The Vision of the Anointed

...As Sowell notes, what makes this vision dangerous is not only its substance but also the fact that it is "the prevailing vision—which means that its assumptions are so much taken for granted...

...Seldom," he concludes, "have so few cost so much to so many...

...consumer advocate" Ralph Nader is a virtucrat, as in their unmodest fashion are members of Greenpeace, the anti-fur brigade, militant vegetarians, Jane Fonda, and former New York Times columnist Anna Quindlen...

...T he war on poverty exhibited to perfection the pattern that Sowell discerns in the policies promulgated by the anointed...

...Since Sowell aims to compare thebenefits that the anointed promise with "the grim and often bitter consequences" of their political and judicial decisions, it is hardly surprising that his book is a study in contrasts...

...Concocted by cadres of liberal elites, the war on poverty was a moralistic crusade that began by grossly overstating the problem in order to whip up a virtucratic fervor among the susceptible...

...No practicing Christian, for example, can in the end subscribe to a tragic view, but Sowell is surely correct that the vapid optimism of the anointed must be challenged...

...Consider the war on poverty, an archetypical instance of the kind of thing Sowell has in mind...

...And as for dealing with urban violence, we all remember Watts and the kindred spectacles that raged across our cities and college campuses in the 1960s and early 1970s...

...One particularly instructive precedent is the 76 The American Spectator October 1995 virtue-mania of Jean-Jacques Rousseau...

...If it were not a calumny on Plato, one could The American Spectator October 1995 75 call Hillary Clinton—remember her speech about the "politics of meaning"?—the Platonic Form of the contemporary political virtucrat...

...In 1960, the number of people below the poverty line was half what it was in 1950...

...Its announced goal was not only to relieve poverty but also to quell urban violence and increase the social and economic independence of its intended beneficiaries...

...There is also the recent history of publicly funded sex education...

...Sowell, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, will be familiar to many readers as the author of Race and Culture, among other books, and as a syndicated columnist whose incisive commentary on social issues is a breath of fresh air...

...A good deal of this book is devoted to anatomizing such particulars...

...n the largest sense, The Vision of the Anointed is a book about the perils of ideology—those dazzling intellectual-moral constructions that seduce the unwary into ignoring the way the world works for the sake of dreams about the way it must...

...A virtucrat (the term, I believe, was coined by the writer Joseph Epstein) is someone who combines smarminess, moralism, and an incurable compulsion to meddle in other peoples' affairs...

...As always, Sowell's analysis is well informed and displays a great deal of that increasingly uncommon quality, common sense...

...and he provides a rough inventory of the kinds of groups and issues that have attracted the sympathy and support of the policy elite...

...In 1961, the murder rate was half what it was in 1933...

...Sowell notes that its distinctive hubris has many historical precedents...

...THE VISION OF THE ANOINTED: SELF-CONGRATULATION AS A BASIS FOR SOCIAL POLICY Thomas Sowell Basic Books/ 305 pages /$25 reviewed by ROGER KIMBALL T homas Sowell's new book might be called "Adventures Among the Virtucrats...

...he shows how the Manichaean vision of the anointed demands that their political opponents be demonized and denounced rather than debated...

...The third—and in some ways most dismaying—step comes when things go wrong, as they inevitably do...

...His discussion is perhaps overly schematic—the opposition of "the anointed" and their bête noir, "the benighted," is rather too bluntly put forth—and there is a fondness for passive constructions and sociologese that will not be to everyone's taste...

...L ike so many odious plagues on contemporary American society, the ideology of the anointed is largely a product of the peculiarly narcissistic radicalism of the 1960s—not that the 1960s have a monopoly on this species of existential folly, of course...

...Robespierre had ways of dealing with such obstreperous people, as did the followers of Karl Marx in our own century...

...Designed to bring liberation as well as lower rates of illegitimacy and venereal disease, this campaign has seen pregnancy rates, abortions, and gonorrhea (to take just one malady) skyrocket among teenagers...

...Between 1960 and 1976, a citizen's chance of being the victim of a violent crime tripled...

...Sowell shows in meticulous detail that the vision of the anointed is a blinkered one that does not so much exclude as refuse to register anything that conflicts with the dictates of its preordained program...

...Sowell revisits the follies of "Teflon prophets" like John Kenneth Galbraith and the neoMalthusean crank Paul Ehrlich, whose reputations seem impervious to repeated failure...

...The first step is to describe—or, if need be, to manufacture—a crisis that can be cast in moral as well as pragmatic terms...

...Sowell allows that the contrast he draws between the anointed and the benighted is also a contrast between a Burkean conservatism that stresses the limits of human perfectibility and those many ideologies that see nothing standing in the way of human progress—except, that is, the interests of recalcitrant individuals...

...Likewise with the issue of criminal justice...

...By 1974, the murder rate was more than twice what it had been in 1961...

...Indeed, empirical evidence itself may be viewed as suspect, insofar as it is inconsistent with that vision...

...It has happened again and again and again...

...They fought to make prosecution more onerous, convictions harder to obtain, and sentencing more lenient...

...Nevertheless, in the early sixties, the anointed discerned a "crisis" in the criminal justice system...

...Another way of putting it would be to say that the vision of the anointed is a perversion of idealism...

...The anointed, instead of adjusting to the evidence, adjust the evidence...

...In The Vision of the Anointed, Sowell sets out to assess the damage done by virtucrats in the realm of social policy...

...But Sowell has grasped an important truth about the political deformation of our times, and in nine chapters he has assembled a grimly eloquent dossier of examples to support his argument...

...Indeed, what is most remarkable is the very predictability of the scenario...

...Hence its contempt for empirical argument: What do mere facts matter when "idealistic" causes are at stake...

...In fact, it had the opposite effect...

...happy if, in the perilous career that an unprecedented revolution just opened before us, I remain constantly faithful to the inspirations I found in your texts...

...I am not sure that one need be quite so fatalistic...

...The second is to formulate policies that focus not on addressing specific, empirically verifiable problems but that offer global solutions to large, abstractly defined evils: Poverty writ large with a capital "P" rather than the concrete problems ofcertain individuals in particular communities...

...Between 1965 and 1974, government-provided benefits increased twenty-fold...

...The so-called Roger Kimball is the managing editor of the New Criterion and author of Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education (HarperCollins...

...that neither those assumptions nor their corollaries are generally confronted with demands for empirical evidence...

...You know the type...

...As Sowell notes, since all social theories are imperfect, the harm they do depends "not only on how far they differ from reality, but also on how readily they adjust to evidence...

...As Sowell shows, by the early 1960s poverty in the United States had been declining sharply for over a decade...

...It is a cautionary tale about the misery wrought by misguided moralists, "the anointed"—that is, "self-anointed"—of his title...

...Sowell proposes "the tragic view of life" as a more realistic alternative to the vision of the anointed...

...Among politicians Pat Schroeder and Ted Kennedy come readily to mind as echt virtucrats...

...And on and on...

...The result...

...In the first place, by involving the federal government in large-scale social welfare programs, the war on poverty further stripped people of their autonomy by making them more and more dependent on public handouts...

...I wish," Robespierre wrote in his "Dedication to Jean-Jacques Rousseau," "to follow your venerable footsteps...

...Whether the issue is crime, the integrity of the family, educational standards, poverty, the environment, sexual morality, or freedom of speech, the results are the same: The anointed promise us paradise and deliver squalor, disintegration, moralistic posturing, and social chaos...

...Admissions officers at most Ivy League schools today are by definition virtucrats, as is anyone who believes that "diversity" is an acceptable substitute for achievement...

...But between 1960 and 1974, the number of people receiving public assistance nearly doubled...

...It is no accident that Rousseau's infatuation with virtue—above all, his own virtue—inspired such notable "idealists" as Saint-Just and Robespierre...

...It is here that the vision of the anointed passes from mere ignorance and foolishness to the convolutions of bad faith and downright mendacity, as evidence of failure is not simply ignored but actively manipulated and distorted...