The Quest for Cosmic Justice by Thomas Sowell
To accept the opposite view—that some have become dramatically better at producing the wealth made possible by modern technology, and that others lag in applying this technology—is to threaten the psyches of those who lag and deprive their would-be rescuers of a dramatic and historic role. It is no denigration of the genius of propaganda to say that it flourishes in a particular context. So do all other achievements.
Did Lenin himself believe the argument he presented in Imperialism? In light of his many other cynical words and deeds, it is doubtful. What is crucial, however, is that he was committed to a vision. As Joseph Schumpeter said, “The first thing a man will do for his ideals is lie.”67 As history has also shown, especially in the twentieth century, one of the first things an ideologue will do after achieving absolute power is kill. That too is part of the tyranny of visions.
Social Reform
Not only sweeping theories but also more limited reform movements can reflect cosmic visions. More specifically, reform movements often reflect the vision of cosmic justice—opposition to a situation deemed morally intolerable, regardless of whether the reform makes those trapped in that situation better off or worse off. For example, reformers shocked by housing conditions in the slums or working conditions in the Third World have often banned by law the housing conditions which offended them or used import bans or public vilification to keep American firms from importing the products of labor working under conditions that offend American reformers.
In the great age of housing reform—the late nineteenth century in the United States—conditions in the slums were truly appalling. Most of the people living in northern urban slums at that time were immigrants, many from much poorer countries than the United States and themselves much poorer than most Americans. These immigrants lived packed into small, illventilated apartments, often three or more per room. If they were lucky, they all shared a toilet out in the hall. If not, they had to go outside—regardless of the weather—to an outhouse in a back yard. In short, there is no question that the conditions were far worse than in slums a hundred years later and far worse than conditions that anyone would like to see human beings living in. To the reformers, it followed as the night follows the day that laws should ban such conditions and set standards for the way apartment buildings were built, as well as standards for how much space must be allowed per person and other desirable features that all housing must have.
Nothing is easier than to agree with these reformers that it was unjust, in some cosmic sense, that some people should find themselves forced to live so much like animals. However, some slum-dwellers were not financially incapable of getting better housing but were living in overcrowded and run-down buildings as a way to skimp and save money to send to their families back in Europe, either for food and shelter or to buy tickets to come join them in America. Some families saved money in order to prepare a better future for themselves and their children. Crusading reformer-journalist Jacob Riis, while painting a heart-rending picture of the slums in which Jewish immigrants were living on the lower east side of New York, noted in passing their small earnings, “more than half of which goes into the bank.”68
In short, people were making choices and trade-offs, however appalling those choices might seem to observers—and however “unfair” it might be that such choices had to be made in the first place, when so many others had so much better options available to them. The kinds of reforms being promoted in the nineteenth century did not expand the slum-dwellers’ options but reduced them. Since better housing mandated by law cost more money, immigrant slum-dwellers now had to devote a higher percentage of their incomes toward purchasing more expensive housing with features that would be more pleasing to third-party observers, rather than make the trade-offs that they themselves would have preferred with their own money.
When one considers the dire poverty and dangers to life and limb from mobs that Jews were facing in Eastern Europe at the time, the desire of Jews on the lower east side of New York to get their loved ones fed and then brought over to America clearly had an urgency, however much that fact might be unknown or ignored by housing reformers. Nor was the desire to save for a better future for their children merely a forlorn hope, as the later rise of Jews in the United States showed.
The fact that people were literally starving to death in the streets of Ireland during the potato famine of the 1840s likewise lent urgency to the desire of Irish immigrants in America to get their families moved across the Atlantic. With the Irish, as with the Jews, most immigrants crossed the ocean with their passages paid by members of their respective groups living in America. So did many people from other immigrant groups. Some of the worst housing conditions were endured by Italian men, living up to ten to a room and sending money back to their families in Italy.
Reformers who reacted to the slums before their eyes, and to their own sense of social injustice, had nothing to force them to face the trade-offs inescapably faced by the people living in those slums. Even the fact that slum-dwellers often joined with slum landlords to physically resist being evicted by the authorities from housing declared “sub-standard” did not cause Jacob Riis or many other reformers to reconsider whether what they were doing was really in the best interests of the people whose interests they were ostensibly protecting. It is all too easy for people with more formal schooling to believe that they know better than those directly concerned.
It is equally easy for others, a hundred years later, to say complacently that “in the long run” it was better for these slums to disappear, so that housing reform was a success, after all. Indeed, reformers at the time often made “before” and “after” comparisons of the housing in which people lived, concluding that these reforms had made those people better off. Yet both comparisons stop far short of proving what they imagine that they prove.
The underlying problem was the poverty of the people living in the slums. Their housing was only a symptom of that problem—indeed, one of the ways of minimizing the effects of their poverty, by leaving more money to meet their needs for food, for help to relatives abroad, and to prepare for their children’s rise in American society. Housing reform added nothing to these people’s meager incomes. On the contrary, it commandeered some of those meager resources to make third parties feel better.
We need not wonder whether nineteenth-century slums would have persisted indefinitely without housing reform crusades. Nineteenth-century crusaders paid no such attention to the housing of Southern blacks and yet that housing improved in a generation at least as much as the housing in Northern immigrant slums. As blacks acquired more options through rising incomes, their housing improved accordingly. There is no reason to believe that immigrants were incapable of doing the same thing. Indeed, rising incomes among immigrants and their children often led them to acquire housing of an even higher standard than the minimum prescribed by the laws passed by housing reformers.
Much the same story can be told today of reformers who decry “sweatshop labor” in Third World countries that export their products to the United States to be sold by American stores. Nothing is easier than to take cheap shots at those stores for “exploiting” Third World people—and nothing will hurt those Third World people more surely than losing one of their few meager opportunities to earn incomes by producing at lower costs than more fortunate people in more industrialized nations. Imposing American wages or American working conditions on people who do not have American productivity means pricing many of those people out of a job. It is reducing their options, rather than adding to those options.
Like so much that is done in the quest for cosmic justice, it makes observers feel better about themselves—and provides no incentives for those observers to scrutinize the consequences of their actions on the ostensible beneficiaries. As in other cases, human beings are sacrificed to the tyranny of visions because those sacrificed are not the same as those exhilarated by the vision.
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS
Vision
In countries fortunate enough to have democratic means of replacing the representatives of visions that failed, these visions could be replaced by very different visions, as happened in Britain and the United States in the 1980s. But the most dramatic and far-reaching visions of the twentieth century—the totalitarianisms of the left and right—permitted no such reversals, short of war or revolution. Yet, even in democratic nations, a prevailing vision can survive many setbacks and even disasters. The prevalence and power of a vision is shown, not by what its evidence or logic can prove, but precisely by its exemption from any need to provide evidence or logic—by the number of things that can be successfully asserted because they fit the vision, without having to meet the test of fitting the facts.
How often has it been asserted, for example, that opposing ideas may have fit “earlier and simpler times” but no longer apply to the “complexities” of the present—without the slightest evidence being asked or given to show that earlier times were in fact simpler, without a single step of logic to show that opposing ideas were more applicable then than now and, most important of all, without ever bringing any alternative set of ideas simultaneously to the test of either facts or reason?
Among the perennially popular notions for which evidence is neither asked nor given, most prove to be very self-flattering to those who believe them. For example, it was for many years a popular staple among American liberals that the Roosevelt New Deal “saved capitalism” in spite of itself—that is, in spite of the capitalists who opposed FDR and his programs. In other words, the stupid or short-sighted businessmen were going to destroy themselves if it had not been for the far-sighted liberals in Washington who saved them and the economic system that made their success possible.
Could anything be more self-congratulatory? Yet, despite the innumerable times that this thesis has been repeated in the media and in academia, it would be virtually impossible to find any serious attempt to advance either evidence or a structured argument to prove it. Since the American economy always recovered from all previous depressions, the case that it recovered from the depression of the 1930s because of the Roosevelt policies is far from obvious. Indeed, what was peculiar about the depression of the 1930s was how long it lasted—and here a case can be made, and in fact has been made, that the constant economic experiments in Washington under FDR generated an atmosphere of uncertainty—and that this uncertainty impeded economic recovery,69 as uncertainty has impeded economic prosperity in countries around the world and in many periods of history. The point here is not to claim that this thesis is the right one—just that it uses evidence and logic, as the prevailing vision does not and does not have to.
Powerful visions may not only dispense with facts, they can defy the most blatant facts for years on end. For the better part of the twentieth century—or, rather, for the worst part of the twentieth century—people by the millions fled countries viewed favorably by the intelligentsia to go to countries viewed unfavorably by the intelligentsia. Subjecting theories to the rigors of logical scrutiny and empirical verification may be tedious, but subjecting whole populations to the fancies of intellectuals and politicians has repeatedly proved deadly. That lesson has been written in blood across the history of the twentieth century and surely the time is overdue to read it.
Even in countries fortunate enough to escape the ideological totalitarianism that engulfed hundreds of millions of human beings in this century, grandiose economic and social experiments created hunger in countries that used to export food and turned great cities into scenes of both physical and moral squalor that their own citizens fled.
It might be thought that the emphasis placed on visions here is either misplaced or exaggerated because many things that are said and done politically are motivated by narrow self-interests, either by the self-interest of the individual politician or that of the politician’s financial or political backers. The extent to which politics is a conflict of special interests, rather than a conflict of visions, can be debated. However, even when what is involved is fundamentally a matter of special interests, often there is a clash with opposing special interests and the net outcome may well depend on the extent to which either side can enlist wider political support. Here the general climate of opinion, including the prevailing vision that forms the background for many people’s opinions on particular issues, can be decisive.
Whether political leaders say what they do out of conviction or as a matter of expediency matters little to this argument. What will be expedient for a particular individual depends on what others sincerely believe. Even lies are effective only because they are regarded as the truth. It is precisely this prevailing sense of what is true and what is right—the vision—that determines what will be expedient for those who are untroubled by either consideration.
While it is convenient to refer to visions in terms of the assumptions they embody and the theories to which they lead, as well as the specific hypotheses that follow from those theories, not everyone systematically analyzes visions in this way. In fact, one of the important advantages of a prevailing vision is that it is so easily and unconsciously absorbed from those around us, without our having to take the trouble to think about it. A prevailing vision is, in computer terms, the “default setting” for our opinions on a whole spectrum of issues. It is what we believe in general when we have no special reason to believe otherwise.
Most people have neither the time nor the inclination to delve deeply into theories and evidence, much less the expertise to do so effectively. Indeed, even experts in particular fields may have little time or inclination to put to the test a vision that extends far beyond their field. In our own specialty, we may have learned through experience or analysis just how false the prevailing vision is as regards a particular issue in that field but, when we turn to things outside our own area of special knowledge, the easiest thing is to accept what “everybody” assumes. For example, if we have studied the actual effects of rent control in countries around the world, then we are unlikely to believe arguments for making housing “affordable” in this way, but we may remain susceptible to other arguments, based on the prevailing vision, that food, medical care, or other things should be made “affordable” by similar government action.
So natural and almost inevitable does the prevailing vision often appear that, when we encounter someone who is clearly out of step with this vision, it is all too easy to dismiss his views on one issue by referring to other issues in which he is also out of step with the vision. Thus, his views on national health insurance may seem suspect or not to be taken seriously because “What can you expect from someone who is against affordable housing for the poor?” In short, intellectual consistency becomes something to condemn when it is consistency with a different set of assumptions than those embodied in the prevailing vision. Put differently, the prevailing vision not only does not require evidence, it becomes a substitute for evidence in condemning alternative views, so that the real criterion is not which theory better fits empirical facts but which theory better fits the prevailing vision.
Visions are not inherently dogmatic and the social sciences are not inherently unscientific in their methods. To explain the levels of dogmatism and resistance to facts found in too many writings in the social sciences—and still more so in the humanities and in the popular media—it is necessary to explor
Just as ancient tyrants gave the people bread and circuses, in exchange for their loyalty, so visions can acquire a tyrannical sway over people’s minds by offering them an exalted sense of themselves in exchange for their loyalty to the vision through all the vicissitudes of facts to the contrary. This self-exaltation can take many forms on many issues.
Whether the particular issue is crime, automobile safety, income statistics, military defense, or overpopulation theories, the one consistency among them is that the conclusions reached exalt those who share the vision over the great unwashed who do not. What is most self-exalting is taking a position above the contenders, creating “moral equivalence” between aggressor dictatorships and defensive democracies or between animal species and human beings. With criminal law issues, theories of “root causes” of crime tend to put criminals and “society” on the same moral plane by depicting crimes as the fruits of society’s failings. In short, moral equivalence—whatever form it takes—is moral self-exaltation. It would be expecting quite a coincidence for the theories and policies which best serve this personal purpose, for those with this vision, to also best serve others for whose ostensible benefit these theories and policies are proposed.