I recall how stunned I was to read sections of this book one afternoon while browsing through a local Barnes and Noble. It seemed so transgressive in that ultra-liberal environment.
When I looked at the backleaf and found that the author --whom I'd never heard of-- was a Black man, I was surprised to hear these ideas from such a guy, and also surmised that this was why he had not been taken out and shot. I later learned that he had been a Marxist who'd been cured of that disease by working one summer for the Federal government and learning firsthand what a governmentally administered economy really looked like.
What he regards as axiomatic common sense remains, as he noted, politically controversial:
1. The impossible is not going to be achieved.
2. It is a waste of precious resources to try to achieve it.
3. The devastating costs and social dangers which go with these attempts to achieve the impossible should be taken into account.
As he says, the people who hold the vision of cosmic justice benefit far more from holding it --at least in their own eyes--than the people ever do whom it is supposed to benefit.
I still have the book. It crystallized a lot of my inchoate discontents and turned me fast and furiously to the Right. I later read his trilogy on culture seen through the lenses of race, migration and conquest. That, I fear, sealed my fate.
Thomas Sowell | Speech "The Quest for Cosmic Justice":
proponents of "social justice" are unduly modest. What they are seeking to correct are not merely the deficiencies of society, but of the cosmos. What they call social justice encompasses far more than any given society is causally responsible for. Crusaders for social justice seek to correct not merely the sins of man but the oversights of God or the accidents of history. What they are really seeking is a universe tailor-made to their vision of equality. They are seeking cosmic justice.
Bingo.
--
Good line from Dr Sowell during a question period, when someone asks him his opinion of X. "Compared to what?"
'via Blog this'
1 comment:
Hm. I don't really have a book that has had a similar effect on me. Maybe Jack D's "Androphilia," but I have yet to read it all the way through. But reading the excerpts confirmed to me that I could love men and still act like a man, and that I was not alone in that respect. It will be one of the first books I get when I move out.
-Sean
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