Is Reality Optional?

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The following is from Thomas Sowell. Is Reality Optional? pp. 3 - 4.

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Is Reality Optional?

WHEN NINETEENTH-CENTURY WRITER AND LECTURER MARGARET FULLER proclaimed, "I accept the universe!" Carlyle's response was: "By God, she had better."

Now, a hundred years later, people who don't accept the universe are not only numerous but are also leading numerous political crusades.

The reality of limited resources and the painful trade-offs they imply are just so many lame excuses, as far as the environmental extremists or the Naderite safety fanatics are concerned. The very idea of taking economic constraints into account when human life is involved is scorned as morally unworthy. Yet a society's economic level is a major determinant of a people's longevity.

Big earthquakes in California do not kill as many people as smaller earthquakes do in Turkey or Iran, simply because the economic resources available in California permit buildings to be built to more earthquake-resistant standards.

If safety fanatics are allowed to kill the goose that lays the golden egg, that can also kill people. Already safety crusades are cracking down on the "pollution" of waterways involving traces of chemicals more minute than those found in tap water, sodas, beer, or even Perrier or Evian water. How much standard of living—which includes medical care—are we prepared to sacrifice in order to eliminate ever more remote dangers?

Even to ask such a question requires accepting the reality of economic constraints—and the trade-offs this implies. But those for whom indignation has become a way of life reject economics as readily as they reject history, geography, or anything else which implies that they cannot "have it all." Widespread use of the word "perceptions" is only one symptom of the notion that everything depends on how you choose to look at it.

It is almost as if the universe is optional.

Even the trade-off involved with a working mother has been waved aside with a phrase like "quality time," suggesting that the quantity of time lost between mother and child can be made up later by the quality. But when a child is frantic and sobbing at 10:30 Monday morning, that is when he needs his mother—and a trip to the zoo next Saturday is not going to make it up.

Those who promoted the banning of DDT and other pesticides, in order to eliminate the dangers created by residues, seldom take responsibility for the resurgence of malaria that followed.

If a trade-off has to be made, we can at least have the moral courage to face it, instead of kidding ourselves with words. Yet the intelligentsia go around saying things like "It's not a question of either/or," and using phrases like "win, win."

No part of reality is more intractable than geography, or more oblivious to our desires for equality. The peoples of the Himalayas have never had an equal opportunity to become great seafarers. The continent of Europe has virtually every conceivable geographical advantage over the continent of Africa, from navigable waterways to fertile soils to a more favorable climate and topography.

Yet neither geography nor economics nor even history are accepted as realities beyond our control. It might seem obvious that the past is an irrevocable reality, which our current wishes or perceptions cannot change. But that is not how many of our contemporaries look at it.

Any group whose past has not provided them with as many heroes, cultural contributions, or other glories as some other group's past now has a grievance against those who write history. Apparently a past to your liking has become an entitlement.

It is not even considered necessary to demonstrate any reality before claiming that a group's current "under-representation" in history books shows "exclusion" or "bias." Many of those who argue this way also loudly proclaim the many injustices suffered by the various under-represented groups. Yet, somehow, these pervasive injustices are not regarded as having inhibited the achievements of those who suffered them. Such is the self-contradictory vision of the multiculturalists.

In a universe without inherent constraints, there will obviously be "solutions" which depend only on our subjective "commitment," "compassion," and other feelings. Conversely, our failure to "solve" these "problems" shows only that most of us are just not as wise or as noble as the morally anointed who talk this way. There is absolutely no sense of the tragedy of the human condition among zealots.

Very few problems can or should be solved, in the sense of wiping out every vestige of them—not even crime or disease. Would anyone really spend half the Gross National Product to wipe out the last vestige of shop-lifting, or every minor skin rash?

The universe does not need our acceptance. Only our own well-being and survival depend on it.

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13 May 2024