I greatly enjoyed this article by Kevin D. Williamson about Thomas Sowell. Sowell is now in his eighties. When somewhat younger, he looked like this:
Here is what is probably the key paragraph in Williamson’s Sowell piece:
Because he is black, his opinions about race are controversial. If he were white, they probably would be unpublishable. This is a rare case in which we are all beneficiaries of American racial hypocrisy. That he works in the special bubble of permissiveness extended by the liberal establishment to some conservatives who are black (in exchange for their being regarded as inauthentic, self-loathing, soulless race traitors) must be maddening to Sowell, even more so than it is for other notable black conservatives. It is plain that the core of his identity, his heart of hearts, is not that of a man who is black. It is that of a man who knows a whole lot more about things than you do and is intent on setting you straight, at length if necessary, if you’d only listen. Take a look at those glasses, that awkward grin, those sweater-vests, and consider his deep interest in Albert Einstein and other geniuses: Thomas Sowell is less an African American than a Nerd American.
My strong is Williamson’s italics.
I’d never thought of Sowell as being anything like this guy …
But yes, I guess maybe there is a resemblance. Here is link to a brief snatch of video of Moss saying something very Sowellish, about the importance of getting a good education.
By the way, I am not calling the actor and director Richard Ayoade a nerd. I don’t know about that. But I do know, as do all who enjoy The IT Crowd, that Ayoade’s TV creation, Moss, most definitely is a nerd, and a nerd first and a black man way down the list, just as Williamson says of Sowell.
Although, as a commenter said of this bit of video: “Richard has a bit of Moss in him.” A bit, yes. But what has really happened is, surely, that Ayoade was a nerdy kid, and has kept hold of it for comic purposes.
I suspect Sowell did something similar, and, as Williamson suggests in his article, in a more courageous and significant way. He too was a genuinely nerdy kid, who could understand truth better than he understood the demands of fashion. Then, when he got older and started to tune into the zeitgeist, he had to decide if he was going to shape up and get with the liberal (in the American sense) fashions of his time or stick with that truth stuff he had got to like so much. He stuck with the truth.
Also, I don’t believe Sowell would ever remove a water tank (see the second of the two video links above) and then be surprised that his plumbing no longer worked properly.
The nerds may not inherit the Earth, but they will understand it better than anyone who does.
Like in the SF story, “The Marching Morons”?
And, btw, Sowell has been one of my intellectual heroes since I first discovered his writings in the early 1980’s.
Sowell’s memoir, A Personal Odyssey is well worth the reading. This is one tough and tough-minded dude.
If our civilization survives then 100 years from now “The Vision of the Anointed” will be required reading by those who want to understand the late 20th century and the early 21st.
Sowell is the man. I was blown away by his perfomances on the Free To Choose debates and have been following him ever since. He tells a great story of his conversion from Marxism, roughly that his years studying under the Chicago Boys didn’t convert him, but then one summer of working in a government department did. If he was a little younger he would have been a most deserving first black President.
His book on Marxism is brilliant.
Thomas Sowell is a great man.
Any philosophical resemblance would have to be coincidental, because Moss is a ‘sympathetic’ character, and the writer of the IT Crowd, although a pleasant chap, is about as un-laissez faire as it is possible to be.
Heh. I’ve identified as nerd-american for a long time now. When teaching at community college I was often asked about race issue questions, and being monstrously pale (a Polish associate once looked at me and said “you are pale like noble” it that tells you what a hazard to aviation I can be), being nerd-american was great, a label one can be proud of.
Sowell’s work has been released in an anthology “The Thomas sowell reader” Reda it; much is in small snippets (copies of his columns) and thereby easy to digest. Some more challenging, but even more instructive.
Thomas Sowell is a national treasure. He combines intelligence (an understatement), insight, courage, clarity (in both writing and speaking), and just plain character. I’ve worked with several black engineers for whom he is a hero. He certainly is one of mine.
A great American.
His studies may be more pertinent today than any time in modern U.S. history.
Unlike the description of Cornell West as someone whose knowledge is a mile wide and an inch deep, Sowell’s
is a mile wide and a mile deep.