The Hypocritical Vision of Thomas Sowell’s The Vision of the Anointed

Thomas Sowell’s The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy argues that the “anointed”, or left-liberals, choose unfounded arguments that make them appear to be the saviors of humanity. They scorn anyone who disagrees with their urgency in fighting their perceived evils, leaving no room for dissent. According to Sowell, empirical evidence clearly demonstrates that the policy initiatives championed by the “anointed” in the 1960s have unequivocally failed.

While his conclusions regarding the outcomes are ones I tend to endorse, the method by which he presents them in the scope of the book I find ironically academically lacking and wholly hypocritical. He cites a plethora of examples of left-liberal policies, such as sex education, Keynesian economics, and affirmative action, to qualify how the “anointed” fail to form a conversation with the other side of the argument. Although Sowell’s dismissal of sentimental, non-evidentiary forms of argument is commendable, he focuses far too much in ascribing these attitudes to left-liberal points of view in place of demonstrating the fallacy of “self-congratulation as a basis for social policy”. Sowell is far too overzealous in using the argument to smear liberals rather than providing a balanced view of the issue.

Using case studies to make a point may sometimes be informative. Sowell very effectively argues the existence of “The Residual Fallacy” in an early chapter.

The common procedure in trying to prove discrimination with statistics is to (1) establish that there are statistical disparities between two or more groups, (2) demonstrate that the odds that these particular disparities are a result of random chance are very small, and (3) show that, even holding constant various nondiscriminatory factors which might influence the outcomes, that still leaves a substantial residual difference between the groups, which must be presumed to be due to discrimination. Since essentially the same intellectual procedure has been used to “prove” genetic inferiority, the choice of what to attribute the residual to is inherently arbitrary. But there is yet another major objection to this procedure. Not uncommonly, as the gross statistics are broken down by holding various characteristics constant, it turns out that the groups involved differ in these characteristics on every level of aggregation – and differ in different proportions from one level to another.

This is an excellent point, even if it is little more than an application of the statistical aphorism, “The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”. However, instead of fully developing this point, Sowell is quick to bash liberals over the head with it. Seeing how all politicians use the “residual fallacy” is used universally is far more instructive in understanding it than to focus on how American left-liberals do by themselves.

Another frequent theme in the book is the contrast between the “Vision of the Anointed” and the “tragic” view of human nature. To Sowell, the tragic view is the economic understanding that the world is one of tradeoffs while the view of the anointed is one of solutions. He portrays Keynesian economics as being of the latter (while never citing a single example demonstrating this), even though some very smart people at least partially accept this view while arguing in the language of the “tragic”. To Sowell, the anointed present a self-congratulatory conjecture while, to paraphrase the author, no evidence is presented and none is asked for those conjectures. While anecdotal evidence is cited, there is no line of argument suggesting such thinking is endemic to the thinking of the left.

It took a while reading the book for my distaste in its style to truly coalesce. All the while I attempt to form an educated opinion on any issue I reasonably can, I only consider myself an expert in one: baseball. Sowell self-evidentially uses the sport to provide an analogy for the “merit versus performance” issue.

Even at a more mundane level, nothing seems to be more of a purely individual feat than a baseball player hitting a home run, and yet the number of home runs depends on factors that reach beyond the individual player. Ted Williams, for example, hit home runs with greater frequency, in proportion to his times at bat, than either Roger Maris or Hank Aaron – and yet Williams never came close to Babe Ruth’s home-run records that Maris and Aaron broke. The difference is that Williams was walked far more often than either Maris or Aaron – in fact, about as often as the two of them put together – and that in turn was due to who was batting after each of these players.

To walk Ted Williams was to drastically reduce the danger of the home run, but to walk Maris or Aaron was only to bat Mickey Mantle or Eddie Matthews [sic], each of them top-rank home-run hitters in his own right, leading the league in that department four years each. Individual batters must of course hit their own home runs, but the man on deck has a lot to do with how the man in the batter’s box will be pitched to – or whether he will be pitched at all.

Now, while The Vision of the Anointed was written in 1995, well before the “statistical revolution” in baseball began, the presumption of such an effect is exactly the type of the type of non-evidentiary Sowell spoke out about. No evidence is presented and none was asked for. Well, in 2007, J. C. Bradbury looked into the question, known in baseball as “protection”, in The Baseball Economist. This question was even examined elsewhere earlier, but not quite as popularly.

For data from 1984 to 1992, we measured the influence of on-deck hitter quality (measured by OPS) on the likelihood that a batter would walk, get a bit, get an extra base hit, or hit a home run. [Colleague] Doug and I were a bit shocked by what we found. Thought the conventional baseball wisdom – a better on-deck hitter does protect a batter from being walked – is partially correct, the batter also lowers his ability to hit for average and power. Therefore, a good hitter imposes a negative externality on the batter who precedes him in the batting order. This is completely counter to the conventional baseball wisdom.

For the one issue I feel I have a firm grasp on, baseball, I can skim and immediately know Sowell has made a strong error of logical presumption. This does not prove that the conclusions to similar arguments he made are incorrect, but that the questions of discrimination or the role of government in society are ones requiring more “empirical” argument than a few dismissive paragraphs.

If Sowell really wanted to argue against the “vision of the anointed”, he should have chosen applicable examples from both Republicans and Democrats. It’s not like non-evidentiary arguments from free-market conservatives didn’t already exist in when he wrote his book. By selectively citing only examples of the “anointed” from the left, the label stops becoming anything meaningful and becomes a smear. Moreover, the book has become far less relevant in this decade as neoconservatives have been far more receptive to non-evidentiary arguments than Reagan-era conservatives ever were. Speaking as someone who is ultimately a conservative Christian, nothing sounds more similar in tone to the anointed than the indifference and evasiveness to truth found within the schools of intelligent design.

“The Vision of the Anointed” ceased to become a meaningful criticism of left-liberals when it ceased to apply the criticism to anyone but left-liberals. The reaction by pseudo-intellectual conservatives to each example of the supposed ignorance of liberals is ironically analogous to the “a-ha! statistics” (confirmation bias in the perusal of statistics) criticized elsewhere by Sowell. As Sowell himself points out, it’s easier to trash the other side of the argument than to rationally converse with it. By providing a guilty-by-association outlet to do exactly that, he supplies an ostensibly scholastic cop-out of what liberals say while ignoring what they actually have to say.

Educated moderate and liberal Americans are going to see straight through the purported “empirics” Sowell presents. I find each of his statements -the failure of sex education, the insignificance of racism in today’s society, etc.- by themselves to be more likely to be true than not, but he is not so compositionally concise that he can give justice to liberals’ arguments in two-and-a-half pages. These are questions that require books by themselves to argue in one direction or another, not something that can be hand waved in a couple hundred words. The structure of the book, by locking in on broad conservative viewpoints, bites off more than it can chew. In doing so, it disregards counterarguments that any academic liberal could rattle off in his sleep with a nearly-fatal dose of opium.

The examples Sowell provides are nothing but fractious, derisive conjectures that further splinter conservatives and liberals apart. If humans individually are psychologically prone to believing themselves to be an omniscient, judgmental savior, Sowell should argue that alone. If a given left-liberal policy is fallacious, that deserves its own book or paper of similar scope. Making the former argument by cherry picking examples of the latter does not do much of anything.