One of my living heroes, the American journalist and economist Thomas Sowell, wrote a column a couple of days ago consisting of “random thoughts”—aphoristic remarks about things as they now are. His points ran from the generality of:
“Perhaps the scariest aspect of our times is how many people think in talking points, rather than in terms of real world consequences.”
To the specificity of:
“Barack Obama seems determined to repeat every disastrous mistake of the 1930s, at home and abroad. He has already repeated Herbert Hoover’s policy of raising taxes on high income earners, FDR’s policy of trying to micro-manage the economy, and Neville Chamberlain’s policy of seeking dialogues with hostile nations while downplaying the dangers they represent.”
Sowell is superb when apothegmatic. The value in such assertions as these—made free of the encumbering apparatus of careful qualification on which he usually depends—is that they light a dark landscape with lightning. They are the pure electric charge of insight.
I love Sowell, because he can “do” desolation without wandering into despair. Reciprocally, he can do hope—the real thing, not the rhetorical posture. A black man, from a fatherless home, raised by an aunt whom he thought was his mother, in rural then urban conditions that would excuse any man for failure, he saw through his circumstances. He dragged himself up, through a machine shop, through the Marines, eventually to great eminence in the academic world, at a time before he could trade on his race. And he continued rising, with the help of honest friends, and by ignoring vilifications.
He is the opposite of the current U.S. president, who, despite a semi-fatherless start, lucked out at every stage, and has consistently traded on race. Which is not to say I’m against luck, per se, nor against exploiting one’s natural advantages. I am instead calling attention to what can be done without luck and advantages. Obama’s youthful memoirs are well-written and captivating, but narcissistic; I would recommend The Autobiography of Malcolm X for better insights into American black experience. And I would recommend Sowell’s A Personal Odyssey for something that defeats both, by refusing to politicize the personal.
We learn by suffering; Sowell knows that, and has learned. We advance by finding advantages in what at first sight are only limitations and oppressions; by turning the tables on fate. This is an individual, not a collective operation; it begins with that refusal to make an excuse. In moments Sowell reminds me almost of Solzhenitsyn, turning a Siberian prison camp into an elite finishing school of hard knocks, and graduating from it, magna cum laude.
When I read a man’s works, I do not look only at his arguments, but when I can know, at how he has lived them. One is not converted by arguments alone, one is converted by personal example, and by spiritual qualities that go beyond the purely rational. Note that construction: the spiritual requires more than the rational, not less. We do not, or rather should not, take instructions on how to live from people who do not live by them.
Now, Professor Sowell is only one of many living heroes, and I mention him today because he is so often casually vilified, demonized, derided and condescended to by “progressive” people, including many fellow blacks, as if he were an Uncle Tom, when he is no such thing.
Clarence Thomas, the U.S. Supreme Court justice who is another of my living heroes, recalled throwing a book by Sowell in the trash, in his young radical days. In Justice Thomas’s memoir, My Grandfather’s Son, a parallel story is told of wrestling with, then finally breaking through, the political myths that have provided the greatest obstacle to the genuine liberation of “African America.”
Another hero, though a man I did not at first appreciate, is the late Martin Luther King Jr. Read him and one finds that he is no mere politician, selling illusions to advance a career, or to promote any party agenda.
His unambiguously Christian apprehension of the world is visible to all who are prepared to take seriously what he has to say, for instance against moral failure, against broken families, against the evil of abortion, against radicalism and violence.
The black man must stand, not as a black, but as a man. King is accepted today as a hero, across all political classes, yet his message is often reduced to that of a “community organizer.” Yet he was, in reality, the opposite of that.
In this Holy Week, facing towards Good Friday, we should remember what lies deeper than politics: Truth. “Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you.” Yet what goes deeper than politics, applies also to politics. It is to stand on truths for which you won’t be thanked, to stand alone if you must, full of the hope that in the end, truth wins.
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