Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell (Jason C. Riley)
"Some of the biggest cases of mistaken identity are among intellectuals who have trouble remembering that they are not God"
I love Thomas Sowell. His scholarship depth and breadth is amazing. This book was okay; it is not really a biography. If you are familiar with Sowell's work (I have read 7 Sowell books including seminal classics such as "A Conflict of Visions" and "Knowledge and Decisions"), it is likely a lot of rehash. The book is worth a read for a handful of comments from author interviews with people who know Sowell and Sowell himself, as well as maybe less known newspaper column quotes and quotes from talk shows; Riley did his homework. After reading this, I will likely get to (at some point) "A Man of Letters" (letters Sowell wrote) and "A Personal Odyssey" (his memoir) as well as Sowell’s culture trilogy books. This book reveals little about Sowell himself other than the fact that he is (gasp) divorced. I enjoyed anecdotes about Sowell being complimentarily stopped by African-Americans in his everyday life, including a security guard asking him "Are you Sowell?" Book illustrates examples of many homogeneous intellectuals to disparage work from people like Tom Sowell via character assassination, questioning his motives, and saying he does not "really care" about black people. If you want to fix a problem, you have to be willing to acknowledge first, accurately, what the problem is, a feat many are incapable of fully analyzing due to their emotional dependencies and insecurities.
· “Wherever black people were going, and wherever we wished to go, we had to get there from where we were—which meant we had to know where we were, not where we wished we were or where we wished others to think we were.”
· “An awful lot of effort goes into maintaining the image of blacks,” he told me. “You want to improve the reality, not the image. And sometimes the focus on the image gets in the way”
· …more interested in questioning their motives than in addressing their arguments
o “Sowell said that in some ways he finds the vitriol reassuring, because it demonstrates that his critics have no substantive arguments to offer. ‘I’m often amazed for someone who writes about so many controversial issues—not just race—how little real criticism I get. People ask what the civil rights groups say in response. They say nothing. And that’s their strategy. They cannot engage’”
· “People who have been trying for years to tell others that Negroes are basically no different from anybody else should not themselves lose sight of the fact that Negroes are just like everyone else in wanting something for nothing”
· “Everybody has asked the question… ‘What should we do with the Negro?’” said Douglass in 1865. “I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are worm-eaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall!… And if the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs!” [Frederick Douglass]
· “[T]he mass would remain as they are,” until the younger generation began to “try harder” and the entire race “lost the omnipresent excuse for failure: prejudice.” [DuBois]
· “[A]rtificially extending the students’ adolescence,” [intellectual’s role in academia]
o “The market can be ruthless in devaluing degrees that do not mean what they say. It should be apparent to anyone not blinded by his own nobility that it also devalues the student in his own eyes.”
· [Sowell wanted to teach at Howard] on the purely emotional ground that it would enable him to make the greatest contribution to the improvement of members of his race.
· “Some of the biggest cases of mistaken identity are among intellectuals who have trouble remembering that they are not God.”
· “I think that’s why people like Malcolm X made such an impact, because he wasn’t fearful. This is one of the reasons people are so ferocious against people like [Arthur] Jensen and [Charles] Murray” and others who have speculated about race and intelligence. “They are afraid in a sense that I’m not”
· if a society’s resources are to be allocated efficiently, it follows that the decision-making process ought to be decentralized as well. [Hayek]
· I’ve been a professor for thirty-seven years. I’ve spent my life at Harvard, Stanford, MIT. And I would certainly count Tom as one of the most brilliant people I’ve come across and one of the deepest thinkers. [Pinker]
· “Groups with a demonstrable history of being discriminated against have, in many countries and in many periods of history, had higher incomes, better educational performance, and more ‘representation’ in high-level positions than those doing the discriminating,…”
o “If we are serious about wanting to enlarge opportunities and advance those who are less fortunate, then we cannot fritter away the limited means at our disposal in quixotic quests. We must decide whether our top priority is to smite the wicked or to advance the less fortunate, whether we are looking for visions and rhetoric that make us feel good for the moment or whether we are seeking methods with a proven track record of success in advancing whole peoples from poverty to prosperity.”
· [Regarding mass consumerization], “Those who deplore such things are also deploring the very process of cultural diffusion by which the human race has advanced for thousands of years.”
· “…what is most needed is an understanding of existing realities, the history from which the present evolved, and the enduring principles constraining our options for the future” [the constrained vision]
· “To pretend to disentangle the innumerable sources of intergroup differences is an exercise in hubris rather than morality.”
· “Self-respect is the most important thing,” he’s written. “Without it, the world’s adulation rings hollow. And with it, even venomous attacks are like water off a duck’s back.”
· “One of the things that struck me domestically as well as internationally among groups that have risen from poverty to affluence is that they almost never have so-called leaders of the prominence of those groups that remain lagging,” he said. “Who has been able to take credit for the Jews rising or for the Asian Americans? Where is their Martin Luther King?”
· Sowell told Lamb that black strangers regularly stop him in public and compliment him for his views. They have read his books and columns, or seen him on television, and agree with what he has to say: “When I checked out of my hotel this morning, the black security guard came over and said, ‘Are you Sowell?’ And I said, ‘Yes,’ and he shook my hand warmly and we walked—he walked me the length of the corridor and talked about this and about that—and that’s not at all an uncommon experience for me. So, it’s not Sowell versus blacks. It’s the black intellectuals.” He further explained to Lamb that these intellectuals “have a very large, vested interest in certain beliefs, which underlie various programs from which they benefit enormously.
o For the moment, the conventional black leadership has a virtual monopoly on expressing what blacks are supposed to believe. But it is an insecure monopoly. It is vulnerable to exposure to the truth.
· “The sins of others are always fascinating to human beings, but they are not always the best way to self-development or self-advancement,”
o “The moral regeneration of white people might be an interesting project, but I am not sure we have quite that much time to spare. Those who have fought on this front are very much like the generals who like to refight the last war instead of preparing for the next struggle.”
· “Groups don’t learn to read well or open businesses; individuals do. Individuals don’t get civil rights legislation passed; groups do.” [Shelby Steele]
· “[H]e’s a socialist, but he’s too smart to remain one too long” [Richard Ware, of Thomas Friedman and Stigler, referring to Sowell]
o “Friedman ‘forced you to confront your own sloppy thinking,’ said Sowell. ‘There is nothing more important as a teacher.’”
· [P]hilosopher Bertrand Russell’s calls for British disarmament in the 1930s [WWII ensued]
· “Intellectuals give people who have the handicap of poverty the further handicap of a sense of victimhood. They have encouraged the poor to believe their poverty is caused by the rich—a message which may be a passing annoyance to the rich but a lasting handicap to the poor, who may see less need to make fundamental changes to their own lives that could lift themselves up, instead of focusing their efforts on dragging others down.”
· “Nowhere in the world do you find this evenness that people use as a norm. And I find it fascinating that they will hold up as a norm something that has never been seen on this planet, and regard as an anomaly something that is seen in country after country.” [Why would people expect the same outcomes from different groups, as an a priori assumption]