Reddit reviews A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles
We found 21 Reddit comments about A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Basic Books AZ
I did some undergrad study in politics and economics, and although centre-left in my politics, have very fond memories of reading Sowell's autobiography A Personal Odyssey, it's little wonder he ended up where he did politically given his insightful and frustrating experiences in his non-academic life.
He's playing to a crowd here, in my opinion his best work is A Conflict of Visions which changed the way I understand personality and political ideology.
Fans of JP will probably get a lot out of Hayek's Road to Serfdom also.
The intellectual framework that explains many of the questions brought up in the podcast about the current state of American politics can be summed up
in two seminal books, A Conflict of Visions and
The Fourth Turning. After completing these two
volumes, Fox News will suddenly start making sense to you, since some of the language and terms used by the right wing are quite literally incomprehensible (what's "unconstrained vision"?) without these guides.
 
The first book in particular, about the distinction between people and processes, is very relevant today. Why does America tolerate a racist, misogynist, xenophobe? Because one won the election fair and square, while the other stole the
primary nomination from Bernie. So the right wingers are focused on the election process (regardless of candidate), and the left wingers are focused on the candidates (regardless of process). We are literally talking past each other when we don't
grasp this fundamental difference; no communication can take place.
 
About the creation of an Asian-American political voice, the right wing view is that more identity politics is NOT the answer. Again, the distinction between people and processes. We don't want to focus on Asian people (or Black people, or Green people...), instead we want to focus
on the process. BLM is an anger that exists because Obama didn't really make black peoples lives significantly better. Having a hypothetical Asian-American man in the White House wouldn't make our lives significantly better either. And having a racist, misogynist, xenophobe there won't make our lives
significantly worse either, and that's what processes are all about. Checks and balances built-in the system, as opposed to having a god-like dictator who's above the law.
 
If you are short on time, at least glance over the first 100 pages of A Conflict of Visions. The explanatory power of his thesis is profound, and reveals why we should fear the left much more (think 18th century French Revolution, which is what today's not-my-president protesters want).
I'm paraphrasing Bill Whittle (https://youtu.be/_dwz_Z62e0s) who in turn is paraphrasing Thomas Sowell (https://www.amazon.ca/Conflict-Visions-Ideological-Political-Struggles/dp/0465002056) so forgive my oversimplification.
If you hold to the following ideas:
You will find that during your pursuit of bringing about your Marxist utopia, inevitably some people will resist your noble goals, holding onto toxic ideas of the past. As long as these people remain, they will spread their traditionalist ideas, and you will never be able to pull out all of the weeds. You may find the most expedient means is to imprison these people and cut them off from spreading their backward-looking ideas. This may be horrible, but since your intentions are so noble, to make a perfect world, the ends justify the means.
tldr: You can't make a Marxist omelette without cracking a few eggs.
I would highly recommend this book. https://www.amazon.com/Conflict-Visions-Ideological-Political-Struggles/dp/0465002056
The author breaks down the underlying assumptions and values that create the phenomenon of two groups of people often lining up side by side against the same other group on issue after issue, even though these issues are not related to each other.
I started to make one a while back but didn't get too far. There are just too many great books to choose from.
Classics 1950-1970
What is Conservatism?
The Conservative Mind
The Road to Serfdom
The Constitution of Liberty
Ideas Have Consequences
The Quest for Community
Economics in One Lesson
Capitalism and Freedom
In Defense of Freedom
Age of Reagan 1970-1990
The Conservative Intellectual Movement Since 1945
Modern Times
Knowledge and Decisions
A Conflict of Visions
Anarchy, State, and Utopia
Roots Of American Order
Modern Must Reads 1990-Today
The Clash of Civilizations
A History of the American People
The Vision of the Annointed
Intellectuals and Society
Illiberal Reformers
Restoring the Lost Constitution
How To Be A Conservative
Your first point about blaming seems absurd to me. How can anyone be blamed for evolution or biology? The idea of ascribing agency to someone for a factor beyond their control is absurd to me. In this case we're talking about evolution which is an extremely large scale abstract process. You can't blame anyone for that except whatever you call God, certainly not women. And as I said in the edit to my first comment, if you did "blame" women for this (blame having a negative connotation) it would be a hugely positive since the increased selection pressure on humanity is what drove us to evolve so far beyond the other species on earth. That said, I don't see how anyone is to blame for evolution. It's too large a process.
Your observation that the discussion hinges on my claim that status is human nature is pretty apt. Disagreement over human nature is the deepest conflict between left and right. The left leans towards a blank slate theory, and the right leans towards some sort of human nature. Most political ideas can be gotten by assuming something along that spectrum and then extrapolating from there.
This is the scientific concept I'm referring to. Unfortunately because of the political ramifications of these ideas, psychology is massively fractured into many different fields and some engage with evolution more than others. Evolutionary biology is an especially hard field to make firm pronouncements on. There are a huge number of competing theories and because of the political ramifications, social scientists and social critics get involved too. I doubt anything I link will be up to your standards of irrefutable proof by authority (status), because of the politics. Some theories of social dominance informed and were informed by Marxist conceptions of hierarchy, and that throws a wrench in things as well.
I think the most well established advocate of these ideas is professor Steven Pinker, who wrote a whole book on this exact subject.
There's a huge amount of evidence on hierarchy among animals and it isn't in dispute at all. There's also a lot on humans. There's no one study I can link you that proves this finding (it would be hard to prove with a single study), so I'll link what I can find.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/games-primates-play/201203/social-dominance-explained-part-i
This article explains a lot of the ideas.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/games-primates-play/201211/are-there-universals-in-human-behavior-yes
This one by the same author refutes a good bit of criticism.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF01542229
Here's a study on economic status and partner selection. It found a woman would rather an unattractive partner in high status clothes than an attractive one in a burger king outfit.
David Buss has done a lot of work on this subject. Buss has done large studies spanning many cultures to figure out sexual preferences.
http://pzacad.pitzer.edu/~dmoore/2007_Buss_Evolution_of_human_mating.pdf
This summarizes a lot of his findings, you can find shorter ones on his wikipedia page. Men emphasize fertility and youth, while women prefer age and status across cultures.
https://labs.la.utexas.edu/buss/files/2015/10/buss-1989-sex-differences-in-human-mate-preferences.pdf
Here is a cross cultural study from Buss.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_selection_in_humans#Selection_preferences_in_females
This section summarizes findings in womens sexul selection preferences.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1090513814001111
This study finds women prefer older men, which correlates with higher status.
http://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1722&context=soss_research
A study finding womem prioritize status and men prioritize physical attactiveness.
https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~seyfarth/Publications/tics.pdf
This one shows how the evolution of language can be traced to Primate knowledge of hierarchy.
There's also Jordan Peterson, who used to teach at Harvard and has numerous citations in his field. He constantly makes the argument of the lobster. It basically says that lobsters organize themselves into hierarchys, and we split off from them billions of years ago which means hierarchy's are something billions of years old. The reason he picks lobsters and not some other animal, is that they're so old, evolutionarily speaking, that it makes the example dramatic. The part of your brain responsible for hierarchy is ancient, and a core structure right up there with breathing and eating. Hierarchy is not caused by capitalism, or male power, or whatever social effects you want to ascribe them to, because hierarchy existed before any of that. Those things are rooted in hierarchy, but removing those things won't remove the hierarchy.
The more general argument is that hierarchy is observed in many many many animals in our evolutionary lineage. It is also observed in humans. Animals act based on instinct so if they organize and select for status, it is a biological behavior not a learned one. For your worldview to make sense, you'd have to reason that humans do organize themselves into hierarchys but that it has nothing to do with biology. Somehow that part of our biology, which is observed in our recent primate ancestors, got bred out but also that we arbitrarily made it the core of our social structures. It just doesn't make any sense. It's biological in animals, and it's biological in humans.
His 30+ books are all great (though not the most exciting of reads), but Conflict of Visions his a pretty good analysis of the conservative/libertarian viewpoint compared to its alternatives.
I think there are plenty of scientist that would make good leaders. I don't think being a scientist makes you inherently a good leader or policy maker.
Have you ever read anything by economist Thomas Sowell? Specifically his book The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy or A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles
I realize it's far-fetched for you to take reading advice from someone you disagree with so much but here is the author discussing the latter book if you're interested.
Thomas Sowell and a Conflict of Visions
SECTION | CONTENT
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Title | Thomas Sowell - A Conflict of Visions
Description | Thomas Sowell discusses the visions that account for the wide political gulf between conservatives and liberals. http://www.LibertyPen.com
Length | 0:09:43
SECTION | CONTENT
:--|:--
Title | The Constrained Vision and the Unconstrained Vision
Description | In this video, I summarise the enduring relevance of Thomas Sowell's masterpiece A Conflict of Visions (1987) and explain some of its crucial insights into modern struggles between social justice warriors and their opponents. I also focus on his discussion F.A. Hayeck on social justice. You can get Sowell's book here: https://www.amazon.com/Conflict-Visions-Ideological-Political-Struggles/dp/0465002056
Length | 0:15:23
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Shameless plug for:
https://www.amazon.com/Conflict-Visions-Ideological-Political-Struggles/dp/0465002056/
The author, Thomas Sowell, is right-wing, but his book is a neutral, and in my opinion, very helpful description of the many dimensions of underlying beliefs and opinions that lead people to hold their particular political positions.
HBD
Darwin’s Enemies on the Left and Right Part 1, Part 2 (Blog Post)*
The History and Geography of Human Genes (Abridged edition) – Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza
The 10,000 Year Explosion – Gregory Cochrane
Race, Evolution, and Behavior – Rushton
Why Race Matters – Michael Levin
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Intelligence and Mind
The Bell Curve – Charles Murray
The Global Bell Curve – Richard Lynn
Human Intelligence – Earl Hunt
Cambridge Handbook of Intelligence – Robert Sternberg
A Conflict of Visions – Thomas Sowell
The Moral Animal – Robert Wright
The Blank Slate – Stephen Pinker
Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature – Murray Rothbard (essay)
****
Education
Real Education – Charles Murray
Inside American Education – Thomas Sowell
Illiberal Education – Dinesh D’Sousa
God and Man at Yale – William Buckley
Weapons of Mass Instruction – John Taylor Gatto
The Higher Education Bubble – Glenn Reynolds
****
​
You've touched on a rather poignant idea - how come both parties line up as they do?
> One of the curious things about political opinions is how often the same people line up on opposite sides of different issues. The issues themselves may have no intrinsic connection with each other. They may range from military spending to drug laws to monetary policy to education. Yet the same familiar faces can be found glaring at each other from opposite sides of the political fence, again and again. It happens too often to be coincidence and it is too uncontrolled to be a plot.
> A closer look at the arguments on both sides often shows that they are reasoning from fundamentally different premises. These different premises—often implicit—are what provide the consistency behind the repeated opposition of individuals and groups on numerous, unrelated issues. They have different visions of how the world works.
It isn't the issues per se, it is the underlying political philosophy that expresses itself as the differing opinions. Rather than choosing an a la carte selection of political issues, try delving deeper as to why you hold the opinions that you do, and ask yourself which party reflects those better.
> and say, well, let's get justice and kill that fucker, case closed, without peering into the conditions that nurtured such reprehensible actions in the first place.
Here I think is the fundamental disagreement. Conditions are neither necessary for humans to commit acts of evil nor an excuse when they do so.
> But we do have some compassion for him, in as much, as he was also a victim of poverty, or perhaps abuse himself (which he more than likely was).
You look at a man who commits murder and rape in a jealous rage and can only see him as a victim.
> No liberal thinks that compassion for that man is the only relevant moral principle. Please, that's a strawman. it's impossible to see an act like that entirely divorced of its socio-economic context, which I think is true for conservatives.
To the degree that the first is a strawman I think your statement here one as well... perhaps the mirror image. Conservatives are just as capable of seeing the situation in it's socio-economic context as liberals are of considering moral principles beyond compassion for the criminal. It is a matter of emphasis and priority. Leftists prioritize socio-economic conditions as exculpatory: "It's not his fault really, society made him the way he is". Those on the right can fully acknowledge the way that his past and environment can contribute to criminality while still believing that the priority is and must be the individual's own freely made choices. I honestly find the liberal view to ultimately be dehumanizing in that it treats the criminal not with the dignity of human with the moral agency and capacity to choose between good and evil but as a robot helplessly programmed by their environment.
You might be interested in Conflict of Visions by Thomas Sowell. It's very much from the conservative position but it's a discussion of the philosophical conflict between what he calls the "unconstrained vision" (man is basically good, human nature is perfectible provide the right circumstances, ideal solutions are possible, structural flaws in society are root cause of various social ills and of individual flaws ) and the constrained vision (man is fundamentally flawed, human nature is ultimately immutable, perfect solutions don't exist only better or worse trade-offs, that flawed human nature is the cause the flaws in society)
The credit is due to Thomas Sowell. He says it many places. I came across it first in this book. This is a great book, as it spells out the assumptions about human nature one is required (at least subconsciously) to make to have certain political beliefs.
Thomas Sowell discusses something related to this in several of his books, particularly A Conflict of Visions and Intellectuals and Society.
He can explain it in his words better than I can, so here's a short interview with him about the first book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyG1zmdh1pA
And a Cato review of A Conflict of Visions:
https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/cato-journal/1987/11/cj7n2-17.pdf
> As Sowell conjectures, the commonly observable correlation and clustering in political opinions cannot be understood as simply reflecting some underlying structure of interests. A more appropriate account, he argues, must be given in terms of certain fundamental ideas or premises—referred to as “visions”—which, largely unarticulated, are behind and give coherence to people’s particular political opinions.
And an FEE review of Intellectuals and Society:
https://fee.org/articles/intellectuals-and-society/
Roughly, the distinction between the two "visions" is that one views the world through individuals operating in a way that is constrained by their circumstances and by how the world functions (the "constrained" vision). The other views the world in a purely "intellectual" way as though society as a whole can not only be understood, but manipulated, simply by defining how society ought to function (the "unconstrained" vision).
People with the unconstrained vision, in Sowell's view, simply don't need to understand ideas like Socialism or Fascism in terms of the mundane facts of how the words have been used in the past or how people behave under those systems, because they already understand these terms from their "intellectual" definitions. (That the people you're complaining about, unlike the academics Sowell is, don't know the academic definitions of the terms and instead go with their own definitions, is not particularly relevant; it's all about their "vision".)
Someone give that kid a book by Thomas Sowell. Perhaps http://www.amazon.com/Conflict-Visions-Ideological-Political-Struggles/dp/0465002056/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1341322886&sr=8-5&keywords=Thomas+Sowell
From Russel Kirk's "Ten Conservative Principles" in the sidebar:
> Human nature suffers irremediably from certain grave faults, the conservatives know. Man being imperfect, no perfect social order ever can be created. Because of human restlessness, mankind would grow rebellious under any utopian domination, and would break out once more in violent discontent—or else expire of boredom. To seek for utopia is to end in disaster, the conservative says: we are not made for perfect things. All that we reasonably can expect is a tolerably ordered, just, and free society, in which some evils, maladjustments, and suffering will continue to lurk. By proper attention to prudent reform, we may preserve and improve this tolerable order. But if the old institutional and moral safeguards of a nation are neglected, then the anarchic impulse in humankind breaks loose: “the ceremony of innocence is drowned.” The ideologues who promise the perfection of man and society have converted a great part of the twentieth-century world into a terrestrial hell.
One of the most fascinating books I've ever read is A Conflict of Visions by conservative economist Thomas Sowell. The main thesis is that the differences in conservatives and liberals beliefs boil down to a philosophical dispute about human nature. On the whole conservatives adhere to the "tragic" view of an inherently imperfect, greedy, violent mankind with impulses that need to be constrained by social institutions, social norms, and moral values. The stereotypical liberal, on the other hand, has an "unconstrained" and optimistic view of humanity in which human nature can be changed by an ideal arrangement of social structures they're always striving for. Highly recommended.
I'd recommend A Conflict of Visions by Thomas Sowell, not an anthropological work though.
https://www.amazon.ca/Conflict-Visions-Ideological-Political-Struggles/dp/0465002056/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1493093349&sr=8-1&keywords=a+conflict+of+visions
The conflict? Does a society mitigate the problems inherent to the human condition, or does a society constrain an otherwise boundless being from improvement. Presented as the constrained vision, and the unconstrained vision, conforming to the right and left, respectively.
You should really read his book. Maybe then what you said would make more sense. https://www.amazon.com/Conflict-Visions-Ideological-Political-Struggles/dp/0465002056
If you're interested in learning about Libertarian ideas and the philosophies of freedom, here are some good resources:
https://fee.org/articles/these-five-freedom-philosophers-will-liberate-your-mind/
https://mises.org/
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Another good book (although a long one) is Thomas Sowell's A Conflict of Visions, which lays out the underlying worldview differences between the Left and the Right. It does a pretty good job answering questions like, why do most people who believe abortion is wrong also believe that people should have the right to own weapons that can kill people? Why do the same people end up on different sides of the debate on so many different issues? Why is there this phenomenon where people who tend to disagree on one particular issue tend to disagree on a lot of other issues that seem to be completely unrelated? If you weren't interested in putting in the time to read the whole book, I think you might find that just reading a summary of the book yields some interesting insights into how each person's worldview shapes so many different seemingly different political views about life.
*rolls eyes* Troll much?
No, the biggest reason why the Senate didn't allow President Obama to do some of the things he wanted was because they politically opposed it. Republicans don't stand in the way of Democrats because Democrats are the party of light-bringers and Republicans are all paid-off neanderthals clinging to their guns and bibles standing in fear of a glorious future.
Both parties oppose each other because they have deep philosophical differences, philosophical differences which then manifest in different ideas about how to govern this country.
If you want an idea about the different philosophical ideas that are at the bottom of the stack which may cause the two sides to come to different answers, it's worth reading A Conflict of Visions by Thomas Sowell.
And Dr. Sowell is black, so, um, you can't exactly use the race card here...