The views of political commentators or writers on social issues often range across a wide spectrum, but their positions on these issues are seldom random. If they are liberal, conservative, or radical on foreign policy, they are likely to be the same on crime, abortion, or education. There is usually a coherence to their beliefs, based on a particular set of underlying assumptions about the world—a certain vision of reality.
Visions differ of course from person to person, from society to society, and from one era to another. Visions also compete with one another, whether for the allegiance of an individual or of a whole society. But in some eras one vision so predominates over all others that it can be considered the prevailing vision of that time and place. This is the current situation among the intelligentsia of the United States and much of the Western world, however much their vision may differ from the visions of most other people. Individual variations in applying this underlying vision do not change the fundamental fact that there is a particular framework of assumptions within which most contemporary social and political discourse takes place in the media, in academia, and in politics.
The rise of the mass media, mass politics, and massive government means that the beliefs which drive a relatively small group of articulate people have great leverage in determining the course taken by a whole society.
The analysis that follows is not only an examination of the vision of this elite intelligentsia and their numerous followers in the political arena and in the courtrooms, but is also an empirical comparison between the promised benefits of policies based on that vision and the grim and often bitter consequences of those political and judicial decisions. In short, the purpose is not simply to see what kind of world exists inside the minds of a self-anointed elite, but to see how that world affects the world of reality in terms as concrete as crime, family disintegration, and other crucial social phenomena of our times.
The immediacy of the issues involved only makes it more imperative to understand the past from which they came and the future toward which they lead. Many of the intellectual and political patterns analyzed here became dominant during the 1960s and many of the assumptions underlying today’s continuations of those trends were either expressed or implied during that decade. However, the historical roots of the currently prevailing vision go back much further, in some cases for centuries. Both the past and the present must be explored, in order to understand the vision of the anointed and its dangerous legacy for the future.
Thomas Sowell
Hoover Institution