Ideological make-believe

Wish I'd said that!

[Reprinted from Issues & Views June 3, 2002]

It is one thing to say that everyone should be equal before the law or is entitled to equal opportunity. It is something else to deny the most blatant facts before our eyes, and insist on a dogma of equality of performance, when virtually every individual or group is better at some things than at others.

More is involved than incidental pious nonsense. Such ideological make-believe has come to dominate public policy and even judicial decisions in the highest courts in the land. Statistical disparities among groups are routinely equated with discrimination, as if there could not possibly be any differences in behavior or performance among the groups themselves.

It gets worse. Whole nations and civilizations are equated, despite enormous disparities between them. People may be living in air-conditioned homes with all the modern amenities in one culture and in huts and shacks without running water or adequate sewage disposal in another. People in one culture may have better health, longer life, more advanced technology, more stable government, and greater personal freedom and safety than others. Moreover, people from other cultures are constantly migrating to these cultures, which fashionable dogmas say are no better than the cultures they are leaving.

Those people who say that all cultures are equal never explain why the results of those cultures are so grossly unequal. Anything that goes against the prevailing social dogma is virtually certain to be dismissed as a stereotype.

To find anything comparable in its blind denial of facts before their eyes, and such fierce and ruthless insistence on an arbitrary party line, you have to go back to the worst days of 20th century totalitarianism. Ironically, it is in our most elite prep schools and colleges that this totalitarian mindset is most deeply entrenched and most intolerant of any other views.

-- Thomas Sowell is an economist and author of many books, including Preferential Policies: An International Perspective (Morrow), Inside American Education: The Decline, The Deception, The Dogmas (Free Press/Macmillan) and Migrations and Cultures: A World View (Basic Books).

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