The Hemispheres of Thomas Sowell

Profiles in Right-Hemispherism

Picture Thomas Sowell, that old warrior of the mind, sitting at his desk, sifting through the wreckage of human folly.

His right hemisphere? Hell if I know how it hums. Does he commune with the Tao, feel the pulse of the cosmos in his bones? Not my place to say, but if you sift his work, you’ll be hard-pressed to spot the pricks of reality appreciated by a robust right hemisphere, like intuition, the mystical, or the glow of tradition.

No, Sowell’s a man with a shovel, digging into the hardpan of reality, unearthing cold, hard facts like arrowheads from a lost civilization.

Yet, if you squint at his A Conflict of Visions, you might catch a flicker of something deeper: a right-hemispheric nod to the constrained vision, that gritty sense of human limits, the kind of wisdom that comes from knowing we’re all stumbling around in the dark, no matter how bright we think our lanterns.

Now, his left hemisphere. Facts, stats, math, logic. The left hemisphere is where Sowell’s mental action is, though you wouldn’t know it from the way he keeps it on a short leash.

Sowell’s got no patience for the airy abstractions that clog the brains of our chattering left-hemispheric classes. He takes facts as they come, no matter how ugly. He’ll nod to religion, even if he’s not singing in the choir. He’ll admit prejudice is baked into the human condition, something to be wrestled and leveraged, not wished away.

And—here’s the kicker—he’ll point out, without flinching, that black folks often fuel the stereotypes that dog them. He’s lived the sting of racial bias, grown up in its shadow, but he’s not blind to how white do-gooders, with their welfare traps and sanctimonious cheerleading, have kneecapped black initiative. Sowell’s a pragmatist, cut from the same rough cloth as William James, stitching together truth from the scraps of what is, not what we wish it to be.

That ain’t an easy thing to do. The left hemisphere loves to spin fairy tales: grand ideas that promise to tidy up the world’s mess. Those ideas? They crystallize into opinions, then harden into judgments, then evolve into sacred Standards.

These Standards are the idols the brainy set bows to, and the smarter you are, the worse it gets. Intelligent folks know they’re clever, so they strut around, cocky as roosters, blind to how they’re worshipping their own abstractions over the stubborn, messy truth.

And here’s the rub: the sharper the mind, the dumber the ideas it’ll defend. Intellectuals, with their turbo-charged left hemispheres, erect these logocentric mini-gods—call it a Standard, a utopia, a five-year plan—and they’ll die on that hill, facts be damned. If reality doesn’t fit, they’ll just dig for more facts, certain the next shovelful will prove their point. A hundred million corpses under Marxism? Doesn’t faze them. Just wait, they say: another hundred million, and the socialist paradise will rise like a phoenix from the ash heap.

Meanwhile, the rest of us are left to navigate the rubble of their dreams.