The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy.

The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy, by Thomas Sowell (Basic, 295 pp., $25)

Mr. George is an associate professor of politics at Princeton University and author of Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality (Oxford).

WHY do liberals and conservatives assess the same social facts so differently? The answer, Thomas Sowell suggests, is that liberals and conservatives differ in their perception of the facts. The difference, in other words, is one of vision.

"The crucial role of vision," Sowell argues, "is that it enables a vast range of beliefs to be regarded as presumptively true until definitively disproved by unchallengeable evidence." Liberals --or, to use Sowell's disparaging label, "the anointed" -- view the world as "a very tidy place," where "prescient politicians can 'invest' tax dollars in 'the industries of the future,' where criminals can be 'rehabilitated,' irresponsible mothers taught 'parenting skills,' and where all sorts of other social problems can be 'solved."' All this is possible, as liberals see things, because human nature, as a "social construct," is far more malleable than most people imagine. Thus, in the vision of the anointed, "there is obviously a very expansive role for government and for the anointed in prescribing what government should do."

Sowell contrasts the vision of the anointed with "the tragic vision" of conservatives. What is "tragic" about this vision is that it assumes that problems such as crime, poverty, and irresponsibility cannot finally be "solved." Conservatives, recognizing that "there are no solutions, only trade-offs," do not go in for grand schemes to put an end to poverty, for example, or make health care a fundamental right, or pursue what Sowell derisively calls "cosmic justice." It is not that conservatives are happy that some people are poor, or without health insurance, or whatever. Nor, for that matter, are they complacent about it. Rather, they realize that liberal schemes to eradicate these evils a) never work, and b) inevitably impose huge social costs of their own.

Thus, conservatives are skeptical of large-scale government programs and bureaucracies and are inclined to rely instead on institutions of civil society, such as families, churches, and neighborhood associations, to accomplish what can be accomplished in the areas of health, education, and welfare. Conservatives are hostile to big government not only because it fails to accomplish its utopian goals, but also because it compromises or displaces religious and other subsidiary institutions which have at least some hope of helping people to escape from poverty, rehabilitate themselves from a life of crime, or improve themselves in other ways. Those, like Sowell, with the tragic vision fault those with the vision of the anointed for making the unattainable ideal "the enemy of the good."

Sowell understands the contest of visions to be a longstanding one in Western culture. Godwin, Condorcet, and Mill all shared the vision of the anointed. Burke and the American Founders possessed the tragic vision. Sowell notes that in our own day "most of the leading contemporary opponents of the prevailing vision were themselves formerly within its orbit." He begins the list with Milton Friedman, F. A. von Hayek, Karl Popper, Edward Banfield, Irving Kristol, and Norman Podhoretz. One notable difference between those with the vision of the anointed and those with the tragic vision is that it tends to be the latter who recognize the role of vision in the first place. "To the anointed, their vision and reality are one and the same. Yet the world inside their mind has few of the harsh constraints of the world inhabited by millions of other human beings."

Sowell's account of vision and its role in political life and the creation of social policy helps to explain the tendency of contemporary elites to shift power from the people and their elected representatives to electorally unaccountable bureaucrats and judges. In the vision of the anointed, most people, inasmuch as they fail to share that vision, are more or less benighted. As such, they simply cannot be trusted to exercise political power justly or, for that matter, to judge accurately their own interests. Because they do not understand "the social construction of gender," for example, they cannot be expected, or permitted, to make social policy regarding women and family life, even if they are themselves women. In their benighted condition, they will view traditional maternal and paternal roles as "natural," rather than as socially constructed, pernicious, and subject to "reform." So the task of making family policy, the anointed believe, must be undertaken by properly educated people whose consciousnesses have been properly raised -- that is, by the anointed themselves.

In this respect and others, Sowell's analysis complements the impressive work of Jeffrey Bell in Populism and Elitism: Politics in the Age of Equality (1992). Like Bell, Sowell is highly skeptical about the capacity of elites to choose wisely on behalf of other people. Indeed, because social policy is largely a matter of trade-offs rather than solutions, as both Bell and Sowell believe it is, there are no uniquely correct answers that would justify transferring decision-making authority in these areas from the people to elites. This would be true even if elites were, as elitists suppose them to be, generally wiser and morally more enlightened than other people.

Consider Sowell's example of the judicial expansion of rights of those accused of crimes. Plainly it is impossible to devise a system of criminal justice that will never convict an innocent person. And often the establishment of procedural protections to make such convictions less likely will make more likely the acquittal of guilty persons who will then be at large to steal, rape, or murder again. No reasonable person would advocate abolishing the criminal-justice system to ensure that there would never be a wrongful conviction; nor would such a person favor a system that afforded the accused no procedural protections. Is there, however, a uniquely correct answer to the question of how much public safety should be sacrificed in return for how much protection against wrongful convictions?

Even if there were such an answer, it is difficult to see why unelected judges would be more likely than elected representatives to discover it. The truth, however, is that there simply is not a uniquely correct answer. It is, as Sowell suggests, a matter of trade-offs. And, if that is so, then judges have no plenary authority to strike the balance for those who must live under it. Of course, as Sowell recognizes, to some significant extent the Constitution has already struck the balance. And in our system it is the legitimate role of courts to enforce constitutional guarantees. But the Constitution leaves much unsettled in this area. So someone must decide. For those with the tragic vision, trade-offs can legitimately be made only by the people and their representatives. For those with the vision of the anointed, it is up to judges, as experts in cosmic justice no less than in constitutional law, to "solve" the problem.

The Vision of the Anointed analyzes a wide variety of liberal schemes that have failed and backfired: from anti-poverty programs and gasoline price controls to population control and sex education. Again and again, as Sowell shows, the anointed have identified a pathology, administered a medicine to cure it, found that the medicine did nothing helpful and may even have made the patient sicker, and then called for stronger doses of the medicine. When sober, careful, and responsible commentators who do not share the vision point to evidence that a scheme isn't working because something is fundamentally wrong with its assumptions about what people are like, the anointed denounce them, as they have so often denounced Sowell himself -- not to mention James Q. Wilson, John DiIulio, and other critics of liberal social policies -- as "simplistic," "uncaring," and even, that most dismissive of epithets, "conservative."

One suspects that the polemical tone of this book -- which will, alas, put off many who would benefit from thoughtful reflection on its teaching -- stems in part from Sowell's understandable desire to fire back at his liberal critics. Even in this, however, there is something gained as well as lost in a trade-off. Many a conservative reader will enjoy Sowell's unrelenting rhetorical barrages against liberals and liberalism. In a good polemic, rhetorical point-scoring neither crowds out nor detracts from analytical rigor. And The Vision of the Anointed, in addition to its other virtues, is a good polemic.