The Public Square
With the enormous attention paid The Bell Curve, the book by
Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray that is inevitably described as “controversial”
(or worse), another book appearing about the same time, and addressing
some of the same questions, went almost unnoticed. It is a shame, because
Thomas Sowell’s Race and Culture: A World View (Basic Books) is
an invaluable resource in a time such as ours when very basic questions
are being asked about the limits of human behavior and the ethics of social
policy. Sowell, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University,
is a prolific author and columnist. Race and Culture is not merely
another of his always suggestive publications, but a summing up of what
he has learned from many years of examining human behavior in cultural
contexts as various as Los Angeles, Sri Lanka, and remote islands of the
South Pacific. It warrants the subtitle “a worldview” by virtue
of both global scope and the range of questions addressed.
Why is it that some groups “succeed” and others don’t? Sowell
is impatient with intellectual complexifiers of what is meant by success.
To succeed, in his view, is to make your way economically, to build a solid
material base on which life is stable and pleasant enough to afford the
luxury of indulging other interesting concerns, including, if one is so
inclined, the question of what it means to succeed. Sowell’s argument is
that some cultures do and some cultures do not support the values, dispositions,
and character traits that, everywhere and always, have produced material
success. Backing up the argument with a stunning array of historical illustrations,
he shows that hard work, an ability to organize others, a gift for rational
thinking, and an eagerness to learn from “superior” cultures
are among the characteristics essential to material success.
Sowell is, to say the least, not intimidated by “multiculturalists”
who insist that all cultures are equal-or, more frequently, imply that
all cultures are equal except their own, which is inferior. He writes:
“Plain and obvious as cultural differences in effectiveness in different
fields should be, there has developed in recent times a reluctance or a
squeamishness about discussing it, and some use the concept of ‘cultural
relativism’ to deny it. After archaeology and anthropology have revealed
the cultural achievements of some groups once dismissed as ‘primitive,’
and especially after the ravages of racism shocked the world when the Nazi
death camps were exposed at the end of World War II, there has been an
understandable revulsion at the idea of labeling any peoples or cultures
‘superior’ or ‘inferior.’ Yet Arabic numerals are not merely different
from Roman numerals; they are superior to Roman numerals. Their superiority
is evidenced by their worldwide acceptance, even in civilizations that
derive from Rome.
“It is hard to imagine the distances encountered in astronomy,
or the complexities of advanced mathematics, being expressed in Roman numerals,
when even expressing the year of American independence-MDCCLXXVI-takes
up more than twice the space required by Arabic numerals, and offers far
more opportunities for errors, because a compound Roman numeral either
adds or subtracts individual numbers according to their place in the sequence.
The Roman numbering system also lacked a zero, a defect of some importance
to mathematicians. Numbers systems do not exist in a vacuum or as mere
badges of cultural identity. They exist to facilitate mathematical analysis-and
some systems facilitate it better than others.”
Some things work, and some things don’t. And if one culture facilitates
the doing of things worth doing better than another culture, hurray for
the culture that works, and (sotto voce) too bad for the culture that doesn’t.
In the real world of Thomas Sowell, inequality is the name of history’s
game, and we should not let sentimentality about “cultural identity,”
“roots,” and “self-esteem” obscure that fact. Sowell
does not view it as a brutal fact, since, all in all, the historical contest
between unequal persons and peoples is the stuff of progress. Along the
way, there are indeed brutalities, and we have to live with that. About
some of the great wrongs of the past, there is very little that we can
do, and only great mischief results from trying to redo the consequences
of contests past. The following gives the flavor of Sowell’s determinedly
unsentimental thinking:
“It is difficult to survey the history of racial or ethnic relations
without being appalled by the inhumanity, brutality, and viciousness of
it all. There is no more humane or moral wish than the wish that this could
all be set right somehow. But there are no more futile or dangerous efforts
than attempts to redress the wrongs of history. These wrongs are not to
be denied. Wrongs in fact constitute a major part of history, in countries
around the world. But while the victims of these wrongs may live on forever
as symbols, most have long ago died as flesh- and-blood human beings. So
have their persecutors, who are as much beyond the reach of our vengeance
as the victims are beyond our help. This may be frustrating and galling,
but that is no justification for taking out those frustrations on living
human beings-or for generating new strife by creating privileges for those
who are contemporary reminders of historical guilt.
“After territorial irredentism has led nations to slaughter each
other’s people over land with virtually no value in itself, merely because
it once belonged in a different political jurisdiction at a time before
any living person’s memory, what is to be expected from instilling the
idea of social irredentism, growing out of historical wrongs? What can
any society hope to gain by having some babies in that society born into
the world with a priori grievances against other babies born into that
same society on the same day?
“The biological or cultural continuity of a people does not make
guilt inheritable. Nor can the particular economic and social consequences
of particular past actions necessarily be isolated or quantified in the
lives of contemporaries-not when innumerable other influences have intervened
in the meantime. Moreover, no group was a tabula rasa to begin with. Yet
a vast literature in many countries confidently attributes intergroup economic
‘gaps’ or statistical disparities in occupational ‘representation’ to particular
historical evils, often with little or no examination of the specifics
of history, or of contemporary demographic, cultural, or other differences.
In keeping with this approach, statistical theories of random events are
often applied to group differences, not only in intellectual speculation
but also in courts of law-as if people were random events, rather than
members of groups with pronounced, enduring, and highly disparate cultural
patterns.”
What Ought To Be
“What can any society hope to gain by having some babies in that
society born into the world with a priori grievances against other babies
born into that same society on the same day?” The question is a forceful
challenge to schemes of affirmative action, quotas, and other policy devices
premised upon “social irredentism.” Yet policy might-and most
of us would argue that it should-take into account that one baby has severely
limited life prospects, while others are greatly favored. One baby’s deprivation
is not caused by the better fortune of the other babies, and there is therefore
no question of its having a grievance against the others, but there is
surely an obligation to do what can be done to improve its life chances.
This is the other side of Sowell’s bracingly realistic critique of efforts
to “redress the wrongs of history.” It is the side that tends
to be neglected in Race and Culture.
This is not to fault Mr. Sowell for lacking that great liberal virtue
called compassion, a virtue that no longer covers many sins. But one is
mindful of Eliot’s observation that “Human kind cannot bear very much
reality.” The realism of Race and Culture, while offering a
convincing description of the world as it really is, shortchanges something
that a more comprehensive realism (dare one say a more realistic realism?)
takes into account: humanity’s unstoppable penchant for challenging what
is with what ought to be. Of course that penchant has at times miscarried,
producing utopian projects both sentimental and totalitarian, but it is
also a part of culture, of moral culture, that is slighted in what is meant
by culture in Race and Culture.
Nonetheless, this is a book to be read and read carefully. It is packed
with information and analysis in support of positions incorrect and unfashionable.
Thomas Sowell is a great believer in Dr. Johnson’s maxim, “Clear your
mind of cant.” He is also a bit of a contrarian, which is perhaps
understandable in one who has for years been berated by establishmentarian
writers, both black and white, as a traitor to his race. “Sowell lacks
soul,” as one critic so very cleverly puts it. The truth is that Thomas
Sowell looks unblinkingly at some unbending, and often unpleasant, facts
about the world, and he would not serve us better if his eyes teared up
more often; that would only blur his vision, and ours. Race and Culture
puts one in mind of Edward Banfield’s The Unheavenly City (1968),
and that is intended as high praise. Both authors argue forcefully that
our political culture has overdosed on the cant of compassion and equality.
Both rub the reader’s nose in powerful evidence that some social problems
may be intractable. In some instances, it may be that the best we can do
is not make them worse. There is much to be said that thinkers such as
Sowell and Banfield do not say. But people who want to be taken seriously
on the subject of changing the world for the better are well advised to
attend closely to what they do say.
Pluralism That Makes a Difference
The still new (and maybe the last) president of the Public Broadcasting
Service, Ervin Duggan, spoke at the fall convocation of his alma mater,
the distinguished Davidson College in Davidson, North Carolina. He underscored
the irreplaceable importance of competence, courage, and commitment. The
following is under the rubric of commitment: “When I was at Davidson
in the late 1950s and early 1960s, this institution was already beginning
its flight from what we believed to be the pinching, limiting strictures
of its Calvinist past. Most of us as students, and many bright, promising
faculty members, believed that the old churchy ways of Davidson-its remaining
ties to its Presbyterian heritage, its quaint belief that religious faith
could be a path to Truth-were not only anachronistic, but also incompatible
with free inquiry.
“We wanted Davidson to shed its parochialism, its starchy, teetotaling
Calvinism. We couldn’t wait for Davidson to free itself from the embarrassing,
suffocating embrace of its church relationship; to liberate itself from
the antiquated notion that Truth could be validly interpreted through a
lens called Faith. We wanted Davidson to be a national institution; to
hold its head up in the secular and pluralistic world of true higher education,
not kneel with bowed head, mumbling by rote the Westminster Shorter Catechism.
“It was only years later that I came to understand that I had
been wrong, dead wrong, about pluralism. Pluralism does not mean becoming
like everybody else. Pluralism is about differences; pluralism is about
robust assertions of one’s distinctive background and beliefs. Genuine
pluralism does not ask people, or institutions, to suppress their individuality
or their convictions so that they blend invisibly into the whole; rather,
it encourages a rich mix of individualities. The old Calvinist Davidson,
however much I might have deplored it, was making a genuine contribution
to pluralism by insisting on being different; by refusing to be all things
to all people.
“It was years later before I understood that Davidson, by asserting
the authenticity of religious Truth-of Christian Truth-was asserting something
profoundly important: the validity of a religious way of knowing. Davidson
College did not reject the scientific way of knowing and interpreting the
material world; that is how Davidson turned out future physicians and scientists.
Davidson accepted, as well, the validity of an aesthetic way of knowing;
that is why it built fine arts buildings and encouraged oboists to practice,
out under the trees. But Davidson also asserted the validity, alongside
these other valid ways of knowing, of a religious way of knowing: a way
to Truth that leads along a lighted path called Faith.
“Only years after leaving this place did I realize that the religious
tradition honored by those starchy old Calvinists was what brought into
being many of the things I cherished most. The teaching that all persons
are created in the image of God, for example: that religious idea gives
the only transcendent depth and meaning to our notions of human rights,
of human beings as sacred. The ancient doctrine of Original Sin, for example:
it led James Madison and John Adams to insist upon limitations on power,
upon a system of checks and balances. The Judeo-Christian idea of covenantal
laws and relationships, for example: this led, in time, to modern democratic
constitutions and Bills of Rights. Indeed, our modern ideas of tolerance
and pluralism owe much to great assertions of human universality like that
of St. Paul: ‘I am persuaded that in Christ, there is neither Jew nor Greek.
. . .’
“It was years before I realized that this valid religious way
of knowing-a way of knowing which gave us the Sistine Madonna of Raphael,
the Divine Comedy of Dante, and the St. Matthew Passion of Bach-was not
an embarrassing artifact of small-minded Calvinists. No, it was instead
a kind of glory: a glory worth defending and cherishing; a glory, yes,
worthy of handing down from generation to generation.”
The Perfectly Revised Version
The New Revised Standard Version, the New New Revised Standard Version,
The New Revised American Version, and on and on. It started five decades
ago, and it seems, as the Preacher might have said, “Of the multiplication
of Bible translations there is no end.” Of course the publishing houses
make a lot of money from this, and there are Bible translation committees
and individual Bible translators who might otherwise have nothing to do
with their time. But what purpose is served? Among others, the unholy purpose
of destroying a common biblical vocabulary. It’s a Catholic problem as
much as a Protestant one. The missalettes used in most parishes (missalettes
for Christianettes?) even have different translations for the same passages
used in the same Mass. (For instance, psalm antiphons frequently differ
from the same passage in the psalm itself.) Most Christians under thirty
no longer have in common a reservoir of biblical texts recognized by all,
and are likely unable to recognize the biblical allusions woven throughout
our English literary history. In addition, with few exceptions, the new
translations represent a dismal declension from any understanding of elevated,
even attractive, language. Way on back in the 1950s when J. B. Phillips
was publishing parts of the New Testament in everyday language, it was
exciting stuff, precisely because we had a standard translation with which
to compare it. Now all most folk have is a cacophony of everyday languages
descending into ever deeper everydayness.
You know we wouldn’t bring the problem up unless we had a solution.
The solution is simple: For all public purposes, liturgical and catechetical,
only the Revised Standard Version may be used. Now if only we could find
some authority that could effectively implement such a rule. Alas, the
Bible translators you have always with you, and, to make matters worse,
they are now in cahoots with sundry ideologues who are eager to put feminist,
liberationist, or other spins on the text. Where will it all end up? Christopher
Seitz, professor of Old Testament at Yale Divinity School, has sent us
a sampling of what he thinks the future might have in store for us. This
is an excerpt from the Perfectly Revised Version (PRV):
1.Bereshith adam. In the beginning, Humankind. Humankind reflected
on itself and saw that humankind was very good, neither male nor female.
Humankind rested after reflecting.
2.Humankind spoke and marvelled on the word, which showed perfectly
what humankind felt. The word did not last forever, and humankind reflected
on time. Bereshith now meant something, though beginning and ending
were abstractions. All time was one, as adam was one. “Day” two.
3.Seeing the power of the word to be other but to include all, humankind
divided itself into two creatures, “she” and “he,”
“male” and “female.” These two joined themselves on
occasion back into the original one, and new life came forth, of one type
or the other. And all three saw that they were good, diverse yet the same.
“Day” three.
4.And humankind said, let us make God in our image, in the likeness
of our threeness we will make God. Sometimes male, sometimes female, sometimes
Godself, always our creation. And God was formed by the word. And humankind
saw Godself. While not “very good,” Godself was “good.”
“Day” four.
5.And humankind saw the world that had always been, with stars, and
sun, and day and night, and animals, and plants, and now also with God,
and humankind said, We shall launch forth and explore. And laws were formed
so that all would be equitably shared. The God they had made was put in
charge of these laws, so that if they were broken, Godself would be judge.
And humankind saw that this arrangement was good. “Day” five.
6.Humankind was very fruitful and multiplied and covered the earth.
When laws were broken through inequitable sharing, God’s justice was called
into question. God sent Godself to rectify the sharing, even to the extent
of becoming adam through perfect obedience. But it was one against many,
and the many knew God was not adam, but the work of humankind’s own hands.
“Day” six.
7.And humankind said, We are sorry we made God. A void is felt among
us. So God was taken back into humankind from whence God came. And humankind
set about to perfect the system of laws, so that humankind could remain
very good and enjoy life forever and ever. And this just striving was the
word and the word was with humankind and the word was humankind. And the
word became the Perfectly Revised Version, which you are hearing this day.
And humankind rested from all humankind’s labors.
Economics in Verse and Prose
Christian thinkers who propose correspondences between Christian morality
and democratic capitalism are frequently challenged by others who contend
that biblical ethics requires a “radical alternative” to the
market economy. More often than not the challenge is from the left, but
things are not always so simple. For instance, among Catholic challengers
are many who are much taken with the ideal of “distributism”
espoused by G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. Distributism is favored
by, among others, the New Oxford Review, which prompted James K.
Fitzpatrick to a response in that magazine’s letters column: “Whenever
I read Chesterton and Belloc, the imagery captures my imagination: small
villages, self-employed craftsmen, religious schools, social life revolving
around the local parsonage, evenings with a pint of ale in a cheery pub.
And then I come back to earth. The goal of distributists is to use the
state to limit unjust concentrations of wealth; their objective is to use
the law to set the framework for a less materialist society, one where
home and hearth and family count for more than the lounge-lizard life of
the [Donald] Trumps and certain stock market gurus. Well, it sounds great,
but, who is going to be in charge of all this social engineering? Who is
going to define what it means to be ‘excessively’ materialist?”
Fitzpatrick recounts a conversation with a monsignor who advocated
a system that would assure a “living wage” that enables a man
to support his family “in dignity.” When this monsignor of a
suburban parish got to listing the things required for dignity (good house,
reliable car, college education for the kids, retirement savings, and so
forth), it added up to an income of well over $100,000 per year, pretty
much what his parishioners were working for in this despised “capitalistic
system.” Fitzpatrick concludes: “Chesterton and Belloc remain
favorites of mine. They are writers of great importance, as are the Southern
Agrarians in our country who viewed society from a similar perspective.
But what they offer on these issues is closer to verse than prose. Their
essays provide an antidote to the preoccupation with money that can overtake
us in capitalist societies. They provide perspective on what monied interests
can do to the political process. All of that is to be commended, without
reservation. But after that? From where I sit, there simply are no position
papers for the candidates for public office to be found in their pages.”
Of course our society is riddled with dreadful problems, but it is
a sloppy and widespread habit of mind that blames the failings of this
or any other social order on “capitalism.” Some problems can
be ameliorated by political or economic changes, although every proposal
for change is afflicted by the law of unintended consequences. Today it
would seem that there are no alternatives to the market economy. Nor, if
we have a thoughtful appreciation of the productive benefits and the virtues
attending the market economy, need we be urgently seeking alternatives.
What we should be seeking is not an alternative to capitalism but better
ways to include everybody in the benefits and virtues of what the encyclical
Centesimus Annus calls “the circle of productivity and exchange.”
Even when that is done better than it is now, however, there will still
be dreadful problems that are endemic to the human condition.
The beginning of wisdom about politics includes agreement with Dr.
Johnson: “How small, of all that human hearts endure,/That part which
laws or kings can cause or cure./Still to ourselves in every place consign’d,/Our
own felicity we make or find.” The wisdom applies equally to fiddling
with economic systems or fantasies. Actually, while politics and economics
can do little to cure human misery, they can do a great deal to cause it.
As witness the doleful history of those societies that have been mobilized
to establish “radical alternatives” to freedom.
But To Be Fair . . .
Once again the irresistible penchant to be fair gets the better of us.
The proponents of distributism would understandably cry foul if we left
the description of that ideal to someone who thinks it is but fetching
poesy. So here is Dermot Quinn, Professor of History at Seton Hall University,
on “Distributism, Democratic Capitalism, and the New World Order.”
It appears in a special issue of the Chesterton Review that contains
a number of papers given at a conference in Croatia in which American and
English Catholics cautioned formerly Communist societies against adopting
the model of democratic capitalism allegedly espoused by certain American
neoconservatives.
No one, writes Professor Quinn, has described the distributist ideal
“with greater wit or lucidity” than Chesterton himself. Here
is himself’s description of what he wanted: “The truth is this; and
it is extremely, even excruciatingly simple. Either Private Property is
good for Man or it is bad for Man. If it is bad, let us all immediately
become honest and courageous Communists. . . . But if it is good for Man
it is good for Everyman. There is a case for Capitalism; a case for Landlordism;
a case for complete Despotism; . . . there are arguments for Trusts, for
Squires, for big employers. But they are all arguments against Private
Property. They are all more or less philosophical reasons why a man, as
such, should not be an owner, as such; why the tenant should not own his
house; why the workman should not own his workshop; why the farmer should
not own his farm. The moment Private Property becomes a privilege, it ceases
to be private property. . . . But [distributists] are not ashamed of private
property; for we would give it to everyone.”
Quinn defends distributism against the charge that it is a form of
cultural fetishism and nostalgia. “According to critics, distributism
was compounded of nostalgia and a sort of sancta simplicitas. It attached
undue moral significance to objects or styles. It was inverted snobbery.
It was a creed of cranks. There is an element of truth here: some distributists
were faddists, pure and simple. What of it? The criticism misses the point.
Distributism was radical, but not egregious. The standard complaint-it
was rural, backward, poujadiste-is caricature. In fact, it was not anti-industrial
or opposed to machines. Rather, it had more to say about ownership itself
than about any particular form of economic activity. ‘Even while we remain
industrial,’ Chesterton remarked, ‘we can work towards industrial distribution
and away from industrial monopoly. . . . Even while we are the workshop
of the world, we can try to own our tools.’ Here was no machine-wrecking,
no horrified flight to the land. Monopoly more than industrialism was the
target. Indeed, because distributists celebrated variety and heterogeneity,
they did not envision a world entirely of small farmers or shopkeepers.
The absurdity of ‘mathematically equal sub-division of property or the
imposition from above of universal one-man independence’ held no charm.
Self-sufficiency-call it economic freedom-was the goal. The form of that
freedom was a matter of choice.”
Against the ravages of consumerist capitalism, Quinn posits his vision
of a better world. “Distributism offers more coherent discernment:
a regime of small ownerships and local attachments, a creed of property
but not possessiveness. Central to it is a nation of life in community,
whether in the town or the family farm or the parish or the religious order:
human organizations with a soul. The rootlessness of city or suburb, however
affluent, holds no appeal. And it is precisely modest proprietorship which
permits individual independence while preserving social responsibility.
Owning one’s own land, one’s shop; practicing a trade or a skill; sharing
profit or loss with one’s fellow workers: these were the distributist ideals.”
Professor Quinn concludes with this: “’Our business is business,’
claimed [Calvin] Coolidge. ‘What,’ he seems to demand of the distributist,
‘is yours?’ Quietly, and with no great claim to originality, the distributist
answers: ‘Our business is the business of life itself.’” Quietly,
and with no claim at all to originality (for Mr. Fitzpatrick and many others
have asked it before), one asks, And what policies or platform do you propose
to advance that worthy end?
The conclusion, no matter how fair one strives to be, is that distributism
is poetry and preachment. It is in some respects necessary poetry and preachment,
for in a sinful world people need always to be recalled to community, to
self-reliance, to neighborliness, and all that constitutes what Russell
Kirk called “the permanent things.” But until the distributist
“ideal” engages the structures and practices of the world of
economics daily chronicled by, say, the Wall Street Journal, it
cannot help but seem vacuous and naive. It seems particularly imprudent
for Catholic intellectuals to tie the Church’s social teaching to the shadow
of an economic idea that, in the view of some thoughtful people, once held
out hope for a “third way” beyond capitalism and socialism. With
the end of socialism, dreams of a third way are irrelevant. As John Paul
II makes explicitly clear in section 42 of Centesimus Annus, the
choice today is between acceptable and unacceptable forms of capitalism.
Another contributor to the special issue of the Chesterton Review,
David Schindler, says he resents the charge that his alternative to capitalism
is “unrealistic.” Christians who honor the martyrs, he writes,
do not have “success” as their goal, and he is certainly right
about that. Christian martyrs, however, are prepared to die for Christ,
not for a dispute over an economic theory that is now chiefly of antiquarian
interest. Anyway, nobody to date seems to have suffered much as a consequence
of attacking the neoconservative proponents of democratic capitalism-unless
one counts lost credibility and poetry diminished by self-dramatization.
Chesterton, to his great credit, took himself ever so much less seriously.
Which is one reason why he will be celebrated long after everybody has
forgotten the wan attempt by some of his devoted disciples to rescue his
unfortunate foray into economic theorizing from the past to which it belongs.
Were he around today, one expects he might-with his accustomed wit and
lucidity, and, above all, charity-try to dissuade his disciples from persisting
in that attempt.
Back to the Fifties?
When Nations Die is a book by Jim Nelson Black that is just out
from Tyndale. The subtitle is America on the Brink: Ten Warning Signs
of a Culture in Crisis, so you can sense right off that the author
is not the bearer of unqualifiedly good news. He concludes with a testimony
by Chief Justice Earl Warren at a Washington prayer breakfast in 1954.
Warren said: “I believe no one can read the history of our country
without realizing that the Good Book and the spirit of the Savior have
from the beginning been our guiding geniuses. . . . Whether we look to
the first charter of Virginia . . . or to the Charter of New England .
. . or to the Charter of Massachusetts Bay . . . or to the Fundamental
Orders of Connecticut . . . the same objective is present: a Christian
land governed by Christian principles. . . . I believe the entire Bill
of Rights came into being because of the knowledge our forefathers had
of the Bible and their belief in it: freedom of belief, of expression,
of assembly, of petition, the dignity of the individual, the sanctity of
the home, equal justice under law, and the reservation of powers to the
people. . . . I like to believe we are living today in the spirit of the
Christian religion. I like also to believe that as long as we do so, no
great harm can come to our country.”
That got us to thinking about an acquaintance, not an unsophisticated
fellow, who sums up his conservatism in one simple command, “Back
to the Fifties!” For a number of reasons we find that formulation
unpersuasive, not least because of the shoddy mix of religion and Americanism
so common to that era. Admittedly, it may be too much to expect politicians
and jurists to be theologically literate, but the sentimental and smug
conflation of Christianity and the American Way got way out of hand back
then. For everything there is a season. Forty-plus years later, some may
think that talk about “a Christian land governed by Christian principles”
sounds pretty good compared with the anti-American and anti- Christian
rhetoric that has gained ascendancy since the countercultural assault of
the sixties. But, at the risk of repeating ourselves, the choice is not
between a sacred public square and a
