One of the greatest public intellectuals of the 20^th and 21^st centuries, Thomas Sowell, a black man and conservative, wrote a book in in 1987 called A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles. I point out his race only to indicate that black conservatives, like Sowell and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas among others, are considered traitors to their race. It’s one of the reasons Candace Owens started an organization called Blexit in 2018 as a takeoff on Brexit when the UK declared independence from the EU. Among the many fruits of Trump has been many black Americans declaring their independence from black Democrat groupthink, escaping the plantation, so to speak. A conflict of visions explains this phenomenon and many other things we are experiencing in 2024.

Sowell’s book is one of the most important books of the modern era because it explains the fundamental dynamic at the heart of the perpetual and escalating conflict in America and the West. This conflict is nothing new, going back to the ancient Greek philosophers, specifically Plato and Aristotle, and has worked itself out in Western history to the present day. Respectively, these two philosophers correspond to the two visions Sowell lays out in the book, the unconstrained and the constrained visions. Plato’s work, especially in The Republic, is represented by his desire to create the ideal society or polis, the Greek city-state, ruled by a philosopher king. Aristotle’s philosophy and politics, on the other hand, was rooted in human nature as he found it. The former wants to mold reality to its wishes because its vision can’t be constrained by reality, the latter works with reality as we find it. 

At the core of Sowell’s analysis is his assumption that “ultimate truth” exists. As a conservative Sowell embraces the constrained vision. I’ve written here recently that the dividing line in Western culture is truth. The left stopped believing in truth a long time ago, and now they are fully invested in “the narrative,” a postmodern Nihilistic mentality that only believes in the will to power, their power. Liberals were always part of the larger left, often calling themselves progressives, and a certain percentage of those believe in truth, and reject the lies that masquerade as “the narrative.” Many things awakened them in the age of Trump, but believing in truth separated them from the woke leftists who currently dominate culture and politics in the West. A perfect example is Robert F. Kenney, Jr. endorsing President Trump. Here is a man who believes in Truth. He’s an old school liberal who believes in truth and can’t make common cause with the current Marxist Democrat Party that doesn’t.

Our Anthropology Determines Our Vision
Sowell starts chapter two with this sentence: 

Social visions differ in their basic conception of the nature of man.

To say this is important for how we live among people in society is akin to saying oxygen is important for life. Well, almost. How we view the fundamental nature of man, of what human beings are in their essence, will determine if we live a life of flourishing and God’s blessings, or if we live a life covered with the dust of death.

Anthropology is the study of that nature, who and what man is in his essential characteristics. Ultimately our metaphysics will determine this, how we see the meaning and nature of the universe. If Darwin was right and we’re merely clever animals, that will lead to certain assumptions about reality and man in it. If the God of the Bible is Creator and man his creature, on the other hand, that will lead to opposite assumptions, as in 180 degrees opposite, as in night and day, up and down, right and wrong, and yes, life and death. These assumptions lead logically to certain conclusions about life, what it is, and what it ought to be, and therefore two conflicting visions. Darwin leads inevitably to an unconstrained vision, while Scripture leads to the constrained vision. Let’s take a look from a biblical perspective how these two visions developed in history.

The Bible tells us man is constrained because he’s a created being living in God’s world. Man, male and female God created them, was created good, but in his rebellion man marred God’s image in himself and all his progeny. The fundamental fact of this story leads us to conclude that man is a flawed and limited being accountable to his Creator, but we need to inquire as to the nature of man’s fundamental flaw, and why it drives him in due course to this unconstrained vision. We learn about this flaw in Genesis three and the familiar story of Satan tempting Eve to disobey the direct order of God. This story is so familiar to us that we fail to realize how utterly unique it is. No other religion or philosophy tells us why human beings are so screwed up, so they have no answer for man’s fundamental problem; he is in rebellion to his Creator and needs to be reconciled to Him.

In this history of Christianity there is something the enemies of the faith have used to attack it called “the problem of evil.” This supposed problem asks the question: if God is good and all powerful why is there evil? The conclusion is, if he’s good he shouldn’t allow it, and if he’s all powerful, he should be able to prevent it. Since there is evil, God is neither good nor all powerful. If he exists at all, he can’t be trusted. This so called problem got its start in Western culture from French philosopher Voltaire in his 1756 poem titled, “Poem on the Lisbon Disaster, Or an Examination of the Axiom, ‘All is Well.’” The poem was Voltaire’s response to the horrific Lisbon earthquake where an estimated 40,000 people died. Let me read you a piece of Voltaire’s sardonic wit, worthy of the New Atheists:

Unhappy mortals! Dark and mourning earth!
Affrighted gathering of human kind!
Eternal lingering of useless pain!
Come, ye philosophers, who cry, “All’s well,”
And contemplate this ruin of a world.
Behold these shreds and cinders of your race,
This child and mother heaped in common wreck,
These scattered limbs beneath the marble shafts–
A hundred thousand whom the earth devours,
Who, torn and bloody, palpitating yet,
Entombed beneath their hospitable roofs,
In racking torment end their stricken lives.
To those expiring murmurs of distress,
To that appalling spectacle of woe,
Will ye reply: “You do but illustrate
The iron laws that chain the will of God”?
Say ye, o’er that yet quivering mass of flesh:
“God is avenged: the wage of sin is death”?
What crime, what sin, had those young hearts conceived
That lie, bleeding and torn, on mother’s breast?
Did fallen Lisbon deeper drink of vice
Than London, Paris, or sunlit Madrid?

Voltaire, in C.S. Lewis’s famous phrase, put “God in the dock,” and man became His prosecuting attorney. Instead of man having to answer to God, now it was God who must answer to man. Of course, there is no answer that would satisfy sinful, rebellious man, so God was declared persona non grata in Western culture which slowly secularized because of it. We call the 17^th century in Western culture the Enlightenment, but in fact it turned out the lights, and Western culture has been groping in the dark ever since.

Why the Unconstrained Vision?
The unconstrained vision got its start in Genesis 3 with the fall, but it broke out in steroids in the 18^th century with Enlightenment rationalism, or the idea that reason is all we need to figure life out and solve all our problems. We’ll remember the essence of Satan’s temptation to Eve:

For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.

There it is, in one haunting sentence, the delusion that man could be God, he could call the shots, that he could mold reality to his wishes. This is further fleshed out in Genesis 11 and the Tower of Babel where the people of God’s creation decided to build a tower “that reaches to the heavens” so they could make a name for themselves. In response, God confused their languages and scattered them over the face of the earth or, He said, “nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.” There it is, the vision that drives the left side of the political-cultural spectrum in Western culture, and the desire to create Utopia on earth by man’s own will and power. This word first occurred in Sir Thomas More’s Utopia which he published in 1516. More made up the word as a compound from the Greek words for “not” (ou) and “place” (topos) and thus meaning “nowhere” which eventually turns into Nihilism, a word coming from Latin meaning nothing, a gift to Western culture given by Friedrich Nietzsche. Nowhere leads to nothing, leads eventually to despair, and ultimately death. This is the vision of Western elites who don’t know Latin and believe they can be God.

If we go back to the so-called problem of evil, the unconstrained vision sees Utopia as something that is attainable by human effort and thinking. The fundamental assumption of this vision is that man is fundamentally good because there is no such thing as original sin if we’re merely material beings and a product of chance. Thus what corrupts man is external to him in society. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a French philosopher friend of Voltaire’s, believed back in the mists of time man was a noble savage who lived in an Edenic paradise that was uncorrupted by the influences of civilization. Man was innately good. Thus the answers to the problem of evil, of man’s fundamental dilemma, is found in molding reality to his liking. If the right circumstances can be created, humanity can be made right. It is assumed reality is malleable to man’s wishes, and thus Babel is a real possibility and “nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.” Or so they think. In their presumption of divinity, Enlightenment man thinks he is in fact God, and he alone determines what is good and evil. The utopian mind has led only to evil, misery, and death wherever it has been tried. Sadly the Utopians never learn their lessons, as we see in our day as the Democrats have embraced a Marxist version of Utopia; they are the unconstrained party.

But God in his mercy scattered the inhabitants of Babel so the misery could be constrained, not to keep his creatures from creating great things. God’s goal and purposes for humanity was always for his creatures to flourish. We see this in the dominion mandate prior to the fall, but post fall given we live by sight not faith, most people have a difficult time believing God still wants humanity to flourish. We know the truth of the matter because He revealed this to us in the very next chapter, 12, where he picks one man, Abram, out of all the Godless heathens in the world to create His very own people. What does he declare His purpose is for His people? He tells us in his promise to Abram:

² “I will make you into a great nation,
    and I will bless you;
I will make your name great,
    and you will be a blessing.
³ I will bless those who bless you,
    and whoever curses you I will curse;
and all peoples on earth
    will be blessed through you.”

Why the Constrained Vision?
The key theme from these verses is “blessing for the nations.” God is specifically establishing his covenant with Abram so through him and his offspring the nations will be blessed, all of them. We might say the foundation of God’s revelation to man is the theme of the first book of that revelation, blessing, used over 65 times. I heard someone once define blessing as empowerment. When God blesses people He empowers them to do a wide variety of things, as he put it, “God empowers people to flourish.” God wants to bless His people. That’s always been the plan. Secularists, by contrast paint Christianity as repressive and intolerant, but what it represses and doesn’t tolerate is sin! Sin destroys everything it touches and makes true flourishing impossible. It is by definition dis-empowering. Jumping forward two thousand years, Jesus says the same thing (John 10:10):

The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it abundantly.

Through the Israelites, God gave humanity the law with the express purpose of allowing His creatures to flourish in obedience to it. God’s law is the means of his blessing the nations. Through Israel we learn that sinful humanity is incapable of obedience to the law and thus being blessed, so God enabled that obedience by becoming a man himself in the person of Jesus of Nazareth to pay the penalty for that disobedience, and sending His Holy Spirit to enable obedience in His people. The law fences in fallen man’s unconstrained tendencies, and it is wise to head the words of one of the great wordsmiths of the modern age, G.K. Chesterton:

 Whenever you remove any fence, always pause long enough to ask why it was put there in the first place.

God has given us His law-word specifically through His people, His church, to place the boundaries of constraint in which we are empowered to flourish for our good and God’s glory.

Thus the constrained vision developed in Western history as God revealed Himself to the world through this people, but also confirmed it through what C.S. Lewis called in his little masterpiece, The Abolition of Man, the Tao. This also came to be known as the natural law, which is revealed in every religion to some degree, but only seen in fullest degree in the face of the Lord Jesus Christ. The constrained vision began working itself out in Western history by God bringing three cultures together in what Paul said was “the fullness of time” (Gal. 4), the Greeks, the Romans, and the Jews. God in His providentially sovereign ordaining power broke into fallen history to establish His kingdom on earth, to change cursed history to a blessed future. The radical nature of this breaking in is often missed by Christians because they assume it only has to do with them personally, or at most the church, the body of fellow believers. But I believe God has something much more profound in mind having to do with the entire created order. Here is how Paul puts it speaking of the ministry of reconciliation in 2 Corinthians 5:

¹⁷ Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!

The NIV translation has this right. Some translations taking their que from the context insert a “he,” so it reads, “if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.” But the Greek simply has the adjective, new, describing the noun, creation. So the way I read it, each person who makes the journey to “in Christ,” at that moment they don’t become a new creation so much as inhabit one. Their history and the history of the world is fundamentally altered because the kingdom of God is now ascendent in their life and in the world. The fall and the curse of sin is being pushed back in everything they do as they “seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness,” knowing if they do that, all the blessings of life will be added as well (Matt. 6:33).

The gospel constrains to bless. God says through Jeremiah (31) that in this New Covenant in Christ,  He will put His law in our minds, and write it on our hearts; and He will be our God, and we will be His people. No longer will we have to be like God, determining what is good and evil. No longer will we presume to mold reality to our wishes, but we will seek to understand reality in His law and created order, and share this “constrained” vision with the entire world. When Jesus commanded the disciples in Mathew 28 to make disciples of all nations because he’d been given “all authority in heaven and on earth,” he meant it. This wasn’t a command in futility, but a command to victory in his power and authority and will. Our vision is exciting and inspiring and it has the extra added benefit that it is true and works because it is true!