Discrimination and Disparities

by Thomas Sowell

At a minimum, history shows how dangerous it can be, to a whole society, to automatically and incessantly attribute statistical differences in outcomes to malevolent actions against the less successful. That the charge can often be false and misleading might also carry some weight, and merit closer attention to the specific facts of particular cases. Not only the society in general, but lagging groups in particular, can benefit from knowing what is true, as distinguished from what is currently in vogue. Not only does the truth offer a clearer path to advancement, the breakdown of law and order brought on by constantly stirred bitter resentments almost invariably leads to more suffering among the less fortunate.

Achievements are a threat to a social vision and a political agenda based on that vision, and so are often kept off the hypothesis-testing agenda by adherents of that vision. Redefining words is a key part of that process.

However much the prevailing social vision may have aimed at creating a society that acts much as a family does in nurturing and protecting its members, what it has in fact done is replace the reciprocal obligations among members of a family with unilateral and unconditional subsidies of the welfare state that are a legal right and entitlement—freeing the recipient from reciprocal duties, even the duty of common decency.

Replacing reciprocal social obligations with unilateral subsidies of self-indulgences does not sound promising, even in theory. In light of the social degeneration that has already taken place, the human consequences of the prevailing social vision hardly seem encouraging as an inducement to go further in that direction.

Despite wide disparities among immigrant groups from different countries and cultures, empirical facts about such differences are seldom part of public debates about immigration policies. The very attempt to discuss such issues in factual terms has been treated as morally unworthy. Any concerns about a need to preserve a domestic culture that has produced a level of prosperity, order and freedom seldom found in some other cultures risks being dismissed as phobias or racism. It is as if the only morally legitimate way to discuss immigration issues is in terms of the prevailing social vision, based on the seemingly invincible fallacy of assuming a sameness of developed capabilities among both peoples and cultures.

The only times over which we have any degree of influence at all are the present and the future—both of which can be made worse by attempts at symbolic restitution among the living for what happened among the dead, who are far beyond our power to help or punish or avenge. Galling as these restrictive facts may be, that does not stop them from being facts beyond our control. Pretending to have powers that we do not in fact have risks creating needless evils in the present, while claiming to deal with the evils of the past.