Thomas Sowell on Cosmic Justice and Equal Treatment

foreign I guess the first thing to do is to Define what  Cosmic Justice is as distinguished from whatever   other kind of Justice we may be familiar with uh  traditional Justice I guess we can summarize at   least in the American tradition as applying the  same rules and the same standards to everybody   Cosmic Justice is very different it means  equalizing the prospects of everybody and those   two things are not only different in concept  they're wholly incompatible with one another   if you apply the same rules and standards to  everybody in baseball Mark McGuire is going   to hit 70 home runs and they're going to be  other people who will spend an entire career   without hitting 70 home runs including people  in the Hall of Fame like Luke Appling who twice   won the batting championship so if you want  the one thing or the other you can go for it   but the one thing you cannot do is pursue the  two things simultaneously or rather you cannot   successfully do that the Supreme Court has been  pursuing the two things simultaneously but quite   a quite a while leading to a lot of five to  four decisions uh and inconsistent decisions   the requirements for the two kinds of Justice  are very different the requirement for treating   everyone the same is very simple it's mass  produced the requirements for Cosmic Justice   must be handmade and tailored to each individual  case it's much more complex and it requires a much   larger amount of government power some third party  must intervene to determine whether the outcomes   are right whether the prospects are right the very  same words have entirely different meanings within   these two Frameworks in fact as I mentioned the  preface to the book what really set me off a few   years ago to finish it up was a discussion with  one of my colleagues at Stanford University who   shall be anonymous in deference to the libel  laws uh who talked about a Level Playing Field   and it became plainfully clear that what he  called the Level Playing Field is what I would   have called a tilted playing field tilted so as  to produce the results that he wanted when we   talk about a fair fight that means very different  things in these two Within These two Frameworks   a fair fight by traditional standards means that  both boxers observe the Marcus of Queensbury rules   and the fight is fair whether it ends up in a  draw or one-sided beating from the other point   of view from the cosmic perspective it's fair  only when the two fighters enter the ring with   the same prospects of winning John Rawls has  uh sort of summarized and epitomized of these   two differences he distinguishes what he calls  Fair equality of opportunity from merely formal   equality of opportunity uh traditional Justice or  fairness by roles and standards means simply that   people are judged by the same rules but genuine  equality of opportunity as he calls it cannot be   achieved by this uh by this method instead he  says undeserved inequalities call for redress and obviously someone must have  power in order to do that or redress now what's called what I call Cosmic justice  has been called by some people's social justice   but I think they're unduly modest because they're  trying to correct not only the inequities that   they see in society they're trying to owe to  correct the oversights of God or the defects of   the cosmos when some people are born with physical  or mental handicaps they want to counterbalance   that and of course that's not always caused by  Society so that when moral says that undeserved   inequalities he includes all sorts of things and  that opens up a very large area for others you   can find this perspective on uh justice the rosian  perspective in many places from the street corner   Community activists right up to the chambers of  the Supreme Court for example a few years ago a an   admissions director at Stanford University wrote a  book in which she pointed out that during all her   years as an administrative director she had never  required students to submit achievement tests   because some of those students she said  true no fault of their own attended schools   where they could not have acquired the  skills necessary to do well on such tests   so she's trying to redress the inequalities and  therefore she would simply not require such tests   the educational testing service is currently  engaging in a renorming of test scores to   take into account the social backgrounds and  handicaps of the students so the school will then   again redress pre-existing inequalities rather  than applying the same standards to everybody   whenever I hear the Notions of fairness and  education I think back to my own education   and I think thank God my teachers were unfair  to me when I was a kid growing up in Harlem   one of these teachers was a lady named Miss Simon   who belonged to what might be called  The General Patton School of Education uh I cannot even imagine that Mrs Simon  gave a momentous thought to my self-esteem every word that we misspelled in her class had  to be written 50 times not in class but as part   of our homework and there was always plenty  of other homework from her and other teachers   and so you misspelled four or five words  and you had quite an evening ahead of you   very little chance of listening to the London  Ranger now was this fair in rosian terms and   the answer is no like many of the children in  Harlem at that time I came from a home where   nobody had gone beyond Elementary School  I still remember what a big fuss was made   when I was promoted to the seventh grade  because I'd go on further than anyone else   uh in later years when I graduated from Harvard  there was no such fuss they expected me to fairness was never an option there was nothing  Miss Simon or anybody else could do about the   fact that we came from homes where we did  not have books and magazines and we were   not as familiar with those words as people  from other neighborhoods might have been   so that was never an option nothing that  schools could have done would have changed   that it would have been an irresponsible  self-indulgence for them to have pretended   to make things fair if there's anything worse  than unfairness it is make-believe fairness   they could like the College Board apparently  is trying to do pretended that we knew more   than we did and that would have made them  feel good it would not have done much for us   instead they forced us to meet standards that were  a little harder for us to meet than there were for   some other kids but far more necessary for us to  meet because that was the only way out of poverty   many years later I happened to run into one  of the other kids from Harlem who went to   that same school at the same time and by now he  was a psychiatrist he owned a home in the Napa   Valley and property out there in fact now he's  uh retired living overseas with servants while   yours truly is still trying to make a living but  as we reminisced about things that had happened   in the old days and what had happened in between  one of the things he mentioned was that over the   years his various secretaries had commented  on the fact that he seldom misspelled a word I told him that my secretaries had made that very  same observation and that if they knew Miss Simon   there would be no mystery as to why we did not  misspell words now it so happens I became a high   school dropout but what I was taught before I  dropped out was enough for me to score higher   on the verbal s.a.t than the average Harvard  student which may have had something to do with   my being admitted to Harvard and in the era  before affirmative action was even thought of what if the teachers had all those of that era  had been imbued with the present-day conception   of fairness where would my school made an  IB today on welfare in prison perhaps in a   halfway house if we were lucky and would that  not have been an injustice to take individuals   capable of independent self-supporting and  self-direct being self-directed women and men   with pride in their own achievements and turn  them into dependence clients supplicants mascots now the primary purpose of mascots is to  ministers to symbolize something that makes   other people feel good the actual fate of the  mascot himself is seldom a major consideration the argument here is not against Real Justice or  real equality both of these things are desirable   in themselves the only argument is that some  versions of these things are simply impossible   and that trying the impossible has costs and  real dangers as well after all the people who   man the communist movement around the world  before the Soviet Union was established didn't   devote themselves to this cause for the  sake of creating gulags and secret police   and territorial aggrandizement they did it  because they were seeking social justice   but what actually happened shows some of  the costs and some of the dangers of that   most ordinary Americans still have the traditional  conception of Justice and that means the people   who have this Cosmic notion of Justice must  misrepresent what is happening as being a   violation of traditional Justice and therefore  they must for example misrepresent test results   as being either arbitrary barriers to advancement  or deliberate efforts to perpetuate inequalities as Joseph Trumpeter once said the first  thing a man will do for his ideals is lie the next thing he will do and this is  my addendum is character assassination   those people who disagree with those with the  vision of cosmic Justice must be stopped in   their view by all means necessary and that  of course includes character assassination   they must be bought to use a verb of our time   now the people who are the victims of this  atmosphere of character assassination are not   simply those we're targeted the whole society  is a victim because you're not going to be   able to attract into the public Arena people  who value their privacy who value protecting   their families from humiliations uh if in fact  this agreements become simply grounds for smears in a sense the people who are caught up in  the vision of cosmic Justice are also victims   because once having demonized other people they  really cannot go back to square one and re-examine   the evidence and find out whether what they've  been advocating has been producing the results   they want while producing totally different  results and so they're locked into the vision   they have too much of a stake in it to ever  think think about doing something different   I have a chapter in the book  called The Tyranny of visions   about how people how the vision becomes more  real to people than any empirical reality   a classic example was one described by Paul  Johnson Lennon and Johnson pointed out that Lenin   although he spoke of himself as a representative  of the proletariat had in fact never set foot in a   working class neighborhood and any of the Cities  he'd ever been in inside or outside of Russia   he had never talked with the workers and had  no idea what they believed about anything   he also after becoming the ruler of Russia  never set foot in Soviet Central Asia which   is an area larger than all of Western Europe  and in which all these doctrinaire schemes   from Moscow were imposed for nearly three  quarters of a century with devastating results   what he was devoted to was the  vision not flesh and blood people   a flesh and blood people were a complication  on the road to realize in the vision and as   it turned out if he had to kill a few million  of those that was just so much too bad and of   course we've seen Hitler Mao and others with the  same approach now fortunately we have thus far in   this country had much more milder versions of this  but you can see also this notion of looking for   visions and the abstractions that go with those  Visions rather than with flesh and blood people the vision of cosmic Justice is very beneficial to  the people who hold it even if it's not beneficial   to Those whom it's intended to benefit and  I think that's one of the reasons that their   people are so reluctant to give it up because  they feel wonderful I'm sure that if we had   the kinds of teachers that we have today and they  had lowered the standards to all of us as we were   coming through the school and we all ended up  going out into the world for doomed of failure   those teachers would have felt wonderful about  themselves because they say hey we're not leaning   on these poor kids we're taking into account  that they come from backgrounds that are deprived   I mean particularly in education this is  devastating because it's been shown again   and again that in one generation people can  do remarkable things with a decent education   uh Jaime escalanti did this out in California  where the Hispanic kids who scored so high on   the calculus test that the educational  testing service could not believe it   uh so an awful lot can be done language is  same thing the whole notion that you have to   have bilingualism well it's known from a lot  of research that the child's brain is better   able to assimilate languages in those first half  dozen years than they will ever be able to do in   later life the brain itself metamorphosis and  uh if you if you don't learn a foreign language   until you're 30 you're never going to speak it  as well as if you learned it when you were five   and so all these things can be done uh but they're  not going to be done as long as third parties   think that the purpose of the educational system  is to make them feel good about themselves [Music] thank you [Music]