There are as many different visions of the world as there are human beings—perhaps more, for we sometimes change our visions over a lifetime. But most of these individual visions are variations on two major visions which have struggled for supremacy in the Western world for more than two centuries. I call them the constrained vision and the unconstrained vision. These two visions have sometimes been equated with the political left and the political right. But the left-right dichotomy itself is misleading. Only the left is defined, even approximately. All those who oppose the left, for whatever reason, are lumped together as ‘the right’, however radically they may differ among themselves. Opponents of the left include monarchists and democrats, libertarians and fascists. They share no common assumptions or values. Therefore the dichotomy that lumps them together as ‘the right’ is a false dichotomy.

By contrast, the dichotomy between the constrained vision and the unconstrained vision reflects a specific set of underlying assumptions about man, about society and about social causation. There are, of course, differences among those individuals within the general tradition of each vision, but these are differences of degree, in a sense in which it is not true that the differences between fascists and libertarians are differences of degree.

I. A CONFLICT OF VISIONS

What are the visions and why are they important? Visions are an image of reality in our minds—our sense of what the facts are and how causation operates. These visions are important because even the most knowledgable individuals are grossly ignorant—and necessarily so—over vast regions of a complex society and a complex set of international relations. Visions not only substitute for knowledge; they also determine how the relatively few hard facts that we do know are fitted into some general framework.

Visions not only affect our explanations of the world around us; they determine what it is that we think needs explaining. When some social thinkers say that we must seek the ‘root causes’ of crime, or the ‘root causes’ of terrorism and war, if we are to solve these problems, they are expressing the unconstrained vision. In that vision, there are no inherent reasons why such evils exist and it is only a question of finding the proper philosophy and the proper leaders in order to banish them entirely. But when others say that crime can only be deterred—restrained but not eliminated—by punishment, and terrorism and war deterred by the threat of retaliation, they are expressing the opposite vision, the constrained vision, in which there are no solutions, only trade-offs, in which we must resort to unpleasant expedients to avoid even greater tragedies.

Historically, when the French Revolution created a government with virtually unlimited powers, in order to seek the general good and carry out the general will, it was expressing the unconstrained vision of man. But when the American Revolution created a government whose actions were hemmed in on all sides by checks and balances, it expressed the constrained vision of man as a creature whose talents and ideals could be used beneficially but whose dangerous shortcomings and evils had to be guarded against at all times. The Federalists, who wrote in justification of the US constitution that they helped shape, were quite aware that it embodied a particular vision of man. 

They said:

It may be a reflection on human nature that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?

‘Why has government been instituted at all?’

‘Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.’ 

II. THE INTERNAL DANGER

The unconstrained vision represents a fundamental threat to the continued existence of a free society in two distinct ways: First, it undermines the legitimacy of the basic institutions of that society, even when those institutions are functioning well. Secondly, policies based on the unconstrained vision reduce the effectiveness of social and economic institutions, and thus reduce the attractiveness of life in a free society, as compared to alternative societies.

The Legitimacy of Institutions

The unconstrained vision blames virtually all unhappy events on failures of social institutions and social attitudes. ‘Crime cannot exist in a community that cares,’ according to a poster produced by the New Zealand government. This slogan captures the essence of unconstrained vision. If there are no severe constraints inherent in the nature of man, then crime—like other sources of unhappiness—is unnecessary and its existence is a condemnation of the society that engenders it.

No institution is more basic than the family—and none has been so consistently undermined by those with the constrained vision. Child abuse, oppression of women, and neglect and abuse of the elderly are some the charges repeatedly made against the family. All too often, both the charges and sensational statistics in support of charges originate in groups with obvious vested interests in taking over from the family in one area or another and substituting the programmes of social theorists, the agenda of ideologues, or the services of psychologist and social workers. Yet, despite the obvious self-interest of individuals and organisations supplying sensational statistics, the media, by and large, accept these statistics, unquestioningly broadcast them far and wide, issue passionate editorials based on those unexamined numbers, and feature interviews and dramatisations to forward the cause.

One of the few reporters to look behind the numbers was a New Zealand journalist named Emily Flynn, who recently investigated a media campaign purporting to show that one girl in four was sexually molested by her own father. After she went back to the original studies on which this sensational statistic was based, after she sifted through the shifting definitions, the sloppy methodology, and the tendentious non sequiturs of the ‘analysis’, Ms Flynn discovered that less than one girl in a hundred was likely to be sexually molested by her father. Despite a massive media campaign arousing fears in mothers and daughters alike—and, not incidentally, soliciting money from the public—it turned out that fathers were the least likely of all males to sexually molest a girl. Those whom we were being taught to turn to for protection from such dangers in the family—teachers and social workers—have dozens of times higher rates of sexual molestation.

None of this is meant to deny that sexual molestation occurs. In a society of millions of imperfect human beings, almost any evil imaginable is likely to occur somewhere, sometimes. Nothing will be easier than for media people, seized with a vision, to go out and find examples and put them in print or on television in all their tearful anguish—as if that made them typical. The usual charges of media bias tend to focus too narrowly on the ideologies prevalent among individuals in the media. This can be a legitimate concern, when the ideological preponderance is all in one direction. But there are also biases inherent in the media, as such, even when there are ideological balance and impeccable professional ethics.

The media dramatise, whether in news or in fiction. The individual is the focus, whether that individual is typical or atypical. Tables of statistics and regression equations do not make good newspaper reading or scintillating television viewing. Moreover, the enormous variety of subjects covered by a media journalist makes it inevitable that he cannot possibly understand what is underneath all the surfaces he glides over. Yet high visibility offers both the opportunity and the temptation to public expressions of moral indignation and media crusades about things that are not even half-understood. The most tempting targets are of course the most basic institutions of the society—which is to say, that the bias of the media, as such, is toward undermining the pillars of a free society.

Sensational campaigns against incestuous molestation are only one example, and it nor other forms of orchestrated hysteria is confined to New Zealand. In the United States, a statistic spread (with suitable expressions of horror) throughout the media is that one American in twelve goes hungry. The highest Gross National Product in the world and one out of twelve people goes hungry—you can easily imagine the words and the music. Virtually no-one does anything so simplistic as look into the origins of this statistic.

How do you count the hungry? Once the question is asked in that direct way, the obvious answer is that you don’t—certainly not 20 million of them. Those who produced the one out of twelve statistic got it by running census data through a computer, with their own definitions added. From the census tape, you can determine how many people meet the federal government’s requirement to receive food stamps. Subtract the number of people who in fact receive food stamps, and the remainder are ‘hungry’—statistically at least. Using this procedure, someone discovered the ‘hungriest’ country in the United States. It turned out to be a farming and ranching community with relatively low money income, entitling many of its inhabitants to food stamps, though only three people in fact received food stamps. For purely statistical purposes, it does not matter how many of the people in that country were in fact eating food that they themselves grew. It does not matter if the people on the ranches were eating more steaks than most Americans. Statistically, they were hungry—and in the media it was a moral outrage.

Innumerable other crusades are based on equally shaky data. The rate of illiteracy in America ranges from less than one percent of the population to more than 30 percent, depending on how you define your terms. Naturally, those who are seeking more government money and bigger social programmes prefer definitions that lead to more alarming statistics. One of the methods used to get inflated ‘illiteracy’ statistics is to present less educated people with a passage written in bureaucratic language and ask them to explain what it means. Some PhD’s would fail such a test. Einstein had someone else do his income taxes for him.

Media people cannot all be statisticians. But they can at least know that they are not statisticians—and not be so quick to grab a number and run with it. They can understand that often the most important thing about a number is its origin.

The real danger from incessant and reckless crusades is not that some wrong policies will be followed here and there. Countries can survive bad policies; otherwise there would be no countries still surviving today. The far greater danger is the steady drumbeat of demoralising and false assertions, proclaiming disaster after disaster in the most basic institutions of society, serving the most important material and human needs. Crying 'wolf’ used to be an irresponsible act of individuals. Today, it is a flourishing industry—one heavily subsidised by tax money.

The Effectiveness of Institutions

In addition to delegitimising the institutions that are functioning poorly, those with the unconstrained vision often also create very real malfunctions in institutions. Where no inherent limitations are taken into account, every unhappy aspect of every tradeoff becomes a basis for a crusade for a ‘solution’. Moreover, no matter how counterproductive this ‘solution’ turns out to be in practice, any problems it creates can be viewed as new and unrelated, or as showing that the ‘solution’ was simply not carried far enough. On a wide range of disparate issues, a pattern has emerged—a pattern that can be broken down into four stages:
 

Stage 1: Some situation exists whose negative aspects some group wants to eliminate. Such a situation is routinely called a ‘crisis’.

Stage 2: Policies are advocated to end the ‘crisis’. Advocates claim that these policies will lead to beneficial result A. Critics say that this will lead to detrimental result Z. The latter claims are dismissed as absurd and impossible, if not also dishonest.

Stage 3: The policies are instituted and lead to detrimental result Z.

Stage 4: Those who say that detrimental result Z is due to the policies are dismissed as ‘simplistic’, and the burden of proof is put on them to demonstrate to an absolute certainty that these policies alone were the only possible cause of the results. No burden of proof whatever is put on those who had so confidently predicted the opposite result. Examples of this pattern abound. 

Back in the 1960s, the number of Americans whose incomes were so low that they are kept out of poverty only by dependence on payments from the government was relatively low—and falling. Yet there was still poverty. This was the ‘crisis’, or stage 1.

Stage 2: President Lyndon Johnson launched the ‘war on poverty’ programmes to enable people to become self-supporting through retraining and other programmes. Critics claimed that this would only create more dependence on government, but this was dismissed by ‘war on poverty’ supporters, who emphasised that its whole purpose was to end handouts; ‘Give a hand, not a handout’ was their slogan and President Johnson proclaimed, 'The days of the dole are numbered’.

Stage 3: After many years and many billions of dollars, the proportion of Americans unable—or unwilling—to support themselves above the poverty level without government payments increased.

Stage 4: Rising poverty has become a new alarm spread by the same people who supported the ‘war on poverty’ programmes—and is used to argue for new programmes along the same lines.

The so-called ‘sex education’ crusade has exhibited the same pattern. Back in the late 1950s American teenage pregnancy had been declining for several years. Still, it had not entirely disappeared and there were many personal tragedies involved.

Stage 1: the ‘solution’ proposed was to introduce sex education into the public schools, letting the ‘experts’ replace the family as the guide to young people’s sexual behaviour. Among the promised benefits were a reduction in teenage pregnancy, consequently a reduction in abortions and a reduction in venereal disease.

Stage 2: During the 1960s sex education began to be introduced in American schools on a massive basis.

Stage 3: The previous decline in teenage pregnancy not only halted but reversed—and skyrocketed to record levels, several times higher than before. Abortions and venereal disease also skyrocketed to record levels.

Stage 4: The present record levels of all these problems is almost universally assumed to demonstrate the desperate need for more sex education programmes in the schools. Anyone who suggests that the present situation is in any way due to the previous sex education programmes is of course dismissed out of hand.

A final example of this pattern in crime in America.

Stage 1: As of the 1950s, the murder rate in leading American cities had been declining for more than two decades. Still, there were many individual tragedies from this and other violent crimes. Those with the unconstrained vision had the solution: Get the ‘root cause’ of crime—poverty, unemployment, and other social ills, including ‘the inhumanity of our prisons’. Make the whole criminal justice system more humane, with new legal rights for the accused.

Stage 2: Partly through legislation, but mostly through Supreme Court decisions, a sweeping new array of rights were created for criminal defendants and convicted prisoners. Sweeping social programmes at the same time gave much larger sums of money to those in poverty and those suffering unemployment.

Stage 3: Crime rates more than doubled within the decade of the 1960s. These included murder rates, which reversed a long decline and doubled from 1963 to 1971. The increase was especially striking among juvenile criminals, whom the new legal reforms favoured especially. The number of murders committed by 16 year-olds tripled in four years in New York City. Some street gangs made it a policy to have their murders committed by their youngest members, who were least likely to receive serious punishment.

Stage 4: Anyone who calls for tightening up the laws against criminals is dismissed as ‘simplistic’ and out of date, since ‘everybody knows’ that what we need to do is get at the social ‘root causes’ of crime.

III. THE EXTERNAL DANGERS

The external threat to freedom and the internal threat are not completely unrelated. They are both related to the unconstrained vision of man. Moreover, the undermining of the institutions of a free society and the demoralisation of a free people cannot help affecting the confidence and zeal with which they are prepared to defend themselves—or the resignation with which some are willing to accept other systems that seem only marginally different from what they have.

This is an especially appropriate time to talk about external threats to freedom. Exactly half a century ago today—on September 29, 1938—the Western democracies committed their greatest blunder of the 20th century at Munich. The Munich agreement, intended by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain to produce ‘peace in our time’, in fact set the stage for World War II, in which 40 million people lost their lives. Western democracies themselves narrowly escaped from being destroyed. Though the Western allies in the end won convincingly, for the first two and a half years of the war, they suffered one swift, crushing and humiliating defeat after another, both in Europe and in the Pacific.

France collapsed in only six weeks of fighting. Other ancient and proud nations of Europe fell after only a few weeks, or even days, of fighting against the lightening warfare (blitzkrieg) of Hitler’s war machine. Britain was expected to fall any moment.

In the Pacific, after only a few hours of bombing, more than half the battleships of the American Pacific fleet lay at the bottom of Pearl Harbor. Over the next few months, Japan’s war machine won victory after shocking victory—taking the Philippines, Singapore and penetrating as far south as New Guinea.

These events did not go unnoticed in Australia. No-one seemed to have been morally ambivalent because the Australian government possessed the terrible weapons of modern warfare. But many were worried that Australia might not possess enough of these weapons to ensure its survival as a free nation.

Many histories and motion pictures have told the story of how the West came back from its desperate predicament to win in the end. What has been neglected is the story of how the West got into such a predicament in the first place. This story is of more than historical interest because it was attitudes rather than circumstances that led the West so close to destruction. Those attitudes—and the vision behind them—are flourishing in the West at this moment.

On the eve of World War II, during the decade of the 1930s, the constrained and the unconstrained visions of war and peace struggled for supremacy in the Western democracies and the unconstrained vision won overwhelmingly.

Back in the 18th century, Edmund Burke said that there is no security for honest men except by believing the worst about evil men. That is what the unconstrained vision cannot do. Its emphasis on the so-called ‘root causes’ of crime, for example, reflects an unwillingness to accept the fact that individuals may choose—knowingly and even calculatingly—to do deliberate evil, with the full awareness of its evil.

In International relations, both in the 1930s and today, the unconstrained vision sees war as so counter-productive for all concerned that it must be a consequence of misunderstandings, emotional relations, or the mindless psychology of an ‘arms race’. Given this, international negotiations and weapons reductions are the way to avoid war. These views and this vision dominated the thinking and the policies of the Western world during the 1930s. Everything that is being advocated by the so-called ‘peace movement’ today was tried then. They led to the bloodiest war in history.

During the 1930s, the entire Western world was seized with the unconstrained vision of peace, in desperate hopes of avoiding a repetition of the horrors of World War I, much as we are today desperate to avoid the horrors of another Vietnam. There is no question that the intentions were good in both cases. It is the consequences that need examining.

Those who saw the greatest dangers to be in the dreadful weapons of modern warfare were able to get a series of treaties limiting military and naval weapons, beginning in the 1920s and continuing up to the eve of the Second World War. Unilateral military reductions in the West supplemented these treaties. Britain, France and the United States all cut their military budgets substantially, during the early to mid-1930s. The US Army’s budget was cut in half in just one year, so that the money saved could be spent on the social programmes of the New Deal. The American Army became only the sixteenth largest army in the world—right after Spain and Portugal.

Even this small remnant of an army did not have enough military equipment. American soldiers trained with wooden rifles and wooden substitutes for tanks and artillery, because there were not enough real rifles, real tanks and real artillery weapons to go around. Those who believe in avoiding an arms race should study the history of the 1930s to see the classic example of avoiding an arms race. Then they should study the history of the outbreak of World War II at the end of that decade to see what the consequences are.

The West was not militarily weak because it had to be but because it chose to be. And it chose to be because its prevailing vision said that armaments increased the chances of war and international agreements increased the chances of peace. The period leading up to World War II is littered with international treaties for peace: the Kellog-Briand Pact, the Washington Naval Agreement, the Locarno Treaty, among others, in the 1920s and a similar set of treaties in the 1930s, culminating in the Munich agreement 50 years ago today. These treaties were seen as a substitute for armaments by those who thought ideologically. To more pragmatic politicians, pieces of paper were cheaper than military weapons and did more to enhance your image as a man of peace.

Throughout the whole period, the Western powers had greater industrial capacity—and therefore greater military potential—than Germany, Japan and Italy combined. Moreover, the leaders of the Western democracies knew that Germany and Japan especially were arming themselves at a rate exceeding any conceivable need for defence. Why did Western leaders do so little to counter these moral threats? British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin perhaps explained it best in 1936, when he stated why he had not alerted the country to its dangers during the 1933 election campaign: Suppose I had gone to the country and said that Germany was rearming, and that we must rearm, does anybody think that this pacific democracy would have rallied to that cry at that movement? Politically, Baldwin was no doubt right. Historically, he was tragically wrong, and millions paid with their lives for his political sagacity. In a larger sense, millions died because of the pacifism rampant in the West during the two decades following the First World War made it politically unfeasible to build up sufficient military forces to deter the Second World War.

Not everyone shared this vision. One of those who did not was a lonely backbencher in Britain’s House of Commons named Winston Churchill. It was not just that Churchill read the events of the times more correctly than Chamberlain. More fundamentally, Churchill started with an entirely different vision of the world.

In the constrained vision, it is not war that needs explaining, but peace. According to the Federalists, ‘nations in general will make war whenever they have a prospect of getting anything by it’. This was the constrained vision of man at its bluntest. In this vision, the challenge was to make it too risky for anybody to attack you. According to Churchill, war can be avoided ‘only by accumulation of deterrents against the aggressor’. In 1934, five years before the Second World War began, Churchill warned: ‘False ideas have been spread about the country that disarmament means peace.’ Just as believers in the constrained vision advocate checks and balances in government, so they advocate maintaining an international balance of military weapons, so as to check the actions of potential aggressors.

In this framework, weakness on the part of a major power risks war, not only for that power, but also for all the other nations depending on international checks and balances to maintain peace. In the 1930s, Churchill warned: ‘Britain’s hour of weakness is Europe’s hour of danger.’ If anything, this was an understatement. The dangers reached around the world. That remains true today.

Our times are, of course, different—but the differences give little basis for comfort. In a nuclear age, you cannot lose a war for two and a half years and still expect to win—or even to survive. In a nuclear age, war must be deterred because it is not even worth winning. Today, as fifty years ago, the West has every industrial and technological capacity to deter any aggressor or any combination of aggressors. The only question is whether our vision will let us do it.

Thomas Sowell has been a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University since 1980. In recent years he has become established as an authority on the political economy of race relations and on public policy towards minorities generally.