The economist Thomas Sowell has just released the second edition of his book Intellectuals and Society . The American Spectator sat down with him recently for a lengthy interview. In this first part of the interview, we discuss the impact intellectuals have on society, why the second edition contains chapters on race while the first edition did not, and how intellectuals affect the issue of race. AmSpec: How do you define an intellectual? Sowell: An intellectual is someone whose end product is ideas. Not everybody who produces an idea is an intellectual because there are many intellectually demanding ideas that end up as products or services such as brain surgery or computer operating systems, etc. But those kinds of things differ in the sense in that there is an external test of the validity of the ideas, other than the approval of one’s peers. For deconstructionists, the only test is whether other deconstructionists like what he is saying. But for a financial wizard, he may be held in awe by his contemporaries and yet if he goes broke his ideas are regarded as failures. Consider that between the two World Wars, intellectuals promoted pacifism to the point they impeded the military build up of any military deterrents against Hitler or Japan, and yet men paid with their lives in the beginning of the war especially because Britain and America had far inferior military equipment. Men died needlessly but no one ever held them accountable for what they said. AmSpec: How does that affect the incentives and constraints that intellectuals face? Sowell: The crucial thing is there is virtually no external constraint on what the intellectuals do. They may believe in anything, say anything, and the consequences don’t matter. One of the books that people no longer know much about but was very influential at the time, was a 1916 bestseller called The Passing of the Great Race by Madison Grant. It was really a shallow book by a dilettante. But it was bestseller, it got translated into several languages including German, and Hitler called it his bible. And six million people were murdered on the strength of that. Madison Grant died before that happened, but had he lived I doubt he would have had to pay the price of unpopularity. AmSpec: What is the ” Vision of the Anointed ?” Sowell: It is the idea that third parties should preempt the decisions of ordinary people. Especially when those third parties are intellectuals or are operating on the prevailing ideas promoted by intellectuals AmSpec: Obviously this affects the issue of race. But why did the first edition of Intellectuals and Society not have any sections on race, and why did you add them into the second edition? Sowell: Very simple. I learned from the history of the book The Bell Curve . It was not a book about race. There were only two chapters on race and intelligence out of twenty-two chapters. Yet when the book was published, those two chapters became the tail that wagged the dog. And the whole major thrust of the book was lost in all the controversy and hysteria over those two chapters. So I decided that if the message I was trying to get out in Intellectuals and Society was to have any chance of being examined it would be by leaving out any chapters on race. AmSpec: Have you gotten any critical feedback on including the chapters on race this time? Sowell: No. And I would say more generally I seldom get any critical feedback on my writings on race, and the reason is the people who run the civil rights movements and “black leaders” and so on, they’re following what is their best strategy which is to ignore what I say and even if it gets a certain amount of attention just wait until that blows over and then resume saying what they’ve always said. AmSpec: If they’re not out there stirring up trouble, the money stops coming in. Sowell: I should have included a section on race as an industry. It’s really poisonous. I’ve recently been reading some writings by the late Derrick Bell, who has been in the news lately. I remember talking to Derrick Bell years and years ago when he was just a civil rights lawyer saying sensible things about civil rights. And to read his later writings you realize how he degenerated into a totally irresponsible charlatan. I attribute that to the fact that he was put into situations where he had nothing to gain by playing it straight. Whatever significance he might have would come from his ability to stir thing up and to appeal to a racial constituency on and off campus. AmSpec: Could you give a general overview of how intellectuals impact the issue of race? Sowell: Intellectuals can predetermine the whole position on race. One of the peculiar things of the 20th century is that for the first two decades, intellectuals, by which I mean primarily progressive intellectuals, were the biggest promoters of racism in the country. The seized upon evidence that was emerging from IQ tests, studies of difference in crime rates and rates of advancing and not advancing in the schools and so on, in order to argue that there were superior and inferior races, that they were genetically predetermined. And they were pushing very hard for a ban on or severe restrictions on immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe that actually became law in the 1920s. They were also for eugenics, with any number of them calling for the sterilization of people. Our only president with a PhD, Woodrow Wilson, was right in the middle of all that. People who are admirers of Wilson try to portray this as an odd aberration of his, but by no means was it. He was absolutely in the mainstream of progressive thought at the time. He became president. There were government agencies that were unsegregated. He segregated them. When the movie Birth of a Nation , glorifying the Ku Klux Klan, came out, he had it played privately at the White House, and he invited political dignitaries to come and watch it with him. In the later decades of the 20th century the intellectuals went to the other end of the spectrum. And now all differences in racial or ethnic groups were attributed to how they were mistreated by the larger society. So all the problems of the minorities were due to the minorities in the view of the intellectuals at the beginning of the 20th century, and all of the problems of the minorities were caused by the majority as the intellectuals saw it at the end of the 20th century. AmSpec: Yet you note that there are patterns among the intelligentsia that are constant regarding what they do to protect their prevailing vision. Sowell: In both eras, they would not even engage in any serious discussion with people who went against the prevailing vision. Madison Grant called people who disagreed with genetic determinism “sentimentalists,” and someone else called it the “Pollyanna School.” Of course, toward the end of the 20th century, those who dared disagree with the prevailing vision were called “racists” or at minimum people who were “blaming the victim,” which of course is a great phrase that begs all questions. AmSpec: Why do they behave that way? Why won’t they subject their vision to tests of logic and fact? Sowell: I’m convinced it is because they have a huge “ego stake” in the vision of the anointed. Contrast it with the “Tragic Vision” of human nature — people with the Tragic Vision might believe in judicial restraint, free markets, families, and all that. That doesn’t exalt them in any way. But if you believe in the Vision of the Anointed, you become one of the Anointed. You’re for social justice, you’re for protecting the environment, you’re anti-war. You are an exalted person. People with that vision have a lot more to lose if anything seriously challenges that vision than do people on the other side. AmSpec: Let’s talk a bit about race and disparities in income and their causes. How do intellectuals look at that, and given all the research you’ve done over the years, what would you say are the likely causes of those disparities? Sowell: The great tendency of intellectuals is to look for a single, overriding cause, and in particular a cause which allows them to be the side of the angels against the forces of evil. I would go about it an entirely different way. I would ask the question, what would lead you to believe that various causes, and there are an enormous range of causes, would come together in such a way that all groups, or even a substantial number of the groups, would have identical achievements, would have identical capacity to generate wealth? When you run through some of the ramifications of geography, climate, and history — if, say, the Siege of Vienna (1529) had gone the other way Europe would be an Islamic continent now — and it could gone one way or the other. So these are just the happenstances of military events. So all the factors that go into achievement — if you just begin to enumerate those factors, you begin to wonder if it was ever possible. But if you go beyond the theoretical things like that, where on this planet or when in history over thousands of years have we found groups that were the same, that were equally distributed in occupations, income levels and so forth? The studies that I’ve seen and conducted myself, have turned up no such groups One example: In a worldwide study of military forces, the author was unable to find any multi-ethnic society in which the military forces were even approximately representative of the ethnic makeup of the society. AmSpec: How does the intelligentsia often respond to disparities? What are some of their ways to address them? In particular, there was this phrase in one of your chapters, “the surplus of intellectuals.” How can that factor into it? Sowell: In countries around the world newly emerging intellectuals from groups that are lagging behind, they almost always study in soft subjects. They do not study in subjects that would give them marketable skills, or for that matter great intellectual advantages in the sense of rigorous thinking and so forth. Moreover they’re usually produced in numbers vastly greater than there is any demand for in the market. And so they are almost invariably disgruntled from both a personal point of view and from the point of view of being part of a group that is lagging and is not as highly regarded as other groups that are more advanced. So they launch attacks against groups that are more advanced. In a sense, it’s insane. I cited one counter-example. David Hume urged his fellow Scots in the 18th century to learn the English language, which they did. All over Scotland there were courses on the English language. What Hume was trying to do was to get the Scots to avail themselves of the same culture that had allowed the English to advance, so the Scots could advance themselves. And as they did, the Scots became wholly disproportionately represented among the leading British intellectuals from about the middle of 18th century until the middle of the 19th century. But that is not the course taken by most intellectuals from most groups that are lagging in most countries around the world. On the contrary, they argue they must cling to their own culture. They must fight against those who have a different culture. And they must blame those who have a different culture for the gap that exists. AmSpec: Is that one the reasons why multiculturalism is so damaging? Sowell: Multiculturalism is absolutely fatal if you follow it to its conclusions, because its advocates are saying that you don’t have to change your culture. AmSpec: First off, what is your definition of multiculturalism? Sowell: It’s not simply that there are different cultures. We already knew that long before the word was coined. It is the idea that all cultures in some metaphysical sense are equal or entitled to equal respect. But in practical terms, it means you should not be trying to change people’s cultures. For example, the schoolteachers in Harlem shouldn’t be trying to change the English of the students there because their English is just as valid again in some metaphysical or even linguistic sense as any other type of English. But the fact of the matter is that it is not the language spoken by 90 percent of the people in this country. And since the whole purpose of language is to communicate, those students damn well better know how to communicate with the other 90 percent if they want to get somewhere in life. There are no books in physics that are in “Black English.” There are no books in higher mathematics written in Black English. There are no books about brain surgery written in Black English. If you want to become something that requires more skill that just sweeping floors, then you are going to have to learn the language in which the skills of those professions are taught. AmSpec: So what you are saying here is that cultures that lag behind, they basically have to absorb the aspects of other cultures that have found ways to succeed? Sowell: Absolutely. Monday: Sowell discusses bilingual education, race and intelligence, and the upcoming presidential election.
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Thomas Sowell Live
Media bias is one subject and Passover is another, you might think. Leftist domination of the academy is one subject and Passover is another, you might also think. But you would be wrong, I fear. The structure of Passover is designed not merely to provide a fun family get-together, nor is it limited to inspiring a spiritual holiday in celebration of freedom. It does all of those things secondarily, but its primary task is to provide the evidentiary framework for the entire Jewish project. The Bible repeats numerous times that the first night of Passover must be used by parents to teach their children the facts of the historical and miraculous redemption by God of the Jewish People from slavery and oppression in Egypt. The great Jewish writer, Nachmanides, expounds on this by declaring that the founding principle of Jewish tradition is that “a man does not pass a legacy of falsehood to his children.” The very fact that in each year in each generation, again and again and again over three thousand years, every Jewish father has told every Jewish child the same story with the same details forms the basis of our certain knowledge of those events. Consequently, when the doubters spin their theories of evolving mythology in an effort to undermine the truth of the Bible, traditional Jews laugh. They do not rely on belief or on faith but on a definite knowledge based on the incontrovertible testimony of a million fathers over thousands of years. All the egghead philosophizing melts away before the veracity of multiple eyewitness reports, preserved in a flawless filing system operating undisturbed over the millennia. Thus the Jew has a heavy stake in the accurate reporting of news and the conscientious transmission of history. He cannot afford to be influenced by a culture that will teach fathers to lie to their children. Once that begins to happen, the foundation is gone. On the one hand, Passover 2012 is a very happy time, especially here in Miami, where we host Jews from all over the world who come to experience the thrill of freedom in a tropical paradise with only one flaw: not enough of it has been paved to make parking lots. The wealthier class of Jew is here leaving his money at all the local businesses. Those who stay at hotels have their food catered but many rent villas here — ten days for a home with a pool costs $2500; younger locals cash in by pocketing the cash and spending Passover at their parents — and cook for themselves, buying thousands in provisions. It is an expensive affair, because all that cheap bread cannot be eaten for eight days, and the specially baked matzohs can cost from five to thirty dollars a pound. These partiers are not selfish and the less fortunate are richly subsidized. In my North Miami Beach neighborhood alone, anonymous donors gave out hundreds of thousands of dollars in gift certificates usable in the stores that sell Passover products. A truck pulled up on a street corner here and unloaded enormous quantities of fresh vegetables available free to local families struggling to get through the holiday. Yet all this passing off falsehood in place of truth gives me pause. Nobel laureate Günter Grass announces in a poem that Israel is a greater obstacle to world peace than Iran. Authoress Naomi Ragen lifts entire sections of Sarah Shapiro’s book virtually word-for-word; when convicted of plagiarism in Israel, she gets American reporters to say that U.S.-born Naomi Ragen is being persecuted by a petty Israeli huckster — concealing the fact that Mrs. Shapiro is not only U.S.-born herself, she is the daughter of famed American author Norman Cousins. The spokeswoman for the U.S. State Department will not state definitively in her press conference that Jerusalem belongs to Israel, saying that is the subject of ongoing negotiations. Truth apparently is a negotiable commodity. Freedom is great and it should be treasured, never more than on Passover. But if we foolishly allow truth to be distorted — even if that is done in the name of social justice or some such chimera — we will find ourselves once again wearing the yoke of slavery, and we will have no one to blame but ourselves.
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Truth and Falsehood at Passover
What do you call a city with a jail named Regina Coeli (Queen of Heaven)? For the last 3,000 years, you call it Rome. Forty years had passed since I had last visited Rome, broke and hitchhiking through Europe the summer after my college graduation. Quite frankly, at the time, I wanted to see a few sites and head north to what I thought were less crowded and expensive destinations such as Florence. In truth, I did not give it the time a city with so many layers of history, architecture, archaeology and theology deserves. It was a once-through, lightly, trip. My wife and I had resolved to commemorate the tenth anniversary of my successful bone marrow transplant with a pilgrimage- cum -celebration, a trip to the Eternal City and, of course, Vatican City, which is embedded within it. We also planned to tack on a few nights in Madrid on the way home since I had never been to Spain and Mary had not been there since high school. The measure of how wonderful this trip was can be gauged by our good luck in returning home on St. Patrick’s Day on Aer Lingus, which United employed as its carrier for the return flight out of Madrid. Call it the luck of the Irish-Germans. Three things immediately strike the visitor coming into Rome from Leonardo da Vinci Airport: the beauty of the city, the way Romans drive and motor with abandon, and the graffiti — omnipresent to an extent I did not recall from my previous visit decades ago. Coming into an intersection or traffic circle, one is swept up in a literal swarm of Smart Cars, Fiats, motorcycles, and other smallish vehicles for which traffic lanes are, well, optional. Riding along in the cab in the left lane, I would often get a start when a pair of motorcyclist appeared just out my left-hand window, heading in my direction but in the lane for the oncoming traffic. To adapt one of Bill Murray’s formulations in Ghostbusters , traffic laws are guidelines, not rules, for Romans. This graffiti phenomenon seemed to me a kind of profanation, given the treasures the city offers on almost every block. If you Google up “graffiti in Rome,” you find 7,960,000 entries. So I am not alone in this feeling. I was informed that some theorize that this is an expression of a youth culture (I use the word reluctantly) spread by the Internet. I do not mean to dwell on this. After all, the Italians are master preservationists and restorers of great art and architecture. So I would not want to call this a dominant part of the Roman scene, but it was jarring nevertheless. Our hosts were renting a very fine apartment right across the street from the walls of Vatican City. No graffiti here, just the papal coat of arms affixed at various places along its great length. Not only did our benefactors provide us with an ideal location from which to explore both cities, but they were excellent guides, generous with their time, and most informative on a range of topics ranging from art history to fine dining. Our tourism coefficient was improved immensely by their tireless attention to our needs. Since we were grateful pilgrims, we offered thanks at the resting places of our favored saints whom we had often petitioned for intercessory prayers to God the Father and his only Son during my battle with cancer. And we prayed for that excellent institution and staff at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore who were instrumental in my recovery. Like pilgrims dating back to at least the time of Chaucer, we spent too much money at the shops selling pricey rosaries, prayer cards, icons and the like so we could take them to St. Peter’s Square at noon on Sunday to pray the noontime Angelus with Pope Benedict XVIII, along with, oh, 25,000 of our closest friends and co-religionists from around the world. We were pleased to help the Roman economy in these difficult times. The Holy Father blessed us and the entire throng of visitors along with our sacramental items which we planned to distribute back home to children, grandchildren, and friends. Like his predecessor, John Paul II, he displayed his linguistic abilities by addressing the assemblage in half a dozen languages to the enthusiastic applause of the Italians, French, German, Polish, Brazilian, and Spanish in attendance. If any ghosts from the Roman Empire were in attendance, they would have been very pleased with his fluent Latin, too. For the visitor who dedicates him- or herself to exploring Rome, the city presents an opportunity for time traveling back and forth over several millennia and epochs, pagan and Christian, ancient, medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, modern and contemporary. The obvious case is St. Peter’s Basilica, starting with the Excavations, including a second century pagan necropolis, once at street level, now beneath the existing structure and culminating in the present towering dome. Today’s Basilica replaced an earlier church erected by Constantine after his conversion which resulted in burying over the pagan burial sites, the necropolis, in the process. Paul Johnson in his slim, informative volume, The Renaissance : A Short History , captures the sweep and drama of the construction of this historic church:
Thanks to Meryl Streep and her movie The Iron Lady there is a renewed surge of interest in the life and times of Margaret Thatcher. Whatever one thinks of this biopic (Streep superb, storyline superficial, is the verdict of your High Spirits movie critic), there is one regrettable omission. There is not a single mention or scene highlighting one of the most important influences on Margaret Thatcher — her faith. As a recently commissioned Thatcher biographer, I have been digging into this aspect of the Iron Lady with increasing fascination. Her faith journey, like her life, began in the English provincial town of Grantham. Her father, Alfred Roberts, was the owner of two grocery stores, but at the time of Margaret’s birth he was much better known as a local preacher. Under her father’s tutelage, the young Margaret Roberts was brought up as a Wesleyan Methodist, attending church four times on a Sunday. Understandably she found this “too much of a good thing” and kicked against such excessive piety. But she was an admirer of preaching that had “intellectual substance.” Her father’s sermons fell into this category, as is clear from his handwritten notes for those of them that survive in the Thatcher archives at Churchill College, Cambridge. Alfred Roberts was no Bible-bashing evangelical. His theology was full of surprises. He rejected fundamentalism. He was liberal in doctrine and ecumenical in reaching out across denominational boundaries. One of his key themes was the link between personal responsibility and spiritual dedication. What he preached, his daughter later practiced. “You must yourself believe intensely and with total conviction if you are to persuade others to believe,” were his words from a Grantham pulpit. They became her credo as a conviction politician. The Methodists of the mid-20th century linked their religious beliefs to the political concerns of the day. But for Margaret, faith was a moral compass, not a political agenda. She was an active member of the John Wesley Society at Oxford University from 1943 to 1947. Like her father she delivered sermons. One of them on the text “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God” made a strong impact on the congregation of an Oxfordshire village. She was a preacher long before she became a politician. After her marriage to Denis (also a believer) in Wesley’s City Road chapel in London, she moved from Methodism to Anglicanism without changing her spiritual convictions, her prayer life, or her Bible reading. In accordance with the conventional approach of English politicians, she said little during her early career about her religion. But she practiced it in terms of frequent churchgoing and occasional displays of biblical knowledge. On a visit to the Soviet Union in the 1960s she was shown a sculpture of a blacksmith beating a sword with a hammer. “That represents communism,” said the guide. “No it doesn’t,” retorted Mrs. Thatcher, “it’s from the Old Testament, ‘And they shall beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks.’” Trust the preacher’s daughter to know Isaiah 2:4 by heart! Once she became prime minister, she gradually lifted the veil on her religious convictions. One interviewer who pried some interesting faith disclosures from her was the mystical author and traveler Laurens van der Post. “The values of a free society like ours come from religion,” she told him, “they do not come from the state.” Explaining to him that the key value was the right of personal choice, the free will that linked the heavenly and earthly kingdoms, she cited the hymn “I Vow to Thee My Country.” It included, as she reminded him, the lines: And soul by soul and silently her shining bounds increase, And her ways are ways of gentleness, and all her paths are peace. “There is the message,” she declared, “soul by soul.” Margaret Thatcher did not neglect her journey of the soul during her years in power. To the astonishment of her staff at 10 Downing Street, she spent several weeks in 1983 rereading every book in the Old Testament. She decided that her favorite scriptures were Psalm 139: O God Thou has searched me out and known me , and Psalm 46: God is our hope and strength: a very present help in trouble . A few months later, in the middle of the most dramatic terrorist attack of her premiership, the Brighton bombing of October 1984, she did indeed find God to be “a very present help in trouble.” Soon after clambering out of the wreckage of the hotel, she writes in her memoirs, The Downing Street Years , she “could only think of one thing to do. Crawfie [her closest personal aide] and I knelt by the side of our beds and prayed for some time in silence.” MARGARET THATCHER WAS NOT SILENT on the subject of her faith. She did not wear it on her sleeve but her occasional speeches on the subject were revealing. She knew her Bible but did not see it as a guide to day-to-day political leadership. “I never thought that Christianity equipped me with a political philosophy but I thought it did equip me with standards to which political activity must, in the end, be referred,” she said, citing Christ’s instructions to “render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.” She thought that wealth creation was more important than welfare when it came to encouraging philanthropy in order to combat poverty. The parables of the Good Samaritan and of the Talents were central to her beliefs. “No one would remember the Good Samaritan if he’d only had good intentions; he had money as well,” she told one TV interviewer. Such views did not endear her to the liberal establishment of the Anglican Church. She took them head on in an address to the (more conservative) General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1988. One of her themes was that it was not the role of the churches to enter into political debate. She thought they should be concerned with “spiritual redemption, not social reform.” Dismayed by what she not-so-privately described as “the wetness” of the Church of England, she increasingly drew her theological inspiration from Catholic writers, particularly Michael Novak. The chief rabbi of British Judaism, Immanuel Jakobovits, was the spiritual leader she most admired. She appointed him to the House of Lords with far greater enthusiasm than she elevated the majority of English bishops who sit there as “Lords Temporel” by constitutional right. Margaret Thatcher thought about faith issues far more deeply than any modern British prime minister. Her father’s teachings, buttressed by a lifetime of spiritual reading, were important navigation points throughout her journey. In an ideological sense she never left the Methodism of her youth. Her quest for “intellectual substance” in a faith of moral certainty was always an interest and at times a passion. Perhaps she wanted the substance to fit too neatly into a box that Alfred Roberts had designed, but that was her worldview. “The fundamental reason for being put on earth is so to improve your character that you are fit for the next world,” she told the BBC Today program in 1987. She had a better shot at this moral and spiritual target than you would ever guess from seeing The Iron Lady .
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Preacher Maggie
“It’s not about you. It’s not about your quality of life. It’s not about your jobs. It’s about some phony ideal, some phony theology. Oh, not a theology based on the Bible, a different theology, but no less a theology.” –
