Is Reality Optional?

And Other Essays

Thomas Sowell

• Publisher: Hoover Institution Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780817992620
• eBook ISBN: 9780817992668
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Sowell challenges all the assumptions of contemporary liberalism on issues ranging from the economy to race to education in this collection of controversial essays, and captures his thoughts on politics, race, and common sense with a section at the end for thought-provoking quotes.

PART I

THE SOCIAL SCENE

IS REALITY OPTIONAL?

WHEN NINETEENTH-CENTURY WRITER AND LECTURER MARGARET FULLER proclaimed, “I accept the universe!” Carlyle’s response was: “By God, she had better.”

Now, a hundred years later, people who don’t accept the universe are not only numerous but are also leading numerous political crusades.

The reality of limited resources and the painful trade-offs they imply are just so many lame excuses, as far as the environmental extremists or the Naderite safety fanatics are concerned. The very idea of taking economic constraints into account when human life is involved is scorned as morally unworthy. Yet a society’s economic level is a major determinant of a people’s longevity.

Big earthquakes in California do not kill as many people as smaller earthquakes do in Turkey or Iran, simply because the economic resources available in California permit buildings to be built to more earthquake-resistant standards.

If safety fanatics are allowed to kill the goose that lays the golden egg, that can also kill people. Already safety crusades are cracking down on the “pollution” of waterways involving traces of chemicals more minute than those found in tap water, sodas, beer, or even Perrier or Evian water. How much standard of living—which includes medical care—are we prepared to sacrifice in order to eliminate ever more remote dangers?

Even to ask such a question requires accepting the reality of economic constraints—and the trade-offs this implies. But those for whom indignation has become a way of life reject economics as readily as they reject history, geography, or anything else which implies that they cannot “have it all.” Widespread use of the word “perceptions” is only one symptom of the notion that everything depends on how you choose to look at it.

It is almost as if the universe is optional.

Even the trade-off involved with a working mother has been waved aside with a phrase like “quality time,” suggesting that the quantity of time lost between mother and child can be made up later by the quality. But when a child is frantic and sobbing at 10:30 Monday morning, that is when he needs his mother—and a trip to the zoo next Saturday is not going to make it up.

Those who promoted the banning of DDT and other pesticides, in order to eliminate the dangers created by residues, seldom take responsibility for the resurgence of malaria that followed.

If a trade-off has to be made, we can at least have the moral courage to face it, instead of kidding ourselves with words. Yet the intelligentsia go around saying things like “It’s not a question of either/or,” and using phrases like “win, win.”

No part of reality is more intractable than geography, or more oblivious to our desires for equality. The peoples of the Himalayas have never had an equal opportunity to become great seafarers. The continent of Europe has virtually every conceivable geographical advantage over the continent of Africa, from navigable waterways to fertile soils to a more favorable climate and topography,

Yet neither geography nor economics nor even history are accepted as realities beyond our control. It might seem obvious that the past is an irrevocable reality, which our current wishes or perceptions cannot change. But that is not how many of our contemporaries look at it.

Any group whose past has not provided them with as many heroes, cultural contributions, or other glories as some other group’s past now has a grievance against those who write history. Apparently a past to your liking has become an entitlement.

It is not even considered necessary to demonstrate any reality before claiming that a group’s current “under-representation” in history books shows “exclusion” or “bias.” Many of those who argue this way also loudly proclaim the many injustices suffered by the various under-represented groups. Yet, somehow, these pervasive injustices are not regarded as having inhibited the achievements of those who suffered them. Such is the self-contradictory vision of the multiculturalists.

In a universe without inherent constraints, there will obviously be “solutions” which depend only on our subjective “commitment,” “compassion,” and other feelings. Conversely, our failure to “solve” these “problems” shows only that most of us are just not as wise or as noble as the morally anointed who talk this way. There is absolutely no sense of the tragedy of the human condition among zealots.

Very few problems can or should be solved, in the sense of wiping out every vestige of them—not even crime or disease. Would anyone really spend half the Gross National Product to wipe out the last vestige of shop-lifting, or every minor skin rash?

The universe does not need our acceptance. Only our own well-being and survival depend on it.

GRASSHOPPER AND ANT

JUST AS THE “ROCKY” AND “STAR WARS” MOVIES had their sequels, so should the old classic fables. Here is the sequel to a well-known fable.

Once upon a time, a grasshopper and an ant lived in a field. All summer long, the grasshopper romped and played, while the ant worked hard under the boiling sun to store up food for the winter.

When winter came, the grasshopper was hungry. One cold and rainy day, he went to ask the ant for some food.

“What are you, crazy?” the ant said. “I’ve been breaking my back all summer long while you ran around hopping and laughing at me for missing all the fun in life.”

“Did I do that?” the grasshopper asked meekly.

“Yes! You said I was one of those old-fashioned clods who had missed the whole point of the modern self-realization philosophy.”

“Gee, I’m sorry about that,” the grasshopper said. “I didn’t realize you were so sensitive. But surely you are not going to hold that against me at a time like this.”

“Well, I don’t hold a grudge—but I do have a long memory.”

Just then another ant came along.

“Hi, Lefty,” the first ant said.

“Hi, George.”

“Lefty, do you know what this grasshopper wants me to do? He wants me to give him some of the food I worked for all summer, under the blazing sun.”

“I would have thought you would already have volunteered to share with him, without being asked,” Lefty said.

“What!!”

“When we have disparate shares in the bounty of nature, the least we can do is try to correct the inequity.”

“Nature’s bounty, my foot,” George said. “I had to tote this stuff uphill and cross a stream on a log—all the while looking out for ant-eaters. Why couldn’t this lazy bum gather his own food and store it?”

“Now, now, George,” Lefty soothed. “Nobody uses the word ‘bum’ anymore. We say ‘the homeless.’”

“I say ‘bum.’ Anyone who is too lazy to put a roof over his own head, who prefers to stand out in this cold rain to doing a little work—”

The grasshopper broke in: “I didn’t know it was going to rain like this. The weather forecast said ‘fair and warmer.’”

“Fair amd warmer?” George sniffed. “That’s what the forecasters told Noah!”

Lefty looked pained. “I’m surprised at your callousness, George—your selfishness, your greed.”

“Have you gone crazy, Lefty?”

“No. On the contrary, I have become educated.”

“Sometimes that’s worse, these days.”

“Last summer, I followed a trail of cookie crumbs left by some students. It led to a classroom at Ivy University.”

“You’ve been to college? No wonder you come back here with all these big words and dumb ideas.”

“I disdain to answer that,” Lefty said. “Anyway, it was Professor Murky’s course on Social Justice. He explained how the world’s benefits are unequally distributed.”

“The world’s benefits?” George repeated. “The world didn’t carry this food uphill. The world didn’t cross the water on a log. The world isn’t going to be eaten by any ant-eater.”

“That’s the narrow way of looking at it,” Lefty said.

“If you’re so generous, why don’t you feed this grasshopper?”

“I will,” Lefty replied. Then, turning to the grasshopper, he said: “Follow me. I will take you to the government’s shelter, where there will be food and a dry place to sleep.”

George gasped. “You’re working for the government now?”

“I’m in public service,” Lefty said loftily. “I want to ‘make a difference’ in this world.”

“You really have been to college,” George said. “But if you’re such a friend of the grasshopper, why don’t you teach him how to work during the summer and save something for the winter?”

“We have no right to change his lifestyle and try to make him like us. That would be cultural imperialism.”

George was too stunned to answer.

Lefty not only won the argument, he continued to expand his program of shelters for grasshoppers. As word spread, grasshoppers came from miles around. Eventually, some of the younger ants decided to adopt the grasshopper lifestyle.

As the older generation of ants passed from the scene, more and more ants joined the grasshoppers, romping and playing in the fields. Finally, all the ants and all the grasshoppers spent all their time enjoying the carefree lifestyle and lived happily ever after—all summer long. Then the winter came.

FAMILIES UNDER SIEGE

THE FAMILY IS UNDER SIEGE TODAY as perhaps never before in history. It is under attack statistically as well as politically.

Clever sophisticates are forever citing statistics suggesting that the traditional nuclear family is already an anachronism. Only 26 percent of households consist of two-parent families and their children, they say.

Superficial plausibility is usually sufficient for political purposes, but what happens if we scrutinize that “26 percent” statistic more closely?

First of all, it excludes even the most traditional two-parent families after their children have grown up. Ozzie and Harriet would not be counted in these statistics, after Ricky and David grew up and left home. In fact, if the entire country consisted of nothing but Ozzie-and-Harriet families, the clever sophisticates could still say that only 33 percent of households were traditional, after Ricky and David began living elsewhere, in their own households.

George Bush and Barbara are not counted as a “traditional family” in the official Census statistics, even though they have been married for 45 years and have raised children, because those children are no longer living with them. Newly weds are likewise not counted as a “traditional family,” until they begin having children.

The family is also under attack in our public schools. Parental authority is undermined in innumerable ways, in textbooks aimed at children as early as preschool. If that seems incredible, read T A for Tots by Alvyn M. Freed (for kindergarteners to third-graders) or Changing Bodies, Changing Lives by Ruth Bell, et al (for high-schoolers).

The theme of all sorts of so-called “decision-making,” “drug-prevention,” or “sex-education” programs in the public schools is that the individual child must make his or her own decisions—and must do so independently of the values taught by parents. The very concepts of right and wrong are dismissed ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I: The Social Scene
• Part II: The World Scene
• Part III: The Economic Scene
• Part IV: The Political Scene
• Part V: The Education Scene
• Part VI: The Legal Scene
• Part VII: The Racial Scene
• Part VIII: Random Thoughts