Thomas Sowell's Conflict Of Vision Essay

Despite serving the same God and reading the same Bible and sharing the same moral values, Christians routinely disagree over how to respond to public policy issues. Why is this so?

Without doubt, the early period of the 21st century is characterised by unprecedented social and cultural change. In this new context, the old Conservative-Liberal divide no longer has the capacity to effectively describe the place of values in the Western world. A better, more comprehensive explanation must be found for the origins of social ethics, political values and religious insight. Thomas Sowell’s ‘conflict of visions’ model offers an important key for understanding and interpreting values in the 21st century Western context.

Sowell, economist and social commentator, has suggested that political, economic, legal and social disagreements are the result of ‘a conflict of visions.’ Sowell contends that opponents are reasoning from fundamentally

Sowell begins his analysis of visions by citing Walter Lippmann’s astute observation: “At the core of every moral code there is a picture of human nature, a map of the universe, and a version of history. To human nature (of the sort conceived), in a universe (of the kind imagined), after a history (so understood), the rules of the code apply.” Sowell argues that social visions differ in their basic conceptions of the nature of man: “The capacities and limitations of man are implicitly seen in radically different terms by those whose explicit philosophical, political, or social theories are built on different visions.” In Sowell’s estimation, advocates of different visions conceive of “[m]an’s moral and mental natures…so differently that their respective concepts of knowledge and institutions necessarily differ as well. Social causation itself is conceived differently, both as to mechanics and