Blurred Vision

Kenneth Silber from the November 1995 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

A common habit of the anointed, Sowell writes, is to treat various elements of society as "mascots" or "targets." Groups that are distrusted or disliked by the general publicsuch as crimi nals, vagrants, and disease carriersare adopted by the left as pet causes; by extending their concern to the "less fortunate," the anointed differentiate themselves from the benighted public. Meanwhile, other groups are targeted by the anointed, precisely because they are held in generally high esteem; successful business people and professionals are among such targets, and hence the anointed favor expansive liability laws that make companies and doctors highly vulnerable to lawsuits.

When Sowell shifts his focus away from consummated policies and toward ongoing controver sies, the unintended effect is to highlight the left's current lack of power and relevance. The recent crusade against Mercator-projection maps is a case in point. Such maps, which make countries near the equator look smaller than those near the poles, have been denounced by the National Council of Churches and other groups as an example of Eurocentric bias against the Third World. Sowell points out, correctly, that the Mercator projection has long proven useful for navigation and other purposes and that alternative types of maps distort the globe in different ways. The deeper point, however, is that the anointed are spending their time on such arcana precisely because they are no longer busy restructuring society.

Indeed, The Vision of the Anointed strikes an unduly pessimistic note. Sowell describes the anointed's world view as the "prevailing" vision of our time: widely accepted among political and intellectual elites, and influential enough to have colored even the views of its opponents.
With each passing decade, he claims, the anointed's vision will become even more pervasive and insular, as precedents accumulate for their proposals and policies. But at a moment when the left is on the ropes politically and intellectually, Sowell's depiction of its self-deluded thinkers and policy makers inflicting broad harm upon society seems oddly anachronistic.

In that sense, The Vision of the Anointed , with its emphasis on controversies from the 1960s, overlooks the changing nature of the left. Increasingly, the focus of "progressive" energies is not on elaborate policy analysis but rather on obscure, intellectualized, free-floating hostility toward exist ing institutions. Instead of planning a new War on Poverty, the left seems eager to retreat into various realms of esoterica, including deconstructionism, multiculturalism, and the "politics of meaning." The Vision of the Anointed's portrayal of a rationalistic elite infatuated with social engineering is a more compelling vision of the anointed's past than of their present or future.

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