A friend of mine recently posted a link to this article by Thomas Sowell on her Facebook page. It turns out that Facebook limits responses to 1,000 characters, so I've moved my response here...
Well, since Thomas Sowell wants people to tell the truth:
Are all people who receive charity drunks? idlers? drug addicts?
Perhaps from where Sowell sits (at his desk a nice job at Stanford's Hoover Institution), it might be hard to see that we live in a society where it's difficult to make a living wage, a society where the gap between rich and poor is widening at an alarming rate. But as someone trying to survive on a teacher's salary, it's not so hard to see that people--even decent, hard-working people who don't abuse drugs or alcohol--might need a bit of help now and again.
Does a widespread system of slavery make it right? Is the historical presence of a practice moral justification? Sowell seems to present the fact that white people have been slaves at various points in history as a way of suggesting that the long-term effects of slavery in the United States (a) don't exist or (b) don't matter.
I, too, despise the mantras that Sowell writes about, but I fail to see what he offers in their place. Truth? Hardly. What we get here isn't truth, isn't data, isn't even effective analysis. Rather, it's a collection of sweeping generalizations presented as a way to argue a right-wing politics that we might call "dispassionate conservativism."
Perhaps Fox News has an opening?
1 comment:
I confess the article was obnoxious, and I do not hold it as the epitome of intelligent analysis. But I thought there were three things worth noting:
1.) It is interesting to consider that humanitarian actions may not be entirely benign. I have a sister who used to run a homeless shelter for teenagers, many of whom struggled with drug addictions. While they need compassion and aid, unadulterated charity, particularly of the monetary kind, often made matters worse instead of better. What many of them needed was accountability and especially treatment. Filling their stomachs was hardly meeting their needs.
2.) I liked his destruction of the inane “giving back” motivation, though I am not sure he went about it as I would have liked. “Giving back” creates an imaginary debt to an unidentifiable lender, which I find absurd. Sowell says that the “lenders” are the people who engendered a society that affords us the luxury of the capacity to give. I think that humanitarianism is NOT motivated by repaying a debt, but by something more noble: the simple fact of loving your neighbor. There is nothing noble about paying what you owe, and that doesn’t explain the great humanitarian sacrifice made by many. Recognizing the dignity and worth of those made in God’s image, who are seeking to bring about His kingdom on earth may be the only thing big enough to explain it, where the poor, the meek, the mourners and the peacemakers are blessed. And this is big enough to encompass people who act outside organized religion or who even subscribe to it. Loving your neighbor is not tied to debt or membership.
3.) I liked that he points out the merits of Western Society. I am watching Amazing Grace in class this week where good men fought to eradicate one of Humanity’s greatest evils. When I was in school, my teachers focused more on the plight of the enslaved instead of the people who fought to eradicate slavery—focused more the opposition to the abolition movement instead of its success. There are two lessons to learn from this part of history, where we need not only review the human potential for great evil but also the potential to eradicate it. The “truth” that he talks about may not be statistically correct or free from generalization, but it should be two-sided.
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