WHY ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

[E]ven though he knew his views would be greeted with hostility, Sowell began writing about race out of a sense of moral obligation. He set out his basic concerns about the course of post-civil rights liberalism in a 1970 New York Times article, excoriating the institutional practice of passing over highly qualified blacks who didn't fit a certain sociological or ideological profile. Consequently, Sowell gained infamy as one of the first "black conservative" figures on the American scene, despite never wholly accepting the label. Attacks from the media and from former colleagues came thick and fast and would continue for years to come. He would go on to publish two books about race in the 1970s--Black Education: Myths and Tragedies and Race and Economics--setting a new career trajectory that would earn him a National Humanities Medal among other accolades. After some time spent in and out of the business world, his career in academia was drawing to a close. Sowell ended the decade by publishing his crowning achievement, Knowledge and Decisions, a book that earned him a fellowship at Stanford University's Hoover Institute.

Published in 1980, Knowledge and Decisions crystallized Sowell's work in economics and life experience to that point, setting the stage for his later writings. Inspired by Friedrich Hayek's essay "The Uses of Knowledge in Society," the book emerged from the observation that the knowledge necessary for complex technological societies to function was increasingly uncoupled from the ability of everyday citizens to make decisions that impact the quality of their lives. In the same way that the objects we see in the world are mostly made up of empty space with dispersed specks of matter keeping them together, in modern societies "specks of knowledge are scattered through a vast emptiness of ignorance, and everything depends on how solid the individual specks of knowledge are, and on how powerfully linked and coordinated they are with one another."24 Each of us is ensconced in a wide spectrum of overlapping and interlocking institutions--families, friend groups, churches, schools, companies--that mobilize and coordinate the knowledge and experience of previous generations. These form the basis of individual decisions in the present--what to teach our children, what food to eat, how to help the less fortunate, and so on. But the dispersion and specialization of knowledge leads to a contraction and centralization of decision-making power, while the hard knowledge and practical wisdom passed down through the ages is overtaken by intellectual or technical expertise wielded by the few over the many.

The knowledge required to make decisions for an entire society can't be harnessed by any human being because most of us have no sense of the complex economic processes involved in producing a cup of coffee or a box of tissues. Given our lack of omniscience and the economic principle of scarcity, there can be no unequivocal solution to any major social issue, only trade-offs, which create their own undesirable outcomes. We can't merely choose to construct a better reality. Improving the conditions of society means setting certain systemic processes in motion that correspond to objective realities and abide by certain principles--representative democracy, the rule of law, universal humanism, due process--with inbuilt feedback mechanisms that constrain decision-making powers and mitigate bad incentives.

No matter how appealing a policy proposal may sound--the Green New Deal, the push to "Defund The Police," prison abolition, the War on Drugs--we should always ask what process we are setting in motion and who gains power to make decisions by it. "The most fundamental question is not what decision to make but who is to make it--through what processes and under what incentives and constraints, and with what feedback mechanisms to correct the decision if it proves to be wrong."25 There is an essential difference, Sowell argues, between market forces and government policy--the former result from the cumulative decisions of millions of people with immediate feedback through the price system, while the latter stems from the immediate decisions of politicians with cumulative feedback, if any, and practically no responsibility for the outcome.

The vision of humanity that informs Knowledge and Decisions is a tragic one. There are, Sowell argued, inherent limitations and constraints to the human condition and it is dangerous to ignore them. In his 1987 book A Conflict of Visions, which he cites as his favorite, Sowell shows just how deep ideological disagreements go. If you show up at a pro-life meeting, it's quite likely there will be much agreement to be found among attendees on many other unrelated political issues. Why is this? Because, at bottom, when we argue about politics or culture it is not about the details of this-or-that issue or policy, it is about our implicit understanding--or vision--of how reality works. Visions are what we feel before we think, an intuition about what causes things to happen in the world. Visions, according to Sowell, "fill in the necessarily large gaps in individual knowledge."26 We need them. But our respective visions conflict on a fundamental level, fashioning the psychological terrain upon which political and cultural debates take place.

The opposite of what Sowell calls the tragic or the constrained vision is the unconstrained vision. From the halls of Yale to the boardrooms of the New York Times, the unconstrained view is the prevailing vision in modern American culture. If the tragic vision works to check the darker elements of human nature, the unconstrained vision works to free our better angels from the chains of the past. While the constrained vision finds prosperity, peace, and public order unusual in an inherently chaotic and brutal universe, the unconstrained vision finds poverty, war, and criminality unusual and unnecessary in a world where things could be otherwise.

At bottom, the visions conflict over the meaning of history: Is our collective past a wellspring of knowledge and wisdom from which to draw, or a hornet's nest of injustice and oppression that we need to discard in the name of progress? A person's preferred vision also informs his attitude toward life itself. The constrained vision accepts tragedy as an unavoidable part of being human and seeks to make the best of things. The unconstrained vision takes human tragedy as evidence that something has gone wrong and someone is to blame--once we fix the problem and remove the blameworthy people we will return to our natural state of goodness. "We will do almost anything for our visions," Sowell writes in the preface, "except think about them. The purpose of this book is to think about them."

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