Few figures in conservativism are more revered than Thomas Sowell. A free-market economist, social theorist and philosopher, Sowell’s work has spanned decades and influenced generations.
Sowell wrote a nationally syndicated column, authored dozens of books and dazzled television audiences time and time again with his common sense, anti-intellectual approach to political and cultural issues.
The following story is part of The Western Journal’s exclusive series “The Sowell Digest.” Each issue will break down and summarize one of Sowell’s many influential works.
At 93 years old, Thomas Sowell is still writing books.
His latest work — “Social Justice Fallacies” — dropped in June and became an instant New York Time bestseller.
In only 130 pages, the book distills many of Sowell’s best arguments and refutations of “social justice.”
He breaks down the most common arguments made by social justice warriors into four distinct categories of “fallacies” and then precedes to rhetorically eviscerate every single one.
Many successful conservative writers spend entire books parsing out many of the arguments that Sowell debunks just as effectively with only a few short lines.
If you want to know exactly why “social justice” is such a problem, you’ll want to read his book.
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For those interested, here’s a summary of the four main refutations Sowell provides within its pages.
‘Equal Chances’ Fallacies
Many on the left assume that if all things were fair, everyone would be equally represented in every area of life.
Therefore, when groups aren’t equally represented that means societal unfairness — racism, sexism or another form of discrimination — must be present.
For example, since men and women are both about 50 percent of the population, then half of our doctors, police, engineers, teachers, etc., should be men, and half should be women.
If that isn’t the case, according to the “equal chances” fallacies, then sexism is to blame.
Sowell summarizes this progressive view with a quote from Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who framed the idea as “the equality which nature established among men and the inequality which they have instituted among themselves.”
“In the kind of world envisioned by Rousseau, all classes, races and other subdivisions of the human species would have equal chances in all endeavors — other things being equal,” Sowell wrote in his new book’s first chapter. “But the more other things there are, influencing outcomes, the lower the chances of all those other things being equal.”
As Sowell demonstrates throughout the book’s first chapter, innumerable factors that have nothing to do with discrimination keep different groups from achieving equal representation in all areas of life.
Simply put, when liberals say “all things being equal,” the truth is those “other things” are never “equal.”
Factors that have nothing to do with discrimination — such as climate, environment, biological differences, birth order, age and group interests — keep individuals and groups from being equal.
Is it “human bias” that keeps Asians underrepresented and black people overrepresented in basketball, for example? Obviously not.
Basketball happens to be much more popular in African-American culture than it is in many Asian cultures.
Similarly, some cultures excel economically because of where their interests lie.
In other cases, cultures advanced because of their geography. Europeans advanced economically past the African nations not because of discrimination, but because of factors such as a much longer coastline that allowed them far more capability to trade and share knowledge and resources with others.
In short, leftists often cry “discrimination” and “bigotry” without ever looking into the reasons disparities exist.
If they did, as Sowell does in his book, they would find that discrimination often doesn’t even rank in the top 10 reasons two groups experience different outcomes.
Racial Fallacies
In the second chapter of “Social Justice Fallacies,” Sowell takes on a whole host of racial fallacies propagated by progressives.
Interestingly, he also goes to great lengths to note that the notion of genetic determinism — that some racial groups are genetically superior to others — was a notion propagated by early 20th-century progressives who believed in social justice.
Sowell goes as far as to note that progressives now believe in “systemic racism” (the racial twist on “equal chances” fallacies) in the very same way, and for the very same reasons, they once believed in white superiority.
“In the early decades of the twentieth century, when Progressivism was a major new force among American intellectuals and in politics, one of Progressivism’s central tenets was genetic determinism — the belief that less successful races were genetically inferior,” he wrote. “Later, in the closing decades of the twentieth century, Progressives with similar views on such other issues as the role of government, environmental protection and legal philosophy, now took an opposite view on racial issues.
“Less successful races were now seen as being automatically victims of racism, as they had once been considered automatically inferior. The conclusions were different, but the way evidence was used and the way contrary views and contrary evidence were disregarded, was very similar.
“Both sets of Progressives expressed utter certainty in their conclusions — on this and other subjects — and dismissed critics as uninformed at best, and confused or dishonest at worst.”
But in both cases, as it turns out, even the slightest stress test of these ideas causes them to implode.
Minorities with cultures that prioritized hard work and learning achieved similar success and IQ scores as those more well-represented in the population, completely dispelling genetic determinism.
Similarly, it has become clear that many groups not well-represented in the population have far exceeded the success of white people, the largest population in the U.S.
Take Asians for example, whose educational and economic outcomes as a whole far exceed the white population’s.
“Asian American data are almost invariably omitted, not only by the media, but even by academic scholars in elite universities. Such data would often present a serious challenge to the conclusions reached by latter-day progressives,” Sowell wrote.
“In the job market, for example, it has often been said that blacks are ‘the last hired and the first fired,’ when there are downturns in the economy. Black employees may in fact be terminated during an economic downturn, sooner or to a greater extent than white employees. But data also show that white employees are often let go before Asian American employees.
“Can this be attributed to racial discrimination against whites, by employers who were usually white themselves?”
Perhaps Sowell’s most biting bit of commentary on this subject comes later when he addresses exactly why certain black disparities exist — the breakdown of the black family, which began not after slavery but after the advent of progressive social welfare policies.
“[S]ince 1984, in no year has the annual poverty rate of black married-couple families been as high as 10 percent. … If black family poverty is caused by ‘systemic racism,’ do racists make an exception for blacks who are married?” he wrote.
Chess Pieces Fallacies
Sowell got the name for “chess pieces fallacies” from famed philosopher Adam Smith.
Smith would often deride social justice-supporting intellectuals who imagine they “can arrange the different members of our great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board.”
For example, socialists view the economy as something that can be controlled and tinkered with by a handful of intellectuals rather than what it is, an incredibly intricate system of forces far too complex for any one person to oversee.
Sowell makes two key arguments to refute this point.
First, intellectuals are often unequipped to deal with such grand systems and lack the knowledge to do so.
Second, governments don’t “arrange,” they “compel,” and any power given to intellectuals to “arrange” society comes at the high cost of personal freedom.
Knowledge Fallacies
In his fourth chapter, Sowell covers some of the ground he’s best known for from previous works such as “Conflict of Visions” and “Intellectuals and Society.”
Sowell calls out a fallacy many intellectuals fall into: the belief that complex knowledge acquired through years of study is always more consequential than knowledge acquired through far more mundane means.
As it turns out, while the expert with his master’s degree may have studied far harder and longer to acquire his degree in public health, he might not have all of the consequential knowledge needed to give proper guidance on how individuals and communities should respond to a pandemic.
As many of us are now painfully aware, such “experts” were seemingly unaware of the incredible social, spiritual and emotional long-term damage that comes with COVID-19 policies such as masking children.
The parents of those children, very few of whom had complex knowledge of public health, had the more consequential mundane knowledge of knowing the developmental consequences that would come with forcibly masking their children for hours on end.
Sowell gives many simple examples of the complex knowledge fallacy throughout the chapter.
“[T]he officers in charge of the Titanic no doubt had much complex knowledge about the intricacies of ships and navigation on the seas. But the most consequential knowledge on a particular night was the mundane knowledge of the location of particular icebergs,” he wrote.
“Stupid people can create problems, but it often takes brilliant people to create a real catastrophe,” Sowell said. “They have already done that enough times — and in enough different ways — for us to reconsider, before joining their latest stampedes, led by self-congratulatory elites, deaf to argument and immune to evidence.”
