Is It Racist to Work Hard and Be Nice?

In A Conflict of Visions, Thomas Sowell, one of our preeminent public intellectuals, as well as the elder statesman of a diverse group of black intellectuals who decline to toe the line on “institutionalized racism,” contrasts two visions of human and societal potential — what he terms the “unconstrained vision” and the “constrained vision.” The unconstrained vision views man as essentially morally perfectible — perfection being chiefly defined by the intent to benefit others.

And because man is perfectible, so is human society. The perpetual evils of human life — poverty, war, and crime — in this view are aberrations, the product of foolish or immoral choices. Ibram X. Kendri’s claim that any differences in outcomes between groups can only be explained by “systemic racism” is a classic example of unconstrained thinking.

The unconstrained vision, developed by Enlightenment thinkers, supposes that indoctrinating people in the proper ethical principles, as determined by an elite already privy to those principles, will lead to justice, writes David Mikics in an excellent piece in Tablet magazine on Sowell’s thought, “The ‘Noble Lies’ of the New Race Politics.”

Proponents  of the constrained vision favor limited government and mechanisms that foster individual choice — e.g., free markets — as protection against the amassing of too much power in the hands of any individual or group. And its vision of social progress is incremental rather than based on some model of perfect justice.