Sowell for Lunch, Prologue: The Beginning of the End for the Social Science Dogmaticians

Courtesy WSJ

I typically don't have lunch, so I thought we'd have Sowell for lunch instead - together. I'll be reading through, and as I go, writing thought blurbs on Thomas Sowell's book called Race and Culture [see here and here]. Find his bio here and here... in short, he's a highly acclaimed and experienced Economist, with a PhD, degrees, and books published galore; a really cool and super smart dude... a learned man who can heal all cases of WOKE-19 with the stroke of his honored pen.

For now I'll begin to set the tone for the rest of the book by looking at the epigraph and preface to Race & Culture. 

Epigraph

Sowell begins on an appropriately contrarian note, quoting Oscar Handlin:

“…men are not blank tablets on which the environment inscribes a culture which can readily be erased to make way for a new inscription.”

This kind of critique will be sustained in a variety of particular ways all over this book, given the particular “social science doctrine” Sowell cantankerously wants to shoot outta the water, and then proceed to beat dead with an unloved stick.

 

 

Preface

“…”social science” doctrines… make the surrounding environment the shaper of groups’ behaviour  and institutional decisions the arbiters of their fate… there is a vast difference between (1) regarding groups as shaped by immediate circumstances, including… people and institutions… and (2) regarding groups as having their own internal cultural patterns, antedating the environment in which they find themselves, and transcending the beliefs, biases, and decisions of others.” (p.x)

This quote, particularly point (2), lays out the main thesis Sowell is attempting to demonstrate in this book: internal cultural patterns, on the main, exist in a group before they entered their present  environment, and persist in their permanence in spite of their treatment by other people in their present environment. Simply put, internal culture is one tough bugger, hard to root out, and certainly no respecter of environment or even oppressive ideology, contra mundum. This taken as such, is clearly against popular notions promulgated by social scientists, whom Sowell thinks, frankly, are not in touch with the reality of history, but drunk on theoretical abstractions.

This thesis does account for the fact that “group cultural patterns may indeed be the product of environments,” however, where Sowell departs from popular social science dogma is in the historically informed fact that “group cultural patterns [are]… products of… environments” yet of those “that existed on the other side of an ocean, in the lives of ancestors, long forgotten, yet transmitted over the generations as distilled values, preferences, skills, and habits.” Essentially, when analysis of particular groups factor in an international/world view scope, across generations,  then they are able to more realistically “establish which patterns are the result of the way particular groups were treated in American society and which are the results of their own internal cultural patterns,” for example.

 

Sowell accounts for a fundamental conflict between his analytical approach and the social science dogmaticians’…

“Chinese, German, Japanese, Italian, and Indian immigrants have risen to prosperity in many countries, often after harrowing beginnings, without ever achieving any notable political success.” (p.xi)

“History indeed records numerous groups rising from poverty to prosperity, in many parts of the world, with no corresponding political activity or political success” (p.xi)

Sowell frowns on these dogmaticians who insist that “a poorer group’s fate is largely in the hands of contemporary outsiders,” as then of course “political activity designed to persuade… those [contemporary] outsiders is essential to the [poorer] group’s progress.” Historically enlightened Sowell, contra mundum, insists that “a group’s own culture, and the skills, behaviour, and performances derived from that culture are the primary determinants of its [present] economic and social state…” This is obviously strongly noted when Sowell highlights the example of the initially poor Chinese, German, Japanese, Italian, and Indian immigrants whose eventual prosperity was achieved without any political activity-rather, through the perspicuous strength of their culture, as seen in their “rags to riches, against all odds” story. Their fate firmly in their own hands, not their so-called oppressors'.

 

In Sowell’s prefatory remarks, he also helps us understand his usage of the terms’ ‘race’ and ‘culture.’

“…specific skills, general work habits, saving propensities, and attitudes toward education and entrepreneurship…” (p.xii)

This being Sowell’s usage of culture “…in short, what economists call “human capital.””

His usage of race is…

“…in the broad social sense in which it is applied in everyday life to designate ethnic groups of various sorts-by race, religion, or nationality.” (p.xiii)

 

Another way of prefatorily thinking about what Sowell is about to do in this book’s unfolding chapters is to reckon with one of his many quotable implicit critiques of popular social science dogma.

“The purpose of this book is not to offer some grand theory explaining cultural differences… There is seldom shortage of people willing to draw up blueprints for salvation… Its goal is to demonstrate the reality, persistence, and consequences of cultural differences-contrary to many of today’s grand theories, based on the supposedly dominant role of “objective conditions,” “economic forces,” or “social structures.”” (p.xii-xiii)

 

This of course is only the preface, in chapter one Sowell will begin to more concretely, with many historical examples, establish and defend his thesis that culture is the important consideration when looking at socio-economic differences within and across groups/nations/races. Now, that may be hard to swallow but it certainly doesn’t mean it’s not true.