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Title: The Quest for Cosmic Justice by Thomas Sowell ISBN: 0-684-86462-2 Publisher: Free Press Pub. Date: 11 October, 1999 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.42 (43 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Chastising the Self-Anointed....
Comment: Thomas Sowell may be one of the most despised black men in America-despised by extremist liberals, black and white, because Sowell has devoted his abilities to exposing their destructive ideologies of social redemption as counterproductive to the best interests of all Americans. Widely known for his provocative, nationally syndicated newspaper articles and other books, he focuses, in The Quest for Cosmic Justice, on the misguided thinking behind the modern impulse to reform the very nature of the human condition from individual responsibility, competition, and performance to the tragic consequences of affirmative action and universal egalitarian equality. Sowell locates the source of much of the problem in the academy, law schools, and government where "new elites" are quietly repealing the American Revolution.
The "morally self-anointed," as he calls excessively liberal reformers and radicals, "have for centuries argued as if no honest disagreement were possible, as if those who opposed them were not merely in error but in sin.... Given this exalted vision of their role by the anointed visionaries, those who disagree with them must be correspondingly degraded or demonized." Marx, Lenin, Hitler, and Mao all followed this procedure, as have utopians of similar or less horrible results.... That comparable dynamics rule the day, especially in the humanities in many American universities, will not surprise those who have any real experience of those departments. Sowell evokes the American political system and tradition in the hope of preventing its further erosion.
One of the many perceptive and striking points Sowell makes in the book involves "The High Cost of Envy." Pointing out its dangers broadly to poor people, he writes,
"The very terms of the discussion encourage them to attribute their less fortunate position to social barriers, if not political plots, and so to neglect the kinds of efforts and skills which are capable of lifting them to higher economic and social levels."
The acquisition of such "skills, education, discipline, foresight," needed to improve their lot, becomes less likely, as the "ideology of envy" blames others for exploitation and racism, undermining their own will to act, while rendering "more successful members suspect as traitors." Sowell observes this same "bogus explanation" can keep entire societies in poverty, making me think of my recent experience as an accredited participant at the United Nations Millennium Forum, May 22-26, 2000, where I witnessed Kofi Annan's wise proposal for a Global Compact with business swept aside and essentially replaced with the "sophisticated modern versions of the envy vision spread by the Third World intelligentsia, often seconded by the intelligentsia in more fortunate countries."
Summing up in a passage that has very wide application, Sowell states, "cosmic justice attempts to create equal results or equal prospects, with little or no regard for whether the individuals or groups involved are in equal circumstances or have equal capabilities or equal personal drives. To do this, it cannot operate under general rules, the essence of law, but must create categories of people entitled to various outcomes, regardless of their own inputs . . . assuming with little or no evidence that only malign intentions or systemic bias could explain unequal results. 'Affirmative action' is perhaps the classic example of this approach but it is only one example." His insight into the subtleties of modern ideologies is truly remarkable, as is his own high and demanding sense of justice.
Alas, I seriously found myself wondering at times if Sowell's Quest for Cosmic Justice is not a voice in the wilderness, as always one come much too late. But I take heart in knowing such people as he, Shelby Steele, and Ward Connerly have the courage to speak out on race and other matters and in the end hope that events will unfold for the good in ways I can not imagine and that now seem so often unlikely. In this context, I recommend reading Robert Conquest's Reflections on a Ravaged Century, a parallel meditation on the dilemmas of modernity.
Rating: 5
Summary: Play Fairly versus Win Regardless
Comment: "You can't change the rules in the middle of the game." "Hey, you just made that rule up." "You're cheating!" Kids on a playground arguing? No, adults in our judicial and political systems. In the first section of The Quest for Cosmic Justice, Thomas Sowell takes us on a tour of the world through time to display examples of childlike behavior in adults. He discusses two types of justice. Traditional justice is process-based: make up the rules before the game, everybody plays by the same rules, and the end result is left open. Cosmic justice is ends-oriented: have rules, but fiddle with them so that the game ends as someone wants it to.
In the second section of the book, Dr. Sowell examines equality, a much bandied-about word, but slippery in the extreme as to what it means. If we have learned anything from science it is that defining terms is crucial to progress - unless one is pursuing cosmic justice, of course. He talks of ". . . politically imposed equality . . . poisonous relations between the races and sexes . . . internal dissensions and demoralization have played a crucial role in the decline and fall of other civilizations, and there is no reason to expect this one to be immune."
Visions, their necessity for humans to operate and the things that can go wrong with them, are treated in the third section. The final section concerns the quiet repeal of the American Revolution. Comparisons of the French Revolution to the American Revolution were very informative, at least to me. I remembered an awful lot of heads got chopped off in France, but hadn't made the connection between that and the philosophy underlying the French Revolution. "At the national level as well, the 'Committee of Public Safety' under Robespierre ruled by decrees that could over-ride any laws."
Now, let's see . . . are Executive Orders when Congress doesn't do what the President wants equivalent to Robespierre's decrees that led to the guillotine?
Rating: 2
Summary: Principle argument fails miserably.
Comment: This book is meant as an antidote to John Rawls' Yheory of Justice. Despite being a thoroughgoing libertarian, I think Sowell's argument completely fails.
Sowell does not try to argue Rawls' point that people do not "deserve" whatever they may reap from their natural abilities.
Sowell argues by saying that, even if this is true, its irrelavant to actual policy because its impossible for mere humans to calculate how much any individual truly deserves.
I can't help but think that this doesn't even begin to put a dent in Rawls' argument.
According to Rawls, absolutely no attribute of an individual can be imputed to moral desert. Hence, in the Rawlsian paradigm, it is easy to find out how much someone deserves. Rawlsians can know, a priori, that every human deserves NOTHING!
Of course, contra Rawls, it doesn't follow from people deserving nothing that everyone deserves an equal share of the undeserved stock of human produce, but Sowell doesn't attempt to argue this point.
Sowell's discusiion of World War two is unbelievably flawed.
Another problem with Sowell's entire "Visions" trilogy is that it generalizes far too mcuh. However, you can always find interesting and useful facts, especially on race and ethnicity, when reading sowell.
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Title: The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation As a Basis for Social Policy by Thomas Sowell ISBN: 046508995X Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: August, 1996 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles by Thomas Sowell ISBN: 0465081428 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: 19 February, 2002 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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Title: Basic Economics: A Citizens Guide to the Economy, Revised and Expanded by Thomas Sowell ISBN: 0465081452 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: 23 December, 2003 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
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Title: Applied Economics: Thinking Beyond Stage One by Thomas Sowell ISBN: 0465081436 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: 11 November, 2003 List Price(USD): $30.00 |
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Title: FDR's Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression by JIM POWELL ISBN: 0761501657 Publisher: Crown Forum Pub. Date: 23 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $27.50 |
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