THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
An Online Journal of Political Commentary & Analysis
Volume X, Issue # 260, October 9, 2008
Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
Government Committed to & Acting in Accord with Conservative Principles
Ensures a Nation's Strength, Progress, & Prosperity
THE QUEST FOR COSMIC JUSTICE -- A SUMMARY:
THREE PROPOSITIONS
By Dr. Thomas Sowell
COSMIC JUSTICE: WHAT IT IS & HOW IT DIFFERS FROM MORE TRADITIONAL CONCEPTIONS OF JUSTICE, & FROM
THE MORE RECENT & MORE FERVENTLY SOUGHT AFTER "SOCIAL JUSTICE" -- TRADITIONAL CONCEPTS OF JUSTICE, OR
FAIRNESS, WITHIN THE AMERICAN TRADITION -- DISADVANTAGED GROUPS, FAIRNESS, & EDUCATIONAL STANDARDS
FULL STORY:
When you try to condense a book representing years of thought and research into a half-hour talk, a certain amount of
over-simplification is inevitable. With that understood, let me try to summarize the message of The Quest for Cosmic
Justice [1] in three propositions which may seem to be axiomatic, but whose implications are, in fact, politically
controversial:
The impossible is not going to be achieved.
It is a waste of precious resources to try to achieve it.
The devastating costs and social dangers which go with these attempts to achieve the impossible should be taken
into account.
Cosmic justice is one of the impossible dreams which has a very high cost and very dangerous potentialities.
What is cosmic justice and how does it differ from more traditional conceptions of justice, and from the more recent and
more fervently sought "social justice"?
Traditional concepts of justice, or fairness, at least within the American tradition, boil down to applying the same rules and
standards to everyone. This is what is meant by a "level playing field" -- at least within that tradition, though the very
same words mean something radically different within a framework that calls itself "social justice." Words like "fairness,"
"advantage," and "disadvantage" likewise have radically different meanings within the very different frameworks of
traditional justice and "social justice."
John Rawls perhaps best summarized the differences when he distinguished "fair" equality of opportunity from merely
"formal" equality of opportunity. Traditional justice, fairness, or equality of opportunity are merely formal in Professor
Rawls' view and in the view of his many followers and comrades. For those with this view, "genuine equality of
opportunity" cannot be achieved by the application of the same rules and standards to all, but requires specific
interventions to equalize either prospects or results. As Rawls puts it, "undeserved inequalities call for redress."
A fight in which both boxers observe the Marquis of Queensberry rules would be a fair fight, according to traditional
standards of fairness, irrespective of whether the contestants were of equal skill, strength, experience. or other factors likely
to affect the outcome, and irrespective of whether that outcome was a hard-fought draw or a completely one-sided beating.
This would not, however, be a fair fight within the framework of those seeking "social justice," if the competing fighters
came into the ring with very different prospects of success, especially if these differences were due to factors beyond their
control.
Presumably, the vast ranges of undeserved inequalities found everywhere are the fault of "society" and so the redressing
of those inequalities is called social justice, going beyond the traditional justice of presenting each individual with the same
rules and standards. However, even those who argue this way often recognize that some undeserved inequalities may arise
from cultural differences, family genes, or from historical confluences of events not controlled by anybody or by any given
society at any given time. For example, there was no way that Pee Wee Reese was going to hit as many home runs as Mark
McGwire, or Shirley Temple run as fast as Jesse Owens. There was no way that Scandinavians or Polynesians were going
to know as much about camels as the Bedouins of the Sahara -- and no way that these Bedouins were going to know as
much about fishing as the Scandinavians or Polynesians.
In a sense, proponents of "social justice" are unduly modest. What they are seeking to correct are not merely the
deficiencies of society, but of the cosmos. What they call social justice encompasses far more than any given society is
causally responsible for. Crusaders for social justice seek to correct not merely the sins of man but the oversights of God or
the accidents of history. What they are really seeking is a universe tailor-made to their vision of equality. They are seeking
cosmic justice.
This perspective on justice can be found in a wide range of activities and places, from the street-corner community activist to
the august judicial chambers of the U.S. Supreme Court. For example, a former dean of admissions at Stanford University
said that she had never required applicants to submit Achievement Test scores because "requiring such tests could unfairly
penalize disadvantaged students in the college admissions process," because such students, "through no fault of their own,
often find themselves in high schools that provide inadequate preparation for the Achievement Tests." [2] Through no fault
of their own -- one of the recurrent phrases in this kind of argument -- seems to imply that it is the fault of "society," but
remedies are sought independently of any empirical evidence that it is.
Let me try to illustrate some of the problems with this approach by a mundane personal example. Whenever I hear
discussions of fairness in education, my automatic response is: "Thank God my teachers were unfair to me when I was a kid
growing up in Harlem." One of these teachers was a lady named Miss Simon, who was from what might be called the General
Patton school of education. Every word that we misspelled in class had to be written 50 times -- not in class, but in our
homework that was due the next morning, on top of all the other homework that she and other teachers loaded onto us.
Misspell four or five words and you had quite an evening ahead of you.
Was this fair? Of course not. Like many of the children in Harlem at that time, I came from a family where no one had been
educated beyond elementary school. We could not afford to buy books and magazines, like children in more affluent
neighborhood schools; so we were far less likely to be familiar with these words that we were required to write 50 times.
But fairness in this cosmic sense was never an option. As noted at the outset, the impossible is not going to be achieved.
Nothing that the schools could do would make things fair in this sense. It would have been an irresponsible self-indulgence
for them to have pretended to make things fair. Far worse than unfairness is make-believe fairness. Instead, they forced us to
meet standards that were harder for us to meet, but far more necessary for us to meet, as these were the main avenues for our
escape from poverty.
Many years later, I happened to run into one of my Harlem schoolmates on the streets of San Francisco. He was now a
psychiatrist and owned a home and property out in the Napa Valley. As we reminisced about the past and caught up on
things that had happened to us in between, he mentioned that his various secretaries over the years had commented on the
fact that he seldom misspelled a word. My secretaries have made the same comment, but, if they knew Miss Simon, it would
be no mystery why we seldom misspelled words.
It so happens that I was a high school dropout. But what I was taught before I dropped out was enough for me to score
higher on the verbal SAT than the average Harvard student. That may well have had something to do with my being
admitted to Harvard in an era before the concept of "Affirmative Action" was conceived.
What if our teachers had been imbued with the present-day conception of "fairness"? Clearly we would not have been
tested with the same tests and held to standards as other kids in higher-income neighborhoods, whose parents had at least
twice as many years of schooling as ours and probably much more than twice as much money. And where would my
schoolmate and I have ended up? Perhaps in some half-way house, if we were lucky.
And would that not have been an injustice -- to take individuals capable of being independent, self-supporting, and
self-directed men and women, with pride in their own achievements, and turn them into dependents, clients, supplicants,
mascots? Currently, the Educational Testing Service is adopting minority students as mascots by turning the SAT exams
into race-normed instruments to circumvent the growing number of prohibitions against group preferences. The primary
purpose of mascots is to symbolize something that makes others feel good. The well-being of the mascot himself is seldom
a major consideration.
The argument here is not against real justice or real equality. Both of these things are desirable in themselves, just as
immortality may be considered desirable in itself. The only arguments against any of these things is that they are
impossible, and the cost of pursuing impossible dreams are not negligible.
Socially counterproductive policies are just one of the many costs of the quest for cosmic justice. The rule of law, on which
a free society depends, is inherently incompatible with cosmic justice. Laws exist in all kinds of societies, from the freest to
the most totalitarian. But the rule of law -- a government of laws and not of men, as it used to be called -- is rare and
vulnerable. You cannot redress the myriad inequalities which pervade human life by applying the same rules to all or by
applying any rules other than the arbitrary dispensations of those in power. The final chapter of The Quest for Cosmic
Justice is titled "The Quiet Repeal of the American Revolution" because that is what is happening piecemeal by zealots
devoted to their own particular applications of cosmic justice.
They are not trying to destroy the rule of law. They are not trying to undermine the American Republic. They are simply
trying to produce "gender equity," institutions that "look like America" or a thousand other goals that are incompatible with
the rule of law, but are corollaries of cosmic justice.
Because ordinary Americans have not yet abandoned traditional justice, those who seek cosmic justice must try to justify it
politically as meeting traditional concepts of justice. A failure to achieve the new vision of justice must be represented to
the public and to the courts as "discrimination." Tests that register the results of innumerable inequalities must be
represented as being the cause of those inequalities or as deliberate efforts to perpetuate those inequalities by erecting
arbitrary barriers to the advancement of the less fortunate.
In short, to promote cosmic justice, they must misrepresent what is happening as violations of traditional justice, as
understood by others who do not share their vision. Nor do those who make such claims necessarily believe them
themselves. As Joseph Schumpeter once said: "The first thing a man will do for his ideals is lie."
The next thing the idealist will do is engage in character assassination. All those who disagree with the great vision must be
shown to have malign intentions, if not deep-seated character flaws. They must be "Borked," to use a verb coined in our
times. They must be depicted as "A Strange Justice," if somehow they survive the Borking process. They must be depicted
as having some personal "obsessions," if they carry out the duties they swore to carry out as a special prosecutor. In short,
demonization is one of the costs of the quest for cosmic justice.
The victims of this process are not limited to those targeted. The society as a whole loses when its decisions are made by
character assassination, rather than by rational discussion, and when its pool of those eligible for leadership is drained by
the exodus of those who are not prepared to sacrifice their good name or subject their family to humiliations for the sake of
grasping the levers of power. This loss is not merely quantitative, for those who are willing to endure any personal or family
humiliations for the sake of power are the most dangerous people to trust with power.
In a sense, those caught up in the vision of cosmic justice are also among its victims. Having committed themselves to a
vision and demonized all who oppose it, how are they to turn around and subject that vision to searching empirical scrutiny,
much less repudiate it as evidence of its counterproductive results mount up?
Ironically, the quest for greater economic and social equality is promoted through a far greater inequality of political power.
If rules cannot produce cosmic justice, only raw power is left as the way to produce the kinds of results being sought. In a
democracy, where power must gain public acquiescence, not only must the rule of law be violated or circumvented, so must
the rule of truth. However noble the vision of cosmic justice, arbitrary power and shameless lies are the only paths that even
seem to lead in its direction. As noted at the outset, the devastating costs and social dangers which go with these attempts
to achieve the impossible should be taken into account.
NOTES:
[1] Thomas Sowell, The Quest for Cosmic Justice (New York: The Free Press, 1999) 219 pages; $25.
[2] Jean H. Fetter, Questions and Admissions: Reflections on 100,000 Admissions Decisions at Stanford (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1995), p. 45. This way of looking at the fairness of the college admissions process is by no means peculiar
to Ms. Fetter. See, for example, John Kronholz, "As States End Racial Preferences, Pressure Rises To Drop SAT to Maintain
Minority Enrollment," Wall Street Journal, February 12, 1998, p. A24; Nancy S. Cole, Educational Testing Service, "Merit and
Opportunity: Testing and Higher education at the Vortex," speech at the conference, New Direction in Assessment for Higher
Education: Fairness, Access, Multiculturalism, and Equity (FAME), New Orleans, Louisiana, March 6-7, 1997; Thomas Sowell,
Inside American Education: The Decline, the Deception, the Dogmas (New York: The Free Press, 1993), pp. 122-126.
LINKS TO RELATED TOPICS:
Education, Training, & America's Schools:
Institutions of Elementary, Secondary, & Higher Education
A Practical Guide to Homeschooling
Ethnic & Racial Politics in the U.S.A.
Legal Issues, Lawyers, & America's Judiciary
The American Political & Cultural Left:
Liberals, Statists, Socialists, Marxists, & Other Leftists:
The Democratic Party, Academia, & the Mainstream Media
Dr. Thomas Sowell, a Ph.D. in Economics (University of Chicago, 1963) and author of numerous books and scholarly articles on economic
policy, is also a columnist and social commentator writing about topics and issues of interest to a general audience -- e.g., education,
child development, history, politics, public policy, the economy, civil rights, and race relations. Dr. Sowell's columns and commentaries
appear in such periodicals as Forbes Magazine, the Wall Street Journal and major newspapers, as well as online on Internet
websites such as the Conservative Townhall.Com.
An African-American black man writing primarily on economic topics, Dr. Sowell, in general, supports a classical Liberal, or laissez-faire,
approach to capitalism and government economic policy. Writing on matters of ethnicity and race, Sowell is an opponent of affirmative
action policy. He is highly critical of the contemporary Liberal Leftist bias of the mainstream media, an activist judiciary, partial birth
abortion, and government bureaucracy.
In 1990, Dr. Sowell won the prestigious Francis Boyer Award, presented by the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research.
Currently, Sowell is Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution in Stanford, California, and has held this position since September, 1980. He
holds the fellowship named after Rose and Milton Friedman.
Previous positions held by Sowell include Professor of Economics, University of California at Los Angeles (1974-1980); Project Director,
The Urban Institute (1972-1974); Associate Professor of Economics, UCLA (1970-1972); Associate Professor of Economics, Brandeis
University (1969-1970); Assistant Professor of Economics, Cornell University (1965-1969); Economic Analyst, American Telephone &
Telegraph Company (1964-1965); Lecturer in Economics, Howard University (1963-1964); Instructor in Economics, Douglass College,
Rutgers University (1962-1963); and Labor Economist, United States Department of Labor (1961-1962).
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