Black and right

Thomas Sowell talks about the arrogance of liberal elites and the loneliness of the black conservative.

By Ray Sawhill

Nov 10, 1999 | Utter the words "right wing" to your typical liberal, and he or she is likely to conjure up a Bosch-like inferno of white sheets, helmet-haired blonds and pollution-loving robber barons. Far be it from me, a mere arts journalist, to suggest that this gaudy image, however satisfying, does considerable injustice to a complicated phenomenon. But liberals also do themselves an injustice by remaining content with such a distorted semi-fantasy.

They deprive themselves of the provocations and contributions of some first-class thinkers and writers who have found a place on the right. Agree or disagree with such writers as Florence King, Richard Brookhiser, James Buchanan, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Francis Fukuyama, Milton Friedman, Kenneth Minogue, James Q. Wilson and Roger Scruton, you're almost certain to find more stimulation from wrestling with their arguments and points than you are from dozing through yet another recital of the familiar old lefty credos.

Add to that list the economist Thomas Sowell, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is, let it be said right now, generally described as a "black conservative." While some reviewers have dismissed Sowell's writings as the biased product of a rigid ideologue, I suspect that many readers are likely to find his thinking remarkably reasonable, his arguments free of moral bullying and his tone a model of open-mindedness and respect. (He indulges a more combative side in his newspaper columns.)

Sowell, 69, grew up in North Carolina and Harlem, and received degrees from Harvard and the University of Chicago. He's the author of "The Vision of the Anointed," a discussion of America's liberal elites and the way they picture the world. If, like me, you're a cranky liberal frequently dismayed by how rigid, blinkered and narcissistic liberals can be, you're likely to find the book a delight. Sowell spoke to Salon Books on the phone from Los Angeles, where he was on tour to promote his 26th book, "The Quest for Cosmic Justice," a fleet and pleasing three-essay treatment of how our dreams of fixing the world from the ground up can, and usually will, backfire.

You make a provocative distinction in your new book between "cosmic justice" and "traditional justice." Would you explain that distinction?

Traditional justice, at least in the American tradition, involves treating people the same, holding them to the same standards and having them play by the same rules. Cosmic justice tries to make their prospects equal. One example: this brouhaha about people in the third world making clothing and running shoes -- Kathie Lee and all that. What's being said is: Isn't it awful that these people have to work for such little rewards, while those back here who are selling the shoes are making such fabulous amounts of money? And that's certainly true.

But the question becomes, are you going to have everyone play by the same rules, or are you going to try to rectify the shortcomings, errors and failures of the entire cosmos? Because those things are wholly incompatible. If you're going to have people play by the same rules, that can be enforced with a minimum amount of interference with people's freedom. But if you're going to try to make the entire cosmos right and just, somebody has got to have an awful lot of power to impose what they think is right on an awful lot of other people. What we've seen, particularly in the 20th century, is that putting that much power in anyone's hands is enormously dangerous. It doesn't inevitably lead to terrible things. But there certainly is that danger.

Can you give me another example?

Yes. I had a teacher when I was growing up as a kid back in Harlem in the '40s who used to make us write every word we misspelled 50 times and bring it in the next day along with our homework. This is on top of the other homework we had. So if you misspelled two or three words, you were in for a long evening. Now, that was unfair. It was unfair because there were kids on Park Avenue, for instance, who were familiar with newspapers and books that used those words, and who had a much better shot than we did at knowing what those words meant and how they were spelled. But correcting that larger unfairness was never an option. It was never on the table. What was on the table was whether you were going to make these kids -- us -- meet standards that were going to be a little harder for us to meet. Or whether you were going to have make-believe fairness instead, and send us out into the world unprepared and foredoomed to failure. It seems to me the latter option is infinitely worse.

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