There Are No Solutions Without God: Sowell, Unamuno and the Tragic Vision

Leading US Black intellectual, Thomas Sowell, has one of those sayings that initially sounds almost unbearably pessimistic: "There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs." Surely there are solutions to some things. Antibiotics solve infections. Engineers solve structural problems. A mechanic solves the problem of a broken alternator. Sowell is not denying anything so obvious. His point concerns the great permanent problems of social existence, where every apparent solution creates costs, competing interests remain, and the material being worked upon is that most troublesome of substances: human beings.

An American Thinker essay by Lars Møller (link below), provides a useful introduction to what Sowell calls the "tragic" or "constrained" vision of humanity. Human nature has limits. Knowledge has limits. Resources have limits. Human beings possess self-interest, passions, prejudices, and moral weaknesses that cannot simply be educated out of existence. Politics therefore does not offer a final escape from the human condition. This is why Sowell contrasts solutions with trade-offs. A government can reduce one danger while increasing another. It can increase equality while weakening incentives. It can provide greater security while sacrificing liberty. It can spend more money on hospitals, but the resources must come from somewhere else. It can attempt to eliminate risk, but eventually the cost of eliminating another increment of risk becomes greater than the benefit.

The mature political question is therefore seldom simply, "Would this be good?" Almost everything sounds good when considered in isolation. The serious questions are: compared with what, at what cost, and what will happen next?

Sowell's opposite type is the unconstrained vision, associated in his later writing with what he called the "anointed." Here the great social problems are regarded as things capable of solution if only sufficient intelligence, compassion, money, and political power are applied to them. If poverty remains, somebody has failed to eradicate it. If crime remains, society has failed to remove its causes. If inequality remains, institutions have failed to engineer equality. Persistent imperfection becomes evidence that somebody has not yet implemented the correct program.

There is an enormous attraction in this vision because it flatters both the heart and the intellect. It tells compassionate people that suffering need not be accepted and intelligent people that they may possess the knowledge necessary to abolish it. The tragic vision delivers a considerably less flattering message. Some suffering cannot be eliminated. Some conflicts cannot be reconciled. Some people will behave badly whatever institutions we create, and the people designing those institutions are themselves subject to precisely the human weaknesses they propose to manage.

That last point is crucial. The utopian temptation usually divides humanity into two groups: the people who require improvement and the people qualified to improve them. Sowell refuses to grant the second group an exemption from human nature. The politician, professor, bureaucrat, judge, social reformer, and intellectual are made from exactly the same defective human material as everybody else. Give such people unlimited power to perfect society and the question immediately arises: who perfects the perfecters?

Here Sowell's secular political economy begins to approach something much older. Christianity has been saying for two thousand years that something is wrong with man. The doctrine of original sin is considerably more sophisticated than the cartoon version in which Christians supposedly believe babies are personally guilty of stealing an apple. Different Christian traditions formulate the doctrine differently, but at its centre lies the claim that humanity exists in a fallen condition. Human beings remain capable of love, sacrifice, reason, beauty, and extraordinary goodness, but something within human nature is disordered. We know the good and fail to do it. We recognise justice and pursue our interests. We love our neighbours and envy them. We condemn greed while accumulating possessions. We denounce pride while congratulating ourselves upon our humility.

Christianity therefore begins its political anthropology with a warning that should be written above the door of every parliament: do not expect angels. This does not mean expecting devils either. Christianity is not the doctrine that humanity is wholly evil. The image of God remains in man, but it is damaged. The Fall does not destroy human nature; it disorders it. That distinction produces a political wisdom remarkably close to Sowell's constrained vision. If human beings were naturally perfectible, concentrated political power might be comparatively safe in the hands of sufficiently enlightened rulers. If human beings are fallen, the enlightened ruler is fallen too. Power must therefore be divided, checked, and restrained because the person exercising it cannot be assumed to possess either perfect knowledge or perfect virtue.

The American constitutional tradition understood precisely this problem. Government is necessary because men are not angels, but government itself must be constrained because governors are not angels either. This is tragic politics. It does not ask how to manufacture the New Man. It asks how ordinary flawed men can live together without destroying one another.

Sowell approaches the problem through economics, history, and institutional analysis. Spanish philosopher, Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936), approached it from an entirely different direction. His great 1912 work The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations is not a work of economics or public policy. Unamuno's tragedy is more intimate and ultimately more terrible than Sowell's. Man knows that he will die. Yet something within him rebels against extinction. We do not merely want humanity to continue. We want ourselves to continue. The abstract assurance that our atoms will remain in the universe or that future generations will remember us does not satisfy the hunger. The individual consciousness wants not merely continuation of the species but personal immortality.

Reason cannot provide Unamuno with the certainty he desires. He therefore finds himself suspended between faith and doubt, hope and despair, the demand for immortality and the intellectual inability conclusively to demonstrate it. That conflict constitutes his tragic sense of life. Sowell looks outward at society and says there are no final solutions. Unamuno looks inward at the human soul and says there is no purely rational resolution of the contradiction between our hunger for eternal life and our knowledge of death. He did not embrace Christianity but instead dwelled in the nether regions of existential doubt.

Christianity stands behind both visions, although neither can simply be reduced to Christian theology. The connection becomes explicit in Unamuno's own discussion of the Fall. In The Tragic Sense of Life, he invokes the story of Paradise, where humanity's acquisition of the knowledge of good and evil brings labour, suffering, and death. He then makes the characteristically paradoxical observation that from the Fall also comes the possibility of Redemption. Here Christianity does something extraordinary with tragedy. It does not deny it.

The biblical story does not say that humanity is basically fine and merely requires improved public administration. Genesis begins with creation as good and then introduces rupture. Human beings turn away from God, brother kills brother, violence spreads, and the remainder of biblical history unfolds among creatures capable of extraordinary fidelity and extraordinary wickedness. The Bible is not a utopian book about human nature. Read the Old Testament without sentimental spectacles. Israel receives the law and repeatedly violates it. Kings who begin well become corrupt. Wisdom does not prevent folly. Prosperity produces decadence. Deliverance is followed by forgetfulness.

The New Testament is no more sentimental. Peter promises loyalty and denies Christ three times. Paul describes the torment of knowing the good while doing what he hates. Even the disciples argue about status. Christianity therefore possesses what might be called the ultimate constrained vision of man. No political arrangement abolishes sin. No educational program abolishes sin. No redistribution of wealth abolishes sin. No technological revolution abolishes sin. No international organisation abolishes sin. No expert committee abolishes sin. Change the institution and fallen human beings enter the new institution.

That does not make reform pointless. This is where a crude pessimism must be distinguished from the tragic vision. Christians built hospitals, schools, and charities precisely because suffering can be reduced even if it cannot be abolished. Laws can become more just. Institutions can become less corrupt. Diseases can be cured. Poverty can be reduced. Violence can be restrained. Sowell likewise does not argue that improvement is impossible. If he believed that, there would be little point studying public policy. The issue is the difference between amelioration and perfection. A tragic worldview seeks better arrangements among imperfect possibilities. A utopian worldview repeatedly mistakes the possibility of improvement for the possibility of perfection.

The distinction matters because the attempt to construct heaven on Earth has an unpleasant historical habit of creating something closer to hell. Once perfection becomes a political objective, ordinary restraints become obstacles. If poverty can finally be abolished, why allow property rights to interfere? If perfect equality can be achieved, why tolerate dissent? If humanity itself can be remade, why permit stubborn individuals to obstruct the transformation? The dissenter ceases to be merely someone with a different opinion. He becomes the obstacle standing between humanity and salvation. Politics thereby acquires the structure of a religion without the Christian doctrine of original sin. That may be one of the most dangerous combinations imaginable.

The Christian knows that he is fallen. The utopian political reformer is tempted to believe that everybody except the reformer requires redemption. Unamuno adds another dimension because the human tragedy cannot finally be solved by successful administration anyway. Imagine that Sowell's anointed somehow succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. Poverty disappeared. Crime vanished. Everyone possessed a comfortable house, excellent healthcare, and an agreeable occupation. Every inequality had been reconciled. We would still die. The deepest human problem would remain untouched.

This is where Unamuno's tragic vision goes beyond politics. The ultimate constraint is mortality itself. A political ideology promising earthly perfection therefore asks politics to carry a burden it cannot possibly bear. Government can improve drainage. It cannot conquer death. Christianity makes an even more radical claim. The answer to the human tragedy does not arise from perfecting human institutions because the fundamental problem lies within humanity itself. Redemption must come from outside. That is the meaning of grace.

Christianity consequently combines an extraordinarily pessimistic view of unaided human perfectibility with an extraordinarily optimistic view of humanity's ultimate destiny. Man cannot save himself, yet man can be saved. This is why Christian realism should never collapse into despair. Sowell teaches prudence because social life consists of unavoidable trade-offs. Unamuno teaches humility before the existential mystery because reason cannot satisfy man's desperate hunger for immortality. Christianity accepts both forms of tragedy but refuses to grant tragedy the final word.

The Fall explains why the world cannot be perfected by politics. The Cross explains why imperfection need not end in despair. The Resurrection explains why death itself does not possess the final victory. There is therefore a profound connection running from Sowell's political realism through Unamuno's existential anguish to the Christian understanding of fallen humanity. Sowell tells us not to expect final solutions from society. Unamuno tells us not to expect reason alone to resolve the deepest contradiction of existence. Christianity tells us why. We are creatures made for something higher, living in a world in which both ourselves and our institutions bear the marks of the Fall. That is indeed a tragic sense of life. But Christianity adds three words that neither economics nor political philosophy can supply on its own: He Is Risen.