This quote is from Sowell’s book Intellectuals and Race, a subset of his 2012 tome Intellectuals and Society. He understands how today’s intellectuals formulate their approach to race, and sees right through them.
Whether in Europe, Asia, Africa, or the Western Hemisphere, a common pattern among intellectuals has been to seek, or demand, equality of results without equality of causes–or on sheer presumptions of equality of causes. Nor have such demands been limited to intellectuals within the lagging groups, whether minorities or majorities. Outside intellectuals, including intellectuals in other countries, have often discussed statistical differences in incomes or other outcomes as “disparities” and “inequities” that need to be “corrected” as if they were discussing abstract people in an abstract world.
The corrections being urged are seldom corrections within the lagging groups, such as Hume urged upon his fellow Scots in the eighteenth century. Today, the prevailing tenets of multiculturalism declare all cultures equal, sealing members of lagging groups within a bubble of their current habits and practices, much as believers in multiculturalism have sealed themselves within a bubble of peer-consensus dogma.
There are certain possibilities that many among the intelligentsia cannot even acknowledge as possibilities, much less try to test empirically, which would be risking a whole vision of the world–and of themselves–on a roll of the dice. Chief among these is the possibility that the most fundamental disparity among people is in their disparities in wealth-generating capabilities, of which the disparities in income and wealth are results, rather than causes. Other disparities, whether in crime, violence and alcohol intake or other social pathology, may also have internal roots. But these possibilities as well are not allowed inside the sealed bubble of the prevailing vision.
It sounds like a great description of how minority communities are kept in their unequal and poverty-stricken conditions, by the intellectuals who wish to be seen as their advocates, or maybe “saviors.”
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