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Compassion versus theft

Political ·Monday April 12, 2010 @ 00:44 EDT (link)

An excerpt that illuminates a tactic I thought might have been only a local phenomenon: claim that people that oppose (failed) government programs, handouts, and redistribution are not "compassionate". A similar trick, not covered so explicitly, is to claim that it is compassionate to take money from people by force and use it to fund such programs.

The contemporary anointed and those who follow them make much of their "compassion" for the less fortunate, their "concern" for the environment, and their being "anti-war," for example—as if these were characteristics which distinguish them from people with opposite views on public policy. The very idea that such an opponent of the prevailing vision as Milton Friedman, for example, has just as much compassion for the poor and the disadvantaged, that he is just as much appalled by pollution, or as horrified by the sufferings and slaughter imposed by war on millions of innocent men, women, and children—such an idea would be a very discordant note in the vision of the anointed. If such an idea were fully accepted, this would mean that opposing arguments on social policy were arguments about methods, probabilities, and empirical evidence—with compassion, caring, and the like being common features on both sides, thus canceling out and disappearing from the debate. That clearly is not the vision of the anointed. One reason for the preservation and insulation of a vision is that it has become inextricably intertwined with the egos of those who believe it. Despite Hamlet's warning against self-flattery, the vision of the anointed is not simply a vision of the world and its functioning in a causal sense, but is also a vision of themselves and of their moral role in the world. It is a vision of differential rectitude. It is not a vision of the tragedy of the human condition: Problems exist because others are not as wise or as virtuous as the anointed.

The great ideological crusades of twentieth-century intellectuals have ranged across he most disparate fields—from the eugenics movement of the early decades of the century to the environmentalism of the later decades, not to mention the welfare state, socialism, communism, Keynesian economics, and medical, nuclear, and automotive safety. What all these highly disparate crusades have in common is their moral exaltation of the anointed above others, who are to have their very different views nullified and superseded by the views of the anointed, imposed via the power of government. Despite the great variety of issues in a series of crusading movements among the intelligentsia during the twentieth century, several key elements have been common to most of them:
  1. Assertions of a great danger to the whole society, a danger to which the masses of people are oblivious.
  2. An urgent need for action to avert impending catastrophe.
  3. A need for government to drastically curtail the dangerous behavior of the many, in response to the prescient conclusions of the few.
  4. A disdainful dismissal of arguments to the contrary as either uninformed, irresponsible, or motivated by unworthy purposes.
… What is remarkable is how few arguments are really engaged in, and how many substitutes for arguments there are. These substitutes for arguments are, almost by definition, more available to adherents of the prevailing vision, whose assumptions are so widely accepted as to permit conclusions based on those assumptions to pass muster without further scrutiny.

—Thomas Sowell, The Vision of the Anointed, 1996.