"We cannot demand justice from the cosmos"

“'Whatever the condition of human beings at the beginning of the species,' writes Thomas Sowell in his new book Social Justice Fallacies, 'scores of millennia had already come and gone before anyone coined the phrase social justice.' And during those vast expanses of time, 'different peoples evolved differently in very different settings around the world, developing different talents that created reciprocal inequalities of achievements in different endeavours.' They did so 'without necessarily creating equality, or even comparability, in any of those endeavours.'
    "The social-justice movement has changed all that, turning the quest for equity into a salient feature of Western culture and politics. The past century has seen this pursuit shift from the fringes of political discourse to the heart of the mainstream, and its narrative now exerts a profound influence on the arts, education, and even religious institutions. In large parts of society, it has instilled the notion that human disparities are entirely the result of oppression, exploitation, and discrimination, and that a remedial equality of outcome must therefore be pursued at all costs. But the attractive vision of an equitable future can only be constructed by ignoring evidence and repeating a litany of fallacies.
    "The gist of Thomas Sowell’s new work is that the flawed assumptions of social-justice activists are endangering Western societies....
    "The singleminded pursuit of [social] justice at all costs is not justice at all, Sowell argues, and will often result in injustice. The results sought by social-justice activists are what Hayek used to call 'cosmic justice,' and they are not attainable 'when there are differences in human fates for which clearly no human agency is responsible.' ...
    "'[W]e cannot demand justice from the cosmos'..."

~ Hannah Gal reviewing Thomas Sowell's latest book 'Social Justice Fallacies'