In the fifth John Bonython Lecture, Thomas Sowell argues that public life in Western countries is blighted by an ‘unconstrained vision’ of man and society. This vision treats all social evils as curable: all we need is knowledge of their ‘root causes’ and the will to adopt the appropriate public policies. In reality, such efforts usually worsen the problems they are meant to solve. But these failures typically form the basis of demands for yet more public money to be spent on investigating and curing them. This futile social activism leads eventually to widespread demoralisation and reduces the legitimacy and effectiveness of social institutions.
The ‘constrained visions’, in contrast, accepts that evil is an ineradicable ingredient of the human condition. It recognises that the best that can be done is to contain and limit social problems by traditional means, including, where appropriate, punishment and deterrence. Nowhere is this approach more urgently needed than in the search for world peace. The prevailing belief that peace can be secured by disarmament and international treaties stems from an ‘unconstrained vision’ of human nature and risks repeating the disastrous policies of pacifism and appeasement followed by the democracies in the 1930s.
(Excerpt)
In a sense, freedom is always endangered. If history shows the repeated strivings of human beings for freedom, it also shows a constant striving for power over other people — whether by bureaucrats over an economy, violent criminals over their victims, or totalitarian dictators over every aspect of life. But the threats to freedom in our times are more specific and more immediate. Both the internal and the external dangers to freedom derive from a particular vision of man.
There are as many different visions of the world as there are human beings — perhaps more, for we sometimes change our visions over a lifetime. But most of these individual visions are variations on two major visions which have struggled for supremacy in the Western world for more than two centuries. I call them the constrained vision and the unconstrained vision. These two visions have sometimes been equated with the political left and the political right.
But the left-right dichotomy itself is misleading. Only the left is defined, even approximately. All those who oppose the left, for whatever reason, are lumped together as ‘the right’, however radically they may differ among themselves. Opponents of the left include monarchists and democrats, libertarians and fascists. They share no common assumptions or values. Therefore the dichotomy that lumps them together as ‘the right’ is a false dichotomy.
By contrast, the dichotomy between the constrained vision and the unconstrained vision reflects a specific set of underlying assumptions about man, about society, and about social causation. There are, of course, differences among those individuals within the general tradition of each vision, but these are differences of degree, in a sense in which it is not true that the differences between fascists and libertarians are differences of
degree.
A Conflict Of Visions
What are the visions and why are they important? Visions are an image of reality in our minds — our sense of what the facts are and how causation operates. These visions are important because even the most knowledgeable individuals are grossly ignorant — and necessarily so— over vast regions of a complex society and a complex set of international relations. Visions not only substitute for knowledge; they also determine how the relatively few hard facts that we do know are fitted into some general framework.
Visions not only affect our explanations of the world around us; they determine what it is that we think needs explaining. When some social thinkers say that we must seek the ‘root causes’ of crime, or the ‘root causes’ of terrorism and war, if we are to solve these problems, they are expressing the unconstrained vision. In that vision, there are no inherent reasons why such evils exist and it is only a question of finding the proper philosophy and the proper leaders in order to banish them entirely. But when others say that crime can only be deterred — restrained but not eliminated — by punishment, and terrorism and war deterred by the threat of retaliation, they are expressing the opposite vision, the constrained vision, in which there are no solutions but only trade-offs, in which we must resort to unpleasant expedients to avoid even greater tragedies.
Historically, when the French Revolution created a government with virtually unlimited powers, in order to seek the general good and carry out the general will, it was expressing the unconstrained vision of man. But when the American Revolution created a government whose actions were hemmed in on all sides by checks and balances, it expressed the constrained vision of man as a creature whose talents and ideals could be used beneficially but whose dangerous shortcomings and evils had to be guarded against at all times. The Federalists, who wrote in justification of the US constitution that they helped shape, were quite aware that it embodied a particular vision of man. They said:
It may be a reflection on human nature that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?
They asked: “Why has government been instituted at all?’ And they answered: “Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.’ Without this constrained vision of man, the whole concept of limited government made no sense. To Condorcet, one of the intellectual godfathers of the French Revolution, the American constitution indeed made no sense. He saw no need for what he called ‘overcomplicated’ government machinery to ‘weigh upon the people’, thwarting or delaying the fulfilment of their wishes through the ‘inertia’ produced by the ‘counterweights’ of government with checks and balances.
Condorcet never accepted the idea of constitutionally limited government, not even when the French Revolution took a direction he did not like, not even when he himself was thrown into prison by the arbitrary powers of government. He continued to write impassioned criticisms of the concept of limited government in the dungeon in which he spent his last days. Condorcet’s thinking represented not only a particular vision, but also the power of a vision — its ability to defy hard facts and ignore harsh realities all around.
The particular vision he espoused, the unconstrained vision, is now the prevailing vision of our time in the Western world — and the central threat to its freedom, both internally and externally.
