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Conflict of Visions Essay Any attentive witness of political and social converse cant but note the ironies and disunity in definite viewpoints from time to time. Conservatives usually support limitations of behavior in order to influence security, while liberals greet freedom; however they are happy to shorten it in order to regulate the resources to hold up their preferential classes. Both of sides, if truthfully introspective, have to worry about the points of view of each other and the reasons of these points existing. Thomas Sowell, one of America's most attentive and intellectually straightforward observers explains these reasons and traces the cause of the question to the Enlightenment and post-enlightenment scholars before French Revolution and straight after it.
He explains the main dichotomy between the "constrained" and "unconstrained" views of people, which view mankind as spoilt or perfectible correspondingly. I would like to highlight how Sowell understands the term vision. For him it is an innocuous truism. He almost with no doubt intends more by usage of "vision" than the ordinary theorists who began from conjectures.
To prevent misunderstanding, I do not maintain the statement that theories cant arise from visions of Sowell's type. I just wish to note that even if one determines the two sorts of visions into which theories of society are divided by Sowell to be a dichotomy of exceptional virtue, this would point out a fact about existing theories. To assert that theories can be grouped in some definite way indicates nothing about how the theories came into life. Nevertheless, Sowell managed to create a really Aristotelian approach to the contemporary thinking. Sowell's main idea about these contrast visions of the ability, comprehension, and excellence of people consists in two very different visions of humanity. These are the visions on which political ideology, debate, and worldview are based.
Sowell's two visions are called, rather uncleanly, constrained and unconstrained. I prefer to call them tragic and utopian like in the book by Steven Pinker. The two visions differ chiefly over what human-beings can become, not what they are at the present moment. The Tragic (constrained) vision of humanity represents man as having weaknesses, motives, and the wish to do something for his own self-interest. In other words, people may now be egoistical and shortsighted; but given the proper conditions usually involving guidance of the elite a true metamorphosis will happen. The constrained vision looks at humans as basically unalterable in their essence.
Sowell asserts that the constrained vision doesnt offer much scope for the moral theory application. In brief, the constrained view emphasizes the "primacy of social interests over those of the individual." According to Sowell the Tragic "sees the evils of the world as deriving from the limited and unhappy choices available, given the inherent moral and intellectual limitations of human beings. " In addition, history should lead us, as the in cognizable choices between various strategies and systems were ironed out through unnamed operations. The Utopians are to be despised for their academic leanings which are not realistic enough: "Hobbes regarded universities as places where fashionable but insignificant words flourished and added that there is nothing so absurd, but may be found in the books of Philosophers. " The Utopian (unconstrained) vision implies that man has not yet realized his full ethical potential, and that this potential is fundamentally perfectible. Sowell explains: "foolish and immoral choices explain the evils of the world - and that wiser or more moral and humane social policies are the solution. " So while there are motives that really work, this fact is rather extraneous to the reaching of real justice. The Utopian vision means that "potential is very different from the actual, and that means exist to improve human nature toward its potential, or that such means can be evolved or discovered, so that man will do the right thing for the right reason, rather than for ulterior psychic or economic rewards. " So the Utopian "promotes pursuit of the highest ideals and the best solution" in the hopes of becoming this perfect man. Unconstrained visionaries put much more stress on what is right, apart from its social consequences.
The rights originate not from their usefulness as an instrument for oiling the social mechanism. They are owed to their possessors and it is morally incorrect to refuse them their adequate recognition. And if the people are slow in understanding it, it is the tasks of the scholar precursor to guide them - even after some time the people are not satisfied with the outcomes because they have not yet understand the method to see the future. Their idea is that reason must lead us, but reason as defined by the greatest: scholars, elected government representatives. I can conclude that the Sowell's book is about two divergent views of how to achieve desired social or policy outcomes better. The biggest difference between the two visions is that one view sees the constraints of the world as the first and the main thing a human has to ask about.
The other view is some kind of a crusading view that there is something that ought to be done, and we have no time to pause and speculate over the input / output analysis. Political visions are unusually linked across various fields of investigation, that these two challenging political visions have been leading in the last two centuries and extending from original grounds, every of them is a rational, consistent, convincing analysis of the world that, however, conflicts totally with its correlate. The propositions are attractive: "While believers in the unconstrained vision seek the special causes of war, poverty, and crime, believers in the constrained vision seek the special causes of peace, wealth, or a law-abiding society. While the constrained vision sees human nature as essentially unchanged across the ages and around the world, the particular cultural expressions of human needs peculiar to specific societies are not seen as being readily and beneficially changeable by forcible intervention. By contrast, those with the unconstrained vision tend to view human nature as beneficially changeable and social customs as expendable holdovers from the past. " (Sowell, Thomas (1984). A Conflict of Visions.
New York. ) In sum, I am sure that this will be a foundation for theoretical and political consideration for the next generations. Sowell showed the different grounds quite clearly. Now it is up to us to appreciate, argue, and decide like Jared Diamond did in his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. The book by Jared Diamond Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed is a continuation of the Sowell's discussion. In his book Diamond shows very interesting point of view which draws the attention of readers. Being a geographer Diamond laid out a great view of the organic roots of human civilizations in fauna, flora, geology and climate.
That vision takes on apocalyptic implication in this appealing comparative study of societies that, from my point of view, have undermined their own ecological bases. Diamond scrutinizes illustrious examples of human social and economic collapse, and even dying out, including classical Mayan civilization, Easter Island, and the Greenland Norse. Jared Diamond describes the suicide of civilizations that disappeared as a result of the disagreement between the way of life they had to keep in order to guarantee their social survival and the way of life they should have accepted in order to provide their biological survival. The author shows the absence of flexibility on the one hand (refusal to modify their ways) and lack of knowledge on the other hand that made the civilizations commit a unhurried suicide by putting the ecological system in the state of crisis.
In the book Jared pays much attention to the detail explanation of his idea. He is an excellent expositor of everything from zoology to anthropology; he provides an intelligible background of scientific knowledge to support an incisive, stimulating historical account of all these multiple declines and falls. Diamonds accounts of various human communities scoop real data from different academic fields, such as pollen analysis, isotope analysis, tree-ring analysis, seismology, archaeology, agronomy, sociology, and the history of religion. More to the point, while explaining how lack of knowledge lead the civilizations to commit an unintentional suicide; he goes several steps further and makes the reader understand that in a first country in the world the same ignorance exists. Jared Diamond explains the significance of the various ancient communities decease for the United States.
Several of these explanations extrapolate from longstanding situations to modern that are very clearly marked as not as solid as the rest of the book. However, I am afraid that they, together with the title of the book, will cause an excuse for people to discard the book as an ideological polemic that is "pro-environment and anti-business." That would be deplorable, because it is virtually balanced and nuanced in the interpretation of the human condition. With his book, Jared Diamond hopes to nudge collective memory of people to keep us from taking the bait of false analogies or forgetting previous experiences, and thereby preserve us from potential devastations. While reading the book I came to the dilemma similar to such of Sowell are the civilizations destroyed by forces outside their control or by their own passiveness? The exhortation of Collapse is that societies are not assassinated. I came to the conclusion that they commit suicide: humans in the course of many years and decades stand by passively and observe themselves bleed to death.
Professor Diamond reserves the most insightful research for the most "irrational" reasons why people are not as yet responding to the scope and urgency of this day converging environmental problems. Really, the existing of two opposite points of view, so different, so contrasting as they were described by Thomas Sowell may lead to the tragedy. People must not be so irritable by the existing of the another point of view and must try not to reject it completely but find the methods to combine all the positive and necessary that can be find in both of these approaches in order to prevent the suicide of the civilization, that is showed by Jared Diamond as a one of possible consequences of Thomas Sowell theory. Bibliography Diamond, Jared (2005). Collapse: How Societies choose to fail or succeed. Viking, Sowell, Thomas (1984).
A Conflict of Visions. New York.
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