If I had another lifetime I think I'd want to read all of Thomas Sowell's books. I'm sure he's
not the only one I'd want to read at such length but he's the one I'm thinking about at the moment, and that's because I just heard a discussion about him on the Glenn Loury Show at You Tube, with Loury, John McWhorter, and guest Jason Riley who wrote a biography of Sowell.
These guys are thinkers. I want to say the best of the thinkers these days seem to be blacks. I don’t know if that’s true but that’s how it hits me.
Then I heard another Loury podcast with guest Heather MacDonald who is new to me, and within the first six minutes she said something that blew me away because it is so true and I’m so glad somebody finally said it that way. Here’s that podcast:
She said she’d been reading books by major black writers – Frederick Douglass, DuBois, Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver and others, and although she sees the “1619 Project” as wrong as history, she found something in that and the other accounts of black experience very sympathetic to the point of calling Loury’s own position in support of the principles of the American founding to be amazingly magnanimous, since “we don’t deserve you.” She said that it was remarkable that a black man could take such a generous position considering the “gratuitous humiliation” whites had subjected blacks to over the years, using also the terms “gratuitous sadism” and “gratuitous nastiness,” and it was those terms that made the crucial point for me.
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Yes, I’ve seen that gratuitous cruelty against blacks, even in parts of my own family. Not very often, it was highly subdued and some family members who turned out to hold such views never expressed them in my hearing, I found out about it later. So I grew up thinking my family was blessedly free of such attitudes for the most part, it was only the odd cousin, the odd aunt who once in a great while said something denigrating about blacks that was so out of context I didn’t know what to do with it. I was pretty strongly antiracist though in a passive way, and thought I got it from my family but now I’m not sure where it came from. School? Church? Other family members?
But I’d certainly heard racist expressions from people outside the family and even in recent years, when Obama was President, I was astonished to hear a Christian denounce him for being black while I was denouncing him for being a Communist and his blackness had nothing to do with it to my mind. THAT blew me away, and then when MacDonald described the attitude of some whites to blacks as gratuitously vicious I recognized how exactly she’d identified that mindset and I needed to be reminded of it in those terms..
So I know it still exists here and there though I agree with her that it’s mostly been done away with in our time and systemic racism is certainly gone. And although I understand what she meant about her surprise at Loury’s generosity considering such mistreatment by whites I just see him as able to transcend his own personal experiences,whatever they might have been because he is a true thinker who can appreciate the philosophical bedrock of the American founding apart from the inherent sinfulness of fallen humanity. I’ve always admired that about him specifically, he has the best grip on these issues of anyone I’ve heard.
While today’s leftist are busy trying to kill America itself as fundamentally flawed by racism, he knows that, on the contrary,fundamentally America was originally designed to be the only answer to it we have, it’s the principles of the founding that brought slavery, and ultimately also racism to an end and without those founding principles there would be no recourse against it. Slavery countinues to thrive in the rest of the world without no such principles to oppose it. Loury appreciates that those principles were the fruit of centuries of western civilization.
She’d started out praising a speech Loury had given at a National Conservatism Conference sometime in the previous year, and since I love Loury I looked it up and was reduced to tears by it. Here it is:
No, he is not just being magnanimous in embracing the principles of the American founding as his own inheritance, his own worldview, over all the mistreatment of blacks by whites in this country. He knows they are not the essence of America, they are fallen human beings acting in spipte of the principles he embraces as an American. He knows that it was those principles that finally made it possible to bring the injustices to an end. The legacy of the west that ended slavery in the west and nowhere else on the planet, is his The humanitarian achievementys of the West are his, and America as the finest embodiment of those virtues are his. .
He doesn’t talk in terms of fallen human nature as I do but the concept is implicit in his thinking. The main framers of the Republic had the fallenness of humanity at the center of their vision of government, aiming to prevent any individual or group from acquiring power to the point of focing the rest of the wountry to submit to their will, which is what the fallen human nature will do when given free rein. We see this happening now as these principles designed to keep such power in check are being ignored. What is happ-ening is a coup, the destruction of the Consitution that would protect us from such tyranny if it were obeyed. We’ve seen it eroded step by step over the last century by twisting its own principles against it. So what Loury is lauding is its original intent and that is what we need to recover it we are to save the nation.
I suppose I should try to unpack that last paragraph but it’s more than this post could bear so I won’t. The point is that we are losing what Loury recognizes as the essence of America. Marxism is in its very nature treason against the American vision but even Marxism couldn’t prevail if that vision remained intact. That is why it is destroying it.
The fallenness the framers sought to keep in bounds is threatening to overthrow it all. Not the racism that was once out of control but now the antiracism that pretends it still exists when it doesn’t any more. The problem with a Constitutional government is that the people who run the government have to understand what it means and have the courage to apply and defend it. As John Adams said, the Constitution was made for a moral and religious people, it is wholly inadequate for the government of any other. Now that we are no longer a moral and religious people it is fallenness that is taking control. We haven’t been alert enough and it’s already torn down much of it going back decades.
The achievements of the West, of the Constitution of the US, are the fruit of the CHRISTIAN PERSPECTIVE OF THE WEST. This is the perspective that needs to be recovered. It is hardly ever recognized--it's been co-opted to the Enlightenment and that's what Loury also says --but it is crucial. The rights and freedoms Loury embraces could not have sprung from any fallen source. The only solution, the ONLY solution to the current breakdown of western society and government is a return to our Christian roots. We can’t put the Constitution back together without God. Once the fallen nature, the unbelievers, have control, it can only continue to disintegrate. Revival on a nationwide scale, God coming among His people to reform us and strengthen us, God’s Spirit drawing millions into His kingdom, that’s the revival we need. And I still don’t know if it’s possible, if we have enough spiritual strength to be heard, if we need to make some reforms before He’ll listen, if He’s already determined that it’s time for judgment and too late for recovery. I don’t know.
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* I realized later that I didn't really say why Heather MacDonald's description of the gratuitous humiliation of blacks by whites had such an impact on me and by now, a couple days later I have to scramble to recover it. I think of it this way: I'm used to the idea that blacks suffered from unfair laws in the Jim Crow era, and used to thinking of racism as a predominantly southern phenomenon even though I could point to instances of it across the country if I stopped to consider it. What MacDonald's description did was make it close and personal, a matter of countless individuals with a racist mindset, a mindless mindset that had no foundation at all that anyone could tell, just a completely senseless attitude, a hatred without a basis. And her expression brought it into my own family in a way the historical facts of unfair laws didn't. So I was able to appreciate what she was saying about being able to accept something in the historically false 1619 Project for instance, and no doubt the writings of the radicals she'd been reading. The scholarship of that recent book is ridiculous but it impressed on her the pervasiveiveness of that gratuitous meanness, and her putting it in those terms impressed it on me too. There's nothing inherently any more racist in whites than any other peoples of the world, evidenced by the fact that it seems to be almost completely eradicated by now, not completely but almost, but there's no denying that for more than half of the previous century sprobably most whites held to that attitude of gratuitous meanness.
Keeping it alive as today's leftists want to do does no service to blacks or the country as a whole, and Loury is quite right to lay claim to the legacy of western civilization as his own because he's an American, and apparently the generations of the last few decades are blessedly free of the racist mistreatments their fathers and grandfathers had endured.
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