The Quest for Cosmic Justice

by Thomas Sowell

  SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

  The government produced by the American revolution was unique, not only by contrast with the monarchies and other despotisms of its time, but also by contrast with other revolutions of its own and later eras. The French revolution of the succeeding decade used similar rhetoric, and was supported by such prominent figures in the American revolution as Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine, but nevertheless the French revolution was grounded on entirely different assumptions and of course took a different path all too characteristic of later revolutions that began with lofty ideals and ended with new and more ruthless despotism.

  Where the American and the French revolutions differed most fundamentally was in the rule of law. Certain members of the French national assembly were deputized to go around the country as “representatives on mission” righting wrongs as they saw them, even when that required over-riding local organs of government or the laws they had created, or dismissing from office those whom these representatives found wanting. Representatives on mission even carried their own guillotine with them, to dispense their own brand of justice on the spot. At the national level as well, the “Committee of Public Safety” under Robespierre ruled by decrees that could over-ride any laws.

  Limited powers and the supremacy of laws were at the heart of the Constitution established by the American revolution. Constitutional checks and balance and procedural safeguards were baffling to an ideological supporter of the French revolution like Condorcet, who saw such things as mere impediments to doing what was right and changing whatever needed changing. Much of what has been done in the United States—in the courts, in politics, and in the streets—in the latter half of the twentieth century is based on assumptions much more similar to those of the French revolution than of the American revolution.

  When Chief Justice Earl Warren interrupted lawyers presenting legal arguments before the Supreme Court to ask “But is it right? Is it good?” he was much more in the tradition of the representatives on mission than in the tradition of “a government of laws and not of men.” The many other judges at all levels who followed Warren’s example—running school systems, changing voting laws, or even ordering legislatures to raise taxes to finance judicial ventures in social engineering—were likewise acting as representatives on mission, rather than preservers of a framework of law.

  The Constitution of the United States is not a convoluted treatise or a collection of arcane concepts that only a priesthood of the bench or the law schools can decipher. Its crucial terms, such as “free speech” or “due process,” already had historical meanings in English law before the American constitution was written by transplanted Englishmen. The much-vaunted “complexity” of constitutional law comes in most cases not from the Constitution itself but from clever attempts to evade the limits on government power set by the Constitution. The virtually unlimited judicial expansion of the concept of “interstate commerce” until it cancels many of those limits and nullifies the Tenth Amendment is perhaps the classic example.

  The ideal of impartiality in the law, exemplified by statues of Justice blindfolded, implies that particular results for particular individuals and groups are to be disregarded when dispensing justice. It is precisely this conception of justice—at the heart of the American revolution—that is being disregarded. As was aptly said:

  The blindfolded Goddess of Justice has been encouraged to peek and she now says, with the jurists of the ancient regime, “First tell me who you are and then I’ll tell you what your rights are.”39

  In politics, the great non sequitur of our time is that (1) things are not right and that (2) the government should make them right. Where right all too often means cosmic justice, trying to set things right means writing a blank check for a never-ending expansion of government power. That in turn means the quiet and piecemeal repeal of the American revolution and the freedom that it signified as an ideal for everyone. It means muffling the shot heard round the world and bringing back the old idea that some are booted and spurred to ride others. That they are riding with a heady sense of moral mission and personal gratification only makes them more dangerous.

  Such moral and intellectual arrogance is in fundamental and irreconcilable conflict with the American creed of the common man. Someone once referred to the masses of immigrants coming to the United States as “the beaten men of beaten races.” In one sense, he was right but, in a deeper sense, history has proved him profoundly wrong. From its colonial beginnings, American society was a “decapitated” society—largely lacking the topmost social layers of European society. The highest elites and the titled aristocracies had little reason to risk their lives crossing the Atlantic and then face the perils of pioneering. Most of the white population of colonial America arrived as indentured servants and the black population as slaves. Later waves of immigrants were disproportionately peasants and proletarians, even when they came from Western Europe, while those from the much-conquered regions of Eastern Europe and the Balkans clearly fit the descriptions of “beaten men from beaten races.” The rise of American society to pre-eminence as an economic, political, and military power in the world was thus the triumph of the common man and a slap across the face to the presumptions of the arrogant, whether an elite of blood or books.

  Now that the United States has its own large and growing class of presumptuously self-anointed moral exemplars—people who consider themselves “the conscience” of others—such people are as much in collision with the American creed of the common man as were those who once spoke of “the beaten men of beaten races.” The disdain of these new elites for “Joe Sixpack” all too easily shades off into a sense of a need to deprive such lesser people of misused autonomy and “correcting” a system that allows the desires of ordinary people to prevail in the marketplace and in the social and political life of the country. Frontal assaults on basic American values would be suicidal, but that does not prevent piecemeal attacks or using other countries with very different values and different systems of government as models to be emulated.

  Plain facts are easily forgotten and their crucial implications ignored when the whole orientation is toward finding fault with one’s own country and seeking to “learn” from others. What that means too often in practice is that one focusses only on the flaws at home and only on the virtues—or assumed virtues—abroad. Thus Americans may fail to ask why America is one of a relative handful of rare exceptions among the countries of the world in having freedom, prosperity, military security, and social generosity. All these things may be of-coursed aside and the prerequisites for such benefits overlooked. For foreign countries, claimed virtues are all too readily accepted as realized virtues, whether these be “social justice” in Communist countries or spirituality in India.

  It simply does not matter how many brides are beaten or even killed in India because their dowries are disappointing, nor does the continued oppression of the untouchables or the lethal mob violence erupting among various social groups in the country make a dent on the image of India as a land that has transcended the materialism and violence of the United States. Even pictures of Indians dancing in the streets after India exploded its first nuclear bomb did not disturb this vision, though Americans have never danced in the streets over their nuclear weapons. During the era of the ascendancy of communism, many American and other Western intellectuals remained unshakably sympathetic to the great social experiment going on in the Soviet Union, and many were positively gushing over Stalin, Mao, Castro, or other dictators whose people were fleeing en masse at the risk of their lives.

  The net result of such attitudes is not simply that credit and discredit may be displaced. What is far more important—and more dangerous—is that there is little sense of the institutions and traditions which produce the enormous social and economic good fortune of Americans—and therefore little or no sense of the dangers from letting those institutions and traditions erode or be pushed aside for the sake of some political goal of
the moment. Much of the world today and down through centuries of history has suffered the terrible consequences of unbridled government power, the prime evil that the writers of the American Constitution sought to guard against. Judges who “interpret” constitutional safeguards out of existence for the sake of some ideological crusade, presidents who over-reach their authority for personal or political reasons, and a Congress whose powers are extended into matters that the Constitution never empowered them to legislate about are all part of the quiet repeal of the American revolution.

  Notes

  The Quest for Cosmic Justice

  1. Milton and Rose Friedman, Free to Choose (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), p. 146.

  2. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1976), pp. 115, 120, 355.

  3. Friedrich A. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, Vol. 2: The Mirage of Social Justice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 33, 64.

  4. Ibid., Vol. 1: Rules and Order (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), Chapter 2.

  5. Ibid., Vol. 2: The Mirage of Social Justice, pp. 31–32.

  6. Thomas Nagel, “The Meaning of Equality,” Washington University Law Quarterly, Vol. 1979, p. 28.

  7. Ibid., p. 27.

  8. The book did not see the causes of these differences as cost-related, but this was pointed out in Walter E. Williams, “Why the Poor Pay More: An Alternative Explanation,” Social Science Quarterly, Vol. 54, No. 2 (September 1973), pp. 372–379.

  9. Milton and Rose Friedman, Free to Choose, p. 148.

  10. Barbara J. Jordan and Elspeth D. Rostow, The Great Society: A Twenty-Year Critique (Austin: Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, 1986), p. 71.

  11. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 100.

  12. Ibid., p. 275.

  13. Jean H. Fetter, Questions and Admissions: Reflections on 100,000 Admissions Decisions at Stanford (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 45.

  14. See, for example, John Kronholz, “As States End Racial Preferences, Pressure Rises To Drop SAT to Maintain Minority Enrollment,” Wall Street Journal, February 12, 1998, p. A24; Nancy S. Cole, Educational Testing Service, “Merit and Opportunity: Testing and Higher Education at the Vortex,” speech at the conference, New Direction in Assessment for Higher Education: Fairness, Access, Multiculturalism, and Equity (F.A.M.E.), New Orleans, Louisiana, March 6–7, 1997; Thomas Sowell, Inside American Education: The Decline, the Deception, the Dogmas (New York: The Free Press, 1993), pp. 122–126.

  15. See, for example, Thomas Sowell, Race and Culture: A World View (New York: Basic Books, 1994), pp. 235–246; Thomas Sowell, Migrations and Cultures: A World View (New York: Basic Books, 1996), pp. 8–18; Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures: An International History (New York: Basic Books, 1998), pp. 10–12, 99–109, 175–177, 205–207, 251–255, 347–348.

  16. William G. Bowen and Derek Bowen, The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. v.

  17. U.S. Bureau of the Census, “Marital Status and Living Arrangements: March 1992,” Current Population Reports, Series P-20, No. 468 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1993), pp. 1, 2.

  18. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1957 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1961), p. 72.

  19. See Ramsey Clark, Crime in America: Observations on Its Nature, Causes, Prevention and Control (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970), pp. 319–320; Miranda v. Ohio 384 U.S. 436 (1966), at 472.

  20. See, for example, William H. McNeill, History of Western Civilization: A Handbook (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 45.

  21. Elizabeth Wiskemann, Czechs and Germans: A Study of the Struggle in the Historic Provinces of Bohemia and Moravia (London: Oxford University Press, 1938), pp. 142, 148.

  22. See, for example, Drew S. Days III, “Concealing Our Meaning from Ourselves: The Forgotten History of Discrimination,” Washington University Law University, Vol. 1979, pp. 81–91; Margaret Bush Wilson, “Reflections on Discrimination in the Private Sector,” Ibid., pp. 783–786.

  23. Joel Glenn Brenner, “A Pattern of Bias in Mortgage Loans,” Washington Post, June 6, 1993, p. A1.

  24. Alicia H. Munnell, Mortgage Lending in Boston: Interpreting HMDA Data, Working Paper No. 92-7, October 1992, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, pp. 2, 24, 25.

  25. Bob Zelnick, Backfire: A Reporter’s Look at Affirmative Action (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, Inc., 1996), p. 330.

  26. The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 2, 1996, p. 22.

  27. See, for example, Thomas Sowell, The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy (New York: Basic Books, 1995), Chapter 3.

  28. Jonathan Kaufman, “How Cambodians Came to Control California Doughnuts,” Wall Street Journal, February 22, 1995, p. A1.

  29. Olive and Sydney Checkland, Industry and Ethos: Scotland 1832–1914 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1989), p. 173.

  30. Robert F. Foerster, The Italian Emigration of Our Times (New York: Arno Press, 1969), p. 262.

  31. Firdaus Hj. Abdullah, “Affirmative Action Policy in Malaysia: To Restructure Society, to Eradicate Poverty,” Ethnic Studies Report, Vol. XV, No. 2 (July 1997), p. 210. (Sri Lanka)

  32. Jean Roche, La Colonisation Allemande et le Rio Grande do Sul, Paris: Institut des Hautes Études de L’Amérique Latine, 1959), pp. 388–389.

  33. Roger P. Bartlett, Human Capital: The Settlement of Foreigners in Russia, 1762–1804 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 151.

  34. L. H. Gann and Peter Duignan, The Rulers of British Africa (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1978), p. 281.

  35. Patricia E. Roy, “Protecting Their Pockets and Preserving Their Race: White Merchants and Oriental Competition,” Cities in the West: Papers of the Western Canadian Urban History Conference—University of Winnipeg, October 1974, edited by A. R. McCormack and Ian MacPherson (Ottawa: National Museums of Canada, 1975), p. 115.

  36. Andrew Tanzer, “The Bamboo Network,” Forbes, July 18, 1994, pp. 138–145.

  37. Ezra Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe Between the World Wars (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), pp. 23, 27, 99, 101.

  38. An entirely different and longer list of large disparities appeared in my The Vision of the Anointed (New York: Basic Books, 1993), pp. 34–35. Other examples are documented in my Conquests and Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1998), pp. 43, 124, 125, 168, 221–222; Migrations and Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1996), pp. 4, 17, 30, 31, 118, 121, 122–123, 126, 130, 135, 152, 154, 157, 158, 162, 164, 167, 176, 177, 179, 182, 193, 196, 201, 211, 212, 213, 215, 224, 226, 251, 258, 264, 265, 275, 277, 278, 289, 290, 300, 305, 306, 310, 313, 314, 318, 320, 323–324, 337, 342, 345, 353–354, 354–355, 356, 358, 363, 366, 372–373. Extending the search for intergroup statistical disparities to the writings of others would of course increase the number of examples exponentially, even when leaving out those cases where discrimination might be a plausible cause of the disparities.

  39. Greg Duncan et al., Years of Poverty, Years of Plenty: The Changing Economic Fortunes of American Workers and Families (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984). See also Income Mobility and Economic Opportunity, report prepared for Representative Richard K. Armey, Ranking Republican, Joint Economic Committee, June 1992, p. 5.

  40. Americans with a net worth of a million dollars or more are just 3.5 percent of the population. See Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko, The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of America’s Wealthy (Atlanta: Longstreet Press, 1996), p. 16. Moreover, even this figure may be unduly generous, since net worth includes many assets, such as household effects, which could never be turned into cash at anywhere near their purchase price.

  41. Myron Weiner, Sons of the Soil: Migration and Ethnic
Conflict in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 250.

  42. John A. A. Ayoade, “Ethnic Management of the 1979 Nigerian Constitution,” Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism, Spring 1987, p. 127.

  43. Daniel C. Thompson, Private Black Colleges at the Crossroads (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1973), p. 88.

  44. Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 670.

  45. Margaret A. Gibson, “Ethnicity and Schooling: West Indian Immigrants in the United States Virgin Islands,” Ethnic Groups, Vol. 5, No. 3 (1983), pp. 190, 191, 192.

  46. Helmut Schoeck, Envy: A Theory of Social Behaviour (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1966), p. 292.

  47. Stephan Thernstrom and Abigail Thernstrom, America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), pp. 184–188.

  The Mirage of Equality

  1. Herbert Stein and Murray Foss, An Illustrated Guide to the American Economy (Washington, D.C.: The AEI Press, 1992), pp. 8–9.

  2. Robert Rector, “Poverty in U.S. is Exaggerated by Census,” Wall Street Journal, September 25, 1990, p. A18.

  3. Robert Rector, “The Myth of Widespread American Poverty,” The Heritage Foundation Backgrounder, No. 1221, September 18, 1998, p. 1.

  4. Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko, The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of America’s Wealthy (Atlanta: Longstreet Press, 1996), p. 16.

  5. Ibid., pp. 27–28.

  6. Ibid., p. 113.

  7. Ibid., p. 44.

  8. Ibid., p. 33.

  9. Ibid., p. 12.

  10. Fernand Braudel, A History of Civilizations, translated by Richard Mayne (New York: The Penguin Press, 1994), p. 17.

  11. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), p. 34.