Men have an all but incurable propensity to try to prejudge all the great questions which interest them by stamping their prejudices upon their language.
—James Fitzjames Stephen1
In light of the underlying assumptions of the prevailing vision, it may be easier to see why the particular vocabulary used by the anointed is what it is. The swirl of their buzzwords—“access,” “stigma,” “progressive,” “diversity,” “crisis,” etc.—shows a discernible pattern. What these innumerable buzzwords have in common is that they either (1) preempt issues rather than debate them, (2) set the anointed and the benighted on different moral and intellectual planes, or (3) evade the issue of personal responsibility.
The word “crisis,” for example, is a preemptive word used for its prospective political effect, rather than for its contemporary or retrospective accuracy. As noted in Chapter 2, all sorts of situations have been called a “crisis,” even when they have in fact been getting better for years. When the anointed say that there is a crisis this means that something must be done—and it must be done simply because the anointed want it done. This word becomes one of many substitutes for evidence or logic. So do words like “genuine need”2 (as determined by third parties) or self-contradictory phrases like people living “below subsistence.”
Phrases like “the peace movement,” used to describe disarmament advocates, preempt the whole momentous question as to whether peace is more likely to be achieved through disarmament or through military deterrence. With untold millions of lives depending on the answer to that question, something more substantive than a presumption that some people like peace more than others might be expected. But here, as elsewhere, all sorts of factual and analytical issues are reduced to psychological propensities.
One of the never-ending crusades of the anointed is for more “public service.” Like so many of the special buzzwords of the anointed, this phrase does not mean what the straightforward sense of the words seems to say. Not every service to the public is a “public service” in this Newspeak. For example, those who deliver tons of life-sustaining food to supermarkets are not engaged in “public service,” as the anointed use the term. Neither are those who build a roof over people’s heads or produce the clothes on people’s heads or produce the clothes on people’s backs. Those who perform these vital services are activated by the incentives of the marketplace, perhaps even by “greed,” another fashionable buzzword that puts the anointed and the benighted on different moral planes.
The call for more “public service” is then a call for more people to work in jobs not representing the preferences of the public, as revealed through the marketplace, but the preferences of third parties enforced through government and paid for by the power of taxation. Sometimes work for foundations and other nonprofit organizations is also included in “public service.” What is crucial is that public service not be service defined by the public itself through its choices of how to spend its own money in market transactions, but defined for them by third-party elites. Otherwise the most valuable and even life-saving activities are not worthy of the benediction “public service,” while making oneself a nuisance to other people with door-to-door solicitations is an activity worthy of that verbal aura, when it is in a cause favored by the anointed. Forcing the public to pay for art calculatingly insulting to the public’s sensibilities is also a “public service,” as the anointed define the term—and a failure to pay is “censorship” in this same lexicon, regardless of how free those artists remain to produce and sell their products to those willing to pay their own money.
What is crucial about the concept of “public service” as used by the anointed is that it must be defined by third parties, not by the public itself.
In this context, it is not hard to understand why repeated attempts to create a “national service” corps of some sort can always count on the hearty support of the anointed, as it seeks to direct young people, especially, not by what other people want them to do enough to pay for it with their own money, but by what the anointed want and pay for with money extracted through taxation. Thus New York Times columnist Bob Herbert hailed the federal government’s creation of an agency called “Americorp”—a sort of “domestic Peace Corps”—as a “noble effort” regarded as a relief from the previous Reagan-Bush era “poisoned by greed.”3 In other words, when people choose their occupations according to what the public wants and is willing to pay for, that is “greed,” but when the public is forced to pay for what the anointed want done, that is “public service.”
The word “greed” itself preempts all sorts of issues. If greed is defined by making money, then any era of prosperity is an era of greed, by definition, and any especially prosperous classes of people are especially greedy. But surely, in the ordinary sense of the word, someone who murders a store owner for the small amount of money in his cash register is greedy—perhaps more greedy than someone who makes millions in legitimate work. The sums of money involved cannot be the touchstone of greed. What is remarkable, however, is how utterly undefined this widely used term remains—and yet how fervently asserted. If the term has any concrete meaning, then there might be some way to test empirically, for example, whether or not the 1980s were indeed a “decade of greed” as so often claimed by the anointed.
Once we abandon the notion that the sums of money earned are a measure of “greed,” then perhaps the disposition of that money might offer a clue. The 1980s in fact saw a rise of philanthropy to unprecedented levels, not only absolutely but as a percentage of income.4 Much of this philanthropy was directed toward academia, one of the severest critics of “greed”—and perhaps a candidate for the title itself, as both tuition and professors’ salaries rose faster than the rate of inflation nine years in a row during that decade.5 Moreover, not all of this was due to the operations of a free market, as a Justice Department investigation found that organized collusion among the Ivy League colleges, MIT, and more than two dozen other elite institutions collectively fixed prices that students and their parents would have to pay.6
Among the many other questions raised by the nebulous concept of “greed” is why it is a term applied almost exclusively to those who want to earn more money or to keep what they have already earned—never to those wanting to take other people’s money in taxes or to those wishing to live on the largess dispensed from such taxation. No amount of taxation is ever described by the anointed as “greed” on the part of government or the clientele of government. Moreover, money is not the only thing for which one might be greedy, nor necessarily the most harmful to society. Greed for material things can be satisfied simultaneously throughout a prospering society, so that even the “poor” of today have amenities that were rare among the elites of earlier times. (The installation of a bathtub with plumbing in the White House was controversial in the nineteenth century because it was felt to be a needless luxury.) Widespread greed for power cannot be satisfied simultaneously, however, since power is by its very nature relative.
These inconsistencies in the use of the word are not random. Those things which serve the purposes of the anointed are exempt from the term and those which go counter to the vision of the anointed are prime candidates. Just as those activities which are responses to what the benighted masses want, as transmitted through the systemic processes of the marketplace, are not going to be considered “public services,” so income received as a result of satisfying the benighted is far more likely to be regarded as representing “greed” than monies received or power exercised by those carrying out the vision of the anointed. Families who wish to be independent financially and to make their own decisions about their lives are of little interest or use to those who are seeking to impose their superior wisdom and virtue on other people. Earning their own money makes these families unlikely candidates for third-party direction and wishing to retain what they have earned threatens to deprive the anointed of the money needed to distribute as largess to others who would thus become subject to their direction. In these circumstances, it is understandable why the desire to increase and retain one’s own earnings should be characterized negatively as “greed,” while wishing to live at the expense of others is not.
In all of this, the vocabulary of the anointed requires no clear definitions, logical arguments, or empirical verifications. Its role is precisely to be a substitute for all these things.
The vocabulary of the anointed also serves to put the anointed and the benighted on different planes. A concern that is important to the anointed is called “a matter of principle,” while a concern that is important to the benighted is called “an emotional issue.” Apparently other people don’t have reasons or principles; all they have are emotions. Often, when the media formally present both sides of an issue, the reasons given by the anointed are “balanced” by the emotions expressed by the benighted. Even when “both sides” are presented in the media, seldom are the reasons for each side presented.
The beliefs of the benighted are depicted as being at best “perceptions,” more often “stereotypes,” and more bluntly “false consciousness.” Such words—and many others to the same effect—express not only a disdain for the firsthand experiences of millions of other people, but also a disregard of the systemic processes which create incentives to be right and winnow out those who are wrong too often. For example, the oft-repeated claim that women receive only about 60 percent of what men receive for doing the same work ignores the competitive economic pressures which are constantly winnowing out businesses. To say that women are paid 60 percent of what men receive for doing the same work is to say that employers can afford to pay two male workers more than they pay three female workers—the women producing 50 percent more output—and still survive economically in a system so competitive that most businesses go under inside of a decade.
It may be in keeping with the vision of the anointed to imagine that the benighted would engage in such economic insanity, but only ignoring the rigors of economic competition could lead anyone to expect employers to survive with such vastly inflated costs of hiring men. As already noted in Chapter 3, women’s skills are often not the same as men’s, even when efforts are made to match them by education. Women also tend to work part-time more often than men, to average fewer hours of work per year, to interrupt their careers for the sake of their children, to choose occupations which are compatible with their domestic responsibilities even when more remunerative work might be available, and to leave their own jobs to move where their husbands find new jobs—all of which tend to reduce their average earnings, though not for the same work. Before there were laws or government policies on pay differentials, single women who worked continuously and full-time earned slightly more than single men who worked continuously and full-time.7
Much discussion of the decisions of businessmen in general by intellectuals proceeds as if employers, landlords, and others operating under the systemic pressures of the marketplace are free to make arbitrary and capricious decisions based on prejudice and misinformation—as if they were intellectuals sitting around a seminar table—and pay no price for being mistaken. Banks and savings-and-loan associations, for example, are treated as if they lose nothing by refusing to lend to minority mortgage loan applicants who have the “same” qualifications as others—and this in an industry where financial institutions have been going bankrupt on a large scale, with others teetering on the brink. Even if most bankers were so completely blinded by prejudice as to risk financial suicide, those whose prejudices were less or whose sense of self-interest was greater would have an enormous advantage in the competition for survival. What matters in a systemic process is not what the initial mixture was like but what the surviving entities are like. Differential survival rates are the whole point of a systemic competition, whether among trees on a mountainside, animals evolving in the wild, or businesses in a competitive market.
The fact that a closer look at the statistical data in Chapter 3 suggests that mortgage lenders are a lot closer to the facts about repayment prospects than the anointed who criticized them is almost incidental. What is crucial is that the very possibility that the benighted may be closer to the truth, even in a given area, is simply not taken seriously by the anointed. Verbal preemption makes it unnecessary for those with the prevailing vision to have to face such a possibility.
Another common characteristic of the vocabulary of the anointed is that it puts off-limits the question as to whether what is proposed is in fact achievable: Result A may be preferable to result B, but the latter may be a better objective if result A cannot be reached. While those with the tragic vision may see social issues in terms of making the best choice among limited and often unpalatable alternatives, those with the vision of the anointed tend to see these same issues in terms of what should be done to make things right in the cosmic scheme of things.
Paradoxically, while feasibility is seldom addressed when proposing public policy, severe limitations on what is feasible by others are often assumed by those with the vision of the anointed and pushed to the point of determinism, with a corresponding denial of personal responsibility. Since the bottom line of the prevailing vision is that the anointed are moral surrogates to make decisions for other people, those other people must be seen as incapable of making the right decisions for themselves. The concept of personal responsibility is thus anathema to this vision and the vocabulary of the anointed reflects this. For example, a story on the front page of the Los Angeles Times was headlined “A Deck Stacked Against the Young” even though the specifics of this supposedly stacked deck included:
Skills: Dubious.
Education: Over, without a diploma.
Job prospects: Nil, save for minimum wage.8
In other words, this “stacked deck” consisted of the fact that some youths had not chosen to learn in school or to acquire skills at work, and thought that they should be paid according to the needs of their egos rather than the productivity of their labor.
Another feature of the prevailing vision is that the anointed must try to change the fundamental character of their fellow human beings, to make them more like themselves. Thus phrases about “raising the consciousness” of others, making them “aware,” or hoping that they will “grow.” In other words, the anointed must not only design a different social world from that which exists, they must people that world with different creatures, custom-made for the purpose.
Here the contrast with the tragic vision is particularly sharp. Those with the tragic vision are seeking to maintain or promote social arrangements which they deem suitable to the kind of people they are familiar with, whether from personal experience or from historical or other sources, and tend to regard schemes that would require people to be fundamentally different as schemes likely to fail. But, to those with the vision of the anointed, to say that a particular plan or policy is contrary to human nature as we know it is only to say that human nature must be changed. Thus the vocabulary of the anointed is replete with such terms as “sensitizing,” “enlightening,” or “reeducating” other people.
Given the assumption of a vast intellectual and moral gulf between the anointed and the benighted, the role of “thinking people” in general and “experts” in particular is decisive. This requires many decisions to be collectivized and those collectivized decisions to be made by surrogates. All sorts of collective “planning,” from a national energy policy to imposed school busing, national “public service” requirements for young people, environmental regulations, and outright socialism fit this pattern. All have been viewed sympathetically by those with the vision of the anointed.
Stated baldly in terms of process characteristics—collectivized decisions made by third parties—these schemes have little appeal. But they are almost invariably stated instead in terms of the goals they propose to achieve—for example, rational “planning” to avoid “chaos,” racial “integration,” or more sweeping goals such as “social justice” today or “liberty, equality, fraternity” in an earlier era. One of the verbal contrasts between the tragic vision and the vision of the anointed is that the former tends to describe its goals in terms of the processes involved—“free markets,” “judicial restraint,” or “traditional values,” for example—which seldom have the emotional impact of statements about ideals and goals.
There is nothing obviously or intrinsically desirable about most of the things espoused by those with the tragic vision. It is only after understanding the reasoning which causes those particular processes to be favored over others that the merits and demerits of these systemic processes can be meaningfully discussed. But anyone can be in favor of “social justice” without further ado. In short, the ideas of so-called “thinking people” often require much less thinking. Indeed, the less thinking there is about definitions, means, and consequences, the more attractive “social justice” seems.
Advocacy in terms of goals rather than processes is only one of the verbal advantages of those with the vision of the anointed. Another is adoption of a cosmic viewpoint from which to discuss moral issues—a viewpoint which spawns a whole galaxy of buzzwords. Finally, there is simple verbal inflation, as useful as monetary inflation for defrauding people without their being fully aware of what is going on.
Many of the ideas and approaches of the anointed make sense only when looking at the world through the eyes of God or from the viewpoint of the cosmos. When Judge David L. Bazelon spoke of a social imperative to “provide every family with the means to create the kind of home all human beings need,”9 it was with no reservations as to whether anyone, anywhere, had ever possessed either the knowledge or the power to externally impose all the values, skills, discipline, and habits—much less love and dedication—required for such a home.
Similarly, when Chief Justice Earl Warren responded to indignant outcries against criminals by calling the people who made such outcries “self-righteous,”10 he was making a statement whose validity depended on adopting the cosmic viewpoint. From such a viewpoint, particular individuals might turn out to be either criminals or law-abiding citizens as a result of innumerable influences resulting from the accidental circumstances into which they were born and which they chanced to encounter as they grew up: There but for the grace of God go I. However, if one is nowhere close to being either God or the cosmos, the question becomes: Now that criminals are what they are, for whatever reasons, how are we to deal with them and protect all the other people? If it were oneself who was the criminal, the policy issue would be the same. The constrained options of the tragic vision permit no policies based on indulgences in cosmic questions—or cosmic dogmatism as to causation. After all, people born to great privilege have often done hideous things throughout history, for reasons beyond our ken today—and perhaps beyond our ken tomorrow and a thousand years thereafter. What we would do if we were omniscient, or could turn back the clock, is irrelevant to choices confronting us within the unyielding constraints of the present and our constrained present knowledge of the past and future.
We shoot mad dogs not only because they are dangerous but also because we do not know how to capture them safely and render them harmless. Surely it would be unconscionable to shoot them if we did. But we shoot them because of our own limitations, as much as because of their dangerousness. Such are the constrained options of the tragic vision. To assume the more sweeping options of the vision of the anointed is more humane only in intention, risking in practice the needless sacrifice of more human lives if our presumptions prove to be unfounded.
The cosmic viewpoint affects all sorts of issues involving “fairness.” Attorney General Ramsey Clark, for example, said that “elemental fairness” required that those arrested for crimes be advised of their right to remain silent because experienced criminals, gang members, and mafiosi already knew that.11 This emphasis on fairness as between criminals ignores the larger fairness as between criminals and their victims. It also assumes that someone has the omniscience to equalize preexisting advantages—and that making such adjustments of the cosmos is an activity to be imposed on an already overburdened and faltering legal system, unable to carry out its more modest function of protecting law-abiding citizens from criminals. Again, this was not the idiosyncracy of one man. The Supreme Court in its landmark Miranda decision likewise argued that to fail to give everyone the same information already possessed by the more sophisticated would be to “take advantage of the poor, the ignorant, and the distracted.”12 Note what this taking advantage consists of: a failure to provide greater means of escaping punishment for crimes committed by criminals who fall below the state of the art in criminal evasions of the law.
Once launched on this line of thinking, however, there is no real reason why the courts should not equalize other preexisting advantages, such as the fact that some criminals can run faster than others, think quicker, or possess other talents to help them evade capture or punishment. All of these things are equally unfair from a cosmic perspective. But for the law to be engaged in equalizing criminals’ ability to escape the law is to abandon the reason for criminal sanctions in the first place and substitute a cosmic crusade.
The cosmic viewpoint takes many forms, whether in the law or elsewhere. One is the desire to equalize “life chances” among individuals born into different classes, races, sexes, and other groups. Yet the full sweep of the range of things that go into “life chances” is as much beyond our ken and control as all the things that go into crime. Those factors which are already known to affect economic and other outcomes are both numerous and in many cases beyond the control of programs and institutions, including even totalitarian institutions. Unless we adopt the arbitrary doctrine that any degree of equalization, however small, is worth any sacrifice, however large, differences in life chances are among the many imperfections of life whose remedy is not even conceivable, short of the cosmic viewpoint.
At a minimum, public policy to equalize life chances would have to either divorce reward from performance or create equality of performance by early and comprehensive intervention in the raising of children, for all practical purposes destroying the family as a decision-making unit. How long parents would continue to regard children who are creatures of the state as being their own is another question. Even so, it is problematical how far the state could eliminate the influence of parents on their children’s life chances, short of removing children from their homes.
As long as the values, habits, and mind-sets of parents remain an influence, these are certain to be different values, habits, and mindsets—not only randomly from one set of parents to another, but systematically from parents from one social group to another. It is hard even to imagine how the state could offset these differences short of, for example, having someone stationed in the home to turn off the television set until all the children from noneducationally inclined groups had done as much reading and homework as the children from groups whose commitment to education goes back generations or even centuries. Alternatively, they could station someone in the homes of the latter children to take away their books and computers, and force them to watch as much television as the other children watch. And yet, even if all this were done, and done successfully, only one source of differences in life chances would have been eliminated. An enormous amount of personal and social disruption might be necessary to accomplish a rather modest change in those life chances.
An oft-quoted statement by President Lyndon Johnson on racial policy, espousing a need to go beyond formal equality before the law, likewise illustrates the cosmic viewpoint:
You do not take a man who, for years, has been hobbled by chains, liberate him, and bring him to the starting line of a race, saying, “You are free to compete with all others,” and still justly believe you have been completely fair.13
This reasoning presupposes that there is some identifiable group of decision makers—“you”—who have such cosmic control that this question can be meaningfully addressed to them. This whole approach is like the personification of “society” that is so much a part of the vocabulary of the anointed. Nor is this issue limited to racial questions. It is of course unfair from a cosmic viewpoint that any group should compete without all the advantages enjoyed by other groups—and those with the tragic vision readily concede it. The incidence of the “benefits and burdens” of the world “would in many instances have to be regarded as very unjust if it were the result of a deliberate allocation to particular people,” according to Friedrich Hayek.14 But the outcomes of a systemic process, or “spontaneous order” in Hayek’s terms, “cannot be just or unjust.”15
Returning to the issue of differences in criminals’ knowledge of how to evade the law, from a cosmic viewpoint such a difference is of course not fair. But the relevant question is whether anyone has the omniscience or omnipotence to make policy from a cosmic viewpoint—and at the cost of undermining law and and the reliance of millions of human beings on law. If law has any value in itself, then even the beneficiaries of a deviation from law lose something as members of the general society. Nor is it certain that they will gain more from the exceptions than they lose by losing the rule of law. In the case of American blacks, where life itself has often been lost as a general deterioration of law enforcement was accompanied by an escalating murder rate, it is particularly uncertain whether bending the law produced net benefits.
Although cosmic notions of justice are often invoked in racial issues, the issue is much broader. Every individual inherits a particular culture or subculture which evolved over a period of generations and centuries before he was born—and there is little or nothing that “we,” “you,” or “society” can do about this plain fact of history. Adopting a cosmic viewpoint only adds lofty presumptions and reckless gambles to the underlying futility.
The notion that it is somehow “self-righteous” to insist on social standards and rules that are easier for some people to conform to than for others is another expression of the cosmic viewpoint. People who complain about the ravages of teenage pregnancy and demand a return to traditional family values have been denounced by the anointed for being “self-righteous” and for “lecturing” the less fortunate. Here again, from a cosmic perspective, many girls who grew up living by traditional values, and who waited for responsible motherhood in tandem with a responsible father, might have taken the condemned path if a number of other influences had been different. But the observation There but for the grace of God go I does not imply that the grace of God must be destroyed, or its consequences neutralized, in the name of equality. These are, after all, not zero-sum games. The community as a whole is better off or worse off according to whether or not the next generation is raised under circumstances that are more likely to produce productive citizens rather than parasites and criminals. Indeed, the less fortunate are the hardest hit by the consequences when social standards are compromise or jettisoned for the sake of cosmic concepts of equality.
Those among the anointed who are not prepared to assume the cosmic role personally may nevertheless attribute or recommend it to “society”—and society often means some designated group of elite decision makers armed with governmental power. But third-party decision making by surrogates for “society” offers no a priori reason to expect a closer approximation to omniscience. On the contrary, such surrogates not only lack the detailed and direct knowledge of the innumerable circumstances surrounding each of the millions of individuals whose decisions they are preempting, they lack the incentives of direct gain and loss from being right or wrong, and they have every incentive to persist in mistaken policies (from which they suffer little), rather than admit to being wrong (from which they could suffer much).
Sometimes the blatancy of elite preemption of other people’s decision making is mitigated by the notion of mass “participation” in collective decision making. If carried out as ideally presented, such general participation would then reduce the issue to one of individual decision making versus collective decision making. For example: Do you wish to raise your own child according to your own best judgment or to have one vote among millions as to how children in general should be raised? If the latter, then disproportionate influence is likely to fall to the articulate, the politically sophisticated, and the morally fervent—in other words, to the anointed.
Another way of verbally masking elite preemption of other people’s decisions is to use the word “ask”—as in “We are just asking everyone to pay their fair share.” But of course governments do not ask, they tell. The Internal Revenue Service does not “ask” for contributions. It takes. It can confiscate bank accounts and other assets and it can put people behind bars for not paying. Yet the word “ask” is used in all sorts of public policy contexts where elite preemption via governmental power is involved. For example, when some parents objected to having their children put at risk by attending public schools with other children stricken with AIDS, New York Times columnist Anna Quindlen said that we should “ask some parents to put their children at some risk, however small, for the sake of principle and fairness.”16 But these parents were not being asked anything. They were being told that it was none of their business to know who or where there were AIDS carriers amidst their children. The anointed had already decided how much risk other people’s children should be exposed to—and official secrecy meant that those other people had nothing to say about it.
Whether this combination of characteristics makes for substantively better decision making, and to an extent sufficient to justify collective preemption, is another question. But it is easy to see why the cosmic viewpoint has such appeal to those with the vision of the anointed. It magnifies their influence and flatters their egos. While the anointed may assume that articulation, political activism, and moral fervor are sufficient, those with the tragic vision believe otherwise. As James Fitzjames Stephen said:
The one talent which is worth all other talents put together in all human affairs is the talent of judging right upon imperfect materials, the talent if you please of guessing right. It is a talent which no rules will ever teach and which even experience does not always give. It often coexists with a good deal of slowness and dulness and with a very slight power of expression.17
Systemic processes tend to reward people for making decisions that turn out to be right—creating great resentments among the anointed, who feel themselves entitled to rewards for being articulate, politically active, and morally fervent.
Many of the words and phrases used in the media and among academics suggest that things simply happen to people, rather than being caused by their own choices or behavior. Thus there is said to be an “epidemic” of teenage pregnancy, or of drug usage, as if these things were like the flu that people catch just by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. In a similar vein, Chief Judge David Bazelon spoke of “forces that drive people to commit crimes.”18 In the economy as well, both parents are often said to be “forced” to work, in order to “make ends meet,” even if the family owns luxury cars, a vacation home, designer clothes, and a swimming pool. Parents, of course, have every right to make whatever choices they wish, but suggesting that people had no choice is precisely what the vocabulary of the anointed does repeatedly, on the most disparate issues—which it reduces to nonissues with deterministic assertions.
People are often said to lack “access” to various jobs, educational institutions, or credit, when in fact they may not have behaved or performed in a way that would enable them to meet the same standards that others meet. “Access” is just one of a number of ex ante expressions—“opportunity,” “bias,” and “glass ceiling,” for example—used to describe ex post results in such a way as to preempt the whole question as to why those results turned out the way they did. If a job ceiling is glass, for example, that says that it is invisible—that the assertion must be accepted without evidence. Implicit in much of this verbiage is the notion that the rules were rigged for or against some individual or group. But whether, or to what extent, this is true is precisely the issue that should be argued—not circumvented by verbal sleight-of-hand.
People who do not choose to spend their money on health insurance, but on other things, are not denied “access” to health care by “society.” On the contrary, they are often given medical treatment at other people’s expense, whether under specific social programs or in various other ways, such as using hospital emergency rooms for things that are not emergencies at all, or which have become emergencies only because nothing was done until a medical problem grew too large to ignore. How often people have chosen to spend their money on things other than health insurance—especially when they are young and healthy—and how often they lack health insurance due to circumstances beyond their control is the crucial question that is sidestepped verbally by speaking of “access.” Millions of individuals from families with incomes of $50,000 and up lack health insurance19—clearly not because they lack “access” but because they have chosen to spend their money on other things. Choice, like behavior and performance, is often circumvented by the vocabulary of the anointed.
Performance standards are often depicted as mere subjective barriers reflecting the biases of those who create them. Thus Professor Stanley Fish of Duke University charges “insincerity” to opponents of affirmative action who want everyone to compete by the same rules by saying that “the playing field is already tilted” in favor of the majority because “the skills that make for success are nurtured by institutions and cultural practices from which the disadvantaged minority has been systematically excluded.”20 With the word “excluded” being used in very elastic senses today, it is hard to know how this statement differs from saying that people from different cultural backgrounds have the prerequisites for various activities to varying extents. In a similar vein, former Harvard president Derek Bok said that to apply the same admissions standards to minority students as to everyone else would be to “exclude them from the university.”21 Among other things, this ignores the fact that blacks were receiving both college and postgraduate degrees from Harvard in the nineteenth century, when it was very unlikely that they were being admitted under lower standards. The more fundamental fallacy, however, is in using ex ante words like “exclude” to describe ex post results.
Widespread personification of “society” is another verbal tactic that evades issues of individual responsibility. Such use of the term “society” is a more sophisticated version of the notion that “the devil made me do it.” Like much of the rest of the special vocabulary of the anointed, it is used as a magic word to make choice, behavior, and performance vanish into thin air. With these three inconvenient complications out of the picture, results after the fact can then be equated with conditions existing before the fact. Success thus becomes “privilege” and failure “disadvantage”—by definition.
Even inanimate things like classics of literature are called “privileged” writings, rather than writings which have achieved appreciation from many successive generations. Such concepts as achievement are precisely what the new vocabulary seeks to displace. By all-or-nothing reasoning, it is of course possible to show that not every individual or group has had the same favorable or unfavorable conditions. Indeed, it is hard to imagine how anything short of omniscience and omnipotence could have made such blanket equality possible. But that is still radically different from saying that outcomes ex post are simply results of circumstances ex ante. For example, voluminous evidence from countries around the world repeatedly shows particular immigrant groups beginning their lives destitute in a new country, taking low-level jobs disdained by the native population, and yet ultimately rising above the economic level of those around them.
The “overseas Chinese” have done this throughout Southeast Asia and in several Western Hemisphere nations. Jews have done the same in numerous countries. The history of the United States has seen this achievement repeated by a number of European immigrant groups and by the Japanese and the Cubans, among others. Such evidence is suggestive, rather than decisive. There is room for debate, but substantive debate is wholly different from verbal preemption, the weapon of choice among the anointed.
In the vision of the anointed, not only must other people be either intellectually or morally incapable of making the right decisions for themselves individually, the traditions they use to supplement their own thinking, and the systemic processes which coordinate their competing desires and complementary inputs—the marketplace, for example—must also be depicted as inadequate to the task, without the benign intervention of the anointed. Surrogate decision making is the common thread in the highly disparate crusades which have captured the imagination and sparked the fervor of the anointed at various times, whether this moral surrogacy was in the form of the eugenics movement, Keynesian economics, or environmentalism. All urgently require the superior wisdom of the anointed to be imposed on the benighted masses, in order to avert disaster.
Underlying much social criticism is the notion that individual merit cannot explain all differences in individual or group results. Professor Stanley Fish of Duke University, for example, condemns the Scholastic Aptitude Test because it does not measure merit.22 Others condemn the incomes earned in the marketplace for the same reason. Whatever weight such considerations as merit might have if we were God on Judgment Day, making a retrospective assessment, the situation is radically different when we are attempting to establish prospective rules or policies in a society of human beings with necessarily limited knowledge and limited ability to monitor what is in anyone else’s heart of hearts.
The requirements for judging “merit” vastly exceed the requirements for judging behavior or performance. We do not know how much innate ability anyone has, and therefore cannot assess how much of the observed performance was simply a windfall gain from nature, rather than being a result of exhausting, disciplined, or otherwise meritorious efforts. Moreover, individual behavior and performance depend on factors reaching well beyond the individual—including the surrounding general culture or special subculture, the particular family, and the complementary performances of others. Had Einstein been born into a family of illiterate peasants in a Third World country, neither he nor the world would have gained the benefits of his potential. But that is still light-years away from saying that observers can look at Third World peasants and decide which ones would have been Einsteins in a wholly different setting, or that anyone knows how to transform the cultural universe of the Third World, or any other world. Still less can anyone grandly wave aside as “irrelevant” the inherent prerequisites for civilization and progress.
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 hit 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 Aaron23—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 together24—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 a home run, but to walk Maris or Aaron was only to bring to bat Mickey Mantle or Eddie Matthews, 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 to at all.
In short, performance cannot be due solely to individual merit where the influence of other individuals and circumstances is at work. The case for rewarding performance is that we can do it, not that it is the same as rewarding merit. Likewise, holding individuals personally responsible for the consequences of their own actions is a social expedient for prospective control, not a cosmic retrospective moral judgment.
The hubris of imagining that one can judge merit, as distinguished from judging behavior and performance, can be seen in attempts of educators to grade students according to how well they used their own ability, rather than how well they performed relative to some fixed standard or to other students. This hubris is consonant with the vision of the anointed and with the vocabulary in which that vision is expressed. Conversely, the inability of ordinary people to make valid assessments, even of observable behavior and performance, is likewise part of the vision of the anointed and finds expressions in such words as “stereotypes,” “bias,” and “prejudice”—all widely used without any corroborating evidence being asked or given.
One of the uses of the concept of merit is to claim that various rewards produced by the economic forces of the marketplace are unmerited. Again, this implicitly assumes that it is possible for a human being to determine merit—otherwise, all conceivable economic systems and policies will produce rewards whose merit is unsubstantiated. Moreover, applying the impossible standard of merit forfeits benefits attainable under the feasible standard of performance in satisfying consumer desires more fully. If, for example, a new product is introduced by five different producers—each in a somewhat different version—then it is possible that none of the five fully understands just exactly what the consumer wants, nor need any of the five be any wiser or more prescient than the others. Yet if one of these products happens to be far closer to the consumers’ desires than the others, its producer may become wealthy as his sales skyrocket, while some of his less fortunate competitors cannot sell enough to avoid bankruptcy. The unmerited gain of the lucky producer, however, serves the larger social purpose of enabling the consumers to receive the product nearest to their desires and stops the economy’s resources from being wasted on the production of other versions that are less satisfactory.
Often, it is precisely the lure of a chance to hit the jackpot which causes all the producers to gamble on untried ventures, out of which some prove to be beneficial to the public. To insist on a closer approximation to merit would reduce the incentives and the benefits to society that flow from these incentives. And is it not equally an injustice to deprive innocent consumers of benefits they could have had, for the sake of an abstract notion important only to a relative handful of the intelligentsia—and little analyzed, even by them?
The vision of the anointed is one in which such ills as poverty, irresponsible sex, and crime derive primarily from “society,” rather than from individual choices and behavior. To believe in personal responsibility would be to destroy the whole special role of the anointed, whose vision casts them in the role of rescuers of people treated unfairly by “society.” Since no society has ever treated everyone fairly, there will always be real examples of what the anointed envision. The fatal step is to make those examples universal explanations of social ills—and to remain oblivious to evidence to the contrary.
What is at stake for the anointed in their discussions of public policy issues is their whole image of themselves as people whose knowledge and wisdom are essential to the diagnosis of social ills and the prescription of “solutions.” To believe that their knowledge and understanding are grossly inadequate for what they are attempting—even if everyone else’s knowledge is also grossly inadequate for such ambitious social engineering—would be to bring their whole world crashing down around them. They must believe that they know—and that they know better than others.
Utter certainty has long been the hallmark of the anointed. When John Maynard Keynes predicted dire economic problems resulting from underpopulation in Western society—on the eve of sharp increases in population growth—he said that we know “much more securely than we know almost any other social or economic factor relating to the future” that we were facing a “stationary or declining” population level.25 Similarly, when Lyndon Johnson spoke of the “conditions that breed despair and violence,” he added: “All of us know what those conditions are” and proceeded to list the explanations that were part of the prevailing social vision.26 His policies followed the logic of that vision, and the failure of such policies to achieve their goals, either in his time or later, calls into question that underlying vision itself. Whatever its failures as social policy, that vision has a logical structure of coherent beliefs and assumptions, as well as a history going back for centuries.
Since specialization is a way of coping with the inadequacies of the human mind, it should hardly be surprising that those with the vision of the anointed often view specialization negatively, or that their vocabulary often reflects that. Cosmic decisions require minds with cosmic scope—and to say that there are no such minds, that the human experience must be broken down into manageable-sized pieces, is to deny the vision of the anointed. Meanwhile, those with the tragic vision have often proclaimed the virtues of specialization. Adam Smith attributed much of economic progress to the “division of labor,”27 Edmund Burke said that he “revered” the specialist within his specialty,28 and Oliver Wendell Holmes said that specialists were more needed than generalists, whose presumptions he derided.29 But such views are the opposite of the views among the anointed.
One symptom of the disdain for specialization among the anointed is their widespread use of the term “microcosm.” Thus a college, for example, may be said to be a microcosm of society—even though its very reason for existence is its specialized activity—that is, its difference from the rest of society. The eye is not a microcosm of the body, although it engages in many of the same general biological processes as other organs (such as using nutrients and expelling wastes), because its whole significance is that it does something that no other part of the body does.
“Interdisciplinary” is another popular buzzword among the anointed, reflecting their aversion to, or lack of appreciation of, specialization. This is understandable, given their underlying assumptions about the scope of the human mind, at least as it exists in themselves and like-minded colleagues. But academic disciplines exist precisely because the human mind is inadequate to grasp things whole and spontaneously, or to judge “the whole person.” Thus mathematics must be separated out for special study, even though it is an ingredient in a vast spectrum of other activities. To the anointed, it seems merely arbitrary to make such separations, and they are forever explaining—as if it were a great discovery of theirs—that all these various disciplines interact in the real world. But specialists are not solipsists. They are simply aware of the limitations of the human mind, and of the implications of those limitations, as the anointed so often are not.
Much of what is called “interdisciplinary” by those with the vision of the anointed is not interdisciplinary at all. It is nondisciplinary, in that it simply ignores boundaries between disciplines. Physical chemistry is truly interdisciplinary in that it requires prior mastery of two different disciplines—physics and chemistry—but many ethnic, gender, and other “studies” do not require prior mastery of any discipline. They are nondisciplinary.
No matter how many disciplines may be mastered by a given individual, that does not make these disciplines any less separate, just as the fact that a particular quarterback can play the violin does not mean that the distinction between football and music is any less sharp. While those with the vision of the anointed often lament the “artificial barriers” between fields, as Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan did,30 or assert “the organic connection between education and personal experience,” as John Dewey did,31 those with the tragic vision who urge that more than one field be studied do so without ever suggesting that the barriers between these fields be erased. Justice Holmes urged legal practitioners to learn economics32—but not to blur the distinction between law and economics. By contrast, Ronald Dworkin has urged a “fusion” of law and moral theory,33 much more in keeping with the unconstrained vistas envisioned by the anointed. When Justice William O. Douglas called for “fresh air blowing from other disciplines” to “ventilate the law,”34 he was likewise reflecting the assumptions underlying his whole vision of the world.
One of the ramifications of the notion that specialization is arbitrary is the application of concepts appropriate to one field to another field where they are not only out of place but counterproductive. Accusations that corporations are “undemocratic” presuppose that the norms of the political order will be beneficial when applied in a very different institutional setting, established for wholly different purposes. Similarly, the imposition of “due process” requirements by courts on institutions such as schools arbitrarily assumes that what is beneficial in one kind of specialized institution is beneficial in a very different institution pursuing very different purposes.
Numerous issues are preempted, and numerous gaps in logic papered over, simply by the names that are given to various things—“capitalism,” “the left,” “the right,” “human rights,” etc. A few examples may be suggestive as to how easily the need for either logic or evidence can be circumvented by a simple repetition of names that dulls people’s awareness so that they literally do not know what they are talking about.
Since capitalism was named by its enemies, it is perhaps not surprising that the name is completely misleading. Despite the name, capitalism is not an “ism.” It is not a philosophy but an economy. Ultimately it is nothing more and nothing less than an economy not run by political authorities. There are no capitalist institutions; any number of institutional ways of carrying out economic activities may flourish under “capitalism”—that is, in the absence of control from above. You may get food from a restaurant, or by buying it from the supermarket and cooking it yourself, or by growing the food on your own land and processing it all the way through to the dinner table. Each of these is just as much “capitalism” as the others. At any given time, caravans, supermarkets, or computerized shopping methods may be used, but none of these is anything more than a modality of the moment. They do not define capitalism but are simply one of the innumerable ways of doing things when choices are unconstrained by authorities.
Many have argued that capitalism does not offer a satisfactory moral message. But that is like saying that calculus does not contain carbohydrates, amino acids, or other essential nutrients. Everything fails by irrelevant standards. Yet no one regards this as making calculus invalid or illegitimate. Once again, the selective application of arbitrary standards is invoked only when it promotes the vision of the anointed.
Among the many thoughtless labels which have gained currency, the dichotomy between the political left and the political right is one of the most striking, not only for its wide acceptance but also for its utter lack of definition—or even an attempt at definition. Only the left is defined—initially by the kinds of ideas held by those who sat on the left side of the French national assembly in the eighteenth century. But while the left is defined, at least in this general sense, the dichotomy itself remains undefined because “the right” remains undefined. Those who oppose the left are said to be on the right—and when they are strongly opposed, or opposed across a broad spectrum of issues, they are said to be on the “far right.” But this is a somewhat Ptolemaic view of the political universe, with the political left being in the center of that universe and all who differ—in any direction—being called “the right.”
Whether free-market libertarians or statists ranging from those with monarchist to fascist views, opponents of the left are called “the right.” In the United States, especially, the related term “conservative” is routinely used to encompass people who have no desire to preserve the status quo or to return to some status quo ante. Friedrich Hayek, for more than half a century a prime opponent of leftist policies on the international stage, was thus considered a conservative, if not part of “the far right.” Yet Hayek himself wrote an article entitled, “Why I Am Not a Conservative.”35 Milton Friedman has likewise repudiated the “conservative” label36 and wrote a book entitled The Tyranny of the Status Quo. Yet he is regarded as the leading “conservative” intellectual of his age, though many of the things he advocates have never existed in any society, or—like school vouchers—did not exist when he first advocated them. Among so-called “black conservatives,” it is virtually impossible to find anyone who wants to go back to anything, this group being opposed to both the racial discrimination policies of the past and the racial preference policies that came after them.
Although the free market is clearly the antithesis of state control of the economy, such as fascists advocate, the left-right dichotomy makes it seem as if fascists are just more extreme versions of “conservatives,” in the same sense in which socialism is a more extreme version of the welfare state. But this vision of a symmetrical political spectrum corresponds to no empirical reality. Those who advocate the free market typically do so as just one aspect of a more general vision in which government’s role in the lives of individuals is to be minimized, within limits set by a need to avoid anarchy and a need to maintain military defense against other nations. In no sense is fascism a further extension of that idea. It is in fact the antithesis of that whole line of thinking. Yet much talk in terms of left and right suggests that there is a political spectrum which proceeds from the center to conservatives to “far right” neo-fascism to fascism itself.
The only logic to such a conception is that it allows disparate opponents of the vision of the anointed to be lumped together and dismissed through guilt by association.
The vocabulary of the anointed is filled with words reflecting their rejection of incremental trade-offs and advocacy of categorical “solutions.” This is most clear in the law and in writings among the legal intelligentsia, where individual and social trade-offs are transformed into categorical legal “rights.” Ronald Dworkin perhaps best expressed this view when he said: “Individual rights are political trumps held by individuals.”37 Just as the smallest trump beats the highest card in any other suit, so these “rights” take precedence over the weightiest other considerations which are not in the form of rights. Thus the “rights” of criminals take precedence over crime control, the “right” to various social “entitlements” takes precedence over the interests of taxpayers, the “rights” of those entitled to compensation for past injustices take precedence over the interests of displaced contemporaries who complain of “reverse discrimination,” and so on. Rights trump interests in this vision.
At its worst, this line of argument arbitrarily singles out some particular kind of individual or group to be made sacred and leaves others to be sacrificed on the altar to this sacredness. The particular beneficiaries chosen may range from racial or ethnic minorities to people with AIDS or endangered species of animals. Alternatively, the categorical priorities may be established and defined by particular benefits rather than particular people or species—food being more important than music, medical care being more important than transportation, etc. But, however reasonable the order of precedence may seem, making that order categorical is the fatal step. Surely everyone would agree that life itself is more important than photography. But would anyone wipe out the entire photographic industry, in order that one person could live 30 seconds longer than otherwise? Life is indeed more important than photography, in the general and elliptical senses in which we usually speak—but not in the categorical senses used in intellectual models or legal proscriptions. It is precisely in relying on intellectual models and legal proscriptions for categorical decisions that we risk absurd and disastrous consequences.
Among many objections to categorical thinking is that it is incompatible with a world of diminishing returns. Where an individual or a society has available any two benefits, to say that benefit X is a “right” and benefit Y is not is to say that the most trivial incremental advantage from a further extension of benefit X is worth the most devastating losses from a further reduction of benefit Y. Since even the most essential things—food, for example, as noted in Chapter 5—reach the point where further increments are of diminishing value, and may even become negative in value, a rule making anything categorically more important than other benefits risks reaching the point of making huge sacrifices of one thing for trivial benefits from another—or no benefits at all from another. Virtually no one would advocate such a thing in plain, straightforward language. It is only in the lofty and roundabout language of “rights,” “priorities,” “entitlements,” and the like that the same kind of categorical results are advocated in different words.
The vision of categorical precedence is central to John Rawls’s celebrated book, A Theory of Justice, where it was asserted that “the rights secured by justice” are not subject to “the calculus of social interests.”38 In short, let justice be done even if the skies must fall—regardless of what this does to those on whom the skies fall. Rawls was quite clear as to the categorical priorities being established in what he called a “lexical order”:
This is an order which requires us to satisfy the first principle in the ordering before we can move on to the second, the second before we consider the third, and so on. A principle does not come into play until those previous to it are either fully met or do not apply. A serial ordering avoids, then, having to balance principles at all; those earlier in the sequence have an absolute weight, so to speak, with respect to later ones, and hold without exception.39
According to Rawls, “The principles of justice are to be ranked in lexical order and therefore liberty can be restricted only for the sake of liberty.”40 The principle of “fair equality of opportunity”—meaning “equal life prospects in all sectors of society for those similarly endowed and motivated”41—cannot be allowed to be infringed for the sake of a greater sum of benefits available to society as a whole by alternative social arrangements.42 In short, there are not to be incremental trade-offs but categorical priorities in which one thing “trumps” another.
There is little danger that anyone would voluntarily adopt such rigidities, if plainly and openly presented. The danger is that lofty words and obscure terms may lead many through the murky and meandering marshlands of abstract theory toward the same disastrous result.
Despite a voluminous and often fervent literature on “income distribution,” the cold fact is that most income is not distributed: It is earned. People paying each other for goods and services generate income. While many people’s entire income comes from a salary paid to them by a given employer, many others collect individual fees for everything from shoe shines to surgery, and it is the sum total of these innumerable fees which constitutes their income. Other income is distributed from a central point as social security checks, welfare payments, unemployment compensation, and the like. But that is not how most people get most income.
To say that “wealth is so unfairly distributed in America,” as Ronald Dworkin does,43 is grossly misleading when most wealth in the United States is not distributed at all. People create it, earn it, save it, and spend it.
If one believes that income and wealth should not originate as they do now, but should instead be distributed as largess from some central point, then that argument should be made openly, plainly, and honestly. But to talk as if we currently have a certain distribution result A which should be changed to distribution result B is to misstate the issue and disguise a radical institutional change as a simple adjustment of preferences. The word “distribution” can of course be used in more than one sense. In a purely statistical sense, we can speak of the “distribution” of heights in the population, without believing that someone in Washington decides how tall we should all be and then mails out these heights to different individuals. What we cannot do, either logically or morally, is to shift back and forth between these two very different conceptions of distribution. Newspapers are distributed in one sense—they are sent out from a printing plant to scattered sites to be sold to readers—but heights are distributed only in the other sense.
Those who criticize the existing “distribution” of income in the United States are criticizing the statistical results of systemic processes. They are usually not even discussing the economic fate of actual flesh-and-blood human beings, for the economic positions of given individuals vary greatly within a relatively few years. What is really being said is that numbers don’t look right to the anointed—and that this is what matters, that all the myriad purposes of the millions of human beings who are transacting with one another in the marketplace must be subordinated to the goal of presenting a certain statistical tableau to anointed observers.
To question the “fairness” or other index of validity of the existing statistics growing out of voluntary economic transactions is to question whether those who spent their own money to buy what they wanted from other people have a right to do so. To say that a shoe shine boy earns “too little” or a surgeon “too much” is to say that third parties should have the right to preempt the decisions of those who elected to spend their money on shoe shines or surgery. To say that “society” should decide how much it values various goods and services is to say that individual decisions on these matters should be superseded by collective decisions made by political surrogates. But to say this openly would require some persuasive reasons why collective decisions are better than individual decisions and why third parties are better judges than those who are making their own trade-offs at their own expense.
Again, no one would seriously entertain such an arrogant and presumptuous goal, if presented openly, plainly, and honestly. They may, however, be led in that direction if the anointed are able to slip undetected back and forth between one definition of “distribution” and another, as the exigencies of the argument require.
A whole family of self-flattering words serves as benedictions for the vision of the anointed. “Progress” and “progressive” are prominent examples. But everyone is for “progress,” by definition. They differ only on specifics, though these differences may be extreme and even violent. Words like “progress” or “progressive” preempt these specific issues by arbitrarily assuming the differential desirability of one’s own preferred changes, without having to debate substance—or even acknowledge its relevance.
Conversely, others’ beliefs or behavior can be verbally put under a cloud by arbitrary labels that substitute for substance. Anyone who has examined and rejected some particular proposition favored by the anointed is often said to have “dismissed” this proposition. No matter how much time, meticulous attention, voluminous evidence, or detailed analysis went into the conclusion reached, it becomes a “dismissal” if it ends up rejecting part of the vision of the anointed. Thus anyone who concludes that racial discrimination, for example, explains less of the intergroup differences in income among racial or ethnic groups than is commonly supposed will be said to have “dismissed” discrimination as a factor, no matter how extensive the data or history examined before reaching that conclusion. This usage of the word “dismiss” is very common in book reviews,44 for example, and serves as a substitute for confronting the arguments in books which challenge some aspect of the vision of the anointed. It preempts the very possibility that there is anything to argue about.
One of the most common benedictions of the anointed is the use of the word “science” to describe notions which are consonant with their vision, but which have neither the certainty nor the intellectual rigor of science. Thus the speculations of sociologists, psychologists, and psychiatrists became part of the criminal justice system under the guise of “science.” In the landmark Durham case of 1954, which expanded the insanity defense for criminals, Chief Judge Bazelon spoke of “the science of psychiatry,”45 of “relevant scientific disciplines” in general,46 and of “scientific knowledge” which supposedly vitiated the previous test of whether the criminal was sane enough to tell right from wrong.47 Justice William J. Brennan likewise spoke of “experts in the behavioral sciences” and of opening “the doors of the nation’s courts to the insights of the social sciences.”48 He also applied the medical concept of “etiology” to crime—to be revealed by anthropologists, social workers, and the like.49 To allow such people to deflect punishment from criminals with theories was equated by Judge Bazelon with opening “the legal process to the widest possible array of information.”50
The notion of judging criminals after seeking “information from any and all sources about their lives”51 ignores or disregards the obvious fact that only those with mitigating or exculpatory testimony have any real incentives to present such “information.” Relatives, friends, and criminal associates have such incentives. But why should those neighbors, teachers, or others with firsthand knowledge contradicting such “information” be expected to step forward and needlessly subject themselves to the prospect of retaliation? Nor is the “expert” testimony of “social scientists” any less likely to be asymmetrical. Numerous studies of the ideological leanings of intellectuals show them clearly in the camp of those with the vision of the anointed, in which punishment is decried. Why should the speculations of those with the vision of the anointed supersede the penalties prescribed by laws passed by elected officials? That question is evaded by calling those speculations “science.”
The most important characteristic of science—empirical verification—is often omitted entirely by those with the vision of the anointed. Indeed, much of their verbal dexterity goes into evading empirical evidence. The crowning irony is that no empirical data are collected or sought as to how often these “scientists” are wrong. A psychiatrist or psychologist whose testimony has freed a hundred criminals, who have committed dozens of violent crimes after being released, will be listened to the one hundred and first time with no record available as to how much havoc he has already contributed to. Nothing could be less scientific.
One of the incidental examples of “scientific” puffery is widespread use of the term “parameters” to mean boundaries, rather than its actual meaning in mathematical equations. What are usually called “parameters” in discussions of social policies could more accurately be called perimeters. But of course that would not foster the illusion of “science.”
In addition to particular words and phrases which betray the mindset of those with the prevailing vision, there is a more general tendency toward verbal inflation among the anointed. Thus the ordinary vicissitudes of life become “traumas.” Any situation which they wish to change becomes a “crisis,” regardless of whether it is any worse than usual or is already getting better on its own.
Verbal inflation, like monetary inflation, would have no effect if everyone understood what was happening and could adjust to it immediately. A ten-fold increase in the price level would mean nothing if everyone were free to add a zero to the sums in all contracts, laws, cash on hand, etc., and did so immediately. Inflation has an economic effect precisely because there is no such instantaneous and total flexibility. In the real world of lagging adjustments, borrowers pay back less than they owe, workers are paid less than they were promised, and the government cheats its way out of part of the national debt by paying it off in dollars that are worth less than the dollars that were borrowed. Verbal inflation likewise enables some people to cheat others. When “harassment,” “discrimination,” or even “rape” are redefined to include things going far beyond the original meanings of these words, there would be no real change if everyone understood what the inflated words now mean and neither social stigmas nor the penalties of the laws applied to the vast range of new things encompassed by these new meanings.
In both cases, runaway inflation is not just a zero-sum game. Monetary inflation not only redistributes benefits but can also reduce the sum total of those benefits, by undermining the credibility of the monetary unit and with it undermining the predictability of the whole system of which it is part, causing the economy to be less productive as people restrict what they do and plan, in order to avoid vastly increased risks. For similar reasons, human relations suffer when the verbal common currency of social interaction loses its meaning and predictability, so that people now protect themselves from new risks by various ways of withdrawing from one another and reducing their cooperation. For example, where mere statistics are enough to enmesh an employer in costly litigation over an inflated meaning of “discrimination,” locations some distance from concentrations of minority workers become more attractive as sites for factories and offices. This works to the detriment of the very minority workers for whom this inflated meaning was created. It also works to the detriment of the economy as a whole, as resources are no longer used where they would be most productive in the absence of the vast new uncertainties created by inflated words. Some other inflated words—“homophobia,” “violence,” and “hopelessness”—are worth a closer look.
Writers who have written for years, or even decades, without ever mentioning homosexuals have been denounced for “homophobia” because they began to write about the subject after the AIDS epidemic appeared—and did not take the “politically correct” position on the issues. How can someone have a “phobia” about something he has scarcely noticed? Many people never knew or cared what homosexuals were doing, until it became a danger to them as a result of the AIDS epidemic. Whether those people’s reactions were right or wrong is something that can be debated. But attributing their position to a “phobia” is circular reasoning, when there is no evidence of any such phobia other than the position itself. Like so much in the vocabulary of the anointed, it is a way of avoiding substantive debate.
Among the writers who took non–“politically correct” positions on AIDS was the late Randy Shilts, whose best-selling book And the Band Played On52 is a chilling exploration of the political irresponsibility, based on fears of offending the organized gay lobby, that led to thousands of unnecessary deaths before the most elementary public health measures were taken to reduce the spread of AIDS. No doubt he too would have been called “homophobic” if he were not himself an avowed homosexual who later died of AIDS.
One of the fashionable inflationary words of our times is “violence”—used to describe whatever social circumstances or political policies one disagrees with, however peaceful such circumstances or policies may be in the ordinary usage of words. Thus any “power that oppresses” is violence, according to some,53 which opens up boundless vistas, based only on what one chooses to call oppression.
Jesse Jackson refers to “economic violence,”54 Ralph Nader refers to “violence” done to the environment by corporations and government,55 and Jonathan Kozol refers to “savage inequalities” in public school financing.56 Similarly, Professor Kenneth B. Clark responded to public concerns about muggings by referring to “pervasive social muggings” such as “the crimes of deteriorating neighborhoods, job discrimination and criminally inferior education.” Thus Professor Clark could speak of “mugged communities,” “mugged neighborhoods,” and “mugged schools which spawn urban ‘muggers.’”57
For some, figurative “violence” serves as an explicit justification of real violence or “counterviolence” as it is called.58 For others, the justification is only implicit. Still others are just practicing the politics of verbal inflation.
One of the inflated words that plays a key role in promoting the vision of the anointed and the social policies based on it is “hopelessness.” Unhappy social circumstances are almost automatically described in this way, with neither evidence nor a demand for evidence, nor even a sign of awareness that evidence might be relevant. Political rhetoric abounds with many empirically unverifiable assertions that “hopelessness” exists among the poor—or would, in the absence of government social programs. Media figure Hodding Carter III used such “hopelessness” as a justification for the “war on poverty” programs of the Johnson administration in which he served.59 New York Times columnist Tom Wicker likewise claimed that “Americans were given hope” by the Johnson administration programs.60
In the absence of any evidence that such widespread hopelessness existed outside the vision of the anointed, it may be useful to look at history. Tens of millions of immigrants came to the United States, often beginning in destitution and rising up the socioeconomic ladder, in the process creating and celebrating “the American dream.” Far from being hopeless, such immigrants, with their enthusiastic letters back to their relatives and friends in Europe, kept more millions crossing the Atlantic in their wake.61 More recently, as already noted, both poverty and dependency were declining for years prior to the Johnson administration’s “war on poverty.” Black income was rising, not only absolutely but relative to rising white income.62 In the five years prior to passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, blacks were rising into professional and other high-level positions at a rate greater than in the five years following passage of the Act.63 Nationwide, Scholastic Aptitude Test scores were rising, venereal diseases were declining sharply, and the murder rate was at an all-time low. This was the “hopelessness” from which the anointed came to rescue us.