I just finished reading Thomas Sowell’s excellent book, The Quest for Cosmic Justice and highly recommend it. This was the first Sowell book I’ve read, though I’m familiar with his essays, and is probably my favorite of the secular books I’ve read in the last several years. I’m tempted to make it part of the family “canon” – something that I want all of my kids to read before they move out. I’d rank it even above Ben Sasse’s The Vanishing American Adult (which I reviewed here) and Them: Why we hate each other and how to heal (which I seem to have forgotten to review), both of which I thought were deeply insightful and helpful. I’d put this on par with Thaddeus Williams’ Confronting Injustice without Compromising Truth (review here) as a truly outstanding book in terms of understanding present-day politics, social change, and social justice. Williams’ book tackles issues from a Biblical perspective; Sowell’s book tackles issues from a secular perspective. Hence, the latter will appeal more to the general audience although the two are highly complementary.

What is “Cosmic justice?”

This book describes the two competing visions of justice battling one another in our time. One view of justice is what Sowell calls “cosmic justice.” Cosmic justice is the idea that we as a society seek to ensure fair outcomes, to ensure that everyone gets what they deserve in a cosmic sense, and that we right wrongs in order to bring the world more in line with how we would have made it if we had the authority and power to design the world. We’re pursuing cosmic justice when we seek to ensure that people who have had unequal opportunities still have an equal chance to succeed, or when we seek to ensure that different races, ethnicities, or genders are represented equally in a particular profession, occupation, or type of position regardless of whether they are equally represented among those seeking that position.

However, there’s a competing view of justice, one which formed the foundation for our legal system – the idea that the only kind of justice we can possibly mete out without omniscience and omnipotence is fairness. Particularly, we ought to ensure we treat people fairly, without favoritism or partiality, according to a consistent set of rules or laws which applies equally to everyone. John Adams famously put this idea in the Massachusetts constitution, describing the government as “a government of laws and not of men.”

In any case, Sowell goes on to argue compellingly (without mentioning God) that unless we have god-like powers and abilities, meting out cosmic justice is simply impossible. We lack the power and knowledge to ensure people get what they deserve for a number of reasons, including we don’t truly know what people deserve, we don’t have the power to give it to them, and we don’t know whether our proposed solutions will achieve the intended effects. Additionally, we don’t know the unintended effects our solutions might have upon other people.

Beyond that, pursuing cosmic justice inevitably comes at the expense of traditional justice. We cannot simultaneously have a system which ensures that people get the outcomes we think they deserve while also ensuring the process is fair. We must have one or the other. That is, if we are truly committed to cosmic justice we must necessarily give up the idea of a government which enforces laws, because equal application of laws won’t always give the results we want.

Cosmic justice and the rule of law

One of the points I found most startling but also most helpful in this book was Sowell’s argument that the pursuit of cosmic justice is necessarily opposed to the rule of law. He argues that you can either pursue a fair process and the rule of law or cosmic justice (fair outcomes), but you cannot have both. The idea of the rule of law is that the law must be knowable by everyone in advance, so that they can determine whether or not they are adhering to it and what punishments they might face if they do not. Cosmic justice, on the other hand, seeks to ensure outcomes are as desired – but outcomes cannot be known in advance, so whether a given law or policy is consistent with cosmic justice cannot be known until its results become clear. Hence, for example, one aspect of civil rights law is concerned with disproportionate impact, where a policy may be a civil rights violation because of its impact on different groups. This impact can often only be determined after the policy is implemented.

I feel I’m really not doing his argument justice here, so at some level I have to say, “Please, just read the book!”

The problems of vision

Sowell covers much more ground in this (relatively short) book than I have time for here, but I want to briefly highlight two other key aspects. One is the problem of Visions, where one adheres to a particular view (vision) or social theory so strongly that the evidence no longer matters, or, often, isn’t even considered at all. Sowell looks at how this played out several times in history, such as in Europe and America’s vision of how to maintain peace in the run-up to World War II (essentially, disarming) and how this actually achieved the opposite rather than the intended effect. The European dictators became convinced that the only countries with the potential military might to stop them lacked the will and desire to do so, and, thus, the dictators believed their chances of success high.

Those dedicated to such grand Visions (I capitalize to indicate the idea of an overriding grand cause) often become so committed and dedicated to the cause that they paint all opposition as unreasonable. The pacifists who arose several times in the 1900s painted their opposition as warmongers; Churchill and those who sought to maintain peace by maintaining a strong military were discounted as actually wanting war, rather than simply disagreeing as to the best way to ensure peace.

This same problem occurs over and over again in area after area; the true believers in a given cause oversimplify and demonize opposing views, ignore opposing evidence, and implement their preferred approach, often resulting in profound harm. Thus, having a grand Vision prevents people from confronting the actual consequences of their beliefs and policies. Sowell cites example after example in support of his viewpoint.

The quest for equality

Sowell also highlights how the quest for equality can lead us astray. In area after area, we find that people’s outcomes are unequal for a host of reasons, yet for some reason we believe that if our system were truly fair, we would see all ethnicities and genders equally represented in all systems. When we do not, we tend to think such differences necessarily indicate there is a problem to be solved, or something fundamentally wrong with the system. Sowell devotes considerable effort to analyzing and debunking these claims using a wide variety of historical examples. Here he is not specifically focused on race but on inequality of a broad range of types and sources, and I found his arguments equally compelling.

Summing up

On the whole, I found this book compelling, enlightening, and helpful. It’s a careful and concerning analysis of a number of the key political forces and views operating in our time and does a good job capturing how complex many of our key problems are. This isn’t a book which pushes a single solution or set of solutions; rather, it looks at how badly the quest for cosmic justice can lead us astray while also failing to provide any real solutions to our deepest problems. Worse, the quest seems certain to drive us towards authoritarianism, since only great power can potentially impose the kind of equality of outcomes that cosmic justice so desperately seeks.

So, please read the book! I’ll note that if you have an Audible subscription, it’s actually available for free as part of the subscription, which is where I read it.