I just want to start off by explaining this is a discussion thread Syrah and I thought up as we're both currently reading this thought provoke tome. Anyone else is welcome to join in with thoughts and comments throughout the week.

For those Lizards who have not yet purchased this book, there is a an interview of Thomas Sowell posted on Youtube where he talks about this book.

The book is worth the price at Amazon or whereever you can find it. I tried finding it a Barnes & Noble walk-in store but they did not have it in stock. You will probably have to buy this on line.

re: #2 Syrah

Comments on that video would be nice too. Worth watching twice, imo.

My favorite quote so far in Ch 3 is this from Edmund Burke:

Happy if learning, not debauched by ambition, had been satisfied to continue the instructor and not aspired to be the master!

Hey all, it's (and a lot of Thomas Sowell's books) are available in unabridged audio format at audible.com --which is accessible thru Amazon as well. Meaning, if you go to the "audio download mp3" link on the Amazon page for the book, it will take you to audible. Hopefully, Charles will still get a clinking in the tip jar.

My favorite quote Mr Sowell uses is in Ch 1 and comes from The Federalist Papers:

Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraints.

That pretty much sums up my view of things. That as much as I sympathize with the unconstrained vision, it is unrealistic in the face of history which has always managed to show example after example of the worst of human nature.

Here is an excerpt from the book. It is from the very first paragraph of the book.

The Role of Visions

One of the curious things about political opinions is how often the same people line up on opposite sides of different issues. The issues themselves may have no intrinsic connection with each other. They may range from military spending to drug drug laws to monetary policy to education. Yet the same familiar faces can be found glaring at each other from opposite sides of the political fence, again and again. It happens too often to be coincidence and it is too uncontrolled to be a plot. A closer look at the arguments on both sides often shows that they are reasoning from fundamentally different premises. These different premises- often implicit- are what provide the consistency behind repeated opposition of individuals and groups on numerous, unrelated issues. They have different visions of how the world works.

I knew there had to be a formula that people used to guide them in how they thought about politics and social issues. I had trouble working out what the formula was.

I would wonder at times about how people that I thought were otherwise sane and rational on mundane issues would turn out to be stark raving nutters when it came to their politics.

I recognize that most people do not have much of a concept of what their political ideology is except to use the inadequate labels of left or right, liberal or conservative. Unfortunately, those terms are almost meaningless. They really do not tell you much except that to be liberal means that you want to be “free with changing things” or that to be conservative means that you are “reluctant to make changes unless it is absolutely necessary”.

These "labels" are just not enough, they don't explain “nimby” group that has sprouted up in my neighborhood this year anymore than they explain how McCain came to be the de facto “conservative” candidate in the last election. My Nimby neighbors are all to the last, moonbats and loons. They are trying to "conserve" the neighborhoods look and feel by converting our individual rights to own and control our property to a collective right to make sure that nobody can do anything with their property that the “community” would object to. And McCain can only really be called a conservative when put up against someones as far radical left as is Obama. (I voted for McCain even though it hurt. Watch the video and see how Thomas Sowell explains why he voted for McCain.)

I like the division offered by Sowell in this book of dividing people up generally as having a "unconstrained vision" of human nature versus having an "constrained vision" of human nature. On one side, you have those who believe that Man is ultimately perfectible, and on the other, you have those who believe that Man is intrinsically fallible.

Everybody falls somewhere more or less on one side or the other of the above two visions.

From there, life gets interesting.

re: #6 Sharmuta

My favorite quote Mr Sowell uses is in Ch 1 and comes from The Federalist Papers:

That pretty much sums up my view of things. That as much as I sympathize with the unconstrained vision, it is unrealistic in the face of history which has always managed to show example after example of the worst of human nature.

The unconstrained vision has in it, an appeal to youthful innocence. I think that only the heartless could not find themselves attracted to an appeal to youthful innocence, but I also think that only the dangerously naive would want to be ruled by it.

re: #8 Syrah

Chapter 3 started off as being a bit confusing to me, as I agreed with some of the points of the unconstrained vision on knowledge. I do think that education is quite important and advances in societies are due in large part to advances made in knowledge. I wasn't until further in the chapter that Mr Sowell made the distinction quite clear that the unconstrained vision sees solutions as coming from an elitist ruling intellectual class instead of a cumulative "tested body of experience that worked".

Where I agreed with the unconstrained vision was in this: "The age of a belief or practice did not exempt it from the crucial test of validation in specifically articulated terms." Seems reasonable enough.

But going back a few pages to the constrained vision we have this: "With no examination whatever, there would be no evolutionary process, and therefore, in this vision, no basis for the confidence in tradition and enduring institutions...." and from Burke, "I must bear with infirmities until they fester into crimes".

So it seems the constrained vision is not immune from challenging the status quo and endeavoring societal change, it is the magnitude of the issue at hand that compels that change. In my own terms, it would be the notion of, "if it's not broken, don't fix it". On the other hand, the unconstrained vision would see it as, "it's alright but could be better".

This jumped out at me, from Ch 3:

The writings of those with the constrained vision abound with examples of counterproductive consequences of well-intentioned policies. But to those with the unconstrained vision, this is simply seizing upon isolated mistakes that are correctable, in order to resist tendencies that are socially beneficial on the whole.

Added emphasis mine. What struck me about this was it seemed to me the unconstrained solution to the isolated mistakes was to apply a more constrained vision.

I have also been pondering how one moves from an unconstrained vision to a constrained one. I don't think it's something that can be taught to the unconstrained by any method except a personal epiphany. I think perhaps September 11th was one such potential learning experience for many.

Also read Sowell's Basic Economics. It is chock full of examples of how the Left screws up everything they do. My favorite is Rent Control. In SF and NY, Rent Control was meant to keep apartment rent low so that the poor could afford to live in one. But just the opposite happened. When Rent is low, families that lived in a 1 bedroom could afford a 2 or 3 bedroom apartment. People who had room mates could afford to live alone. Well off business men and women who have long commutes might rent a place in the city for occasions when they could not make it home. Fewer apartment buildings are built because there is less profit in it. And so the problem only got worse. Helping the poor via Rent Control is an Unconstrained Vision. Everyone should read Sowell's books.

I might add that the audio books are good. But chances are you are going to want to dog ear and highlight certain sections of the book. If in doubt get both. At least for Visions and Basic Economics.

re: #9 Sharmuta

Thinking about your comments off the top of my head . . .

I think that one part the constrained visions innate suspicion of "education" is not so much a distrust with learning as it is with the learned. I think that the other part has to do with the disruptive nature of new knowledge and a desire to allow the new knowlwdge to make changes in society in a prudent and cautious manner rather than in a pell-mell, higgly-piggly upending of the old ways.

One of the problems that you have with education, particularly higher education, is that many people think that their degrees confer upon them a kind of titled superiority over those with no degrees. Rather than coming to understand how much about the world and existence that there is that they don't know, they deluded themselves into believing that they are, via their education as proved by their title, more knowing. Worse yet, these learned elites will then take their specialized and greater knowledge of a narrow field and think that it gives them license to make judgments about things outside their expertise and believe that their opinion should carry as much weight there as it would within their narrow area of expertise.

Noam Chomsky would be a prime example of this. Within the field of linguistics, Noam Chomsky may well be an expert that can speak with authority on the nature of human language and verbal communications. Outside of that narrow field of his expertise, Chomsky's opinions and judgments may well prove, as I think they do, laughably if not tragically wrong.

I think that the constrained vision respects education so long as the educated do not presume that their expertise in one field allows them to speak with equal authority outside of their expertise.

There is also the problem with disruption that new knowledge may incur in a dynamic society. New knowledge is disruptive. It must be by its very nature. It would not be good for a society to resist changes that new knowledge would demand, but it would also not be good to make sudden and sweeping changes based on new knowledge without taking into account the cost that the disruptions will bring on a society. To those of the constrained vision, change is both a good and inevitable, but it is not something that should be managed recklessly.

By contrast, those of the unconstrained vision look to the learned with respect that is not bound by that learned persons narrow field of expertise. They see that the learned person was smart enough to become an expert in the one area and see no reason that the learned person is not capable of bringing the same intellectual capacity to bear on any other field.

Also, the unconstrained would look at change due to new knowledge as something that must, as a mater of righteousness, be engaged with the utmost speed. Each moment lost to them in achieving the perfected "new man" is to them a sin of wasted time, effort and resources that could be better be used making mankind more perfect.

Where the constrained would argue for "do no harm" the unconstrained would argue for "waste no time".

re: #10 Sharmuta

I have wondered about this myself.

I am inclined to think that the constrained and the unconstrained are thus at the very core of their being. I am not sure that even an epiphany would or could change their view of mankind and nature.

The 911 effect I think was more of an epiphany of measuring where the 911'ers found themselves thinking about the political views and alliances that they had and have held more by matter of tradition and habit than of careful and considered examination.

Those that found themselves leaving the Democrat left, left more because they had come to realize that the Democrat left had long ago left them, if they were ever really of like mind to begin with.

As I look more and more at the discussion of the opposing constrained and unconstrained visions of the world, I am reminded of Jungian personality archetypes. I think that like those archetypes, some one who is of one type may shift in time in minor details, but not in broad or sweeping ways.

I found this most interesting:

A similar difference between individual and systemic rationality can be found in religious doctrines in which (1) the Deity is conceived to act directly to affect natural and human phenomena, versus (2) those in which a Providential systemic process makes life possible and beneficent without requiring Divine superintendence of details. What both the secular and religious versions of systemic processes have in common is that the wisdom of the individual human actor is not the wisdom of the drama. Conversely, there are both secular and religious versions of individual rationality, the religious version being one in which the Deity directly decides on individual events, from daily weather changes to deaths of individuals. Fundamentalist religion is the most pervasive vision of central planning, though many fundamentalists may oppose human central planning as an usurpation or "playing God". This is consistent with the fundamentalist vision of an unconstrained God and a highly constrained man.

This struck me in light of the ID/evolution threads, and was later reconfirmed in Ch 4:

The constrained vision is not a static vision of the social process, nor a view that the status quo should not be altered. On the contrary, its central principle is evolution.

Additionally:

The same basic view has been expressed in the twentieth century by F.A. Hayek:

Tradition is not something constant but the product of a process of selection guided not by reason but by success.

The Hayekian view is even further removed from deliberate design than that of Burke, since Hayek incorporates a "survival of the fittest" culture-selection process which depends upon survival in competition with other social systems rather than simply on the basis of pragmatic individual judgements of success. The intervening influence of Darwin between these two exponents of the constrained vision is apparent.

It seems to me we're witnessing the constrained vs. unconstrained dichotomy playing out in the republican party with conservatives being of the constrained vision, and many on the religious "right" being of the unconstrained vision. I think it is in the discussions we've had on science where this manifests itself best. The two visions on the right deal with science in different manners- the constrained accepting societal evolution due to scientific advancements, with the unconstrained political savior being the Bible itself.

Refering to the discussion of the different views of "time" by the two sides, starting on page 79.

This I think has some important implications. On the one side, the unconstrained, you have a mindset that rebels against agreements for future actions and behaviors, whether it be contracts or traditions.

Contracts and traditions, are the very foundations of a civilization. They are what makes it possible to keep the state of nature at bay. Yet here is the crux. The unconstrained idealizes the state of nature as a happy Eden-like paradise, where as the constrained looks at the state of nature as being a kind of a war of one against all (Hobbesian) nightmare.

There is a centrifugal like force in the unconstrained universe that by its nature threatens to tear everything apart for what ever is the whim of the moment. The constrained vision conversely at its extreme makes adjusting to future information difficult to very difficult.

I think that civilization naturaly favors the constrained in this dichotomy but that the constrained could, if taken to excess, present a risk to civilization that could be equally destructive.

Where I think that the constrained is twice favored over the unconstrained is that the constrained community has time for repair on its side, where as the unconstrained community does not and the constrained can come to effective agreement amongst its community members where as the unconstrained could never trust any agreements made amongst its community's members.

The constrained looks at the state of nature as a bad and dangerous thing, where as the unconstrained looks at the state of nature as a good and desirable thing. Both sides act accordingly.