking. I’ve always admired economist Thomas Sowell and have read several of his books. I recently finished A Conflict of Visions, which I recommend. I wanted to write up a sort of review of the book and some thoughts I had as a result of reading it.
Quotes and ideas from The Conflict of Visions
I recently read Thomas Sowell’s The Conflict of Visions. Sowell is a very wise conservative economist I admire. Reading books by intellectual people, thinkers who are way ahead of me in their education and depth of thought, always challenges and inspires me, and stretches my thinking in ways I haven’t previously imagined or thought of. Have you found this to be true in your life? In this blog, I just want to go over some of the main ideas I got from this book, and add some thoughts of my own that came from reading it.
First of all, Sowell deals with two visions for life in this book, which are really two worldviews that are prevalent today in our society. These he calls the Unconstrained and the Constrained Visions. It quickly becomes apparent that the first is what today we call liberalism/progressivism, and the second is what we call conservatism.
I like this quote from Walter Lippmann in the beginning of chapter 2: “At the core of every moral code there is a picture of human nature, a map of the universe, and a version of history. To human nature (of the sort conceived), in a universe (of the kind imagined), after a history (so understood), the rules of the code apply.” Those who hold to the constrained vision believe man and the world are fallen, fatally flawed in some way, and are therefore constrained in terms of what they can achieve and be. Those with the unconstrained vision believe man is basically good and unlimited in potential, if he could just throw off the shackles in his mind, which were put there by traditions and by religion, things of the past.
I like Sowell’s long quote from Adam Smith about if 100 million Chinese were destroyed and some European read about it in the paper, he might say, “Oh, isn’t that dreadful!” and think about it for a few moments. But then he’d go on with his business, his pleasures, hobbies, entertainments, etc., and snore peacefully that night. He would be more upset if he were to lose his little finger than he would be for 100 million people annihilated, but Smith didn’t lament that or say it should be changed. He just saw it as the way things were/are. So he wanted to see inducements or incentives to get people to do things, not try to get them to be different people. Smith is of the constrained vision (cv), so he knows human beings are just that way. You can’t change them at their core.
Another very important point was that in the constrained vision, we seek equality of processes. In the unconstrained, they seek equality of results. If you have a foot race, and one guy wins because he’s faster, and he wins time after time, that’s not unjust! He’s just faster. As long as he ran fairly and all the others did too, you had a just process, and that’s what counts. For those of the unconstrained vision, however, that’s not just at all! The guy won too often! We have to do something about that, make it possible for others or maybe even for all to win as well! Maybe we should put some extra weights on the fast guy, or hold him back so he can’t start at the same time. Whatever it takes, we need equality of results; otherwise, things are just unfair, unjust!
The CV believes in incremental changes of things like government and law, because it believes in the results of millions of minds over centuries of time, and thinks these patterns are safer. The UV believes more in elites who should do the thinking for everyone. That’s why for the UV, the constitution is less valuable, legal precedent is less valuable, market trends are less just, etc., because we’re more advanced now than they were then.
As intimated above, the UV also believes in sort of unlimited potential for the human race, believes in human ability to use reason and come up with better and better morality and policy, whereas the CV believes man is broken and fallen, corrupt and untrustworthy, and will always fail and sin, so you have to plan on that, be on guard against it, legislate to counter it, etc. You can really see how these differences played out in the French and Soviet revolutions, by the way. CV people believe we can’t change human nature. We just have to restrict the evil aspects of it, and try to incentivize good behavior. That’s why we like capitalism, because it incentivizes people to be pleasant to customers, to do their best to serve them well, give them a better bargain, etc. A waitress is polite and helpful to her customers, because they’ll tip her better if she is.
CV people believe the general public, even uneducated people, have some ideas and are sometimes better or wiser or can come up with as brilliant or more brilliant ideas than some highly educated person. We believe a gifted person is only gifted in a limited area, so he/she could actually be brilliant in one field but quite dumb in others or quite deficient in others. You could be a genius scientist but know nothing about business or social policies. A common laborer will often see things more clearly or know about some area a highly educated person knows nothing about. So the voice and input of all is important.
The UV people think knowledge and reason are concentrated more in certain people, so they should make decisions for everyone. Bureaucrats or technocrats in government should do economic planning, be involved in judicial activism, make decisions for all of us and change decisions already made. Those with the CV think each or any individual’s knowledge is so limited as to be “grossly inadequate compared to the knowledge mobilized systemically through economic markets, traditional values, and other social processes, that surrogate decision-makers in general – and non-elected judges in particular – should severely limit themselves to drawing up rules defining the boundaries of others’ discretion, not second-guess the decisions actually made within those boundaries.” CV people also believe perfection in results is never possible; the best we can hope for is to do trade-offs. We accept that laws we write can’t be perfect or cover every possible case. Someone might be treated or punished unfairly because a law didn’t take into consideration their specific situation, it’s true. But legislators must still try to pass laws that will generally restrict evil. CV people don’t believe perfect solutions are ever possible. The UV people think they are, and demand results that are equal or fair.
Various issues, like economic planning, even to include ideas and policies directed toward third world development, vs. a laissez-faire, market-driven economic policy, judicial activism vs. judicial restraint, affirmative action vs. comparable worth, these are all areas in which the assumptions of the people of the two visions are so different that they lead logically to opposite conclusions. We differ on what we even see as desirable outcomes as well as what sorts of methods or strategies would be more effective.
For example, UV people do things like creating rent caps or minimum wage laws to help the poor, though these have been shown to be, not only ineffective, but to have detrimental secondary effects that make things worse for the very people they’re trying to help, and they often rob others in order to “give” to the “oppressed,” thus oppressing a whole different group of people!
The UV vision seems to believe all the poor are that way because the richer classes have taken from them. To them, the world is a zero-sum game. They seem to never understand many are poor because of their own failings – lack of initiative, drive, or creativity, drug addiction, harmful patterns of living, laziness, etc. To them, even mentioning such things is to “blame the victim.” Their thinking drives them to devise strategies and policies which will take from the rich and give to the poor, in order to bring about “social justice.” They completely ignore the fact that to take from some in order to give to others is to treat them unjustly, because it doesn’t give them the opportunity to gain from their ingenuity or hard work. It’s unjust! Their “solution” to what they perceive as injustice is to simply switch who we’re unjust to! They want to treat the producers of society unjustly in order to (supposedly) treat the non-producers more justly?
This is what we’ve seen with things like affirmative action. To increase something you think desirable, a greater “diversity,” you grant unfair advantage to some groups, not recognizing that in doing so, you are being unjust to other groups! How can it be best or right to discriminate against a new group in order to balance out the results for another group?
CV folks don’t believe equality of results is possible because the world is not equal at all. Some are fat, others thin, some tall, others short, some intelligent, others not so intelligent, some are creative or diligent or entrepreneurial, whereas others want to just barely get by, etc. We are all unique individuals with different drives and abilities and gifts. How can there possibly be equality of results?!
“Whatever one’s vision, other visions are easily misunderstood – not only because of caricatures produced by polemics but also because the very words used (equality, freedom, justice, power) mean entirely different things in the context of different presuppositions. It is not merely misunderstanding but the inherent logic of each vision which leads to these semantic differences as well as to substantively different conclusions across a wide spectrum of issues.” (Summary, 42) I learned this long ago in dealing with cults. They use the same words as we Christians, but with entirely different meanings, so we can have a conversation in which it may seem we’re in agreement, when in fact, we have nothing in common at all! It’s impossible to agree or come up with solutions that work, when you don’t even agree on what the words you’re using mean!
This book, along with my recent reading and studying on the Enlightenment and the French and Russian revolutions, and a series of lectures from the Heritage Foundation on liberalism/progressivism vs. conservatism, all of these things have made me see that our present divisions in the United States, our completely different values, ways of seeing things, and sense of what would be desirable and what would be good goals to strive for are not recent developments. In fact, these are foundational differences that have been with us since at least the 18th century.
As the lecturer for the Heritage Foundation, David Azerrad, pointed out, we’ve really had a “regime change” in the US over the last 50 years, without many even realizing what was going on. This other vision, this unconstrained vision Sowell talks about, has supplanted our more constrained vision, which had been the primary way people saw things for our first two centuries of existence as a country.
Postmodern thinking really began among French intellectuals too, and is an extension of the trends of the Enlightenment. At its core, the Enlightenment, in my view, was just a new eruption of rebellion against God. It was a reaction against Christian domination of Europe for centuries. When the Reformation occurred, it was a good thing. But at the same time, it served to disunify Europe. Religious wars resulted, which turned many against religion.
The Reformation’s emphasis on the individual’s personal relationship with God and rejection of the absolute, “infallible” Roman Catholic hierarchy, these were good things. But at the same time, they fostered a new attitude of individualism and rebellion against all authority, not just of the Church, but of God Himself as well and of His Word. They allowed people to “throw off the shackles” so to speak, of a mostly Christian worldview which had dominated European thinking for 1000 years. That was not a positive. It opened the doors for a more general rebellion. It’s why, in my opinion, Europe today is post-Christian and only 1-2% of most countries populations attend any church with regularity.
The Enlightenment was rebellion against God, because it fostered the idea that human reason, apart from divine revelation, was all we needed, and we could create a better world. It wasn’t original sin, or the sinful rebellious nature of mankind that was the problem. That was all religious rubbish, foisted upon society to give church leaders greater authority. Instead, it was wrong forms of government, it was tradition, it was religious thinking that had impeded our progress. If we could just rid ourselves of all this, we could make a better world. That’s the essence of the Unconstrained vision! And apparently, it is the mindset or worldview of millions of Americans today. I, for one, fear where this sort of thinking will take us!