The ANTI-INTELLECTUAL: a Menace and a Hypocrite. [Part III. (Brief Summary.)]

Thomas Sowell’s proposition, as I have been led to understand it, is that there are only two predominant positions in the realm of politics, the one assuming that we’re tragic beings who are predisposed to failure by our flaws, the other that we’re good at heart and that we have the opportunity to build a better World. Yet classical morality, in all its forms, cannot be classed as one and not the other of these viewpoints, since it’s founded on the understanding that we’re beings who are neither perfect nor entirely corrupt, and that is why we *must* be better, that the World is fallen, and that in itself implies the *obligation to improve* it. Any moralizing rhetoric that seeks to undermine this fact — that our flaws are just what makes perfection necessary as a goal — is evil. Cynicism and Utopian ideals are both authoritarian and arbitrary. Moral progress always moves from lead to gold, so there’s no point in trying to define the essence of all men as being either gold or lead.

**[({R.G.)}]**


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