The real truth behind the pretense of the Left

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In the following Thomas Sowell explores what the modern Left is really all about as opposed to what it pretends to be about.

At bottom the modern liberals are Marxists / socialists. They are idealistic dreamers clinging to the beliefs of Marxism / Socialism. In spite of the way these ideas have been discredited in Russia, China and other countries around the world they stubbornly cling to ideological beliefs they were raised to believe in. They hate capitalism, hate our system, and want to bring it down. Pretending to have great concern for the poor and minorities they present themselves as moral authorities, angels, and accusers of our system. Their real object is to criticize, denigrate our system.

The liberals want to create discontent, anger, hatred, havoc, chaos. They want to divide us, splinter us, turn one group against another. In midst of social chaos they hope to be able to get a popular vote that would topple our system.

The following is from Thomas Sowell. Intellectuals and Society. pp. 179 - 185

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To understand intellectuals’ role in society, we must look beyond their rhetoric, or that of their critics, to the reality of their revealed preferences.

How can we tell what anyone’s goals and priorities are? One way might be to pay attention to what they say. But of course outward words do not always accurately reflect inward thoughts. Moreover, even the thoughts which people articulate to themselves need not reflect their actual behavior pattern. Goals, preferences and priorities articulated either inwardly or outwardly need not be consistent with the choices actually made when confronted with the options presented in the real world. A man may claim or believe that keeping the lawn mowed is more important than watching television but, if he is found spending hours in front of the TV screen, day in and day out for weeks on end, while weeds and tall grass take over the lawn, then the preferences revealed by his behavior are a more accurate indicator of that individual’s priorities than either his expressed words or whatever beliefs he may have about himself.

What preferences are revealed by the actual behavior of intellectuals — especially in their social crusades — and how do such revealed preferences compare with their rhetoric? The professed beliefs of intellectuals center about their concern for others — especially for the poor, for minorities, for “social justice”, and for protecting endangered species and saving the environment, for example. Their rhetoric is too familiar and too pervasive to require elaboration here. The real question, however, is: What are their revealed preferences?

The phrase “unintended consequences” has become a cliche precisely because so many policies and programs intended, for example, to better the situation of the less fortunate have in fact made their situation worse, that it is no longer possible to regard good intentions as automatic harbingers of good results. Anyone whose primary concern is in improving the lot of the less fortunate would therefore, by this time, after decades of experience with negative “unintended consequences,” see a need not only to invest time and efforts to turn good intentions into policies and programs, but also to invest time and efforts afterwards into trying to ferret out answers as to what the actual consequences of those policies and programs have been.

Moreover, anyone whose primary concern was improving the lot of the less fortunate would also be alert and receptive to other factors from beyond the vision of the intellectuals, when those other factors have been found empirically to have helped advance the well-being of the less fortunate, even if in ways not contemplated by the intelligentsia and even if in ways counter to the beliefs or visions of the intelligentsia.

In short, one of the ways to test whether expressed concerns for the well-being of the less fortunate represent primarily a concern for that well-being or a use of the less fortunate as a means to condemn society, or to seek either political or moral authority over society — to be on the side of the angels against the forces of evil — would be to see the revealed preferences of intellectuals in terms of how much time and energy they invest in scrutinizing (1) the actual consequences of things done in the name of that vision and (2) benefits to the less fortunate created outside the vision and even counter to that vision.

Crusaders for a “living wage” or to end “sweatshop labor” in the Third World, for example, may invest great amounts of time and energy promoting those goals but virtually none in scrutinizing the many studies done in countries around the world to discover the actual consequences of minimum wage laws in general or of “living wage’ laws in particular. These consequences have included such things as higher levels of unemployment and longer periods of unemployment, especially for the least skilled and least experienced segments of the population. Whether one agrees with or disputes these studies, the crucial question here is whether one bothers to read them at all.

If the real purpose of social crusades is to make the less fortunate better off, then the actual consequences of such policies as wage control become central and require investigation, in order to avoid “unintended consequences” which have already become widely recognized in the context of many other policies. But if the real purpose of social crusades is to proclaim oneself to be on the side of the angels, then such investigations have a low priority, if any priority at all, since the goal of being on the side of the angels is accomplished when the policies have been advocated and then instituted, after which social crusaders can move on to other issues. The revealed preference of many, if not most, of the intelligentsia has been to be on the side of the angels.

The same conclusion is hard to avoid when looking at the response of intellectuals to improvements in the condition of the poor that follow policies or circumstances which offer no opportunities to be on the side of the angels. For example, under new economic policies beginning in the 1990s, tens of millions of people in India have risen above that country’s official poverty level. In China under similar policies begun earlier, a million people a month have risen out of poverty. Surely anyone concerned with the fate of the less fortunate would want to know how this desirable development came about for such vast numbers of very poor people — and therefore how similar improvements might be produced elsewhere in the world. But these and other dramatic increases in living standards, based ultimately on the production of more wealth, arouse little or no interest among intellectuals.

However important for the poor, these developments offer no opportunities for the intelligentsia to be on the side of the angels against the forces of evil — and that is what their revealed preferences show repeatedly to be their real priority. Questions about what policies or conditions increase or decrease the rate of growth of output seldom arouse the interest of most intellectuals, even though such changes have done more to reduce poverty — in both rich and poor countries — than changes in the distribution of income have done. French writer Raymond Aron has suggested that achieving the ostensible goals of the left without using the methods favored by the left actually provokes resentments:

In fact the European Left has a grudge against the United States mainly because the later has succeeded by means which were not laid down in the revolutionary code. Prosperity, power, the tendency towards uniformity of economic conditions — these results have been achieved by private initiative, by competition rather than State intervention, in other words by capitalism, which every well-brought-up intellectual has been taught to despise.

Similarly, despite decades of laments in the United States about the poor quality of education in most black schools, studies of particular schools where black students meet or exceed national norms arouse little or no interest among most intellectuals, even those who are active in discussions of racial issues. As with people rising out of poverty in Third World countries, lack of interest in academically successful black schools by people who are otherwise vocal and vehement on racial issues suggests a revealed preference for the condemnation of unsuccessful schools and of the society that maintains such schools. Investigating successful black schools could offer hope of finding a possible source of knowledge and insights into how to improve education for a group often lagging far behind in educational achievement and in the incomes and occupations that depend on education. But it would not offer an opportunity for the anointed to be on the side of the angels against the forces of evil.

That many, if not most, of these successful black schools do not follow educational notions in vogue among the intelligentsia may be part of the reason for the lack of interest in such schools, just as the lack of interest in how India and China managed to raise the living standards of many millions of poor people may be in part because it was done by moving away from the kinds of economic policies long favored by the left.

It has often been said that intellectuals on the left are “soft on criminals” but, even here, the question is whether those people accused of crime or convicted and in prison are the real objects of intellectuals’ concern or are incidental props in a larger picture — and expendable like others who are used as props. For example, one of the horrific experiences of many men in prison is being gang raped by other male prisoners. Yet any attempt reduce the incidence of such lasting traumatic experiences by building more prisons, so that each prisoner could be housed alone in a single cell, is bitterly opposed by the same people who are vehement in defense of prisoners’ “rights”. Those rights matter as a means of condemning “society” but so does opposition to the building of more prisons. When the actual well-being of prisoners conflicts with the symbolic issue of preventing more prisons from being built, prisoners become just another sacrifice on the altar to a vision.

In many ways, on a whole range of issues, the revealed preference of intellectuals is to gain moral authority — or, vicariously, political power — or both, over the rest of society. The desires or interests of the ostensible beneficiaries of that political power — whether the poor, minorities, or criminals in prison — are seldom allowed to outweigh the more fundamental issue of gaining and maintaining the moral hegemony of the anointed.

One of the sources of the credibility and influence of intellectuals with the vision of the anointed is that they are often seen as people promoting the interests of the less fortunate, rather than people promoting their own financial interest. But financial self-interests are by no means the only self-interests, nor necessarily the most dangerous self-interests. As T. S. Eliot put it:

Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm — but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.

Few things illustrate the heedlessness of social crusades so plainly or so painfully as the consequences of the worldwide environmentalist crusade to ban the insecticide DDT, on grounds of its adverse effects on some birds’ eggs — leading to the melodramatic title of Rachel Carson’s best-selling book, Silent Spring, silent presumably because of the extinction of song birds.

But, whatever harm that DDT might do to the reproduction rates of some birds, it had a very dramatic effect in reducing the incidence of lethal malaria among human beings, by killing the mosquitoes which transmit that disease. For example, before the use of DDT on a mass scale was first used in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in 1946, there was an average of more than 40,000 cases of malaria annually in Ceylon in the years from 1937 through 1945. But after the introduction of DDT, the number of cases of malaria there was cut by more than three-quarters by 1949, was under a thousand by 1955, and was in single digits by 1960.

There were similarly steep reductions in the incidence of malaria in other tropical and sub-tropical countries, saving vast numbers of lives around the world. Conversely, after the political success of the anti-DDT crusade by environmentalists, the banning of this insecticide was followed by a resurgence of malaria, taking millions of lives, even in countries where the disease had been all but eradicated. Rachel Carson may have been responsible for more deaths of human beings than anyone without an army. Yet she remains a revered figure among environmental crusaders.

The point here is not that one particular crusade had catastrophic effects but that the crusading spirit of those with the vision of the anointed makes effects on others less important than the self-exaltation of the crusaders. The idea that crusaders “don’t mean to do harm — but the harm does not interest them,” when they are “absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves” applies far beyond any particular social crusade.

This preoccupation with self-exaltation was perhaps epitomized in the greeting of a Yale law school dean to incoming students as “Citizens of the republic of conscience,” saying, “We are not just a law school of professional excellence; we are an intellectual community of high moral purpose.” In other words, the students were not just simply entering an institution designed to teach legal principles, they were joining those who were on the side of the angels.

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13 Jan 2024