Thomas Sowell: Tragic Optimist
"In his 2000 memoir A Personal Odyssey, Sowell recounts a parable that was read to him as a young boy and which he never forgot. “One story I found sad at the time, but remembered the rest of my life, was about a dog with a bone who saw his reflection in a stream and thought that the dog he saw had a bigger bone than he did. He opened his mouth to try to get the other dog’s bone—and of course lost his own when it dropped in the water. There would be many occasions in life to remember that story.” This set the tone for a life and career committed to closing the gap between image and reality...
Sowell began to develop a distaste for the paternalism of low expectations and impoverished standards to which minorities tended to be held...
At Howard, Sowell met the renowned poet Sterling Brown... “Although a bitterly eloquent critic of racism in his writings,” Sowell writes of his former teacher, “he also understood the pitfalls of a victim mentality.” When he left Howard, he recalls Brown telling him, “Don’t come back here and tell me you didn’t make it ’cause the white folks were mean.”...
Sowell had held onto his leftist convictions throughout school, but direct experience exposed the knowledge gap between practical wisdom and bureaucratic expertise and disabused him of his belief that government intervention could resolve social issues. While he was working as an economist for the Department of Labor one summer, Sowell was tasked with studying the sugar cane industry in Puerto Rico and its minimum wage laws. To determine whether the law itself was creating unemployment or if there were other environmental factors at play, he decided to look at how much sugar cane there was before and after a recent hurricane. His colleagues were stunned. Minimum wage laws made up a significant chunk of the Department of Labor’s budget, and the experience showed him how the decisions of those charged with serving the public good were guided by their own set of incentives and interests...
Sowell was also beginning to harbor doubts about the direction of black activism after the legislative and cultural victories of the civil rights movement. Even with segregation abolished, there was clearly much work to be done. But Sowell was unable to identify with the obsessive fixation on racism at the expense of more practical, developmental concerns. “Given all the urgent needs for more and better education, for example, and for all the things that can be obtained with the fruits of work skills and business experience, how much time and effort could be spared for endless campaigns to get into every hamburger stand operated by a redneck?” he remembers thinking at the time. “Not only did this seem like an investment that ought to be put somewhere else, it annoyed me that we seemed to be constantly seeking acceptance and validation by white people—any white people at all, anywhere.”
Symbolic of the turn toward black power in the 1960s, the tone of the moral leadership had likewise shifted. One day, Sowell turned on the television to find James Baldwin telling an audience, “I’ve just come back from seeing a dead boy—and you killed him.” Sowell’s immediate response was, “Not me, Jim. I’ve been here in the apartment all day.” The dead boy to whom Baldwin referred was actually a man in his 20s who had died of an overdose. “Apparently, ‘society’ was to blame, or more specifically whites in the society. However, Baldwin was a master of images, not logic. Psychological warfare was the stock in trade of the new charismatic leaders, and the tactic of putting others on the moral defensive was sometimes used against blacks as well as against whites.”...
Affirmative Action policies were taking off, and Sowell began noticing growing angst among the black students funneled into activism. He saw desperate and alienated young people who recoiled from being treated as disposable tokens used to exonerate the university of racism, no matter how many of the students failed to graduate in the process. He saw the students’ endless demands for racial concessions—black studies departments, separate dorms and graduation ceremonies—as arising from the same foundational insecurity: The fear of being seen as inferior in an environment that constantly seemed to confirm it.
Sowell recognized that preferential racial policies in college admissions were mismatching black students with schools above their academic level. This, in turn, often caused them to fall behind or drop out when they could have done much better in less demanding environments. The problem was not so much the content of the classes than the pace at which those classes moved. But rather than acknowledging the issue, it was easier to rail against racial oppression, sparing them the shame and embarrassment that might otherwise have motivated them to work harder. Worse, it was in the interests of the predominantly white faculty to encourage the students’ paranoid delusions—either to alleviate feelings of guilt or, more likely, to cover for themselves. Sowell was appalled, realizing that he wouldn’t have done as well in school had he been told that his unpreparedness was actually a consequence of racism rather than simply not being good enough at math or English. It was an easy excuse for failure that precluded the difficult effort of development.
Many of his fellow black faculty understood what was happening but were terrified to say so. Any black academic who openly challenged the efficacy of Affirmative Action policies or other Great Society programs meant to benefit blacks was certain to be stigmatized as a race traitor. And, of course, no white academic could protest. Sowell was reluctant to write about race because the subject lay outside his specialty. “Let the professionals handle it,” he thought. Then, he actually read what the so-called professionals had to say and decided that “if these are the professionals then maybe it’s time to give an amateur a try!”
And so, even though he knew his views would be greeted with hostility, Sowell began writing about race out of a sense of moral obligation... Sowell gained infamy as one of the first “black conservative” figures on the American scene, despite never wholly accepting the label. Attacks from the media and from former colleagues came thick and fast and would continue for years to come...
Knowledge and Decisions crystallized Sowell’s work in economics and life experience to that point, setting the stage for his later writings. Inspired by Friedrich Hayek’s essay “The Uses of Knowledge in Society,” the book emerged from the observation that the knowledge necessary for complex technological societies to function was increasingly uncoupled from the ability of everyday citizens to make decisions that impact the quality of their lives...
Given our lack of omniscience and the economic principle of scarcity, there can be no unequivocal solution to any major social issue, only trade-offs, which create their own undesirable outcomes. We can’t merely choose to construct a better reality. Improving the conditions of society means setting certain systemic processes in motion that correspond to objective realities and abide by certain principles—representative democracy, the rule of law, universal humanism, due process—with inbuilt feedback mechanisms that constrain decision-making powers and mitigate bad incentives.
No matter how appealing a policy proposal may sound—the Green New Deal, the push to “Defund The Police,” prison abolition, the War on Drugs—we should always ask what process we are setting in motion and who gains power to make decisions by it. “The most fundamental question is not what decision to make but who is to make it—through what processes and under what incentives and constraints, and with what feedback mechanisms to correct the decision if it proves to be wrong.”...
Sowell spent over a decade traveling the world in search of an answer to one of the central questions of contemporary political debate: Why are there such massive disparities in wealth and income between different racial and ethnic groups and among different nations and civilizations? The upshot of these investigations was his comprehensive trilogy on the impact of culture across the world and throughout history in the development of modern society—Race and Culture, Migrations and Cultures, and Conquests and Cultures. Prevailing wisdom holds that unequal outcomes are a consequence of unequal treatment and power differentials, and that group disparities will dissipate in their absence. However, as Sowell summarizes in Race and Culture, there are countless examples of minority groups around the world beginning in poverty and going on to achieve remarkable success, dominating entire industries in the face of majoritarian hostility and in the absence of political representation or power.
For example, in the late-19th century, the German minority in Czarist Russia made up about one percent of the population and yet constituted 40 percent of Russia’s high ranking military generals—diplomatic correspondences were even written in German. And those were mainly Baltic Germans, who made up a smaller proportion of that one percent than either Black Sea Germans or Volga Germans. Indeed, it is difficult to find any sector of society, anywhere in the history of the world, without such disparities. The list of minority groups who went on to out-earn the ethnic majorities around them could be extended almost indefinitely—the Parsis in India, the Japanese in the Americas, the Chinese in Southeast Asia, the Italians in South America, the Lebanese in West Africa, the Tamils in Sri Lanka, the Jews in Europe, the Greeks in the Ottoman Empire. The question is not why there are disparities between different groups of people, but why we would ever expect different groups with completely different histories and cultures to excel at the same pace in the same endeavors.
We all began in poverty; what matters is how we got out. The determining factor in a group’s advancement is the evolved set of skills, work habits, attitudes, norms, interests, and values inherited from their cultural past—a group’s human capital—which evolved from contact with other cultures in other times and places through migration and conquest amid the expansion and contraction of different civilizations. Moreover, the range of a group’s cultural contacts is heavily influenced by geographical factors like navigable waterways and the contours of the land. For instance, Europe has a longer coastline than Africa despite being nowhere near its size, historically providing it with more channels through which to exchange with and learn from other societies.
When the British came to North America, for example, they did so on a ship with rudders invented in China, and they navigated with trigonometry from Egypt, letters invented by the Romans, and numbers from India brought west by Arabs. Millennia earlier, there were no buildings in Britain until the Romans built them, nor was there anything resembling London before the Romans built that, too. After the fall of the Roman Empire, the standard of living in Western Europe deteriorated, opening the continent to invasion by the Mongols, the Ottomans, and the Moors, before emerging centuries later as a world power. “A history which spans thousands of years,” Sowell writes, “encompassing the rise and fall of empires and of peoples, makes it difficult—if not impossible—to believe in the permanent superiority of any race or culture.”
Sowell is telling a story of human history, in which economic development and cultural diffusion are more important than zero-sum political power struggles. Shattering the false binary of heredity versus environment, he argues that “peoples whose skills and values have been shaped by different external factors in the past tend today to have different internal cultural patterns with which to confront the opportunities and challenges presented by external conditions in the present.” Culture is inherited, at least in the sense that we acquire it from our parents, and yet it remains highly malleable across time.
Moreover, culture goes deeper than race. Different ethnic groups of the same race live side by side but yield vastly different outcomes and succeed in different areas, whether it be the Italian and Jewish immigrants to America in the late-19th and early-20th century, or West Indian and native-born blacks more recently. As Sowell bluntly puts it, “Jews are not Italians and Italians are not Jews.” Of course they’re not. Every ethnic group trails its own unique set of cultural features, some of which are better equipped to flourish in a complex knowledge-based economy than others. Individual blame, moreover, has nothing to do with the cultural patterns we happen to acquire from our ancestors, which develop beyond anyone’s choosing through a complex tangle of historical, geographic, and demographic forces. Still, by recognizing how our cultural past affects us today, some degree of freedom is opened within those constraints—we can adopt different values if we want to. This is, after all, how we got here. Every group goes through this.
In contrast to the multicultural ethos that seeks to “preserve cultures in their purity, almost like butterflies in amber,” Sowell argues that “cultural features do not merely exist as badges of identity to which we have some emotional attachment. They exist to meet the necessities and forward the purposes of human life.” And just because a certain culture served a purpose in a past environment, that doesn’t mean it serves any useful purpose in the present. Some cultural features are clearly better than others, just as books are better than scrolls and Arabic numerals are better than Roman numerals. “Cultural competition is not a zero-sum game. It is what advances the human race… No culture has grown great in isolation, but a number of cultures have made great and astonishing advances when their isolation was ended. Those who use the term cultural diversity to create a multiplicity of segregated ethnic enclaves are doing an enormous harm to the people in those enclaves.” In short, cultural exposure, criticism, appropriation, and competition are how we progress as human beings, while relativism is a path backwards.
In his 2005 book, Black Rednecks and White Liberals, Sowell applies his culture concept to race issues in America. Why is it that, more than a half-century after the civil rights movement, the condition of lower-class black Americans has remained practically the same or even worsened? The progressive response to this question points to the compounding historical effects of racism and white supremacy, but Sowell offers an alternative thesis. Blacks, he argues, who lived predominantly in the south until the Great Migration, adopted the cultural heritage of white southerners, who originally descended from the northern borderlands of England, the Scottish Highlands, and Ulster County in Ireland. The inability of this culture to adapt to modern life helps explain the vicious cycle of urban crime and poverty among blacks.
The same cultural patterns found in the worst urban black ghettos today were, for centuries, recorded in those parts of the British Isles from which white southerners immigrated—styles of speech, religious oratory, touchy pridefulness, resistance to education, promiscuity, money habits, even particular card games—before dying out in Britain and the south. In the debauched and marauding regions of the British Isles, what Sowell calls the redneck or cracker culture was necessary for survival, but it outlived its original use.
Sowell contends that it is no longer white racism but a particular set of cultural elements that inhibit the development of poor blacks in America’s inner-cities. Many of the racial barriers erected in the 20th century were overreactions among northern whites to the black redneck culture of the south during the Great Migration—barriers that would take on a life of their own. The same barriers were upheld, to an even greater extent in some cases, against white southerners moving north. Meanwhile, the northern population of blacks lived side by side with whites and attended integrated schools for generations before such barriers were erected.
In the decades preceding the civil rights movement—a period of virulent racism and institutional segregation—black Americans were rapidly advancing on whites along a number of socio-economic metrics, from labor participation rates to household wealth and employment. Sowell attributes these advancements, in large part, to the acculturation efforts of New England teachers who established black schools in the south. In this telling, civil rights were more of an effect than a cause of black development. But after the 1960s, many of these patterns stalled or even reversed.
In Sowell’s view, this development was the result of two factors. First, the unintended consequences of various War on Poverty and Great Society programs such as the expansion of welfare rolls and various federal housing initiatives—framed as reparational at the time—that effectively discharged black responsibility, discouraged entrepreneurship, and broke apart the black family. Second, the overarching moral and cultural shift in American society that came to view black redneck culture as somehow authentic, concomitant with a white liberal guilt complex that shielded it from criticism and suppressed the need for cultural assimilation and development. In other words, the acknowledgement of historical racism on the part of the larger society gave black Americans a perpetual excuse for failure that simply did not exist before...
To modern progressives, the notion that black suffering isn’t necessarily tied to historical racism is a hard pill to swallow. It seems to blame the victim and alleviate white responsibility. But this whole way of looking at things in terms of intergenerational guilt and victimization is fundamentally flawed: Morality is not causation. In retrospect, we can all agree that slavery and Jim Crow were terrible, but that doesn’t mean they explain what’s happening in our own time. Further, the notion of historical justice itself implies that we could somehow correct for past injustices. We can’t. If we go far back enough, we will all find slaves and enslavers, conquerors and conquered among our ancestors at one point or another. It’s an insult to our forebears to suppose we could somehow account for their suffering in the present by selectively parsing the sins of some groups and not others to satisfy contemporary moral sensibilities. What’s historically unique is the idea that everyone should have freedom and rights, which was by no means obvious for most of world history.
In the same way that we can’t blame someone for inheriting a problematic culture, we can’t blame someone for the sins their ancestors may or may not have committed. The impulse to resuscitate the historical grievances of long-dead and symbolic victims creates new injustices between flesh-and-blood human beings in the present. History becomes a cudgel for prevailing political visions instead of a record of what actually happened. “What can any society hope to gain,” Sowell asks, “by having some babies in that society born into the world with a priori grievances against other babies born into that same society on the same day?” We can learn from our mistakes, but we can’t change the past.
The Quest For Cosmic Justice, Sowell describes this impulse as “an attempt to mitigate and make more just the undeserved misfortunes arising from the cosmos” in ways that transform “the tragedy of the human condition into the specific sins of specific societies.” While traditional justice applies the same rules equally across the board, regardless of whether everyone ends up with the same things, cosmic justice applies different rules to different groups of people until all unearned advantages or disadvantages disappear. This conflict is why what believers in cosmic justice mean by anti-racism or equality or justice looks a lot to believers in traditional justice like racism, inequality, and injustice. One of the many problems with cosmic justice is that most of people’s advantages and disadvantages in life are undeserved anyway, and on a long enough time scale, many advantages become disadvantages and many disadvantages become advantages. The idea that anyone could possibly weigh out the privileges and deficits of a given life, let alone an entire group of people throughout history, as if looking down upon Earth through the eyes of God, conveys a startling degree of moral arrogance.
Similarly misguided is the belief that “society” is an anthropomorphic
entity capable of making conscious decisions and taking responsibility
for them, instead of a complex system of moving parts over which no one
has full control. Of course, it is unjust, in a cosmic sense, that some
people suffer more than others by no fault of their own while others
enjoy benefits through no merit of their own, but the reflexive tendency
to draw a straight line from one of those things to the other
inevitably stirs up the ancient tribal impulse for revenge. The
flip-side of cosmic justice is cosmic vengeance."
