Finished A Conflict of Visions, a MUST read

Finished reading before the election. I have thought about it every day since. Rarely does a book provoke real introspection and thought. The subtitle is “Ideological Origins of Political Struggles” and that is not even the half of it. What Sowell describes is the essential duality of man. We are the top of the food chain, the strongest on the planet, yet what makes us different from the other creatures is our ability to think and feel. We are two genders, man and woman. Strength and caring. Sowell lays out the case that our political ideological conflicts are very much related to our family and social structure and our fundamental assumptions about the nature of human beings. He also points out that we can waver from time to time. At times some things are more important than others. Sowell also makes the case that visions about humanity and the nature of man are MUCH more powerful political forces than specific policies. We saw this in spades in the last election. The facts didn’t matter as much as the visions of the state of the world and the nature of people in it. If you believed the world is a dangerous place with bad people in it, you probably voted for a strong leader (bush). If you believed the world was basically a good place and it was America’s mis-steps that made it dangerous and that if we just sat down and had tea with everyone it would be alright, you probably voted for Kerry. Here are some choice quotes:

There are two dominant visions of human nature: Constrained (Adam Smith, Alexander Hamilton) and Unconstrained (william Goodwin, Robespierre).

Social visions differ in their basic conceptions of the nature of man. The capacities and limitations of man are implicitly seen in radically different terms by those whose explicit philosophical, political, or social theories are built on different visions. Man’s moral and mental natures are seen so differently that their respective concepts of knowledge and of institutions necessarily differ as well.

The Constrained (American):

Instead of regarding man’s nature as something that could or should be changed, Smith attempted to determine how the moral and social benefits desired could be produced in the most efficient way, within that constraint. One of the hallmarks of the constrained vision is that it deals in trade-offs rather than solutions.

The unconstrained (French):

Goodwin regarded the intention to benefit others as being “of the essence of virtue,” and virtue in turn as being the road to human happiness. His was the unconstrained vision of human nature, in which man was capable of directly feeling other people’s needs as more important than his own, and therefore of consistently acting impartially, even when his own interests or those of his family were involved. Unlike Smith, who regarded human selfishness as a given, Godwin regarded it as being promoted by the very system of rewards used to cope with it. The real goal was the long-run development of a higher sense of social duty. The “hope of reward” and “fear of punishment” were, in Godwin’s vision, “wrong in themselves”. Given the unconstrained possibilities of man and nature, poverty or other sources of dissatisfaction could only be a result of evil intentions or blindness to solutions readily achievable by changing existing institutions.

More:

The two great revolutions in the eighteenth century - in France and in America - can be viewed as applications of these differing visions… The underlying premises of the French revolution more clearly reflected the unconstrained vision of man which prevailed among its leaders. The intellectual foundations of the American Revolution were more mixed,… Also including as a dominant influence on the Constitution, the classic constrained vision of man expressed in The Federalist Papers. Where Robespierre sought a solution, Hamilton a trade-off. The Constitution of the United States, with its elaborate checks and balances, clearly reflected the view that no one was ever to be completely trusted with power. This was in sharp contrast to the French Revolution, which gave sweeping powers, including the power of life and death, to all those who spoke in the name of “the people”, expressing the Rousseauean “general will”.

Which do you believe? Does it make sense why the French were against Iraq? Does it make sense that Kerry wanted a “world test” for foreign policy? Why this scared the Republicans so much?

Required reading.