Thomas Sowell As Cultural Historian: A Conversation With Coleman Hughes, Victor Davis Hanson, And Sir Niall Ferguson

- Well, thank you very much, Kim. Thanks everybody. We're going to talk about a very different aspect of Thomas Sowell's work. And that is his work as an historian. And not everybody will get how much he is an historian, but he really is. And I want to begin by asking Victor to talk a bit about that and also maybe say a little bit about your relationship with the enigmatic, elusive, and indeed largely invisible Thomas Sowell. First, Victor, in what sense is Thomas Sowell an historian?

- Well, he is by training an economist, but it was almost autodidactic. He versed himself in history and he tried to apply what he had learned about economics and sociology. And so he wrote this great trilogy Race and Culture, Migrations and Culture, and Conquest and Culture. And as he explained it to me, he did this when he was 65 and started. So he wrote 1600 pages. And it wasn't just that he was 65, he accomplished that in four years. And it was so large that the original idea that it was going to be one volume, he broke up 1995, 1997, 1999. Very briefly, the first volume Race and Culture, his effort, as I interpret it and I'd ask him, was to globalize the racial situation in the United States and try to inform the people that what we though was a unique situation with the history of slavery and Jim Crow was a human phenomenon, and it happened in places and times all over the world. And that he was also trying to... He used a lot of his economic knowledge about inequality. We'll hear more about that from the economist. And his point was that inequality wasn't the problem in itself. It was the people who suffered from inequality, what their standard of living was. And if they were able to be prosperous and secure, sometimes because of inequality, then inequality was not the problem. And if it was a problem and the people who were on the lower end of an economic spectrum, but were prosperous, and he gave examples throughout history across time and space, then envy was a problem. And we heard from Glynn about Tocqueville. Tocqueville said most people would rather be equal and poor than have inequality and be better off affluent. And that was one of the themes. In the second volume, Race and Migrations, he looked at particular groups, the Germans, the Italians, the Jews, Japanese, and his-

- [Niall] Don't forget the Scots.

- What? And Scots.

- [Niall] 'Cause they were really important part of the .

- Out of deference for Niall I didn't want to mention the Scots because they were borderland people that were sort of backward in Tom's analysis.

- [Niall] Still are. Still are.

- But his point was that certain peoples in their own societies might not have been esteemed. They might not have owned land, but they had human capital. They understood in a very prescient way how the economy worked. He uses the word "human capital" a lot, "middleman" a lot. And when they leave the confines of their own societies and they go, in the case of people from India to Africa or Jews throughout Europe or Japanese to America or Chinese throughout the Pacific, they do very well. And there's a resentment against their prosperity. But they embody certain universal skills about punctuality, discipline, the value of education, the knowledge of the economy. And they have no social inhibition about being a so-called middleman. And then a traditional society that honors land owning and aristocracy and birth, this doesn't really matter as much to them. And they succeed quite well despite the prejudices that they incur because they're often a minority within this population. And it really is kind of a window on the United States why certain groups are disliked or stereotyped. Jews, for example, or Indian Americans. The final one Race and Conquest-

- Race and Culture.

- Yeah.

- Conquest and Culture.

- And he points out that, it's very funny that cultural transformation makes a big difference whether the conqueror is sophisticated and civilized or backward. So the British who, in the hierarchy of the Greek and Roman value of civilization are way down there when the Romans encounter them. They are conquered by the Romans and yet they absorb this Roman culture and they're better off for it. And he gives a number of examples. And sometimes it's quite controversial about indigenous people are conquered by European settlers and this is tragic. It can be genocidal, but they absorb this culture. On the other hand, if the conquering power is less sophisticated, i.e. white-skinned Germans coming across the Danube and the Rhine in the 5th century AD, then the society itself suffers because they imbue a less sophisticated paradigm. And when you look at the paradigm on human capital, it's basically empiricism, meritocracy, value for religion, but religion separate. It's kind of the Western paradigm to the degree that a society has that and conquers another one. The conquered, while it's being deprived of liberty, slowly evolves and absorbs that. But if it's the other direction from a non-Western or less sophisticated society, the results as you see whether it's Byzantium in 1453 or the Romans in the 5th century AD, it can be catastrophic. That was very controversial.

- Coleman, can I bring you in here? Because you wrote an extremely good article about Thomas Sowell: The Nonconformist. And in that article, you have something that Thomas Sowell said on Bill Buckley's firing line, and I'm just going to quote it. And this is really a conversation they're having about this trilogy of books that Victor was talking about. Quote, "I haven't been able to find a single country in the world where the policies that are being advocated for Blacks in the United States have lifted any people out of poverty." This stuck with me because it's sort of the underlying point of the three books, that they are an attempt to set the problem of race and inequality in a global perspective over not just centuries, but millennia. And it's an astonishing achievement. Where did you encounter those books first? Because it's not like they're assigned in many undergraduate courses. They certainly were not assigned at Harvard when I was teaching there.

- My father went to Howard University and was in the economics club with none other than Kamala Harris. And in their yearbook photo, you can see a picture of my father, Dwayne Hughes, next to Kamala Harris as, you know, 22-year-olds in the Howard Economics Club that had like eight members total. My father did his undergrad economics thesis on Thomas Sowell's work. So when I was 19 years old or so and curious and needing things to read, I just went to my dad's bookshelf. I'd heard the name Thomas Sowell. I knew he was some kind of bad guy that you were not supposed to agree with. And I read a book that I think is called The Economics and Politics of Race. It's like kind of a more obscure Sowell book. And I don't know if the title's been changed or something like that. But similar to what Justice Thomas was saying earlier, I realized many of the points he was making were questions that had been raised in my head in a kind of, you know, incomplete form. And it was, I had a similar experience of drinking water, like, you know, an oasis in the desert. And from then on, I just figured I'm gonna read everything this guy has written, so I did. And so I bought those, the Culture Trilogy on Amazon. The bit you picked out there, that is the crux. That's the crux of Thomas Sowell on race in a nutshell. Whereas most American intellectuals and writers have thought about the racial inequality issue from a standpoint of, okay, let's do a bunch of research about America and then make a whole bunch of assumptions. Thomas Sowell comes at it the other way around. He says, "I'm going to posit that Americans are human beings and that we have something to learn from the entire history of the rest of the world as well." That we're not like Athena sprung from the head of Zeus, but that somehow the principles of social and economic causality that obtain on the other four corners of the earth might have something to inform us. So he says, "Well, we think of affirmative action as an American thing." Well, hold on. India's had affirmative action policies longer than we have. China's had affirmative... why don't we look at what happened there? Okay, we think of slavery as an American thing. Well, hold on. The whole rest of the world has had slavery. In every permutation of white, Black, Asian and every other race. So let's see if the kinds of things we're advocating here as a solution to racial inequality have been tried elsewhere. And lo and behold, what he finds is, it's the exact opposite. Where you can find dozens and dozens of examples of ethnic groups starting out with nothing and rising to the top by adopting certain cultural attitudes, you can't find a single one that obeys the implicit theory of progressives in Americas. Namely that what you got to do is lower standards and give handouts. It's an incredibly deep insight. I don't think there's any really good response to it from the left, frankly.

- I was blown away by these books. And I confess, I had not read them until I was given the assignment of writing a paper for this conference. And if you're in the same position as I was in, you haven't read them, I have a treat in store for you. I have to confess, the scope of these books made me initially skeptical. I thought this is wildly over ambitious. Who could possibly do this? I'm gonna check him out because there's a bunch of stuff in here about Scotland and the Scots. And I wonder, I bet he doesn't get that right. He gets it so right. I learned things that I did not know about my own people. And of course, as Victor alluded to, I mean, the Scots were at one time kind of where Afghanistan is today. Like the most crazy, barbaric, uncivilized, violent place in the world. The place the Romans couldn't conquer. They tried. There's this great Antonine Wall that they built, which the Scots dismantled, destroyed entirely. And the room is like, "These people cannot be civilized. We are out of here." So I read these extraordinary books and I'm learning immediately about something I thought I knew about. Victor, did you have the same feeling that he finds out things about the things you know in, say, his treatment of the ancient history in the trilogy? I'm particularly interested in the interplay of culture and geography, which is another key part of the trilogy. He's almost like a kind of 18th century enlightenment thinker in his ambition, his readiness to bring together all the different facets of human society. How does he play, how does he perform as an ancient historian?

- Well, very well. I was curious about that question because I had written a lot about geography and the ancient world, but he wasn't a geographical determinist like Jared Diamond. He didn't say, if you have favorable geography. What he basically said is, geography matters, culture matters, human capital. But geography did matter. So when he would discuss the Mediterranean, obviously, as Plato said, if you were a frog around this pond, then you had a straight shot between Africa, Asia, and Europe, and countries had advantages by that proximity. And people that were further away, mostly white-skinned Scots and Thracians, they were not going to be as advanced. That was one factor. I learned that when I got to Hoover in 2003, I got a call from him. I had read a lot, but I didn't know, I'd been told he was acerbic. And he said, "I'd like to have lunch with you." And I said, "Really?" And he said, you know, "I don't know if we'll have lunch a second time, but..." So we went to lunch and we went to El Freno and he said, "I wrote a book. You wrote a book, Carnage and Culture. I wrote a book Conquest and Culture. I don't know anything about farming." I said, "I don't know anything about photography." And he said, "Do you believe in the values of drinking 12 ounces of milk at lunch?" I said, "Yes, I do." And we hit it off. It was very eccentric. And out of that, we did that once or twice a month until 2019 for 16 years. Sometimes we were treated by Shelby Steele joining us, and they were very close friends. But what I got out of those conversations over that 15-year period, he had a certain tragic view of life. And by that I mean, his view was that people are all smart. We're endowed with a God-given empiricism. And we know what the truth is if we're disciplined enough. We can look at examples we've inherited from the Greeks the inductive method. We can look at examples. We can come logically to a common understanding of how the world works. But we don't get there because people are ideological, but more importantly, human nature being what it is, people gravitate to the common opinion or what they think is orthodoxy. If they say something they know is not true and they're gonna be rewarded for it, they will champion that. And therefore there are going to be certain people. And he's not a contrarian. He doesn't just say whatever the majority is I'm against. But he says, if people are purely empirical and they go by the evidence, the chances are more than not that they're not going to be happy or liked because people are going to resent that because they're not going toward where the orthodox and comfortable place is. And then you have to do that. And if you do that, you have to accept that people are not going to find you affable. They're going to say that you're unfriendly. And that is something that you should strive to be if it's at the price of being independent thinking and follow the evidence wherever it goes.

- So tomorrow in one of the other panels I'll be talking about the paradox of the public intellectual as an intensely private person.

- Yes.

- And why it is that we hardly ever see Thomas Sowell in these buildings. I've had just one meeting with him in all the time that I've been here, which means I must have failed the audition quite badly. Coleman, can I turn to another part of Thomas Sowell's over, which is the work in Conflict of Visions?. I see that as an extraordinary bold intervention in intellectual history or the history of ideas in which he essentially says there are really two ways of thinking about the world. And I'll give another quote here just to set the scene. "While believers in the unconstrained vision seek the special causes of war, poverty, and crime, believers in the constrained vision seek the special causes of peace, wealth, or a law-abiding society." Help us understand that distinction. And how is it that he categorizes thinkers? What are these two different forms of thought? Andwhich one, of course, does he identify with?

- Yeah, so I have to give a nod to Steven Pinker, who is in the crowd, wrote the great book called The Blank Slate on the Denial of Human Nature. And Pinker renamed Sowell's visions here, the tragic vision and the utopian vision. And Victor, you just mentioned it's no surprise Sowell himself has more of the tragic vision than the utopian. So the utopian vision assumes that basically people are good. You come into the world, most people are kind, most people are decent. And so when things go wrong, when people start slaughtering each other or when they start raiding Walmarts and stealing televisions, the big question you have to ask is what has gone wrong? What has been done to these people that is making them behave in such a strange and abnormal way? If you hear that someone has committed a crime, someone has robbed a liquor store, you want to go into that person's background, figure out what did his parents teach him wrong? What happened to this person as a child? The tragic vision says the opposite. It says essentially most human beings, even decent ones are all self-interested. You know, most people don't, spontaneously don't donate 100% of their income to charity above what they need to survive. In fact, most people try to conserve their resources as much as possible, spend it largely on their family, their kin. And that that's an ineradicable part of human nature. And so people in the tragic vision try to create societies that allow for human self-interest and usher it towards pro-social outcomes, like market capitalism. Market capitalism allows you to express your natural self-interest to become as wealthy as possible, but it creates a set of rules of the game so that the way you have to do that is by creating a product other people will exchange money for. This way, everyone can be self-interested, but the net result is that everything gets more efficient. Food becomes cheaper, healthier. We get technology, we get innovation. The utopian vision, on the other hand, something like communism says basically we can create, we can create a world where we treat all of our fellow strangers kind of like we treat our family, right? A family is essentially a small communist unit, right? It's like, your three-year-old is gonna to do whatever chore he can do, but that's not gonna affect how much he eats, right? So it's to each according to their need in a way.

- My family has total communism when it comes to electronics. So all cables for all devices are common property.

- Yeah, exactly.

- I don't know if anybody else has that experience. It's the communism of Apple cables.

- It's digital communism. Yeah. So anyway, the long story short, the utopian vision imagines, because it's a nice idea and because it makes us feel warm and fuzzy inside to think the world could be so, that therefore the world is so. And all we've got to do is educate people in the right way and we'll all stop being more self-interested. We'll all be one big happy family. And of course, the whole history of the 20th century testifies to the fact that this does not work. So ironically, it's the utopian vision, Sowell argues, that leads to tragedy and the tragic vision that leads to the best result we can actually hope for.

- And so in a way, it's kind of Russo, Marx, and all of their heirs who are the utopians. And I guess it's Adam Smith and Burke all the way to Hayek who are really the non-utopians. And in a way the great problem of Thomas Sowell's lifetime is that the utopians have been dominant in the academy. And particularly in the realm of the people we call public intellectuals.

- Yeah. And let me say one more thing about that. You know, when I read Conflict of Visions, I also identified more with the tragic. And, you know, you think of a moment like 2020 where you see, you know, young people rioting and running into stores and, you know, burning down, throwing Molotov cocktails into cars. And I thought to my own, you know, teenage experience, like, what would explain that kind of behavior? And to me, it just seems obvious that if teenager boys can do that kind of thing, they will, right? If there's suddenly social permission, they will, because it's fun.

- Yeah.

- And there was this over-intellectualizing sense of, okay, what much have happened to get people to do this? I'm like, don't you remember what it was like to be a teenager? You just wanted to destroy stuff because it was fun to do, right? So it's not that behavior that needs to be explained. What needs to be explained is the fact that people sit down for six hours at a time and behave and don't hit each other.

- So can we talk a bit about Black Rednecks and White Liberals, which is one of the most extraordinary of Thomas Sowell's many books, not least because of the argument that it makes about African American culture. I don't know which of you wants to talk about it. Coleman, you discussed this in your essay for this conference. And in particular, the argument that Sowell makes that the cultural patterns that emerged from the economy of slavery in the American South is not as we tend to think of it, but actually has its roots in the culture of the Scotch Irish slavers, the plantation owners and the slave traders. Talk a bit about that. And then maybe I'll come back to Victor because it goes to your points about being conquered by the wrong sorts of people. But Coleman first.

- Sure. Yeah. So Sowell starts out by making this observation that in America we're obsessed with talking about disparities between Black and white and Hispanic and Asian. But forget race for a moment. Let's just look at what we call white people. You look at white Americans from the north and white Americans from the south. And at any point in American history, you see massive differences in terms of crime, in terms of income, in terms of out of wedlock births, in terms of anything associated with how communities are generally doing. He goes on to observe that if you look at the white Americans that came to the north, where did they come from in the British Isles? Look at the people that came to the South. They came from very different places and different cultures within the British Isles that were associated with those same cultural outcomes in the British Isles as they brought to the various places that were settled in America. After that, he makes the observation that obviously today if you say you're Black, you could be from anywhere, right? And if anything African Americans have become really urbanized over time. But at any point before the year 1900, 90% of Black people are living in the South. That is where the ethnic group we call African Americans was 50 some odd different ethnic groups speaking 50 different languages in Africa and was forged and coalesced into a new ethnicity and a new culture in the American South. And who did they get that culture from? I mean, by and large, who did they learn English from? They learned it from the Scotch Irish that came from a particular part of the British Isles, had a particular culture, and had many of the high crime, you know, pathologies and problems that would later be associated with the African American community and still with the white American South to an extent to this day. And he traces this in so far as language as a good proxy for culture, what we call African American vernacular English. It's like, "He be going there," or "He ain't doing that." That's all from Scotch, like, Scotch English, right? And so it's a very controversial and subversive, but deep and profound argument.

- This, of course, is the light motif of our conversation, that the Scots are really the problem. The deepest historical problem is the Scots. Victor.

- That was a... I asked him about that and I think he characterized it, it was a lose-lose book as far as the reception because he was basically saying there's a pathology in the Black community and it comes from a pathology in the white community and they're both pathological. And what he was talking about, as Coleman says, these particular traits of linguistic, but it was also things about an exalted sense of personal honor, masochism, dueling, fighting, challenging people to a duel. All of this was caught up in the borderlands of the United Kingdom where, again, with all my apologies, were-

- [Niall] Oh, we're quite proud of it.

- They had not been fully assimilated into the British core. So there were places in Wales in Scotland, in Ireland, Northern. And he pointed out that on per capita income, educational levels, they did not have parity with the British experience. And as Coleman said, given the migration patterns people who were industrial, they came out of the industrial revolution, the university system. He does have, I think, a pretty good discussion of the Scottish enlightenment that this was a British importation. But, in any case, the North then benefited from that. And Blacks that had grown up in the North had advantages over Blacks that had grown up in the South. And the same was true of white people. You can see that people in the South didn't appreciate that. One thing though, I ask him is that while he was critical, he had a developed sense of honor himself. I can give you an anecdote. There was a very prominent person that came once to lunch and said, in a very imperious way, "This person is going to give a lot of money if you're on the board, and I want you to do this, and I want you to do this." And I though, "Oh my God, this is not gonna work out well." And I said, "I've got to go to the bathroom. I'll be back." And when I came back, the person was telling Tom what he was going to do. And he said, "Can I ask you a question?" And I thought about Black rednecks. And I kidded him about it. I said, "You were playing the Black redneck." And he said, "Have I ever asked you to write me a column? Have I ever asked you to give me a speech? Have I ever asked you to give a lecture? I don't think I have. So why are you telling me what I have to do when I don't tell you what you have to do?" This person was very prominent. And so then he went to the bathroom. And the person said to me, I said, "I've seen this before, and there's a fifty-fifty chance he's not coming back." So I went and talked to him and it was... What I liked about him was he had a sense of decorum. He once said to me, "Well, who do you think is causing most of the problems in the United States?" I said, "Well, it's the people you say who are not empirical. They're deductive and they're bound by weaknesses in character. They want to be liked." And he said, "But who are those people?" And I said, "Well, to be frank, they're mostly white, liberal, highly educated people." And he said, "Yes." And the thing is, they're not just misguided. They do people damage. But I don't know whether they do it out of misplaced idealism or they really do it because they're pernicious people. And we talked about that all the time. And I said, I think what I liked about him was so much, and I do like about him was, when a waitress would come over When somebody was cleaning that area, he treated them with dignity and respect almost more than if somebody came up and intruded and said, "I want to sign this book." He had a natural empathy for people. And that was just completely opposite of when I had first got to who were people said he is acerbic, he is stubborn. I never found that to be true. He just had, he just basically... He reminded me growing up on a farm of certain farmers who had a code of conduct. It was a tragic code. And it was basically, "I expect you to treat me the way I treat you. And if you don't do that, I'm not responsible for what I'm gonna say to you if you, if you tell me what to do." He reminded me, I said to him once, I don't know if he remembers, but you remember Lonesome Dove? There was the Tommy Lee Jones captain. And he was very, he was the the hero, anti-hero of the whole series. And he at once really does something to somebody. "I don't treat you this way. I expect a certain level of decorum. And when I don't find it, I'm not responsible." And that, I, And he was always very... He said to me, you know, "I want to tell you about my Marine Corps experience. I want to tell you from the beginning, I had a little discipline problem." And I said, "Tom, my father and his brother joined the Marine Corps and they got in a fight with an officer." And one of them had to take the blame. And it was my father who had to transfer. And they said, "We're gonna fix you, Mr. Hanson. You hit an officer. Which one of you two Hansons did it?" And he said, "I did." And they sentenced him to die in B-29. So he flew 40 missions on a B-29 and he survived and the brother that stayed in the Marine Corps was killed on Okinawa. So Tom really liked that, but he was, what I'm trying to say is that he was trying to say things that he thought might offend people to get it out in the open. And he was completely transparent, but not in a showy way. The more that I got to know him, the more that I, I don't want to say idolized him, but I really respected the way he treated people. And he talked about his research and history. And every once in a while I would be home and a package would come and it would be some used book that was actually a classic of geography or sociology or the ancient world. And he would send it to me and he'd send me pictures of Yosemite. He's highly eccentric, but one of the most unusual people I'll ever meet.

- You were talking about your father and uncle punching a Marine officer. I wonder if Hanson is a Scottish name.

- No, actually it's-

- Sounds very Scottish.

- It's on the borderland of Europe. So, I don't know if Minnesota qualifies as a South, but Scandinavians had some of that strait. They always said Swedes were Danes with their brains blown out.

- When Glen, Larry, and Roland were exchanging in the last session about the fact that Thomas Sowell's work is not something that a person undergraduate economics program would likely be exposed to. And I think the same is true of anyone reading history here or at the Ivy League. They don't read Sowell's work. It's not assigned because the public intellectual class that is dominant in universities has essentially excommunicated, tacitly excommunicated Thomas Sowell. And so you only find him in the kind of way that you describe by finding the book on your father's bookshelf. But there's a twist in this tale, which is the subject of your contribution to this conference, Coleman. And that is the strange second life of Thomas Sowell's work.

- Yes.

- On Twitter, X, and YouTube. Talk a bit about this, because the facts are startling. Some of you may already know this, but there's an X account, Thomas Sowell Quotes that has 1.3 million followers. More you say than the Speaker of the House, the Governor and former ice presidential candidate, Tim Waltz, and the New York City mayoral candidate, Zohran Mamdani, which is impressive. And then there are all the clips on YouTube. What's going on here? I mean, I'm sure Sowell himself pays no attention to this. But it's as if a new generation is finding Thomas Sowell through channels quite different from the educational institutions.

- Yeah, I realized this when I was, it was a typical night like any other. Me and my fiance were winding down the day. And she says to me, "Did you know that the British Empire stamped out slavery throughout the world?" And I did a double take because I was like, "Okay, where in your day of venture investing did you come across this tidbit?" And she goes, "Well, I saw it on the Thomas Sowell account." So my first thought was obviously to get a time machine, go back in time to my college self and be like, "You have great taste in women. Stick with this one." But then, you know, I began looking into it. The Thomas Sowell's account, Twitter page. Yeah, it's got 1.3 million followers. And it's a bit of a paradox because Thomas Sowell, you know, he spent his life avoiding the old media, much less the new one. He's, you know, locked himself away and written these door-stopping tomes of deep insight. All of this would suggest that Thomas Sowell should mix with modern social media like oil and water. Yet a Twitter account that simply posts his quotes with no other content can get over a million views. What does this say? Well, for one thing, we're supposed to be in an age of no attention span. And Sowell's writing style is famously to the point. In other words, he is going to cut right to the deepest crux of an issue within the first paragraph of the book that you're reading. No fluff. No B.S. Just right to the crux of the issue. And ironically, I think this makes him incredibly well suited to the modern era of short attention spans. Secondly, I think, you know, so much of what passes for insight on social media and in articles today is just warmed over talking points that people have heard before. And so that feeling that Justice Thomas described of an oasis in the desert, that feeling persists to the present, especially for young people that are just hearing so much noise all day, right? When they actually come across something that's deeply insightful, it strikes them by contrast with everything else going on. So I think it's proof at the end of the day that quality insight is a winning formula in any generation.

- [Niall] One of the points you make in your paper is that his prose style is extraordinarily pithy.

- Yes.

- And I realized that that was why I really whizzed through the trilogy. They're extraordinarily readable. I wonder where that prose style came from. It put me in mind of George Orwell's journalism, which I used to hold up to students as an example of how to write clearly with no frills so that it's really clear what your point is. There's something of that in Sowell, but where does it come from, I wonder?

- I can tell you where I think it comes from. I think it comes from the exact same place as his distrust and hatred of experts, the expert class. In other words, what experts so often do is try to bamboozle you with big words. And then the assumption of the normal person is, well, wow, that guy said a lot of big words. I mean, I didn't quite understand it. And he's like telling me that they've got it all figured out but-

- You mean things like gendering the other in an intersectionality paradigm?

- Exactly, they're telling me that like gender is a spectrum. It's not just boys and girls. Okay? But they used a lot of big words that I don't know how to refute. So they must be onto something, right? And this is a mode of like expert bamboozlement of the public that I think Sowell absolutely despises. One way he expresses that contempt is by writing in a way that any intelligent person could understand. Because my idea should survive or fail based on whether it makes any sense to you, not based on whether I can use a bunch of gobbledygook academic jargon that's actually meant to hide the fact that I'm not making sense.

- So one of the most shocking things I learned in preparing for this session is that you're still only 29 which, I guess I shouldn't be surprised by because when I first came across your writing and you write with the same extraordinary clarity, I was astonished to find that I was reading essays by an undergraduate at Columbia. I had though I'd come across somebody who was in mid-career, but somehow I had missed. So you're part of a new generation that has discovered Sowell not through school, but as it were, by other channels. Can we hope for this revival to keep going? Do you think there's a sense in which he's only just begun to go viral? And I'm thinking in particular of young men, Black and white and of mixed race, who felt so alienated by the gobbledygook. And by the kind of progressive consensus that they all have that Justice Thomas feeling of the water in the desert. Do you think this is spreading? Is it building?

- I think so. And the reason I think that is because I teach a course at the University of Austin called The Legacy of Slavery. And the reading I signed that... These are 18-year-old kids that was most interesting to them. And as a professor, you can't help but notice your students perk up at certain readings and they fall asleep at others and then you revise based on that feedback. They all perked up when reading Sowell's essay called "The Real History of Slavery." It was news to them that slavery was, as Sowell puts it, you know, if slavery had been confined to two races within one country for three centuries, it would not be one tenth as great a moral evil as it actually was. Why would people want to arbitrarily understate this great evil unless they were trying to put that to political purposes, convenient political purposes during their time? So that's the opening of his essay. And the fact that it resonated with 18-year-olds last year so much tells me something optimistic.

- Victor, this is another example of Thomas Sowell as historian. You know, it seems to me that one thing that we need to really work on is getting these books assigned not just in universities, but in high schools too. Do you see any way that we can do this? It seems to me that it's part of the Hoover Institution's mission to spread the word about Thomas Sowell. How can we do that?

- Well, YouTube is... Justice Thomas, it's been his biggest aid because he's so succinct and he does so well in the visual and the YouTube people are discovering. I get every morning a synopsis by a group of the news stories and it always starts with quotes of Tom Sowell that are applied to current things like an open border or defund the police. And somebody is going through there and collating his corpus and finding something. And as far as his style, you know, an editor from a publishing company he doesn't publish with who had used to publish with him called me once and said, "Tom won't change one word." And said, "Well, you can edit it and then tell him you didn't change anything." Which they did, I suppose. But I was trying to explain to him that he was a tacitean, and there's a big argument in the ancient world whether you're the Asiatic or the Attic. The Attic style was blunt. And I said, Tom... He doesn't believe you don't repeat a word just for variety. If he says "Constitution," he'll use it in two sentences because it's the most exact. He believes in noun, verb, predicate, not a lot of dependent clauses. If there's an Anglo-Saxon word that's accessible to people, he will prefer that over a Latina word. And that's not because he doesn't know how to write. That's by his own choice to make it accessible. And it's sort of like reading an Ernest Hemingway novel versus Thomas Wolfe. It's just presentable. I got up. I went to bed. It's very powerful if you can see what he, you can come to appreciate that style. And the other thing that I'd remark about it is we're all here and we're celebrating his life. And I think there's a sense from everybody that he proved triumphant against his critics. That he was right and people are starting to see that now. Especially these problems that we've had the last eight or 10 years have made him even more relevant because he had answers to what's been happening, this dissension in the government. But I would like to say that we get the idea that he was a maverick, but he was treated very badly by the intellectual community and very unfairly, and it hurt him. And he would say that, how unfair it was. And I'd said, "I've been treated unfairly, but what I have suffered compared to you." But what I'm getting at is he got that tragic view against the therapeutic, and it really was integral that the more that they unfairly attacked him or the more that they caricatured him. If you read the Kirkish reviews, just to take one example of this trilogy, they're almost all negative, but they all have one thing in common. They're all condescending. And they're written by leftists and they're all unfair. And yet that's the marquee review that determines whether a book will be bought by a bookstore. And yet it affected him. But he just, he kept going. So what I'm trying to say is he didn't come in a lot to universities or to Hoover to get a lot of solidarity or group support. He was often solitary and everybody said, "Well, he doesn't need help," or, "He's very independent." But it was just strength of character. I don't know how he did it. Because some of the things they wrote about him were not just unfair, but they were completely lunatic. And they didn't understand his prose style. They didn't understand what he was trying to do with this tacitean directness. And it was mostly people on the left, but it did affect him. And I don't know of anybody in the scholarly world looking back over 95 years of a life that was less, that was as treated poorly by the intellectual community as he was. I mean, he was a giant and he's recognized now, but there were things that were so unfair to him. And he never really wrote a rebutal and said, "I'm being treated unfairly." His idea was, "I'm just gonna keep going and going and I'm gonna overwhelm them by the power and the variety and the corpus of my thought." And he did.

- And I think he did.

- He did.

- So we've got a little under 10 minutes for questions from the floor. There's one right there and there's one back there. Can the microphones race at high speed to our questioners? Yes. Go ahead.

- All right. This is a question for you, Victor. I think, you're getting at this a little bit with some of these Thomas Sowell stories. And I'm curious if there's maybe a special story that you have, because I think there's so many of these incredible facts about Tom Sowell that I've never heard of any person out there, whether it was the book that you're referring to or the book deals that, you know, basically no edits. The manuscript was essentially perfect when it was sent in. Tom would actually design the book covers themselves. Many people may not realize that. You know, he would famously, I think, get up at a dinner table at like 9:00 PM if he was at a wonderful dinner table. An event like this, he would get up at 9:0 PM and go home because that's how dedicated he was. He would turn down, you know, a $100,000 honorarium to spend a half day down in Palm Springs at some event. I'm curious what your fondest memories with Dr. Sowell were if there's maybe one or two that stand out in your mind.

- Well, he once... When he would write a book, he would sign it, give it to me. And when I would write a book, I would sign it. And he said, "You have a very, uh..." When I wrote a book on the Greeks or the history of war, they would always kind of get a Renaissance painting, you know, as the famous one. And he said, "Do you really think that is necessary?" And so I said to him, "Well, with all due respect, Tom, you have a black top and a white bottom and red letters. And then the next book, it's black letters and red top and white." And he said "Well, don't you think..." And he mentioned his, he worshiped his assistant, Na, and he said, "Well, Na and I, she's figured out how to do the cover and we can bypass all of those people. They're all not necessary." And I said, "But don't you think that if you, after about four interchanges of black, white, red, that maybe you would want to go back to this painting or something?" And he said, "How many copies do you sell?" And that was the end of the, that was the end of it.

- That was the deciding argument. One, another question from the back, please.

- I'm a graduate student at at Dartmouth. I'm reading Christopher Lasch currently in his 2002 book, Plain Style. And Coleman, I'm wondering, you were describing a little bit language as a proxy for culture. How that's influenced your work on colorblindness. And Lasch and Sowell, surprisingly, there seems to be very little at least citation, overlap between the two despite being born at similar times. But I'm wondering if you had, how that kind of plain style of communication that Lasch saw as kind of bound up with a kind of democratic communication. It's very different than what you see in the academy, how that has influenced your work on colorblindness.

- I'm not sure it's influenced my work on colorblindness specifically. It's influenced my whole approach to writing. I take after Thomas Sowell, I take after George Orwell, I take after all the people who write in the plain style. My assumption is the point of being guys up here that write books and talk to people is actually to be understood, right? So I consider that axiomatic. And there's a whole another style of speaking where it's, you know, more of a performance to bamboozle and to be unclear intentionally and perhaps more charitably to be poetic. But that's not my approach. I take after Sowell. I think that's the point of, you know, doing stuff like this.

- I would just say that there is a commonality that if you have three books, most authors would not say Race and Culture, Migration and Culture, Conquest and Culture, or they wouldn't write in that terse style, or they wouldn't read, just recycle the same book cover. Unless the point was you considered all of that superfluous to the content. And you though that the best way to transmit what the book was about was a plain style and not to distract with a Renaissance painting on the cover that might not be relevant to the content. And if it was about race and culture, then put culture. You didn't really care if it appeared three times in the next book. And that was very unusual for somebody to do that.

- I'm thinking we need a kind of textbook for high schools, how to write like Thomas Sowell. Just showing how he does it because that would be a great way to get a lot more people reading Thomas Sowell, just to see how the style works. We've got time for one more question before we clear the stage. Yes, please.

- Hi. This question is primarily for Dr. Hanson. But I was thinking when you were describing how, and I think Coleman touched on this too, how Thomas Sowell has written about the history of slavery, how he draws from the global and trans historical experience. Yet that information seems to have not been communicated into the popular consciousness. There seems to be a great deal of resistance toward that. You touching on that reminded me of the work of Orlando Patterson, who does much the same thing in his Slavery and Social Death. And also thinking of kind of a different aspect of race relations, if you will, of even the work of Jim Sidanius on the nature of kind of intergroup relations and intergroup violence. Again, drawing on a more global perspective and then applying that to the American case. So it seems that maybe particularly in this like period of the 1970s to '90s or so, we had a really great wealth of academics like Thomas Sowell telling us kind of these truths drawn from analysis, transhistorical and global analysis that could be applied to American society, but that there is just this persistence resistance toward greater uptake for. And I'm wondering where you think that comes from. Is there something about American culture that's just resistant to learning from other parts of the world and from other places from other times throughout history? Or is it kind of more top-down coming from these elite gatekeepers who have a particular perspective on American society?

- Did you get the-

- Thank you. And you'll have to give a Thomas Sowell terse answer because we're actually fresh out of time. The question is, why is there resistance to Sowell's historical view, particularly of slavery in the United States? Is that resistance because deep down Americans don't really want to study their own history in a comparative perspective? Or is this an elite public intellectual, academic intellectual resistance?

- I'm sorry, I didn't hear that. So I'm glad that Niall. I think if you ask him that he would think that it's innate to Americans to be American-centric, that we think the entire world revolves around our own unique experience. And given that until recently, we were not a multiracial society. We had a Black population and we were a biracial society. And that formed a lot of our history. And we talked about it in purely American terms. And we were far away from Europe. We were far away from Africa. We had these two oceans and we became kind of parochial about it. And what he was trying to do was to look at the phenomenon of slavery, slave, master; master, slave in terms of both history and geography. And so if you look at everything... He wrote essays on slavery, but if you look at everything he wrote, the gist of it was, there was always slavery. The Muslim world had more slavery out of Africa than the Western world. But the Greeks, and I think he was influenced, and I was talking to Coleman about it by Frederick Snowden who wrote Blacks in Antiquity, a brilliant scholar whose son was a brilliant historian at Yale. And Snowden and people had pointed out that the Greeks and the Romans did not have... Slavery was an accident of birth. If you were born and somebody took your city or you were born to a slave, but it was never predicated on race. And therefore, there was no reason to abolish it because it was an equal opportunity oppressor. Plato was for times reportedly a slave. Aristotle actually said there should be something called natural slavery, meaning some people... He had to say that because the predominant view was there wasn't. So it was never really abolished. And then when the European experience and colonialism went to different places, and the same was true of Islam, and they did not see monumental architecture, or they did not see sophisticated literature in what they were used to, and they had superior technology, then they enslaved people, and then they created a post facto ideology. And for the first time in the history of slavery, and Tom talks about that, then they said, "Well, these people are slaves because they're not as advanced as we are." And that was really the first time in the 16th century that people had made that argument. Islam had done it a little earlier for religious and other purposes. As Tom kind of hints and talks about, that kind of doomed it, doomed slavery. And in other words, that was the epitaph for slavery in the Western world because the Greeks were never encumbered by an illogical pretense that said, "Well, the slave knows geometry more than the master." Or Esep has a better pithy epigram than the master. They'd say, "Yes, he does. He's smarter than the master, but he had bad luck." But all of a sudden, when you say Africans are not as sophisticated genetically or something, then you're wedded to that and you're embedded. And then when you are in the plantation and somebody educates and gives an opportunity to a Black person, and they prove as smart or smarter than a white person, or you have a Frederick Douglas, then it puts into, it puts the whole question of slavery back up for debate. It says slavery now is based on a lie that a less capable people are deserved to be slaves. And when the fact is, when you give them the same opportunity, then they belie the whole pretense. They're just as capable or more capable of the enslavers. But until that point, when people would point out you that fact, they said, "So what? We never said anybody was a slave because of their race." It was anybody, white people. So we're not prone to that discrepancy or weakness in slavery. In an irony, once you predicated on race, and once the enslaved race proved that that was a lie, then you could see that you could see the origins of eliminating slavery. And that was one of the things that people did in the abolitionist movement.

- Can I give a three sentence answer before we wrap up?

- Yes. Give us the punch. Take us home before Kim drags us off the stage.

- Shelby Steele has argued that in the '60s, Americans developed a political identity around shame. The idea, our country is uniquely evil. The worldwide facts of slavery are a threat to that identity. That's why they get ignored.

- That illustrates, I think, just how huge a contribution Thomas Sowell has made as an historian. We're gonna get back to his contribution as an economist later, but all it remains for me to do is to ask you to join me in thanking our brilliant panelists.

- Thank You.