Anyone who has ever been in a Third World country, or even in a slum neighborhood at home, is likely to wonder why there can be such dire poverty among some people while others are prospering.
Both politicians and intellectuals have tended to have simple answers to that question, even if these simple answers have been different in different eras.
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A hundred years ago, the prevailing answer was that some people are innately and genetically inferior. Not only was this answer thundered from political platforms in redneck dialect by politicians in the Jim Crow South, the same message was delivered in cultured and lofty tones from academic podiums in the most prestigious colleges and universities across the country.
Nor was this unique to the United States. In Britain, a study of high-achieving families by Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, concluded that the reason for their achievements was genetic superiority. From there it was a short step to seeing various races as genetically superior and inferior.
More ominously, Galton saw those who were inferior as a drag on society that should be eliminated. As often happens when a big idea seizes the imagination of the intelligentsia, their strongest argument is that there is no argument — that “science” has already proved what they believe.
As Sir Francis Galton put it: “There exists a sentiment, for the most part quite unreasonable, against the gradual extinction of an inferior race.”
The idea that those with different views had only “sentiment” on their side, while he had science, was common among intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic.
Eugenics — a term Galton coined — became a crusading creed, and eugenics societies were set up by such stellar intellectuals as John Maynard Keynes, H. G. Wells, and George Bernard Shaw in England. In the United States, there were 376 courses devoted to eugenics in American colleges and universities in 1928.
By the end of the 20th century, the pendulum had swung to the opposite end of the spectrum. Now differences in achievements among classes, races, or the sexes were seen as being a result of discriminatory treatment. And, again, as with the intelligentsia of the Progressive era, those with different views were dismissed with a word — often “racist” now, as compared to “sentimental” in the earlier period. But in neither era were views different from the crusading creed of the day seriously engaged.
In our supposedly more enlightened time, it became dangerous even to express differing views on the subject on leading college and university campuses.
A fundamental question was seldom asked, in either the earlier or the later period: Was there ever any realistic reason to expect the same achievements among races, classes, or other subdivisions of the human species?
Could we really have expected Eskimos to have the same ability to grow pineapples as the people of Hawaii had? Could the Bedouins of the Sahara really know as much about fishing as the Polynesians of the Pacific? Could the people of the Himalayas have the same seafaring skills as people living in ports around the Mediterranean?
On a more general level, could people living in isolated mountain valleys realistically be expected to develop their own intellectual potential as fully as people living in cities that were international crossroads of commerce, cultures, and ideas from around the world?
When the Spaniards discovered the Canary Islands in the 15th century, they found people of a Caucasian race living at a Stone Age level. Isolation and backwardness have gone together in many parts of the world, regardless of the race of the people involved.
Historical happenstances — the fact that the Romans invaded Western Europe but not Eastern Europe, for example — left a legacy of written languages in Western Europe that people in Eastern Europe did not have until centuries later.
But the innumerable factors affecting human achievements are not only complex and hard to untangle, they offer neither politicians nor intellectuals the opportunity to simply be on the side of the angels against the forces of evil. Factors which present no opportunity to star in a moral melodrama have often been ignored in favor of factors that do.
I like the cut of your reflective jib Dr Sowell. Meta-narratives and melodrama obfuscate the all those messy little details that challenge whatever is deemed as conventional wisdom and creative thinking. History is a hard course to slog but then how else do we take the measure of humankind.
I remember a few years ago people saying there would never be another white world heavyweight champion - blacks were just "genetically superior" at boxing. Yet in recent years Maskaev, Chagaev, Valuev, Liakhovich, Klitschko, Povetkin etc have shown just how wrong those people were.
Likewise, people make the same claim about the 100m sprint. They say that "West African" genes make you faster. But this is also obviously wrong. Most of the champion sprinters are from the US and the Caribbean, where their West African genes have been watered down with plenty of others. Actual "pure" West Africans - e.g. from Ghana or Nigeria - don't have a particularly strong record at track.
What makes me curious (and what Mr. Sowell's books have answered in part) is why certain ethnic groups go into particular fields after they immigrate. China isn't known for well pressed suits. The Vietnamese don't all have perfect nails. Greeks don't eat out for every meal. Yet they come here and large numbers of them go into specific industries unrelated to the culture they came from. It's a strange kind of situational excellence, where (to use my grandfather as an example) an immigrant from a sheep infested village in the hills can get off a boat and within a few years have his very own diner. It makes no sense from the 'simple' point of view.
Greeks aren't genetically gifted, though a eugenicist could argue that all the ones who wanted to work more than six hours a day came here. There were no pro-Greek government set asides. If you correlate the wave of Italian immigrants with modern Mexican immigrants (began as migrant labor, self-segregating, Catholic, high birth rate, a public connection to organized crime, but without the penchant for political terrorism the Italians had) then the Greeks were the Salvadorans of the last century. Not exactly welcome into the WASP world. So where does that leave the simple answer?
The answer is simple. When your Greek grandfather came to the USA he had to find a job, create his own job, or starve to death. There were no food stamps, no free health care, no welfare. That plus the fact that your grandfather was genetically endowed with a work ethic made him succesfull. Today we have a President who believes that putting everybody on welfare "creates jobs".
Yes, just like the vast majority of current legal immigrants. But why did he gravitate to restaurants? Was it just a matter of the first Greek off the boat getting a job as a bottlewasher and word got back that the sinks were paved with gold? What causes a particular nationality to pile into one field when they emigrate? Some make sense - Scots moving to Appalachia, Swedes to Minnesota, for instance. It's just like home. But for Greeks to overrun Chicago and open restaurants makes no sense. The Vietnamese didn't collectively decide they wanted to come to America to sand foreign bunions and paint toes. But there they are, one nail shop per square mile. The Chinese didn't look at the first European visitors and conclude, "That doublet is too wrinkled."
I keep waiting for Mr. Sowell to produce a fourth 'Culture' book on this subject. Then I can try to explain to my daughter why she's compelled to create new sandwiches and market them to the public.
“The axels of tyranny are greased by the spittle of the short tongued” –Pell Roberts
American’s are woefully under informed and do not have the requisite fund of knowledge for critical decision making.
Wait I’m no elitist…there is nothing wrong with this knowledge gap… every citizen or elected official cannot be all knowing. That’s why we have a representative democracy. To elect those with the requisite knowledge and skill or the capacity to take counsel from those who do.
But when the public relies on 30 second clips, Oped pages or the vacuous and biased analysis of the MSM, the ability to choose effective decision makers is lost. This is the crux of our problem, we allow smooth and soothing sound-bytes of the short tongued to decide our fate. As the demagogues of Athens destroyed her from within, our ‘short-tongued’ savants will sacrifice our nation for their own self interest.
"Could we really have expected Eskimos to have the same ability to grow pineapples as the people of Hawaii had? Could the Bedouins of the Sahara really know as much about fishing as the Polynesians of the Pacific? Could the people of the Himalayas have the same seafaring skills as people living in ports around the Mediterranean?"
Dare I say that I might be as smart as Mr. Sowell? I doubt it, but I've had similar thoughts. People talk a lot about "intelligence" and it is easy to point to a "primitive tribe" and claim they are not and laugh because they don't know what a computer is.
But intelligence, to me, is relative to the society you live in. The most intelligent person in the Kalahari Bushmen tribe would be one who could find water and extract it, or find food and be a successful hunter, etc. The most intelligent person in America would be someone like Jobs or Gates or a physicist or rocket scientist or Thomas Sowell - someone who can navigate the best through OUR culture and OUR economy, etc. If we put Gates or some other highly intelligent American in the Kalahari desert with the Bushman, how long would they last? Unless they had survival training, probably not very long at all. And how long would the Bushman last sitting in an office in front of a computer. Not long, of course.
Does it mean that either person is "not intelligent". No. He's intelligent for the society he lives in and guaranteed both people could probably be taught to live in that other society and do just fine. That is what makes human beings so wonderful and successful as a species - we are adaptable. You can take a Kalahari Bushman baby and raise him in NYC and he'd be just fine. You could take a NYC baby and raise him with the Bushman and he'd be just fine. "Race" and even "culture" don't mean much to the mostly blank slate that is a human baby. We are not animals that are born knowing certain things because we belong to a certain species or a certain race or a certain culture. We learn and adapt.
I also remember learning in one of my anthropology classes in college about an island tribe that at one time had started to "advance" quite well, until another island tribe came to them asking for a particular item that was important to them, but that they could no longer find where they were. Well the first tribe said "sure, we have that" and instead of continuing to advance in the one direction, stayed more primitive because it was more lucrative to trade the item the second tribe was looking for.
Humankind is vast and complex. To think there will ever be one overriding reason why people as individuals or people as groups do things is hubris. I think the best place to start from is respect for human life, respect for individual life and go from there. And providing equal opportunity is an important part of that and American as been at the fore since its inception.
Some people don't want to work 60 hour weeks and make six figures at the expense of their family. Some people do. Some people are not "book learners" and others are. Neither set of my grandparents ever got past a 3rd grade education, but they were all a darn sight smarter than me in many ways.
