Recently, the Daily Mail told me what the Guardian chose not to – research in the tapes made by the FBI of Martin Luther King suggest they were more embarrassing than just those impertinent recordings of a man when intimate with his wife that the narrative assured us was all they were.
Of the truth or falsity of these new claims I will say nothing. Truth is the daughter of time, and I think it wise to keep an open mind for at least a little more time. The point of this post is different.
Although it’s been old news for years (these stories may revive it), there was a time when the narrative was very invested in assuring us that Robert Kennedy signed off on this bugging in all innocence. Poor Bobby just thought the bugging would prove that Dr King was not a communist sympathiser, and so discredit the racially-motivated rumours. How upset he was to realise – too late, alas – that racist J Edgar Hoover had used it otherwise. Like ex-KKK member the ultra-liberal senator Byrd, and that other Kennedy after his belatedly-reported car accident, Bobby got the absolution that all get who get with the PC programme.
Meanwhile, on the other side of this ledger, Dr King is now accused of joining the elite in enjoying the 60s sexual revolution in 1964, a few years before it was announced to us commoners – and, much more seriously, of being the accomplice in a rape. That is, it is claimed that very hard credible evidence exists of Dr King’s doing more determined and greater evil than Justice Kavanaugh was accused of doing without a shred of credible evidence.
Reacting to this, some have asked
Should we change the name on every school, park, and boulevard across the nation named after him as if he were the inverse of Robert E. Lee
Others quote a commenter to one of the early reports urging that when statues and street names are threatened by the PC, the name of Dr King can be mentioned
NOT in the spirit of “Whataboutism”, but in order to remind them that there is no incompatibility between celebrating the achievements of people in the past and acknowledging that those people had – as we all do – major flaws.
(“major flaws” reminded me of Laurie’s enraged “Rape is a ‘moral lapse’ !” response to the comedian’s – arguably lesser, as we eventually discover – guilt in Watchmen.)
To be fair, other names besides General Lee are being bandied about. Of Jefferson at least, there is both contemporary accusation (“He sold the offspring of his lusts at the block to swell his profits”, said Hamilton) and some later evidence (I do not know if the “him or his brother” aspect of the DNA evidence has been fully resolved); did Jefferson “tremble for my country when I think that God is just, that his justice will not sleep forever” because he had memories of which he was not proud? Of some others, we know only that on the old south’s plantations (where white control was strongest) between 1% and 2% of the babies born were of mixed race, which is one guide to the probabilities on either side of any debate about a given insufficiently-known individual. No doubt some master-slave sex was consensual – in a sense. Though the old south did not equal an Arab harem’s ability to give its occupants no alternatives and compelling motives, one does not have to OD on PC and MeToo to see what could be said about the limits of that sense – but one does have to OD on them not to see that the absence or presence of overt refusal and misery on the part of the woman says something important about the character of the man. If the tapes only showed Dr King anticipating the fashionable left-wing mores of the later 60s with women (over whom he had authority) who were overtly consensual, former admirers would not call it ‘nauseating’.
Of General Lee, I long ago said that I admired his character, but was glad his cause lost. Of Dr King (if this prove true) I will one day say that I’m glad his cause won but do not admire him – very much the reverse. And I will indeed not mention him with General Lee in any spirit of what-about-ism – because there would be a great gulf fixed between the characters of the two men. King would indeed be an inverse of Lee – inverse in cause and inverse in character, and those two the inverses of each other. Let’s have no new double-standard, like an adversity-qualified SAT score, about what makes a decent human being.
Or, as powerline remarks in passing,
For what it is worth, however, I think that American heroes like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses Grant and Ronald Reagan were of far higher moral character than King.
Me too!
on the old south’s plantations (where white control was strongest) between 1% and 2% of the babies born were of mixed race
Given the temptations and the power differential, 2% seems surprisingly low. I believe it has been suggested that present day American Blacks have a genetic mixture of about 20% European 80% African (with maybe 1% Native American in there too.) But I’ve also seen a figure of 65% of American Black men having Y chromosomes of African origin. Implying that the non African (ie mostly European) share of the mix is more like 35%.
Doing the math properly would be way too complicated but at a simplistic level, 98% to the power of 11 is 80%, while 98% to the power of 21 is 65%. 21 generations is way too many, particularly as the droit de seigneur social structure would have come to an end (mostly) 150 years ago.
So I’m guessing that slaveowners started off taking advantage of their female slaves at a brisker rate than 2% of births.
Though if the mixed race sons of the master were of higher status and had better access to females than other males, then that might account for a higher European Y chromosome average than a figure for mixed race births might imply, since the offspring of a mixed race man and a 100% African woman presumably wouldn’t have been recorded as mixed race.
I don’t see the left having any problems in throwing MLK under the bus. After all, as well as being a rampant sexist, he was also a dreadful racist.
He once said, in a major speech, that he hoped people could be judged not by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character and what could be more racist than that!
It is all well to say that Washington was of high character until you remember that he had hundreds of slaves. I’m not sure anyone, even given the historical context, who holds hundreds of people in bondage, could be called of high moral character. That isn’t to diminish his accomplishments. In that sense he holds the same structure of MLK — a dubious guy who did amazingly beneficial things.
(BTW about MLK I don’t know about the issue you are referring to — sounds like some sort of metoo moment, however, it is now fairly widely acknowledged the he plagiarized substantial parts of his doctoral thesis. Of course it is hushed up, but it seems the evidence that he did so is overwhelming. However, much as the right thinks it treasonous to criticize Washington, the left thinks it is treasonous racism to criticize King, irrespective of the truth of the criticisms.)
Lee Moore (May 29, 2019 at 12:50 pm), the statistic I quote was for “plantations (where white control was strongest)” – i.e. where the only “in a sense” aspect of any consensuality would be strongest. There was a good deal more interracial sex in the cities, but white control was weaker there. (Every 30-50 years or so, southern cities would issue ordinances seeking to limit or ban such things as blacks frequenting bars used by white prostitutes and suchlike, invariably failing to note it had been done before, to little effect.) Frederick Douglas wrote that a black slave in a city was virtually a free citizen. (We would hardly put it quite like that, but there were many slaves who ‘hired their own time’, whippings were apt to be unpopular with the neighbours, etc.) Thus the overall statistics are indeed higher, but the figure I quoted is relevant to what happened where the owner’s authority was, to the highest degree possible in that society, unmonitored and unchallengeable.
It seems to me that pointing out the logical implications of applying a principle to other cases is a dialectical strategy that doesn’t work with a lot of people. They don’t adhere to principles as actual constraints on their beliefs or behavior. Rather, they treat principles as things to be appealed to rhetorically when they support a particular goal, and set aside after that goal has been reached, like a ladder after one has climbed a wall. People who stick to principles consistently, or feel uncomfortable at not doing so, are much more susceptible than average to becoming libertarians.
Decades ago now, Ayn Rand wrote about (then) young people who could be presented with an argument for a principle, and agree with it, and seem to understand it—but the next time it was applicable to some issue, it would be as if they had never heard of it; it was meaningful for them only in the context of that one specific discussion. I don’t think things have changed—at least, not for the better.
Assume – call it Situation A – that humanity collectively decides, in one hundred years, that animals are as worthy and as intrinsically valuable as humans.
Someone writes, in 2120, “It is all well to say that Fraser Orr was of high moral character until you remember that he knowingly ate animal flesh.”
Now assume – call it Situation B – that, in one hundred years, humanity still eats animals.
Everyone in 2120 agrees that, back when he was alive, Fraser Orr was of high moral character.
The only change occurs long after your death. Can your moral character change based on attitudes that change long after your death? I would argue that it’s not moral character you’re talking about, but more a political/sociological correctness.
I was recently surprised to learn that judging people by the content of the character rather than the color of their skin is apparently not a libertarian ideal.
Now the concept is that you can’t judge an action or statement until you consider the color of the person who said or did it.
Who knew?
By those standards, I don’t see any reason why MLK would be subject to the same rules as Lee or Washington.
It’s not?
Thirteen scholars, including Robert F. Turner, Forrest McDonald, Walter Williams, Paul Rahe, and several others, were asked by The Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society to study evidence about the claim that Sally Hemings, a slave to Mr. Jefferson, bore him a child.
From the T.J.H.S. website (my boldface):
https://www.tjheritage.org/the-scholars-commission
The site linked above provides a timeline of the investigation and a summary of the results. The 40-page findings report by the Scholars Commission, as it was called, is posted on the Web as “The Jefferson-Hemings Controversy: Report of the Scholars Commission,” and can be downloaded at
https://www.tjheritage.org/scholars-commission-pdf
I have found it detailed and very interesting.
On Sept. 1, 2001, the Heritage Society posted this on the main page (first link above):
Only Dr. Paul Rahe dissented from the overall conclusion of the rest of the Commission.
The main page also includes this notice:
As Capitalism Magazine wrote:
To anyone who’s interested in this, I do recommend reading the Report.
Some years ago, I took the train from central London to Heathrow airport, and thus was exposed to the video news playing on the train to keep us all plugged in to what is happening right now. The “news” was all about the long-dead DJ Jimmy Saville, and the evil things he was now alleged to have done with children. Thorough despicable behavior, of course … if the allegations were true. Perhaps not quite as despicable as the behavior of the those who claimed to know about it at the time … and did nothing.
If MLK raped women in the 1960s, that was despicable behavior. (Criminal behavior too, but that is another issue). But his behavior was no less despicable than that of those who knew at the time that evil was being perpetrated — and did nothing.
On the topic of the behavior of generations-dead slave owners — we don’t have to look for evil in the history books, not when there is more than enough evil being committed in the world today. If we are prepared to look the other way at today’s evil, we should not look at evil in the past and pat ourselves on the back about how much better we now are. The slavery issue may be a little off-topic, but it is very difficult to put ourselves in the position of slaves or slave-owners in the 18th Century. Until the development of the fossil-fuel powered steam engine, slavery was the natural condition of mankind. It had been that way at least since Biblical times, and probably since pre-historic times. For people back then, questioning the natural order of slavery would have been as far-out as it would be for us today to question the natural order of democracy.
However, some elements of human behavior are constant over the centuries. One element is hypergamy — the evolutionary imperative for women to prefer to carry the babies of the most dominant male they can find. We should not assume that all the slave women who rolled in the hay with their masters did so unwillingly. Another aspect of human behavior which is often overlooked in connection with slavery is that slaves were property — very expensive property. One account stated that in pre-Civil War US, a slave cost the same as eight horses. While there are always stupid people in the world, it is a reasonable guess that most slave owners took care of their valuable property. Unfortunately, the subject of slavery has been so politicized that a curtain has been drawn over much of the topic — it is not Politically Correct to note that African slaves were originally enslaved and sold by other Africans, or that (white) Scandinavians enslaved and sold the (white) Slavic slaves who filled the slave markets of Byzantium and the Arab world.
Fraser (and pace Bobby b’s response)
“It is all well to say that Washington was of high character until you remember that he had hundreds of slaves.”
I would submit that the rather more important test is whether his actions would have been considered moral in their time. We have, remember, a very very strong presumption against law being applied retrospectively.
In this regard, Washington was not necessarily going strongly against the grain in his time, but MLK – and all those who knew about his actions – would have known with absolute certainty that his actions were not just illegal but monstrously immoral at the time that they occurred.
That’s the difference.
If the sense meant is ‘commonplace’, ‘usual’, etc., then the word ‘natural’ above is correct but if ‘natural’ means ‘universal’ or ‘unavoidable’, it is not. England eliminated slavery and its lesser cousin serfdom centuries before it invented the steam engine. Indeed, it is because England became a free society that it eventually became the first society to use steam power and other inventions. Lord Mansfield’s ruling that English common law was wholly adverse to slavery came less than a century after the very first small water-pump mine steam engine was deployed but more than two centuries after England, by any analysis, had become a society where all citizens were free citizens and many centuries after the end of slavery.
Are you referring to Kevin B’s comment at 12:51pm, Ferox? If you were, I think you need to readjust your sarcasm detection apparatus.
As for the allegations that MLK egged on rapists, two points have been made elsewhere.
1. Why would David Garrow, a member of the DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) and presumably therefore in favor of MLK*, choose to include the charges in his biography of King? Just to gin up interest in his book? Or because as a professional historian, he couldn’t bear to blinker (what he thought to be) the facts?
(For what it’s worth, pundit Rod Dreher is quoted at
https://www.thenewneo.com/2019/05/28/martin-luther-kings-feet-of-clay/
as saying, in an article at American Greatness,
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/cached/mlk-metoo.html
2. Do the alleged FBI tapes even exist, and if so, why would we give them automatic credence? (I understand they’ll be officially declassified and released in 2027, and we’ll have to wait till then to see what they really say.)
. . . . .
Also, another very good posting from Niall. :>)))
No. I am referring to an entirely different thread.
If you are going to advocate racial double standards regarding the actions (or words) of others, its no use being surprised when those double standards are applied to things you did not intend.
Although one could frame the same end-judgement in those terms – sexual immorality, let alone sexual violence, was condemned by the Christianity common to all the historical characters named above – I do not do so. As Lady Macbeth’s
earns Banquo’s reply
so – although a era’s opportunities, concepts and legal frameworks matter much in lesser cases – there are deeds to which
gets from me the reply
and my contrasting of characters is based on that.
Well then you had better link to it – if you want your comment to be comprehended, that is.
@bobby b compares my claim that Washington was immoral for his slaveholding to the possibility that I might retrospectively be though immoral for eating animals (should the moral sensibilities on this change in future.)
So this is actually an interesting question (and one I debate often since one of my children recently decided to become vegan.) It is a broad question as to what “morality” actually is, and so I could probably bang on about it for several pages. But TL;DR my viewpoint is that there is no such thing as absolute morality, morality is really rather what a society as a group decides it is.
So this position may well support your view the Washington was not immoral for slaving keeping, since slavekeeping was common practice in Colonial Virginia. However, I think a little bit of analysis debunks this view. What was George Washington’s view of slavekeeping, and were his actions consistent with his internal moral views, for that, surely, is the very definition of a high moral character.
And I think there is pretty solid evidence that, in his heart, Washington knew that slaveholding was deeply immoral. That isn’t to say he subscribed to the view that the “negro” was the equivalent to the white man, in fact he certainly did not (he would not allow blacks free or slave to serve in his army, until the British offered blacks freedom for service, at which time he changed to allow free blacks.) But he certainly recognized that slavery was a wrong. Here, for example, is what he said about it:
There is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do, to see a plan adopted for this abolition of [slavery] but there is only one proper and effectual mode by which it can be accomplished, & that is by Legislative authority.
Here is a man morally conflicted. Acknowledging that “something needs to be done” but dishonestly deferring that action to the government rather than “change starts with me.” And one should not underestimate the severity of slavery under Washington. He was perhaps less cruel than his peers, but did not hesitate to use the whip, buy and sell slaves, steal their offspring, and, in particular, sell recalcitrant slaves to the West Indies — an effective death sentence.
So that is one view on the subject. An entirely different perspective would say that, when I judge someone immoral, I do so by the standard of morality I use, and, even if those standards were not contemporary, I still have a right to assess someone’s character based on the framework I have. If we accept that people, or their immediate society, can define morality, then we are stuck with some very unpleasant consequences. For example, were we to judge the Nuremberg War Crime trials by the standard of morality prevalent in much of Germany at the time the acts were committed, we would have allowed all to walk free. Or, perhaps more obviously so, were we to allow the Japanese to be judged by Japanese moral standards and practices then the rape of Nanking would have been morally acceptable. (Japan, at the time, thought of the Chinese as equally valueless and disposable as Washington did his slaves.)
And now let me offer a third viewpoint on this, returning if I may, to genteel colonial Virginia. There is no doubt that the white slaving holding class in Virginia viewed slavery as acceptable and normal, though in all honesty I imagine there was a lot of that “forcing oneself to believe what was obviously not true” as you might see today with the American left’s insistence that very late term abortion is perfectly reasonable. But perhaps I am wrong, perhaps their religious justifications were sufficient to soothe their moral queasiness. However, they consisted of a tiny proportion of the population of Virginia at the time. If we are to say “society” defines morality then why don’t the black people of that society get a say? Surely the averaged out view on slavery in Virginia was that it was a terrible injustice?
I am reminded actually of the argument for succession. We are told that the people of South Carolina wanted to leave the union and so had a right to do so. I agree with the general principle that a people have a right to self determination. However, the “people” in question probably consisted of less than 10% of the population. I doubt very much that the black people of South Carolina wanted to leave. By what right did the elites get to decide their fate, either in this precursor to the civil war, or by what right do we chose the judge the morality of the day by the isolated, narcissistic views of the minority planter class in colonial Virginia?
So the argument that Washington was not immoral for owning slaves is not based on the view that the morality of the day did not condemn him from doing so, but rather it is based on the view that the morality of a tiny, self interested group justified it, in face of widespread opposition from those whose views they discounted for naught.
So in summary, I offer three viewpoints, none of which would absolve Washington. Firstly, it is evident that Washington recognized that slavery was wrong, but did not have the moral character to do much about it. Secondly, we probably should and do judge groups by our own moral standards irrespective of whether those we judge shared those moral standards. And thirdly, to say the morality of the day justified his actions belies the reality of the moral landscape in which his decisions were made.
So I am not advocating tearing down statues of Washington. I think he is a complex man of strange contradictions. Although he may have done terrible things at his home, he is still one of the, admittedly blackly ironic, pillars of freedom of the Western World. Without him there would have been no MLK. So perhaps we can acknowledge that people are not bifurcated into heroes or villains. Perhaps we can recognize the gray, and praise them for what they did right, and condemn them for what they did wrong.
Fraser @ 5.47 pm — With respect, I personally do not find your three viewpoints convincing. They all seem too much like applying later accepted standards to an earlier time.
We forget how hard life was for most people in the 18th Century. Lots of the “white” immigrants came as indentured servants — basically, in the same position as slaves, except that they would eventually complete their term, if they lived long enough. Shipping English criminals as forced laborers to what is now the United States was common practice until the War of Independence. Life for most of the slave-owners was no bowl of cherries either, if we believe some of the history.
Will a future more-enlightened time look back on Brexit and tut-tut about decadent Brits immorally wanting to deny freedom of movement to desperate Third World immigrants?
Niall K: “… two centuries after England, by any analysis, had become a society where all citizens were free citizens and many centuries after the end of slavery.”
If we are going to apply present-day standards to the past, don’t be too proud of England. The English did not abolish slavery in their world-spanning colonies until 1834 — after the introduction of the steam engine rendered human slave labor economically inefficient.
Yes, the English banned slavery in England itself in 1772 (because of morality or because of xenophobia?) but the English continued as active participants in the international slave trade and as slave owners in their colonies for nearly 3 generations thereafter.
Well, it would be good for the real estate market, so I guess it depends on how you feel about gentrification.
(Streets named after MLK tend to mark bad neighborhoods. Perhaps this is the the motivation for this coming out now. Am I too cynical?)
Above:
.
Ah. I’m not sure that I knew that. Incitement to research! So, a running report on my morning’s investigations:
According to the Foot of All Knowledge (my boldface),
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_Abolition_Act_1833
And of the steam engine, at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_engine ,
it says that
Finally, in its article on James Watt (clever fellows, these Scots!), it tells us that
Thus far, this is all interesting, but it’s not entirely consistent. Indeed, in its article on “Abolitionism in the United Kingdom,” the Font of All Knowledge quotes the Cowper poem, which it seems to take as evidence that there was no slavery in England at the time of its writing (see the first Wiki quote above).
.
But see also the Wikip article on Slavery_in_Britain, which is particularly interesting and gives a précis of the history before 1773.
and
yet that
Grasping the true situation from these articles is not helped by the fact that they don’t distinguish sharply between chattel slavery and “lesser” forms of slavery, such as “forced labor.”
So we come at last to a basic question: Was chattel slavery abolished in 1772 de jure or only de facto?
.
Conclusion:
Either way, chattel slavery ended (at least semi-officially) at most only a few years before the (Watt) steam engine came into use in the Industrial Revolution in Britain.
Here is another post and subsequent debate worthy of Samizdata!
I do object, however, to the thesis that the steam engine made slavery obsolete. The steam engine was not, and is not, suitable for picking cotton. AI suitable for automating agricultural labor has not yet been developed (afaik); and before the Anglo-Dutch Agricultural Revolution, almost all human labor (including slave labor) was agricultural labor.
Fraser Orr’s arguments against applying moral relativism to justify Washington’s slave-holding seem reasonable to me — I am not completely convinced, but then i did not study his arguments closely. Possibly the strongest argument is that some illustrious contemporaries of Washington, such as Ben Franklin, John Adams, and Edmund Burke, were opposed to slavery.
As for bobby’s thought experiment about what people will think of eating meat in 2120, two objections come to mind:
1. It seems to me that bobby misses the point of the OP: people in 2120 might well think us immoral for eating meat, but they still ought to acknowledge our better side.
2. If people in 2120 get to judge me by their standards, then i get to judge them by my standards. That’s what i call Napier relativism.
As to Washington’s slaveholding: By law at the time, he couldn’t legally free such slaves as came to him through his wife, or so says “Ten Facts about Washington & Slavery,” at
https://www.mountvernon.org/george-washington/slavery/ten-facts-about-washington-slavery/
There are links to other information, including to Washington’s will.
. . .
“Thomas Jefferson and Slavery”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson_and_slavery
Excerpts:
“In 1778, with Jefferson’s leadership, slave importation was banned in Virginia, one of the first jurisdictions worldwide to do so. Jefferson was a lifelong advocate of ending the trade and as president led the effort to criminalize the international slave trade that passed Congress and he signed in 1807, shortly before Britain passed a similar law.[5]
“In 1779, as a practical solution to end the legal enslavement of humans, Jefferson supported gradual emancipation, training, and colonization of African-American slaves rather than unconditional manumission, believing that releasing unprepared people with no place to go and no means to support themselves would only bring them misfortune. In 1784, Jefferson proposed federal legislation banning slavery in the New Territories of the North and South after 1800, which failed to pass Congress by one vote.[6][7]”
.
“In 1794 and 1796, Jefferson manumitted by deed two of males he had kept as slaves; they had been trained and were qualified to hold employment.”
.
[Back to Sally Hemings; a more complete discussion follows later on]
“Most historians [but see my comment above] believe that after the death of his wife Martha, Jefferson had a long-term relationship with an enslaved woman who might have been Martha’s half-sister, Sally Hemings.[9][10] Jefferson allowed two of Sally Hemings’s surviving four children to “escape”, the other two he freed through his will after his death. The children were the only family to gain freedom from Monticello.[11]”
.
“In his will, Jefferson freed three older men who had been forced to work for him for decades.[11] In 1827, the remaining 130 people who had been kept as slaves at Monticello were sold to pay the debts of Jefferson’s estate.[12][13][14]”
. . .
There’s a good deal more in this long, interesting, and seemingly thorough discussion of Jefferson and slavery.
Gavin Longmuir (May 29, 2019 at 6:29 pm), I was not in fact boasting about England but merely refuting the suggestion that failing to abolish slavery was somehow wholly understandable or unavoidable before the steam engine was invented.
Julie near Chicago (May 29, 2019 at 6:40 pm), as your sources note, slavery existed in Anglo-Saxon England and some slaves are still recorded in the domesday book but in the 12th-century, there came to be no slaves, only serfs, a change associated with the Norman conquest. The disappearance of serfdom is similarly sometimes associated with the population reduction of the black death. There are also more intentional actions relevant to this – the usual history-argument-without-end applies to why servile status disappeared. My point was that Queen Elizabeth I inherited and ruled over a free society.
Mostly as a side-effect of slave-trading from the African coast to the colonies. a population of negroes grew up in England in late 1600s and 1700s. Many arrived as youngsters, sometimes doubling as servants and as fashion accessories of wealthy families (like peacocks on the terrace). Like other servants they received board, and if no-one got around to explaining to them that they were not slaves and could give notice, then they would not necessarily know it. In the early period, the people around them might not know it either – ordinary people knew that “Britons never never never shall be slaves” but could be less clear about this new phenomenon of Africans who had been slaves arriving as servants in the UK. Complicating their understanding was the fact that indenture for a fixed term was legal, as was pursuing runaways from such indentures, etc.
For a long time, Lord Mansfield dealt with this situation via quiet diplomacy. Whenever a case threatened to come before him of a master in the UK seeming to treat his black servant as a slave, Mansfield would drop heavy hints that he might have to rule that their black servant was no slave, so would not the master rather inform the servant to that effect, and gain the credit. Masters took the hint and asserted the freedom of their servants – and Mansfield avoided having to judge the case and issue a public ruling.
Eventually he found himself caught between an irresistible force and an immovable object. The immovable object was Somerset’s owner who was furious that well-treated Somerset – a buyer for his business who, for a slave, had known a varied and somewhat responsible lifestyle, had access to money, etc., should be so ungrateful as to quit his service. He wanted Somerset shipped to the Carolinas where a life picking cotton would inform him of how wrong it had been to reject his former, more prosperous and less fatiguing duties. Mansfield got nowhere hinting to the enraged owner that Somerset should be freed. So he suggested to the Quaker who had helped Somerset that the Quakers should buy and free Somerset (hinting broadly that he, Mansfield, might lend them the money and be very lackadaisical about asking for repayment). This merely acquainted him with the irresistible force of the Quaker conscience: to do a right thing in a wrong way was unacceptable. So, finally, cornered, Mansfield had to take the case and issue the ruling he had long foreseen.
Mansfield’s ruling was that slavery was wholly contrary to English common law and therefore unlawful unless explicitly supported by positive statute law overriding the common law. As no such law had ever been voted for the UK by its parliament, his ruling meant it was (and had been) unlawful.
(I have a few other reflections in this old comment.)
BTW, thanks for the information about Jefferson. I’m a John Adams man rather than a Jefferson man myself, and the fact that the suggestion had been made at the time (by Hamilton) weakened my normal caution about PC-friendly narratives (plus, to put it mildly, that sort of thing did happen at that time) so I had never researched it. I will look into your sources.
@Gavin Longmuir
May 29, 2019 at 6:12 pm
I personally do not find your three viewpoints convincing. They all seem too much like applying later accepted standards to an earlier time.
Fair enough, however, two of my three arguments were based quite specifically on the moral standards of that day, not modern ones. As the the one based on modern morals — that is to say we should judge people based on the moral environment in which they lived — I wonder what your thoughts are on the rape of Nanking? It is plain the Japanese culture at the time very much approved of this mass murder and torture of Chinese women, children, babies and men. Soldiers going from house to house gang raping the women before bayoneting them, starting with the oldest women all the way down to the young girls. One of the famous stories is of two Japanese officers in a race to see who could behead 100 innocent bystanders with their swords — a race eagerly followed back home by the Japanese public in the newspapers of the time like some morbid game show.
Here we have something I would not hesitate to condemn even though by contemporary Japanese standards it was admired and approved, and that is true even though life in Japan was harsh, brutal an unpleasant. (Today many in Japan deny that it even happened, or was as severe as history describes, which is quite disheartening. For all their sins the Germans at least confess them and pay penance.) Of course worldwide standards did not approve it, but worldwide standards at the time did not approve of chattel slavery either, the French Revolution, for example, for all its depredations, did emancipate the slaves in the French Empire.
I find the reluctance to condemn Washington (and I think perhaps even more justifiably Jefferson) for this a curiosity. I think Americans are raised with “I must not tell a lie” and “Washington crossing the Delaware River” and venerate our heroes. Perhaps we, humans, need our heroes to be untouchable. But slavery in America, and on George Washington’s farms, was among the worst in history. Men and women beaten into compliance, mothers robbed of their children. Young girls stolen from their parents for concubinage, the lame and the weak disposed of as worthless garbage. I remember one story of a runaway who was caught. Another slave was forced to defecate in his mouth, which was then sewn shut, and he was tied to a post and left to die in the baking sunshine. Obviously as an example. Why? Such utter brutality was necessary to suppress the deep longing in the human heart to be free, such that only the most dreadful violence would prevent it. This isn’t someone else. These are the sorts of things that Washington did, on his own farm. The same guy in the fancy coat at the prow of the boat crossing the Delaware. The same guy who refused the crown to be King of America. The same guy who save America from being a dictatorship by, quietly, willingly, laying down the Presidency at the end of his terms.
I think we, who love liberty, are really rather uncomfortable with the fact that the liberty hating lefties might actually be right about something, that their mindless iconoclasm might, occasionally, hit a target deserving of it. But, as they say, a stopped clock is right twice a day.
It is something I have struggled with myself. But I am comfortable recognizing that people are complex, not the cartoon characters that history often portray them as. A mix of bad and good and in between. I can say, much as I revile what he did on his farms, I admire the man and am grateful for what he and his contemporaries did — things that have made the world a massively better place. It is why I believe that Jefferson and Washington are perhaps two of the most interesting and most important characters in all of human history.
Will a future more-enlightened time look back on Brexit and tut-tut about decadent Brits immorally wanting to deny freedom of movement to desperate Third World immigrants?
Perhaps they will. But you and I can only make the best moral judgement we can today about things, something (as my original arguments attempt to show) that Washington did not do on this matter. And I suppose that what they think of me is 2120 doesn’t matter too much since I will be dead. I doubt George Washington much cares what I think of him either.
@Julie near Chicago
There’s a good deal more in this long, interesting, and seemingly thorough discussion of Jefferson and slavery.
Yes, Jefferson’s (and to a lesser degree Washington’s) relationship to slavery is complex. But in a sense it very much proves my first point. Their ambivalence to slavery and their actions against it simply demonstrate in a “exception that proves the rule” kind of a way that they acknowledged that it was not a moral good at all. So the idea that they lived in this world where they were deluded by the society they lived to think that slavery was a perfectly acceptable thing is plainly not correct. Their own moral ambivalence betrays their true feelings.
So given that they nibbled at the edges of justice for the slaves why did they not, during their lifetimes have the moral fiber to at least free (de facto if de jure was not possible) the slaves over which they have immediate and direct control? The simple truth is that they did not do so because it would have affected them economically.
To commit a moral crime ignorantly is one thing, to do it knowingly, for ones own personal gain is quite another.
Julie — Thanks for the research. As the founder of Wikipedia advises us, always be careful about what you read in Wikipedia! 🙂
It is so hard for us today to project ourselves back in time. Freedom versus slavery conjures up one picture for us today, but we should be careful about assuming that our freedom today is similar to our ancestors “freedom” back in the day. An old thermodynamics textbook had a drawing of women in an 18th Century Scottish coal mine, bringing up coal from the mine by climbing steep ladders in the dark with heavy baskets on their backs. Of course, that was only because the women got the easy jobs in the mine! Free women.
I am no expert on English slavery, and would be glad to learn from anyone who has looked into this in more depth. The principal observation is that the English banned slavery in England where there were very few slaves, but kept their slaves and their active participation in the slave trade in the Caribbean and elsewhere in their colonies where it was economically important to them (until the steam engine developed adequately). The 18th Century English might be seen as rather similar in their hypocrisy to today’s Greenies, who promote offshoring industry to less regulated Third World countries while preening about how much cleaner they have made their own local environment.
In the limited reading I have done on England’s long involvement in slavery, there have been some suggestions that banning slavery in England in 1772 was mainly an intra-mural fight among the English Upper Class. Some of the English nobility had become very rich off of their slave-run sugar plantations in the West Indies, and brought a few of their slaves back to England to impress the neighbors with their exotic servants . The less economically successful sections of the English nobility did not like this display of wealth, and put an end to it. As a side note, some of the better hotels in Moscow today employ splendidly dressed Africans as doormen to impress their arriving guests. Plus ca change, as someone once said.
A couple of addenda to my comment above.
It seems that in Viking Iceland, slavery disappeared without being formally abolished. The crucial factor was the introduction of Christianity, which meant that exposing newborn babies became illegal (and commonly seen as immoral). That made it un-economical to own slaves.
That is probably why it disappeared in Europe, too, during the “”Dark”” Ages. It reappeared in the European colonies, where nobody would know whether the slave-owners exposed babies or not.
As for the Charles James Napier quote: i seemed to remember a better phrasing, and i found it on Mark Steyn’s site. I have no idea what words General Sir C.J. Napier actually used.
It was more like, I was ignoring the point of the OP and instead reacting to Frazer Orr’s comment. My own point had to do more with our conception of “moral character” than with our acceptance that every man is the product of his good and his bad.
My point – which FO addressed directly – had to do with the immutability of “good.” If I act throughout my entire life following what I and society perceive to be the “good”, but society changes its mind about what is “good” after I die, does that mean I wasn’t “good”? Or does it mean that I’m no longer perceived as “good”? I think there’s a difference.
You make it a question of fashion when you invoke the opinions of Ben Franklin, John Adams, and Edmund Burke. How quickly must one adopt new ways of thinking to remain “good”? How accurately must one be in forecasting those opinions? Am I “good” because I tend to sympathize with TERFs? (Trans-exclusionary radical feminists, that.) Or, will their position ultimately lose the battle of public opinion, and thus make me after-the-fact into a bad person?
Why would any of us aspire to “goodness” if the definition can change and we can become “bad” after we’re gone?
The MLK situation is different – there’s no doubt that all of the situations in which he is now implicated would have fallen outside of “moral good.” If he did those things, then he knew at the time that they were bad, and he did them anyway. (Much like Washington’s slave ownership, per FO.) Certainly, he had his demons as do we all, but his situation is much easier to judge than that of the man who can claim the mantle of “good” while he was alive, only to lose that status with changing mores.
We’re no longer examining MLK’s life in a context of the “good” having been defined differently than it is now. We’re examining a conflicted man, and there is presumably some balancing point that leaves us unable to accept the inadequate amount of “good” versus “bad” in his life. Standing by while his friend raped a woman who had been uppity in a meeting might well be that point.
Is that even possible?
Fraser O: “It is plain the Japanese culture at the time [of the Rape of Nanking] very much approved of this mass murder and torture of Chinese women, children, babies and men.”
How did English culture in the 1940s react to the deliberate firebombing of Dresden, where women, children, babies literally melted in the heat? And then the Allies sent planes over the burned out city the next morning to strafe & kill the survivors stumbling about in the ruins.
War is Hell, anyway you cut it! Is it morally better to murder a young mother by dropping a bomb on her from on high than to murder her by sticking a knife in her stomach? Or is it moral when our guys do it, but not when their guys do it? If you were face to face with a modern Japanese person condemning the English for what they did in Dresden, would you agree with him?
Gavin Longmuir
If you were face to face with a modern Japanese person condemning the English for what they did in Dresden, would you agree with him?
So I am happy to engage with you on a discussion of the complex subject of morality and war. But let me ask you this, plain and simple. Do you think the Allies were wrong to prosecute hundreds of Germans in the Nuremberg War trials? If you think the Allies actions where equivalent to the Axis’ actions from a moral standpoint, were these trials invalid kangaroo courts? Just the winners final crushing of the losers? Or did they have some moral standing independent of who won and who lost? Had the Axis won would the trials still have been justified even were it not practical for them to have been held?
Trying not to get too far off topic, this really is the essential question — can the moral mores of the Allies be justifiably applied to the Axis, who at the time had evidently a different set of mores? That bears very much on the question of how we might judge George Washington.
Fraser — as you say, we might be getting a little far from the original topic, but maybe not. As far as the Nuremburg Trials go, my personal view is that they were a farce. If the Axis had won, they could have run similar trials of FDR and Churchill with equally as much justification. Chairman Mao once said something like ‘Political power comes out the barrel of a gun’. In the case of the Nuremburg Trials, so did the ‘Rule of Law’. It was simply the Rule of the Victors. The Allies were going to kill their opponents — had been killing their opponents for years by that time. There was no need to gussie it up with a pretend trial.
If the Allies had applied their own “moral mores” to themselves on the principle that any real Law should apply evenly to everyone, would they have had to find themselves guilty for what they did in Dresden? You did rather sidestep the question about your response to the hypothetical modern Japanese person.
Bottom line, we should be very cautious about applying the moral mores of one era to another time.
Bobby:
Not at all. I admit that i mistakenly gave that impression, but what i had in mind was feasibility, not moral fashion.
What i meant is:
We might think that it seemed unfeasible to people at the time of Washington, to abolish slavery (however morally fashionable it might or might not have been). But that is not so: Franklin, Adams, and Burke (and many others, i suppose) thought it feasible; and they were right!
Fraser, if the examples you give were in fact things that could be shown to have been done by George Washington personally on his own farm simply to make examples of slaves who had run off and been recaptured, then, by the reasoning of my own post and comments, his reputation would indeed take a deserved hit – just as MLK’s will take a deserved hit if what is now being said proves true.
I know a great deal about Lee and the Civil War and can assure you with great confidence that Lee did not do things such as you describe. (I allow the abstract possibility that we can discover startling information about a historical character we think we know, but I find it revealing that admirers of MLK are visibly not as incredulous as one might have expected.) My historical reading has also given me an impression of Washington’s character but I do not have anywhere near the same depth of lifelong research and reading about the earlier period, so I will let commenters who have studied it say whether the same incredulity should apply to attributing such acts to George Washington.
During the civil war, the Confederacy mobilised over three-quarters of its age-15-to-60 manpower, plus many older men and some boys, and sent them to the front to fight the Union armies.
wrote one observer. When a Union army entered an area, a large part of the negro population would decamp to them but before that happened, Confederate concern that this now very ill-policed group might give trouble is more evident than evidence that it did, and such concern was not very evident. Accusations of cowardice against men who suggested they stay behind lest the slaves give trouble, and a very efficient draft (much helped by female enforcement of it), display a past unwelcome to some recent PC historians but very clear in fact. (“For the purposes of recruitment from the general population, the functions of this bureau may cease with the end of 1864”, wrote the draft board, a sentence that must have chilled Jefferson Davis’ heart as he read it.)
Coming from Africa, where the various tribes indulged brutalities that make even your stories seem tame, and apparently did so for sport, not to control a ‘deep longing’ which was not so obvious there, it took time for such longing to become potent in the slaves transported to the new world. This in turn raises the thought that where such brutalities as you describe occurred, they were not done from some necessity but from the cruelty of a particular slaveowner who went beyond punishments accepted at that time – whips, for example – because his cruel nature prompted him to, and the evil of slavery meant he could.
And there’s the crux of the point I was making – if we’re speaking of morality, we’re all using several different definitions of it. In my mind, morality – acting for good – has to be a timeless concept.
In one hundred years, I’d bet that the prevailing morality of abortion settles on one of two positions:
– personal sovereignty is paramount, and so of course it is a woman’s unalienable right to control all of her own body at all times; or
– a human life at any stage is sacrosanct, and so abortion is bad.
People hold mostly to one of these two beliefs now, out of decent intentions and philosophies. To me, it is those decent intentions and philosophies that make their stance a moral one, not the vagaries of society’s current democratically-determined conclusion about the result. No matter which position society ultimately adopts, my goodness or badness now isn’t dependent upon a future trend.
A determination of right and wrong that depends on future mores seems to me more like fashion than morality.
But, as I said, all of this is far away from the situation of MLK. There’s no moral vagueness in his supposed acts. There’s simply a balancing of his history to determine if he was, overall, “good” or “bad.” Jeffrey Dahmer’s mother loved him, and saw good in him, yet we place him solidly in the “bad” camp, because on balance, his bad overran his good. Our question here is, where lies MLK’s balance?
@bobby b
But, as I said, all of this is far away from the situation of MLK. There’s no moral vagueness in his supposed acts. There’s simply a balancing of his history to determine if he was, overall, “good” or “bad.” Jeffrey Dahmer’s mother loved him, and saw good in him, yet we place him solidly in the “bad” camp, because on balance, his bad overran his good. Our question here is, where lies MLK’s balance?
But I think that is wrong Bobby, and in a sense is my whole point. Why do we have to measure a man on a line from good to bad and determine what point he exists on that line? It is like asking “what is the best metal”? I mean it depends on the metric you are using. It might be silver if you want to conduct electricity, it might be titanium if you want strength to weight, it might be thallium if you want to poison someone, it might be gold it you want to make a pretty necklace.
So the question about MLK depends. If you want someone as a great orator at your rally, he’s your guy. If you want someone to babysit your daughter, perhaps he isn’t the best choice.
Our need to have a single metric to measure the man is simplistic and flawed. Again, people are not bifurcated into heroes and villains, even famous people. People’s lives are tapestries, not black or white. It is the very mistake that the left character assassins make. Trump said a really stupid thing on a bus years ago, therefore he is a fundamentally bad man. God help you or I were we to be judged based on the stupidest thing we have ever said.
However, twitter doesn’t allow for nuance.
I agree with you. And yet, we do still perform that balancing act with everyone’s past.
Take my Jeffrey Dahmer example. Do we view him as a normal flawed human with good and bad parts? Not generally. He undoubtedly did have some good in him, but society has measured him and found him wanting. He is labeled “bad.”
So there is some point on that balance beam where we do assign a binary label of good or bad. In my view, MLK hasn’t crossed that line yet. In the view of a woman who has maybe been raped in the past, he might be firmly over that line.
Hitler? He does fit your description, but we seldom view him with much good/bad nuance.
Niall, above at 7:58 pm,
Thanks very much for the detailed additional info.
(Naturally you would prefer Adams, of Scottish descent, to the radical Jefferson; even though Adams did defend the British troops who were charged in the Boston Massacre, and despite the fact that, as a Scotsman, you cannot personally be in favor of defending Brits. *tease*)
. . .
O/T : It occurs to me that if you pronounce “Scotsman” through your false teeth, like Sean Connery*, it will come out sounding like “Scotchman.” Same for Scots vs. Scotch.
*Fun at Mr. Connery’s expense. I don’t know that he has false teeth, but in his later years it surely sounds to me as if he does. No disrespect intended. *g*
. . .
Gavin, one is certainly wary around the Great Foot, but when one lacks both knowledge and access to scholarly sources, it can at least provide leads. And I am almost totally ignorant about slavery in the British Isles. In fact before I read Niall’s comment above on May 29, 2019 at 4:51 pm, I’d have had to have said that I was totally (rather than almost totally) ignorant.
Of course, it’s not just Wikipedia. Encyclopedias produced by professional scholars are also capable of carrying misinformation, whether intentionally or in good faith. Even the exalted Encyclopedia Britannica.
.
And Niall again, at 9:57 pm:
An excellent point, if you grant its premise — which given the evidence of modern goings-on in Africa (not to mention elsewhere) I do. (Save only that I’m not sure about the part I set off between slashes. The heart can yearn for what the mind knows not.)
I’m not sure what value that leaves in being a moral person beyond social integration, which I find unsatisfying.
I don’t believe this is true, and as evidence I point to the fact it was a capital crime to spread rumors (true or not) about the camps and what went on there. The Nazis knew very well the average German would not accept their Final Solution as moral. Hitler himself fretted over the mental health of the men who ran the camps because everybody involved knew what they were doing was wrong even though they had convinced themselves it was necessary.
I’ve observed no such longing in the average person. Most people will gladly trade their freedom for comfort and safety.
Not quite. They banned the British slave trade in 1807 and then were “active” only in blockading and seizing slave ships.
More generally, judging the past with today’s values is silly. What matters is that the UK and some other countries were among the first to break with this sordid practice that existed for as long as their were people on this planet.
Julie near Chicago (May 30, 2019 at 2:48 am), I was speaking of an active articulate coordinated longing so great that merely flogging and hanging people would not suffice, so that the extraordinary, ‘cruel and unusual’ acts mentioned by Fraser Orr would be ‘necessary’ to its control. The ordinary and usual punishments of hanging and flogging speak to your point.
Back in the 1700s, when maybe the Scots accent was stronger, a great many Englishmen wrote ‘Scotch’ for Scots. Of course, ‘No true Scotsman’ ever doubted that ‘Scotch’ was a drink. 🙂
That is true but there is much evidence that it does not mean what you seem to suggest – that a majority of Germans were opposed, still less that a majority of Germans would have supported punishment, let alone harsh punishment, for the perpetrators.
Goebbels experimented with two ways of managing public opinion in the fall and winter of 1941-42. The first was to assert the justice and necessity of exterminating the Jews. The problem with this approach was that it implicitly created a space in which some could argue against the more extreme applications, or for exceptions. In one small town, when a draft of elderly Jews arrived for deportation, people around started to discuss whether it was necessary since these old Jews “would soon die anyway” and were obviously too old to have any children. Unusually, party supporters seem not to have been in the majority on this occasion. Goebbels was concerned about such incidents and so in early 1942 switched to a second tactic, one of shared quiet complicity in which everyone knew (a point verified by a vast amount of information) but it was not said often, or in explicit terms. This second strategy was very successful – it forced opponents to be the ones to raise the subject.
Goebbels strategy partly rebounded on him in summer of 1943. As it happened, Germany was declared judenrein in May 1943 and the RAF’s bombing of cities began to be effective not long after, steadily leading up to the Hamburg firestorm of July. Goebbels branded it “Jewish terror bombing”, but was warned by the “reports from the reich” people that the public was understanding this as “revenge for what we did to the Jews” (note the first-person plural). At a time when the RAF bombed cities because they could not hit anything smaller, there is much historical information and some dark humour in the many, many records of Germans interpreting which cities were attacked and which streets were hit in terms of what had happened to Jews in those particular places. Perhaps Goebbels greatest propaganda success – but one in which he had much help from the german people themselves – was to overcome the shudder of morale that hit the Reich in late summer 1943, and a key part of this is the way the Germans got past their feelings of wondering if they shouldn’t have done it to accepting that they had done it, that “What’s done cannot be undone” and that they would now defend it.
WWII Germany gives many examples of noble character but more of the opposite. A key point is that Nazi Germany was a totalitarian regime. As Hannah Arendt defines it
This is a key difference between totalitarian and other regimes that are in some way evil. To say a regime is totalitarian is to say that a noble character can only exist in opposition to it.
Well this is all very laudable about how great the British and/or English may have been in abolishing or otherwise making slavery illegal, but I’m afraid us Scots have led the field again:
http://www.tumblinglassie.com/about-the-tumbling-lassie
The Court of Session (sort of equivalent to the High Court in England) dismissed a claim with the trenchant observation
“But we have no slaves in Scotland, and mothers cannot sell their bairns…”
This was in January 1687…
FWIW, I am originally from Glasgow and the rule I learned is that Scotch applies only to whisky and eggs.
Also, FWIW thinking about scotch eggs, I have lived in the USA for most of my adult life and curiously the thing I miss most about Scotland (aside from family of course) is the food. Millionaires shortbread, Greg’s cheese and onion pasties, haggis supper on the way home from the pub. I used to live above Bert’s bar in Stockbridge, Edinburgh (which rather depressingly has subsequently become a yuppie wine bar), and their specialty was serving various different pies with their beer. My, do I miss those days….
Funny, I’d say few would renown Scotland for their food, but that is the thing I miss the most.
Ah Fraser, now you’re talking.
Jock Pie, with beans in the top…
@Eric
I’m not sure what value that leaves in being a moral person beyond social integration, which I find unsatisfying.
Logic frequently leads to unsatisfactory conclusions, but that doesn’t invalidate the logic. If you think morality is not a socially evolved concept then you might want to think where it actually comes from, and as you do you might want to come up with an explanation for why it has changed throughout history.
Consider this: If you went into a high society church five hundred years ago and asked for hands up who thinks slavery is necessary and supported by the Bible, you’d get most hands up. Three hundred years ago, ask then if blacks are inferior to whites or women to men. Again, most hands go up (including the women’s). One hundred and fifty years ago ask then if they think homosexuals should be put to death according to what the Bible demands, again most hands go up (though by this time few hands go up on the slavery question). Ask these questions today in that same church and no hands go up for any of these questions. Ask them about gay marriage bans though, again most hands go up. Perhaps in one hundred years that will change too. Morality evolves over time. And thank God that it does.
Niall K May 29, 2019 at 9.57 pm: “Coming from Africa, where the various tribes indulged brutalities that make even your stories seem tame …”
Brutality is unfortunately deep in the human soul. It has been a while since I read Robert Hughes book “The Fatal Shore” about the colonization of Australia, but the sound of Englishmen viciously whipping other Englishmen still echoes in my mind.
Since we are talking about pies here (and let’s never forget the Deep Fried Mars Bar!), maybe we can tolerate mention of an issue on the fringe of the original topic. There is an aspect of slavery which surprisingly many libertarians and economists seem to ignore: slaves were capital; expensive capital. Although the literature is full of stories about how badly slaves were treated (and horrible treatment certainly occurred), how representative are those tales? It would seem to be foolish in the extreme for an owner to abuse his own capital.
The abuse that English guards heaped on English convicts in Australia is in one sense more understandable, because the guards had no investment in their prisoners and no interest in their long-term well-being & productivity.
I have certainly read a good deal on this in factual studies (one may also see it in occasional incidents in the novels of Mark Twain). A related economic aspect is that, since harsh punishment motivates the desire to escape, so a relatively lower or higher chance of escape moderates it.
– The worst form of slavery was political slavery – the kind of thing that Hitler and Stalin did. Those who made the decisions tended to be insulated from the cost of acquiring and keeping, even when slavery was not also a political weapon that actually desired a high slave death rate. Guards, and the effort of pursuing escapees, were also a political cost, typically not falling on those who set the policies.
– The next worst was mining – a fact still registered in public awareness. When the man wearing the green alien costume yells “Send him to the thorium mines of Beleg VI” at our hero, every viewer knows without needing to be told that the thorium mines of Beleg VI are some ghastly hellhole where you work all the hours God sends for some pittance of rations. In real life, it was said that no-one survived 5 years in the Ottoman empire’s salt mines. Quarries were similar – classical scholars may recall Athens’ captured soldiers reciting Euripedes for food to survive the quarries of Syracuse. The typical mine was a natural prison where a small number of guards could easily defend the entrances against many seeking to charge from below. Mines also did not naturally produce food, which the guards could therefore exchange for ore at a harsh rate. (FYI, there was no mining slavery in the ante-bellum US.)
– The next harshest was simple plantation crops – cotton being an obvious example. While long-term escapes from the old south were rare unless begun within 100 miles of the north-south divide or else from a port (a fact which partly explains the gentler conditions in the upper south and in cities), temporary escapes from the threat of severe punishment “till massa calm down some” were not hard and acted as a restraint on incessant and wildly capricious punishment. You are also quite right that the slaves were valuable and this motivated no more punishment than was required to make them work. It also encouraged the typical plantation owner’s wife’s christian practice in such matters as providing medical care. Slaves were not of course motivated to work hard and did not – the balance between the overseer’s whip and the temporary escape effect, etc., produced an equilibrium in which the masters complained that slaves were lazy and the slaves felt they worked quite hard enough.
– The next harshest form was more complex crops like tobacco, where care early in the season was needed but could not be effectively monitored by an overseer and would only be revealed late in the season (when it could no longer easily be related to the particular slovenliness of a particular slave). This led to bonus and profit-share schemes in Virginia that caused visitors from the deep south to complain it was hardly slavery and undermined racial subordination, but the Virginia tobacco farmers found it necessary to get the required work on their crops. The smallish number of old-south slaves who worked in pearl diving and logging experienced a similar benefit. (This last contrasts with Soviet Gulag logging, dreaded by all in the Gulag system. The norms, devised by city bureaucrats, were far above the possible so for this very hard work everyone was swiftly reduced to punishment rations. Michael Krupa describes, in Shallow Graves in Siberia, how he survived one year then seized a chance to escape, knowing no-one survived two years.)
– Domestic slavery was relatively the least harsh of all. Such tasks as correct care of babies required attentiveness, were not easily monitored moment to moment and could have serious consequences if neglected. Conversely, the misery or sullenness of a harshly-punished slave, even if overtly cowed, was far more visible in a domestic setting and did not make for a happy home. Domestic slaves were also best placed to form personal ties to their owners leading to special privileges and even freedom – statistically, a domestic slave’s chance of being manumitted was much better than a field hand’s.
So while many a PC commentator may ignore this and trade horror stories till the implausible and rare is made to look like the norm, there is in fact an academic literature of slavery that includes the economic aspects and their complex interplay with culture in mitigating or harshening the condition.
@Niall
Thanks for the interesting analysis. However, there are two things I find disturbing about this whole discussion. Firstly, we are libertarians, the word “liberty” is right there in our name. The greatest insult we can imagine to a human is to rob them of their liberty. Perhaps some slave masters were more benign than others, and I don’t doubt that, by the standards of his time, Washington was on the less sadistic end of the spectrum. But the very condition of slavery should be abhorrent to us and a gigantic blot on any man who would lock that chain and close the cage.
I am reminded of a preacher I once knew back in my religious days. We were discussing the Greek word doulos, which is generally speaking translated “slave”. We were discussing the passages that, for example, tell slaves to obey their masters. And in our discussion he described slaves as if they were more like employees than anything. But that completely misses the point. A slave may well be employed as head of the household. He might manage a staff of 100 other slaves. He might have the a fantastic home to raise his family, and might be clothed in the greatest finery. But that doesn’t change his fundamental condition.
Slavery, irrespective of the consequences of slavery is the most dreadful thing. And any man, Washington included, who would dare to claim ownership of a human being, to claim the right to chose life or death for them, to take the children of that slave as his own property, and to separate those children from their parents for the simple matter of pecuniary gain, is quite simply a man with a dreadful blot on his character. And as I have argued above, it was not that he was deluded about the moral character of his behavior, he plainly knew full well that slave keeping was a dreadful abuse.
So, my honest concern here is that I do not understand the mad rush to defend Washington with a string of reasons why his manner of slave keeping wasn’t so bad after all. I think it is horrifying. That isn’t to say that others weren’t even more horrifying, but it is still in itself horrifying.
But my second concern is one I have expressed above, and which really follows from this: that is our need to bifurcate people into heroes or villains. This is the root cause of this rush to defend Washington. If he had villianous behavior, and we only have two buckets then villain he must be. But we, for very good reason, want to put him in the hero bucket.
This bifurcation is really at the root of an awful lot of the wrongs we are seeing in our society. #metoo has this at its very root. Of course there were some dreadful people who did dreadful things to women, but it seems that if you have video of some public figure checking out the ass of a woman walking by then into the “sexual predator” bucket he goes, irrespective of what his life really means. We see it in criminal views of, for example, rape. Dragging awoman into the bushes at gunpoint is set the moral equivalent as a drunken encounter, with fuzzy consent that went a bit too far. Brett Kavanaugh, we are told, is unqualified to be a judge because he drunk a few too many beers in high school? I means the news is replete with this nonsense.
And for those of us who love liberty we need to recognize that this is one of a number of new and very effective tools that those who hate liberty have developed. Manipulation of vocabulary (as I discussed earlier with words like “dog whistle” and “alt-right” and “hate”), along with this tool of gross simplification of people by this bifurcation process, and a whole host of other tools, are being used to rob people of their legitimate rights, and to silence and censor them in fear of the crazy twitter mob.
People are a patchwork, good, bad and in between, and we should judge them based on their suitability for the role we wish to assign them. Why can we not admire Washington for what he did while acknowledging that he also did terrible things? Can we not allow for a mature, nuanced view of the guy?
Let me say this: it is widely acknowledged that super heroes in comic books are made much more interesting, much more three dimensional when, along with their miscellaneous superpowers, they have weaknesses against which they have to struggle. Perhaps we should allow our actual heroes to have weaknesses too, perhaps if we are honest about them their star will shine brighter against the darkness of their very real shortcomings.
“Firstly, we are libertarians, the word “liberty” is right there in our name. The greatest insult we can imagine to a human is to rob them of their liberty. Perhaps some slave masters were more benign than others, and I don’t doubt that, by the standards of his time, Washington was on the less sadistic end of the spectrum. But the very condition of slavery should be abhorrent to us and a gigantic blot on any man who would lock that chain and close the cage.”
By our contemporary libertarian standards, yes. And we as libertarians and moral beings should always judge by them. But it’s no use blinding ourselves to the fact that other moral standards exist – both at different times and places, and even within our own society. Moral fashions change over time – and what is one year widely considered laudable may be the next year widely considered abhorrent. They are indexicals – their meaning depends on where we stand, like ‘left’ and ‘right’ (the spatial, not political meaning). What is ‘on the left’ to me may be ‘on the right’ to you. When judging historic figures, we have to be precise about what moral system we are talking about when making any statement. It’s a coordinate system for behaviour.
It is abhorrent by our standards. It was not especially abhorrent by theirs. And it’s unreasonable to expect people to abide by a moral system that won’t be invented until long after they’re dead. That doesn’t mean you can’t judge their actions as good or evil; but you judge the society, not the individual.
The point about libertarianism as a moral system is that it is the system of minimal constraints giving maximum freedom. It is the minimally consistent intersection of all the others – the most freedom you can have consistent with the requirement that everyone else has the same freedoms you do. (Roughly.)
“This is the root cause of this rush to defend Washington. If he had villianous behavior, and we only have two buckets then villain he must be. But we, for very good reason, want to put him in the hero bucket.”
Yes. Everyone does that! Think about the way the other side wriggles when we point out the moral flaws (by their standard) and hypocrisy of one of their heros.
But the need to put people in one bucket or the other can result in a mixed judgement appearing contrarian to both sides. Those for who he is a hero are puzzled at why we see the need to attack his slave-owning ways. Those for who he is a villain are puzzled at why we seem to be defending him on many points of context. Take the middle ground, and you will get attacked as an ideological enemy by both sides.
I get that a lot!
“And for those of us who love liberty we need to recognize that this is one of a number of new and very effective tools that those who hate liberty have developed.”
It’s not new. It’s like the way people are always going on about how Orwell’s Nineteen Eight Four was some sort of prophetic prediction. But it was actually a book about 1948; when he wrote it. Newspeak and the manipulation of vocabulary was based on how society worked back then. It’s not a new method – just a new target.
Heresy and blasphemy and morality laws have always policed speech. Hints that one might be subject to some unfashionable moral failing have always been able to blight a career, or result in social exclusion, or worse. The behaviours that are out of fashion have changed, but not much else.
Fraser O: “The greatest insult we can imagine to a human is to rob them of their liberty.”
Depends on what we mean by ‘liberty’. The phrase “wage slave” did not come from nowhere. The Chinese laborers shipped in the 19th Century (often by Brits) to work on building the US transcontinental railroad were nominally free men. They were contractors — operating cost, not capital investment. When they died on the job, they were simply replaced. If they malingered, they were fired — and left an ocean away from home in a place where they could not speak the language and ran a serious risk of starving to death. Free men.
Until very recently, it had always been a hard world, and life was difficult for almost everyone.
@Nullius in Verba
It is abhorrent by our standards. It was not especially abhorrent by theirs.
But that is exactly wrong. If you look back at my original three arguments the first and third specifically address this question. Namely that they knew full well that what they were doing was abhorrent.
@Gavin Longmuir
Depends on what we mean by ‘liberty’. The phrase “wage slave” did not come from nowhere.
The phrase “wage slave” is a deliberate misdirection by the left. Those Chinese workers had the choice whether to take that job or not. They could have stayed in China and done something else. They could have found a way to accumulate capital to allow them to leave without starving. Moreover, were they to have children, those children would not be obliged to work for the company, neither could the company take them away and sell them to another company.
Freedom, liberty, is the right to chose among your available choices. Slavery is where that right is exercised by someone else. For sure, the world has lived in grinding poverty for most of history and the choices available to even the freest man have been limited. But at least they could chose. At least they could work to generate more options, however pitifully they might be. This is indeed the history of humankind, scraping together pitufull options, leading to slightly less pitiful options, and on up until their situation, or that of their children or grandchildren was much less pitiful.
As a slave they had, de jure, no options. Any capital they generated was stolen. Any progress they made taken by others. A slave has no choices not because of lack of options, but because their right to choose has been stolen. And even were they to generate some capital to create options, they still did not have the right to exercise these options.
Perhaps that worker might abandon the railroad and have to find some way to live off the land — perhaps working as a low paid laborer, perhaps hunting and trapping, and perhaps just not making it. However, at least they were not hunted down by dogs and then tortured to death as an example to the other workers lest they should dare to exercise their free will.
Niall — wrt yours on May 30, 2019 at 11:41 am,
Due no doubt to a superabundance of holes in the head, I’m not getting your point, but I can stand that if you can. :>)
I just want to make it clear that I really did, and do, think that your comment to which I referred was an excellent one.
(I hope you understand that I was joshing about your presumed reason for preferring Adams to Jeff. — OTOH, if you’d care to expound on your reasons, here or elsewhere, I’d be extremely interested.)
By the way, since you’re interested in the history of the South, have you read any of Eric Foner’s stuff? (I haven’t.) If so, what do you think of it?
I should have added my thanks for your responding at all. :>))
Julie near Chicago (May 31, 2019 at 6:35 am), I am always grateful when you respond to my posts or comments though, in an attempt to limit my prolixity, I often skip saying so.
My point was a very particular response to a remark of Fraser Orr’s.
– Fraser described some extraordinary punishments – punishments that well merit the description ‘cruel and unusual’ in Washington’s time – as ‘necessary’ to the slavery of the ante-bellum south, because of the ‘deep longing for freedom in the human heart.’
– I wonder if we should be so proud as to feel sure that cruel and unusual punishments would be necessary for us – whether the experience of flogging and the threat of hanging might not suffice to cool many a ‘liberty or death’ libertarian’s fervour (but see below*). What I know is we benefit from the experience of liberty and of its praise in our culture. Africans were enslaved in a culture whose philosophy was expressed by the chief who said, “The good people are all weak: they are good because they are not strong enough to be bad.” No more than any Einsteins born there were any moral geniuses born back then in Africa able to affect that culture – or so at least it would seem from what we know.
So I’m disagreeing with Fraser’s word ‘necessity’. Where he sees a necessity, I instead suggest that it took time for Africans, accustomed to slavery before they were themselves enslaved and shipped to the US, to integrate into its very unusual culture (which they entered at the lowest point) – so unusual a culture that slavery, commonplace in the world at that time and universal in Africa, was a ‘peculiar institution’ within it. Only then could the, “I want to be the master not the slave” attitude shown by the chief I quote give way to “We should be free. Everyone should be free.”
* The determination of the Messenian helots, once they had rebelled, never to let themselves be enslaved again and the courage shown by Haitians when Napoleon ordered their re-enslavement both offer evidence that, once the ideal of freedom is both grasped and experienced, it is harder to take it away again.
Thanks very much, Niall. Now I see. Makes sense. :>))
“If you look back at my original three arguments the first and third specifically address this question. Namely that they knew full well that what they were doing was abhorrent.”
OK, Let’s have a look at those arguments.
“Here is a man morally conflicted. Acknowledging that “something needs to be done” but dishonestly deferring that action to the government rather than “change starts with me.””
This is the martyr’s choice: You think society is wrong, but if you say so or act against it, society will destroy you. What do you do? Well, you can go ahead and be a martyr, but unless there are lots of others like you on the verge of taking action, that’s unlikely to effect any change. All that happens is you get destroyed, and there’s one less good person in the world. Or you can campaign to change society’s mind, to get them to change the rules voluntarily, but without stepping outside the system.
Somebody once told me a story about US segregation. Employers in shops and restaurants wanted to employ black people, they were cheaper and the owners were not unsympathetic. But if black people appeared serving in the shop they would lose all their business. White customers would go elsewhere. They’d either go bankrupt, or be forced to give the policy up. So they employed black people in the back rooms, out of sight of the public, but not out front. The problem is that doing it first, you’re doing it all alone, and an easy target.
When the new equality laws came in, it made all the businesses do it at once. Racists could no longer boycott shops with black staff out front, because now they all did. And the shop owners were very happy about it, and arguably now that the barrier had been burst open, the equality law was no longer needed.
Recall JS Mill on the social tyranny…
That slavery can be economic. We all have to work. We all have to swallow a few of our principles to be able to do so and survive.
I don’t know if that was truly the case with Washington, but it’s how I read the comment of his you quote. He’s arguing that change won’t happen without the change being coordinated across the whole of society.
Society gets locked into a stable state – small perturbations create forces that push it back. Only a big perturbation can push it over the hill and down into a different stable state.
“If we are to say “society” defines morality then why don’t the black people of that society get a say?”
They do, sort of. But when we say society defines morality, it’s not some sort of national vote where everyone gets an equal say. People interact, one person gives way to the other, or they negotiate a compromise, and the collective result of all those interactions evolves a set of rules on who gets to do what. (Black people contribute to the rule’s evolution by choosing to bow down, rather than get beaten or killed. That they chose to do so doesn’t mean they like it, or wouldn’t prefer a different rule.)
The best analogy I can come up with is that morality is like language. They’re both social instincts that enable humans to live in close proximity in dense, cooperative societies without major conflict over territory and resources. They’re both learnt during childhood and to some degree ‘locked in’, so it becomes very difficult as an adult to change to a different one. For a language to work, everyone must agree that the same sound corresponds to the same concept. For a morality to work, everyone must agree that the same situation must lead to the same allowed actions. We collectively agree on language through people talking to try to communicate concepts. You can invent your own words, but if the other person can’t figure out what you mean it’s useless. Useful new words spread, though. Likewise, a morality develops through individual interactions where there is a conflict of interests, and we negotiate an outcome at least acceptable to both. Useful rules and principles for doing so spread.
The need for agreement on the rules, combined with the tendency to copy rules off one another, results in each social network converging on a common set. We all speak the same language, so we can understand one another and cooperate. We all share the same morality, so we can live peacefully together and cooperate.
But both languages and moralities mutate and change over time, and if isolated from one another they diverge down different paths. The result is a world where people of different tribes speak entirely different languages, and when they meet the result is mutual incomprehension. And if you have only ever lived in one single culture, where everyone speaks the same language, this comes as a shock. There’s the image of the stereotypical English tourist, who thinks that if they shout the words slowly and distinctly enough at the foreign waiter, the message will somehow get through. Everyone speaks English! Read the Bible, and you see Jesus speaking English. Moses spoke in English. The words carved on the tablets of stone are in English. The words “Let there be light” are obviously in English!
And we likewise see morality the same way: The whole world naturally shares the same morality, like everyone in all the stories speaks English. And it seems incomprehensible to someone who has lived their entire lives in one culture that others could genuinely not see the morality of a situation as they do.
So in thinking about morality and moral relativism and such matters, I find it useful to translate into the language analogy. The fact that there are many languages does not mean that languages don’t exist, or are invalid, or that there are no rules, or that you can get away with breaking grammatical rules as you like, or that you can make up new words at random and expect to be understood, or that there’s no benefit in trying to teach a foreigner your language, while picking up a few useful words from theirs. It is unreasonable to criticise Chaucer’s spelling using modern English standards. It makes no sense to say that one language is more ‘correct’ than another – both sides always think their own language is obviously correct and natural and the other is worthless heathen gabble. But that doesn’t mean that language has no genuine practical/objective value. One language can genuinely be ‘better’ than another – it can be more powerful at expressing ideas, more compact and faster, more precise and accurate, one can have vocabulary about recent inventions, and so on. But when it comes to the many arbitrary choices, neither is objectively any better than the other. But the main value in languages arises from their commonality. We gain huge advantage from all speaking the same language, possibly more than we do from speaking our own language.
And the way we all learn to speak the same language is to mix socially. English is the most commonly spoken language in the world, just ahead of Chinese and miles ahead of the rest, because we went out and conquered the world, and everyone else learned English so they could talk to us. (Spanish is ahead of us in native speakers, but English is ten times more common as a second language.) You don’t form a common language and eliminate rival languages by building walls between peoples.
It works the same with morality. The world is converging on Western culture for exactly the same reason it is converging on English as a common language. They want to talk to us. They want to do business with us. They want to live among us, and trade with us. And all that necessitates the development of a common language and morality. It’s a natural and instinctive process, but because only children have the flexibility to really adopt one at an instinctive level, it’s one that can take generations to fully converge. The first step with languages is a ‘pidgin’ which is a grammatically-broken mess of a language invented by adults trying to communicate. But that turns into a grammatically-sophisticated ‘creole’ when the next generation of children learn it from them. I expect the analogy works for moral systems, too.
NIV — Truly excellent well-considered clearly-stated comment! Consider yourself Upvoted. 🙂
Fraser O: “… they knew full well that what they were doing was abhorrent.”
Fraser, not playing games or trying to be smart — just sharing something that has troubled me for quite some time. Today, we can afford to buy (for example) nice shoes made by child laborers in sweatshops in places like Vietnam — children who are paid a pittance. How different are we from the slave-owners of Ancient Egypt who lived well on the backs of the enslaved Jews?
Yes, the Vietnamese child is “free”– she could quit her job and … maybe stay alive picking things out from the local garbage dump. But then her parents might starve.
When a future generation looks back on the exploitation of our fellow human beings in which we participate, how would we try to justify ourselves against their allegation that what we are doing today is abhorrent, and we know it? Or would we simply admit the charge?
Interesting question. I’ll assume for now that it’s not rhetorical, and that you, personally, find it abhorrent.
(yes, they’re “free” to make a choice, but neither choice is entirely “good” by our standards of living, is, I think your point?)
First time I visited a Chinese factory, I was shown a line with people making a Microsoft webcam. First thing the supervisor did was assure me that they were all 18, and that he had documents to back it up. I’d have guessed 15 or 16, but the trope that Chinese look youthful is not untrue, so who knows?
Second thing he did was clout one of them round the back of the head for resting with her head on the table while no webcams were coming down the line, and look to me for my forthcoming approval. I’m tall for an Englishman…in China, I’m a giant. Needless to say, he didn’t take the look I gave him as “approval”.
In other factories, they make sure that they show you “the ping-pong room”. Typically, workers ship in from the “impoverished rural west” to the east coast, and live in poor conditions – so they show you the recreational facilities, because they know that us westerners get uncomfortable.
I was somewhat disturbed (understatement – I felt like an utter shit, as I was arguing for a cost price decrease) on that first trip, but have since learned to live with it – I tell this anecdote to empathise.
Vietnam is (in my limited experience) better than China, slightly, but I’ve seen and heard some horror stories.
As I see it, these are our choices –
1) Live with it.
It’s a pittance, but it’s better than the alternative. Not all countries are equal, but capitalism raises all boats. We can’t save everyone tomorrow, but we can help them aim for a decent standard of living in ten* years.
*number pulled out of my rear end.
2) Boycott companies who use child labour.
Laudable, but runs the risk of those kids ending up digging through dustbins.
Also, you’ll never be able to – there’s no way that you can trace supply chains that far to really, really be sure. Some people track this kind of thing, and that’s great. No Logo would be a good example of a book which exposes such wrong-doing, right? Let’s see what our fellows here on Samizdata have to say about Naomi Klein.
3) Only shop from companies which have strict policies on supply-chain child labour.
It’s almost the same as the above – but with the caveat of “trust” built into it. A lot of companies (including all the ones I’ve worked with) DO have strict policies, and spend an amount of time/money enforcing and policing them – hence my experience with being assured that the “kids” on the line were all 18 or over. So, instead of having to research, you look at their “social responsibility” section of their website. And then you have to trust them.
Wasn’t there a recent thread here on corporate social responsibility where most commentators came down on the side of “businesses shouldn’t have social responsibility, their sole purpose is profit! Red in tooth and claw!”
4) Actually, turns out none of the above matter. Both the UK and US have regulations against companies using Child Labour! Yay!
The UK Modern Slavery Act (2015) compels big companies to address child labour in their supply chain. In the same year, the US has The Trade Facilitation and Trade Enforcement Act (which appears to also prevent the use of child labour – corrections from my US friends welcome, of course, since I only just googled it).
So, rest easy. Our governments have regulated against it. And we love regulations, because they stop us having to do all the work required in examples 2 and 3, where we need to actually put some effort into understanding which companies we feel comfortable shopping with, and would, importantly, still get it wrong.
(as opposed to governments, who never get it wrong)
A knotty problem, no?
“Fraser, not playing games or trying to be smart — just sharing something that has troubled me for quite some time. Today, we can afford to buy (for example) nice shoes made by child laborers in sweatshops in places like Vietnam — children who are paid a pittance. How different are we from the slave-owners of Ancient Egypt who lived well on the backs of the enslaved Jews?”
It’s worth noting that the lower the pay, the more children you can employ with the money you’ve got.
Say you’ve got a million kids need a job – or they and their families will starve. You can employ a hundred thousand of them on $10 a day, and the other nine hundred thousand starve. Or you can employ all one million on $1 a day, and they all live. Which is more moral?
You have only got so many resources and sometimes you can’t save everyone. When demand increases to the point where you need two million children to produce it, and you’ve only got a million, then the price rises until demand drops enough to match supply. You need to pay the kids $2 a day to get them to work for you rather than your rivals, and your rivals are forced to follow suit or go out of business because there aren’t enough kids to satisfy everyone.
The best way to raise their wages is to increase demand, which means Buy! Buy! Buy! First, that rescues more of the kids sat starving outside the factory and brings them in. Only when they’re all inside, it raises their wages. That the workers are low paid should – morally – be a motivation to buy more of their produce, not less. Because that’s what actually rescues them from poverty, as we can see when we think about the economics. A minimum wage is even more harmful for them than it is for us.
Sadly, the people who produced all those publicity campaigns (the ones that have persuaded the Western world that sweatshops are bad and buying from them immoral) don’t understand economics. It’s an education thing.
PS. Thanks for the upvote!
You ever visited those factories?
Neonsnake: “A knotty problem, no?”
It really is! It has troubled me a lot for quite some time. Maybe that is why I tend to over-react when people get censorious about the evils of long-dead slave-owners. We need to look in the mirror and ask ourselves what we are doing today about our own abhorrent situation.
We can tell ourselves that we are superior to those 19th Century English lords with their slave-run sugar plantations in the Caribbean — we don’t personally own slaves and work them to death. And that is true. But our standard of living does rely on low-cost products from a system of near-slave labor in the sweatshops of the Third World. Morally, is knowingly buying stolen goods superior to stealing them directly?
We can tell ourselves that the Third World children are better off working in a miserable sweatshop for a low wage than exercising their freedom combing through garbage heaps. And that is probably true too. But I would hate to have a discussion with some enlightened Bangladeshi 200 years from now who was asserting that morally we 21st Century Westerners are not far removed from 19th Century slave-owners.
“You ever visited those factories?”
Have you ever visited the queues of people trying to get into the factories?
This is the bit the conventional presentation doesn’t see. (As in Bastiat’s “That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not Seen”.) People look at the people in the factories and see that it’s horrible. They don’t see the alternative.
The *first* priority in all this is to get as many people as we can into the factories, earning and learning. The point of paying them the minimum is to rescue as many as possible. The point of lowering wages is to increase the number of widgets there is demand for, so you can employ more people. You’re operating a liferaft with hundreds of people in the water. You pack as many people as you possibly can into the liferaft, and don’t worry too much about their comfort, because it’s better than being in the cold water with the sharks.
*Only when* you’ve got everyone out of the water and into the liferaft do you start thinking about upgrading everyone to a lifeboat, fishing boat, ferry, cruiser, luxury motor yacht, and so on.
Poverty is a global emergency! To complain about the conditions in the liferaft while there are still millions in the water is missing the point. Yes of course we know the conditions in the sweatshops are horrible! The question is how best can we fix it? Do we give them thousands more (and cheaper/lower quality) liferafts? Or do we ban the use of all liferafts that don’t have all the home comforts we ourselves expect and demand? Take away those they’ve got, and dump them back in the water?
Yes. I really have.
Hence my “Live with it” proposal.
It is a mistake to think that Martin Luther King was a Marxist – he did not have sufficient knowledge of Marxism to actually be a Marxist. Although he did end up a sort-of “Fellow Traveller” – repeating what the Comrades wanted him to say.
Martin Luther King spent his life copying other people – his doctorate was the thesis of someone else who the young Martin simply copied and passed off as his own. The famous “I have dream” speech was copied from the Republican (yes Republican) National Convention of 1956 – when a Black Minister gave a very good speech (it was actually quite logical for Martin Luther King to copy it – the only ethical problem is that he implied it was his own work).
In the 1960s Martin ended up copying the Marxists (for example repeating their Talking Points on poverty and the Vietnam War) – as well as experimenting with orgies and various drugs.
Drink, drugs and lots of young women do not actually fit with the image that Martin Luther King pushed about himself – he was the “Reverent” Martin Luther King, an ordained minister. He was NOT specially bad – it was the 1960s, the “spirit of the age” was awful. But it would have been nice if Martin Luther King has stood against the bad things of his time – rather than gone along with them.
“What are you talking about! – Martin Luther King got rid of Jim Crow!”.
Actually the movement against segregation was winning from the 1940s onwards – for example the famous judgement of 1954 (by all nine Supreme Court justices – no dissenters). Even back in the 1940S Governor Tom Dewey of New York made segregation actually illegal (not only was it not compulsory in New York – it was actually forbidden). The days of the 1930s when Jewish owners of buildings were sometimes barred from the very buildings they owned – by their own policy banned (it was NOT the law of New York even then – it was the voluntary decision of property owners to bar themselves, in order to attract bigoted gentile tenants and customers).
Martin Luther King was not the man behind the judgement of 1954, or even the Act of 1964.
YES Martin Luther King was brave – and did stand against segregation. And his murder was an terrible outrage. But he was not the person who ended segregation.
As for the FBI – they could have destroyed Martin Luther King, they had the tapes of his drug abuse and orgies with young women. But they choose NOT to destroy him – why?
The reason is simple – Martin Luther King was, in his anti segregation stand, following UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT POLICY.
President Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson were all opposed to segregation – so in THIS Martin Luther King was no “rebel”, he was pushing Federal Government policy.
Contrary to what people are led to believe, the FBI was not interested in Martin Luther King because of his anti segregation side (it was U.S. government policy to get rid of segregation at State and local level) they were actually concerned at his becoming a mouthpiece of the Marxists – during the Vietnam War.
Of course the FBI were interested in people who come under the influence of the enemy in time of war.
“But the American government killed Martin Luther King” – NO THEY DID NOT, they had NOTHING TO DO WITH THE MURDER.
Think about it – you have in your hands the evidence (the tapes) that could destroy Martin Luther King.
So why kill him?
If you dislike him – you can destroy him by releasing the evidence of his drug abuse and orgies. MURDERING the man makes him a MARTYR – a modern SAINT.
All of us, unless we consume very “consciously” indeed, are responsible for that; I’m just one step closer since I’m more directly involved with third-world factories. So, this might be self-serving to assuage any latent guilt 😉
I’ve not been to India, but in Vietnam and China I’ve seen the alternatives – and they’re worse than working in factories.
(NIV – reviewing last night’s comments, I may have come across a bit snippy, as my last couple of comments were short with no elaboration and might have seem pointed. If so, please accept my apology, I was busy doing other stuff)
My honest opinion is that we’re helping these countries. Slowly. And the “slowly” part is why we feel guilty about it – conditions in some factories are genuinely pretty awful, and in some factories it’s actually no worse than any factory in the UK or the US. Slowly, they’re improving; mainly because of historical bad PR and because western consumers and companies are encouraging ever-increasing improvements.
I would hope that an enlightened Bangladeshi, living in what will hopefully be a much-improved Bangladesh, would see that factories were just an early step, which improved living conditions slowly towards those enjoyed by countries like ours.
Similarly, I would hope that I would have the grace to treat a UK textile factory owner from the 19th century in the same way, knowing what I know now about living standards in the UK. I admit that I would find it difficult!
“(NIV – reviewing last night’s comments, I may have come across a bit snippy, as my last couple of comments were short with no elaboration and might have seem pointed. If so, please accept my apology, I was busy doing other stuff)”
Don’t worry about it. You didn’t, particularly. Anyway, I’ve been insulted by experts, and it just bounces off. ‘Snippy’ doesn’t even scratch the paint!
Plus, I was aware that in embarking on an economics tutorial like that, it could have come across as patronizing or insulting – suggesting people were ignorant. It wasn’t intended that way – I just love talking about all the cool and non-obvious stuff in free market economics! But if people are sometimes a bit snippy in response that’s perfectly understandable.
Actually, I was quite happy about the exchange, because your comment prompted me to think of the ‘liferaft’ analogy, which I’m quite pleased about. It’s a useful explanation that I expect I’ll use again someday.
“My honest opinion is that we’re helping these countries. Slowly. And the “slowly” part is why we feel guilty about it – conditions in some factories are genuinely pretty awful, and in some factories it’s actually no worse than any factory in the UK or the US.”
I expect you’ve seen the Hans Rosling talks? Yes, we could always wish it was faster, but in my view we’re actually moving very fast – I’d guess they’re moving at about 2 to 4 times the speed at which we did it, back in the industrial revolution. They don’t have to wait for the technology to be invented. They just have to learn to apply it.
We send kids to school, with dreams of them instantly becoming doctors or engineers, and five years later they’re just about able to add and multiply. It takes another ten to make them a barely-employable raw recruit. A forty-year career to make them a true expert. The modern world is extremely complicated, it takes a long time to learn how to do it, and all that education costs a huge slice of even our vastly greater resources.
For what it’s worth, the SRES economic models the IPCC commissioned for the global warming reports (so they could figure out how much CO2 we’d be emitting) predicted that the developing world would achieve parity with the West by around 2080. Computer models, though.
No, I don’t think we deserve to feel guilty about that. If there’s one thing that I *do* think we should feel guilty about, it’s that we don’t teach everyone how the system their survival depends upon works! Basic economics is one of the most vital sciences not only for practical stuff like running a business, but also for understanding much of modern politics. If they taught economics to everyone at school (as a topic in the mathematics curriculum, for example), a lot of the socialist blether would wither away.
We’ve know this stuff for 150 years. We’ve known how important it is, and how much damage the many misunderstandings have done to society. Why on earth are we teaching kids trigonometry, and not the law of supply and demand?! We could have done something about it, and we didn’t. We could have created free markets, and we didn’t. There could be another outbreak of socialism, or something worse. If I was a citizen of a hundred years hence, that’s what I’d be pointing the finger of moral guilt at.
But perhaps fortunately, we can’t predict which way society will turn next, or what aspects of today’s society they will find most abhorrent. I’m sure we’d all be horrified if we could!
Likewise!
Wasn’t intended to be 🙂 My “have you seen the factories” wasn’t intended to be as dismissive as it might have come across. More – I can fully understand why someone, seeing those conditions, would be appalled. I’d actually question anyone who wasn’t! But a sober analysis would say that a) they’re necessary (or at least, beneficial) in the short-term and b) that they’re actually getting much better.
Are you familiar with the Chinese New Year effect? Every year, after all the workers go home for CNY, when they come back, roughly 20% go to work for a different factory? The reasons are obvious (demand vs supply) – and the outcomes are obvious (better conditions and wages to retain staff). Standards are getting better partly (but not solely) because of that.
I’ve seen the 200 Countries in 200 years video – any others you’d recommend? In the same vein, the author Charles Stross makes similar points in one of his series (The Merchant Princes) – particularly that developing countries can move very quickly when they have a model to follow – but just as importantly, mustn’t outpace the infrastructure and education needed to cope with advances.
Prompted me to think of the 19th Century textile factory analogy, which has pleased me, as someone who occasionally feels a twinge of guilt over the outcomes of some of my decisions 😉
Paul Marks, May 31, 2019 at 9:37 pm, your point about the political meaning of the FBI not exploiting these tapes against MLK makes sense. Certainly president Eisenhower, who desegregated the army and deployed the 101st airborne against segregationists, was in the business of achieving the goals desired by King, and that remained the Federal government’s policy thereafter.
One thing these tapes will do (if confirmed) is very thoroughly disprove (to those who care what is true) the PC narrative about the bugging (and so, indirectly, some of the more general narrative). It is old news today but embedded in the myth history of the period pushed by those who mostly don’t care what is true – though let us note that David Garrow (who may not be getting another pulitzer prize anytime soon) apparently does.
Reviewing chattering class discussion of the Eichmann trial, Hannah Arendt spoke of its revealing “deep confusion over basic issues of morality.” The thread above includes a suggestion the Nuremberg trials were a “farce”, some (partial?) endorsements of a culturally-relative morality, and the appearance of the word ‘wage-slave’ – so I’d say these “basic confusions’ (one could use a more neutral term than ‘confusion’) have appeared, as they do every now and then when a topic breaks out of its bounds.
I don’t think the tail end of a long thread on a specific discovery about a specific famous living-memory person is the ideal place to address “basic issues of morality” so I will briefly (as brief as NLK – Niall Longwinded Kilmartin – ever is) indicate mine FYI, without seeking to prolong the thread.
My Too cruel at any time comment expresses my whole-hearted rejection of a relative morality in grave matters, and my willingness to let the custom of the times inform my understanding of the meaning of lesser ones.
However, while that sets limits (so my attitude to the “Washington owned slaves – burn all respect for him” idea could be changed by a historical discovery like these tapes), my main objection comes from another matter. Later on in this thread I quoted Hannah Arendt
as a key differentiator between a culture where to be good would necessarily mean to be driven to reject that culture, and one where you could condemn a cultural practice and yet praise, for other reasons, one of its members.
In an old post on something completely different, I described our grandparents’ UK generation as
As my quote indicates, we can substitute slavery (which that generation also condemned) and say exactly the same. (Indeed, there are a lot of old Greek and Roman statues that could be got rid of, whether for a reason ISIS would share or for a reason that ISIS very much would not share.)
I think when a society is not totalitarian, you can make a distinction between good and bad characters of people who are not rebels against it, and admire someone for the good they individually did (Washington’s achievement was a gain for freedom), not for the evil they shared with those around. (It is relevant to this that Washington is usually praised amongst the founding fathers, not for being the cleverest but for having a granite character that carried the cause to success.)
Neonsnake: “Hence my “Live with it” proposal.”
I pretty much come down in the same place. There is really nothing effective we can do as individuals in the short term to change a system where we in the West benefit today from the privations of people much worse off than ourselves. It is the ‘SYSTEM, MAN’ as the hippies used to say. So knowing that we, just like our ancestors, have a share of Original Sin, what can we do?
First thing is to be a little bit more understanding about the conditions under which our ancestors lived — their SYSTEM, MAN. A system about which they, as individuals, could do as little as we can about the inequitable system which benefits us today. The world was a much more brutal place then because most people were living much closer to the edge. And if the usual suspects ever succeed in driving us back to a world powered only by windmills, our behavior will probably return to a similar level of brutality.
What we in the West can do constructively is to rehabilitate nuclear power as the energy source of the future. The best way to address the tough situation for human beings in the Third World is to bring everyone on the planet up to First World standards. That is going to require a lot of energy. Currently, we are in about a 15 TerraWatt world — to bring everyone up to First World level would need about 100 TerraWatts. There are not enough fossil fuels to achieve that, and subsidized unsustainable “renewables” won’t get us there either. Nuclear energy is almost a moral imperative!
“I’ve seen the 200 Countries in 200 years video – any others you’d recommend?”
There were several good ones. I’ve not got the time right now, but if I remember I’ll try to look some of them up later.
However, if you’ve seen that one, you’ve no doubt got the gist!
“The task of a totalitarian regime is to organise the guilt of its citizens.”
Original sin? 🙂
Another way to look at it is that, sure, we benefit from their labors, but they benefit more from our participation in their labors. If you want to find fault, it’s that maybe we’re not bringing them upwards as fast as we could – but we are bringing them upwards. Their lives are better for their interactions with us.
TL/DR version: don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
bobby b: “… sure, we benefit from their labors, but they benefit more from our participation in their labors.”
That might be overstating the case a little. A little as if one of the 19th Century English slave lords had pointed out — accurately enough — that the opportunity for an African king to sell his defeated enemies as slaves to European shippers for transport to the lord’s sugar plantation in the Caribbean was the only reason those defeated African tribesmen were not sacrificially murdered right there & then in Africa.
Economic progress requires innovation, investment, and energy. Certainly, the low-paid Third World labor from which we all benefit does help create an investable surplus in those countries, and hopefully puts those hard-working people on the path to a more reasonable standard of living.
My main beef in all of this is the supercilious attitude that we today are morally superior to the English, French, Spanish, Portugese, American slave owners of less than 2 centuries ago — the attitude that would have us look down on the US Founding Fathers. There has been no evolutionary advance in that short time; we are not morally better people today — simply similar human beings in different (fortunately better) circumstances.
Nullius in Verba (June 1, 2019 at 4:06 pm), as regards
Hannah Arendt’s point was the same as that of a gang who demand each new member commit a murder, or the scenes in George Orwell’s 1984 where O’Brien tricks Winston and Julia into promising to commit horrendous acts in support of their rebellion against the party – and then replays the recording to undermine Winston’s faith in his own morality. The ideology goes after “the silent ones”, as Stalin called them. It works hard to make every citizen complicit in acts that (via cognitive dissonance theory and other effects) will hamper their ability to believe in a superior morality from which which they can condemn it.
By contrast, the argument over Washington’s slave ownership reflects the exactly opposite idea that his society was guilty of a sin they did not recognise – slave ownership. When Jefferson wrote “I tremble for my country when I think that God is just”, it was precisely this idea of there being a morality superior to that of the state of Virginia – one from which that state’s accepted customs could be condemned – that he was expressing. The doctrine of original sin is one of various ways of expressing the concept that there is just such a superior morality from which totalitarian states can be wholly condemned and other states can be found wanting.
The original sin doctrine you linked to asserts that any state will be found wanting to some degree. It implies the impossibility of earthly millenarian schemes such as communism. I think any straightforward expression of Christian doctrine would imply the same, though no doubt one could find some who would call themselves Christians while disputing that. In this, its practical conclusions are like those right-wing/libertarian doctrines that deny such schemes can work because no-one knows enough or is virtuous enough to be the rulers. C.S.Lewis was expressing a standard Christian view when he wrote that he could accept Aristotle’s doctrine that some men were fit only to be slaves but disagreed with Aristotle’s conclusions because no men were fit to be masters.
“Hannah Arendt’s point was the same as that of a gang who demand each new member commit a murder, or the scenes in George Orwell’s 1984 where O’Brien tricks Winston and Julia into promising to commit horrendous acts in support of their rebellion against the party – and then replays the recording to undermine Winston’s faith in his own morality.”
I’m not disagreeing with Arendt’s principle, but I’m not sure if those examples are quite the same thing. The totalitarian state wants people fearful of breaking the rules and feeling guilty because they’re worried they have done may be caught. Gangs want members who are *not* fearful about breaking rules. It’s more a test and demonstration that you *can’t* be controlled by feelings of guilt about murdering people. (And also makes you legally vulnerable to blackmail/prosecution, and thereby more dependent on the gang’s protection.) Winston was being a bit inconsistent about his morality, but the true believer would argue that such violent acts of terrorism against the Party are morally fully justified because of its evil, and thus not a matter for feelings of guilt. If Winston felt guilty about what he said, it can only be because he still believes it is morally wrong to attack the Party in that way. If so, it is not so much a way to undermine his moral certainty as a demonstration that it has already been thoroughly undermined.
What I was thinking of was a description of the troika system in Stalinist Communism. I think it may have been Solzhenitsyn, but my memory of the source is fuzzy. There were a great many vaguely-worded rules that sounded reasonable enough for people to accept as moral, but ambiguous enough that pretty much anyone could be found guilty of breaking them. And it was up to the discretion of the judge how they chose to interpret them. It sets the person’s morality against their self-interest. On the one hand, the moral position is that they’re guilty, but self-interest motivates them to corrupt that moral principle by ingratiating themselves with the judge. This had the effect of making people very compliant and submissive. Someone for who morality and self-interest are aligned can be brave and defiant. Somebody morally at war with themselves is timid and obedient.
The moral instinct is a very powerful way of getting people to police their own behaviour, even when you’re not watching them, but they have to truly believe in the morality of the moral system for that to work. Morality can only be used to control ‘good’ people – people who feel the need to follow society’s rules. But evil can only defeat good by tempting it to do bad. That breaks their will, their self-confidence.
Totalitarians societies make up lots of rules so that people can’t help but break them. But it’s no use simply to get people to break society’s rules, the psychological effect only works when they’re breaking their own rules, and for that, they have to accept that society has the moral authority.
If you truly have ‘a place of superior morality’ from which you can condemn their entire system, such tactics don’t work. You have your own justification for breaking their rules. You are not bound by them. You are not bound not to corrupt them. You have no reason to feel guilty about doing so.
“By contrast, the argument over Washington’s slave ownership reflects the exactly opposite idea that his society was guilty of a sin they did not recognise – slave ownership.”
Well, certainly the slave-owners were not the subject of totalitarianism! That would be the slaves. And I’m sure there were similar techniques used on them to make them feel guilty about resisting their ‘duty’ to their masters.
But I agree – it’s a straightforward conflict between different moral systems, not the exploitation of moral feelings within a single moral system.
“When Jefferson wrote “I tremble for my country when I think that God is just”, it was precisely this idea of there being a morality superior to that of the state of Virginia – one from which that state’s accepted customs could be condemned – that he was expressing.”
And truly does man create God in his own image!
Jefferson thought slavery was unjust, so he therefore presumed a just God would agree with him, and therefore I guess he feared God might do a bit of smiting of the unjust to compel his nation’s obedience to God’s laws, as frequently described in the Old Testament! Does that make sense?
I’ve no doubt the slave-owners thought slavery was just, presumed that a just God would agree with them, and that he’d smite all those who sought to steal their property without compensation. They’d no doubt be able to cite scripture to support their view, too!
From whence do such moral standards truly come? The Gods? Or from men who, having no way to justify their moral rules objectively, cite the Authority of a figure who is very unlikely to appear in court as witness and contradict them?
“The doctrine of original sin is one of various ways of expressing the concept that there is just such a superior morality from which totalitarian states can be wholly condemned and other states can be found wanting.”
And (in some versions, at least) that you are inescapably guilty from birth for that sin, condemned to everlasting torment for it, except by the grace of God as administered by his Church. It’s why infants were baptised so soon after birth, to ‘wash away their sins’. There was much debate over the fate of unbaptised infant souls in the hereafter. But without original sin, what sins could a day-old infant possibly have to be washed away? Gluttony? Sloth?
Other bits of the Church held that it wasn’t a sin for which you were guilty as such, but rather a vulnerability and weakness that inevitably led you to give in to temptation, without God’s grace to ‘fix’ you and grant you the will to resist (and to grant absolution for your sins when you didn’t). But it all got a bit complicated and metaphysical and I’m sure very confusing to the worshippers.
However, my point was that even if a citizen were to obey every single one of the many rules laid down by the Church, and ask for what crime they were being condemned to hell unless they sought the Church’s baptism and blessing, you could always still catch them out as a sinner by citing ‘original sin’. Everyone is automatically guilty, and only the Church can grant (and withdraw) absolution if they choose to. You don’t have a right to it.
Such power, combined with widespread belief in the Church’s moral authority to set such rules, makes men timid and obedient. Just the way they like it.
@Nullius in Verba
This is the martyr’s choice: You think society is wrong, but if you say so or act against it, society will destroy you.
That isn’t true at all. Washington plainly had choices he could have exercised here to maintain his putative high moral standards. He could have sold his farm, moved north and started some other business, for example. (Unpleasantly, I have to state that when he sold his farm he would do so without selling the slaves. Obviously he would make less money, but if you steal a Monet, hang it in your house and then sell the house, but without the Monet, you also make less money.) He could have taken up a commission and worked in the military. He could have stayed in Philadelphia.
But rather, even when President, he famously longed to be back on his farm. Which sounds all very rural and nice until you realize that what he was longing for was to be back at the top of an empire build on the stolen labor of others, enforced with brutality, and founded on a system that he plainly knew was immoral. This isn’t Emmerdale farm or Little House on the Praire. It is systematic, brutal cruelty. Washington had options to chose a different path, and he knowingly chose the path that he knew was evil.
Washington, unlike his slaves, actually still owned his own choices, and his choices reflect his character.
What do you do? Well, you can go ahead and be a martyr, but unless there are lots of others like you on the verge of taking action,
Since we are arguing about character here, the very essence of character is the willingness to do what you consider right, even when nobody else was. There is no “character” in doing what everyone else does.
Somebody once told me a story about US segregation. Employers in shops and restaurants wanted to employ black people, they were cheaper and the owners were not unsympathetic.
So? Move to somewhere less dreadful. Character is most certainly not genuflecting to the baying masses. In fact it is absolutely the opposite of that. It reminds me of all those celebrities who are lionized when then “take a stand for the environment” or “speak out against racism” as if there is some bravery and character is agreeing with everyone else. True character is to stand against what you think is wrong, irrespective of the cause.
So argue, if you will, that Washington’s slave holding was in his best interest, sure. But don’t somehow turn that around to suggest that it somehow defends his character. Acting in your own self interest even when you know you are performing something bad, in fact vile, is the very opposite of good character.
It is unreasonable to criticise Chaucer’s spelling using modern English standards. It makes no sense to say that one language is more ‘correct’ than another
You can’t possibly think that different spelling is somehow comparable to the knowing choice to rob hundreds of people of their freedom, to steal their children and to beat them into compliance?
I think I might have missed some of your lengthy response, but this seems sufficient to me.
@Gavin Longmuir
Today, we can afford to buy (for example) nice shoes made by child laborers in sweatshops in places like Vietnam — children who are paid a pittance. How different are we from the slave-owners of Ancient Egypt who lived well on the backs of the enslaved Jews?
Slavery and poverty are not the same thing. The history of humans is starting with very little, accumulating a tiny amount of capital from that, then having a tiny bit more, and so on. Then using the process of compound interest to get to the point where their children or grand children, or great grand children are in a much better position.
Slavery is the de jure removal of choices, poverty looks the same, because it de facto greatly reduces choices, however, with the slave he can never have choices, whereas the poor person can, over time improve his situation.
If you wish to assist the aforementioned children of Vietnam I think that is an admirable thing to do. Go ahead. Nothing is stopping you from writing a check to one of the many worthy charities around the world who help the destitute and impoverished. (Would that our taxes were lower on our welfare dollars spent on many less worthy recipients, we all might be able to do more.)
However, interfering with the market process, which sets the price of their labor, is perhaps the worst thing you can do. It screws up the incentives everywhere, and it interrupts the process of them growing their economy from poverty to success. You can see this in one of the growth stories of this century — China. It used to be famous for these self same sweat shops, but now it has risen out of poverty not through “fair” trade but by the market economy (and it is only in those islands of free market economics such as Shanghai and Hong Kong that this has really happened.) I have indeed been in factories in China, and for sure they aren’t like American factories, but they sure aren’t something Charles Dickens would write a novel about.
Having said that, and re-emphasizing this point, often the poverty is caused by the oppressive governments in these countries. Vietnam is a communist state which by policy uses the workers as tools of the state. You can see this most evidently in Africa which is and has remained poor almost entirely because the whole continent is run by kleptocracies.
What to do about this latter problem I do not know. What I do know is that the best thing you can do to help the “sweat shops” in Vietnam is to continue to buy their products to allow them to grow themselves, and, if you feel so inclined use some of your relative riches to support charities around the world who try to help those who don’t have the advantages that you or I do. The worst thing you can do is mix charity and business.
When a future generation looks back on the exploitation of our fellow human beings in which we participate, how would we try to justify ourselves against their allegation that what we are doing today is abhorrent, and we know it? Or would we simply admit the charge?
I don’t know. My defense would be that I did not think what I was doing was abhorrent (something Washington evidently could not say.) On the contrary, I believe trading with them is better than not trading with them. Low wages are better than zero wages, which is, indeed, why these factories have lines out the door applying for the jobs. Giving people what they want, even if it isn’t something I wouldn’t want, is something I think I would feel comfortable defending in the dock in front of my future judges. But perhaps they could come up with some clever argument to condemn me, at which point my argument is that I did not act knowingly in an immoral manner, something Washington cannot claim as we now judge him.
@Gavin Longmuir
that the opportunity for an African king to sell his defeated enemies as slaves to European shippers for transport to the lord’s sugar plantation in the Caribbean was the only reason those defeated African tribesmen were not sacrificially murdered right there & then in Africa.
Well sure, mutilating someone is less bad than murdering them, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t both crimes. The very nature of free trade is two people willingly entering into a trade, one where both think they will benefit. Certainly sometimes that benefit is asymmetric, but it is still on net a benefit to both. If someone enters a trade where they are not benefited they usually do so due to some external force, or sometimes some form of fraud. Employment is completely different than slavery, even when the employee doesn’t earn very much. One is voluntary, the other is not.
It is why I strongly disagree with that principle in the New Testament: “slaves obey your masters”. On the contrary, I think slaves should take every viable opportunity to escape, and if they can kill their masters on the way out all the better. And that I would have advocated for Washington and Jefferson’s slaves, much as I recognized that their loss would be a great loss to humanity.
One of the most famous slaves in all of literature is Princess Leia, you know, in the gold bikini. Rather disturbingly held up as a sex symbol, the thing I liked most about her was not so much her evidently delightful good looks, but rather that she took the chain with which she was enslaved and used it to strangle to death the man who enslaved her. That is my kind of Princess.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mE-UNIFJTQU
I think you’re being too hard on GW.
Of the 55 delegates to the US Constitutional Convention, 27 owned slaves. 19 of them owned multiple slaves and relied upon that labor for their livelihood.
The prevailing social view of blacks up to that time was that they were not fully human beings. I remember reading – I couldn’t cite to this, as I have no memory of where I read it – that the term “souls on board” (referring to the people aboard a ship) did not include black slaves, because the slaves had no souls. Abhorrent to us, certainly, but that was the prevailing view throughout our history. That view began to change only during the time of GW’s life – and we all know that people change major philosophical paradigms rarely. Generally, paradigms only change as adherents die off.
Maybe think of him as unfortunate to have lived during a time when the major paradigms were so at odds with those we hold to be true now, but remember that morality has to have a context, and that context is composed of the extant paradigms during our existence. We can only be “moral” to the extent we accept some system of morality, and people whose concept of morality is at odds with society’s concept aren’t generally held in high esteem. The Unabomber certainly held to a specific and rigid morality – he was true to it – but . . .
Fraser O: “My defense would be that I did not think what I was doing was abhorrent …”
I guess we will just have to disagree on that point. There is no moral clarity in this situation — especially when we throw in consideration for our neighbor who is now unemployed because his work has been offshored to very low paid people in the Third World, while we are benefitting from the low priced imports created by those under-paid people. We could tell ourselves that this is simply economics, and morality has no place in this situation. But if we are prepared to give ourselves that dispensation, why would we deny that same dispensation to the slave owners of history? They were simply acting rationally within an economic system which had been the norm for human beings since the beginning of history.
Separately, this discussion has led me to the work of Eric Williams, which casts another light on the question (mainly of academic interest) about why the Industrial Revolution happened where it did and when it did. The link between the Industrial Revolution and the ending of slavery is undeniable.
People have advanced all sorts of explanations for the Industrial Revolution starting in 18th Century England, ranging from serendipity to prior improvements in agriculture to patent law. Williams points out that the Industrial Revolution required the investment of large amounts of capital — and England had that capital because of the huge profits Englishmen were making from their participation in the slave trade and their sugar plantations in the Caribbean, where the slaves would typically last for only 5 hard years. I am not sure about that hypothesis, and will have to dig deeper.
“That isn’t true at all. Washington plainly had choices he could have exercised here to maintain his putative high moral standards. He could have sold his farm, moved north and started some other business, for example.”
But all alternative businesses have the same problem. If all your competitors are using slaves, and you’re paying a wage, you can’t match their prices and you go out of business.
I don’t know whether he could have found an alternative. What I was saying was that based on what he said, he appears to have believed that he couldn’t.
“He could have taken up a commission and worked in the military.”
I don’t know about Washington, but by this standard that ought to be difficult for any libertarian. Since taxes are stolen by force from those who earned it, to work for the government is morally as bad as owning slaves. That would obviously include the military. That would also surely include government contracts.
Indeed, getting paid at all poses a problem, since everyone wants to do it with the government’s worthless fiat money, which is to participate in that evil deception. It’s an interesting line of thought. You could have some sort of libertarian equivalent of a vegan, which is a fascinating concept. Rather than refusing anything that exploits animals, one refuses anything that exploits taxpayers! Hmm… I like it!
“So argue, if you will, that Washington’s slave holding was in his best interest, sure. But don’t somehow turn that around to suggest that it somehow defends his character. Acting in your own self interest even when you know you are performing something bad, in fact vile, is the very opposite of good character.”
That wasn’t precisely the argument. It wasn’t simply that society would destroy you if you resisted, and self-preservation justifies compliance. (Although many would think it not unreasonable.) It was that resisting would achive nothing but to destroy a good person, and leave the world with one good person fewer. If every good person did so individually, and got destroyed, there would be nobody left to bring about change.
There is nobility in sacrificing yourself to do good. But what good is done by sacrificing the virtuous in exchange for nothing at all?
Suppose you are one of those (hypothetical) people who are ethically opposed to eating the bodies of any living thing, animal, plant, fungi, or bacteria? Are you morally obliged to starve? Or would it be better to eat and to devote your life to inventing lab-made artificial foods from non-living precursors?
“You can’t possibly think that different spelling is somehow comparable to the knowing choice to rob hundreds of people of their freedom, to steal their children and to beat them into compliance?”
In what sense? That you think the comparison is semantically invalid, or that moral rules hold a greater emotional significance that it’s wrong to ignore or make light of because witnessing major violations of moral rules evokes in us a visceral emotional reaction of violent anger, and spelling mistakes don’t? (Unless you count thrown blackboard erasers by red-faced English teachers…)
To answer the question: Yes! I do! It is an easily observable historical fact that many humans, widely aclaimed by their peers as superior in their morality, have invented and operated moral systems that supported exactly that!
This is what I was talking about. This is the equivalent of the English tourist who cannot believe that foreigners don’t speak English. The language, and the moral rules you are brought up with seem totally natural and necessary. It’s the way things are. The way things have to be. The only way they could be. That digging implement *is* a spade, not a ‘bêche’ or whatever other outlandish made-up syllables you want to invent!
And because they can’t process the idea, such people invent some story that enables them to retain their worldview. That foreigners know they’re using the wrong words for things and are only doing it for personal advantage, or to annoy the English, or as a temporary step on the way to becoming English, or because they’ve been misled. There’s an old joke, that argued that the reason foreigners were less intelligent than the English was that they were continually having to translate everything said into and out of a foreign language. Because obviously everyone thinks in English.
The world doesn’t work like that. Other moral systems are held by their followers to be as true and good as we hold ours, as naturally as speaking their language. They’d cheerfully impose slavery, and then write self-congratulatory books about it all, admitting what they did, to show the world how morally superior they were.
Chaucer genuinely thought that was how the words were spelt. He wasn’t doing it for effect, or to make things difficult for the reader. And Moses genuinely thought he was doing God’s will when he slaughtered the Midianites. He sent his army out to do the job, who slaughted the men of the the tribe and brought back the women and children as chattels. Moses flew into a rage, because they’d left the women and children alive! The women and boys were slaughtered, and the virgin girls they kept for themselves… And Moses was clearly a high-minded man to who morality was extremely important, and whose innovations in this area we still carve on tablets of stone today. It’s not that he was ‘immoral’, in contemporary terms. (Well, I guess the Midianites might have argued…) It’s that the morality of his times is as different to ours as their language is. He spoke a different language. He held to a different morality. To someone with an English language and morality, what he said and did is wrong. But as neither was to be invented for thousands of years, it’s not reasonable to expect him to have said or done otherwise. We can judge the system, but not the man.
What I’m about to say might come across badly, I’m not always able to express myself well. Take my word that I absolutely genuinely mean this, without any irony, sarcasm, patronisation (patronage?) or condescension.
I think the fact that this troubles you is a sign of good character.
Fraser Orr, would you be willing to back me up – like me, you’ve seen (some) factories out in the Far East? Presumably, like me, you’ve also seen the alternative?
I think that you’re being too hard on yourself, Gavin.
Honestly, I do. And I’m generally a bit of a big ol’ softie on that kind of thing, right? 🙂 Proper SJW, me.
I draw a sharp line between “choices between bad alternatives” (sweatshops vs digging through garbage) and “no choice” (actual slavery).
It’s not easy. I think that, maybe I just hope that, we are able to think critically and are able to note that difference between “rational choices” and “bad choices”. A free man in the midst of a storm on a boat has free choice – but none of his choices are good ones! A slave has none – or none, that we as libertarians, who hold “liberty” as a high ideal, would recognise. But, I don’t think it’s sensible (let alone correct) to pretend that inequality of opportunity doesn’t exist. I think that’s what you’re recognising – some people only have bad choices available!
(I share Fraser’s discomfort with the conversation that assuages guilt from slave-owners, but my take might be a little different. Beyond the “principle” of self-ownership, I’m slight discomforted that this thread (started with a more critical discussion of MLK, one of the “greatest” figures in black liberation history and now cast under a more critical lens) morphed into a “kinda, just saying” defence of ownership of black people, because y’know, that weren’t treated badly, and y’know, black people did it too, and white people owned white people, too, amirite? I’ve so far avoided discussion of that part of it, because I don’t really have skin in the game. I don’t venerate ancestors, as a general personal rule, nor do I judge them – but I’m not from the US, where the conversation is much more sharp)
I go back to – I honestly believe that we’re helping people. The factories are (generally) not as bad as made out, and are getting better. In turn, life is getting better – go back up to my “Chinese New Year” comment, as an example. There are outliers – always there are outliers! – but in general, we’re helping people.
It’s just that it’s slow, and we wish we could could package up “our” standard of living and parachute it all in in one go.
But, my experience is that in the five years I spent working with suppliers over there (as in, I spent five years going on trips over there, not that I spent five years living over there exclusively), the speed of change was immense. Faster than we managed it, when we were making it up as we go along!
I was amazed at the difference in only five years (2009 to 2014), I’ve not been there since. Maybe Fraser can cast some insight on more recent developments.
Do I recall correctly, that a little while ago, you (and others) went out of your way to try to make me feel better about doing just that?
🙂
You didn’t need to, but you did (and everyone else who did so) – because you are decent human beings who think carefully about these things, right?
Neonsnake: We are all products of our environment, as NIV has so eloquently argued. Probably like you, I was brought up with the clear understanding that (a) all slaves were black and worked in the cotton fields of the American South, and (b) the slave-owner went to bed tired every night from flogging his slaves. It was only later that I realized this was a very distorted, highly incomplete view of history.
The Jews were enslaved by Egyptians. The Romans took slaves from almost every group they encountered. The very word “slave” comes from “Slav”, the distinctly non-black people who were enslaved generation-after-generation by those nice Scandinavians and sold into slavery in the Muslim world. 90% of the Africans enslaved & sold by other Africans for shipment across the Atlantic went to English, French, Portugese, Spanish colonies in the Caribbean and South America where their lives we so short that a continued supply of new slaves was required. If Europeans today want to feel guilty about slavery, they have a lot of material to work with!
Please understand, I am not defending the ancient practice of slavery. I am criticizing today’s View of the Enlightened that we can demonstrate how good we are by ticking the Politically Correct box and being vocally opposed to long-gone slavery and, in particular, by adopting an entirely unwarranted stance of moral superiority to those long-dead slave owners.
Neonsnake: “Do I recall correctly, that a little while ago, you (and others) went out of your way to try to make me feel better about doing just that?”
Yes, you do recall correctly. And I still believe you did the right thing by awarding the work to the Eastern European supplier. And you did the right thing by ruminating extensively over that decision before making it. That was the appropriate economic decision in the world as it exists today.
All I am trying to point out with the discussion about offshoring work to low-paid Third Worlders (while leaving our fellow citizens with the opportunity to exercise their freedom by looking for other employment) is that we should be careful about adopting a stance of moral superiority to historical figures who equally made rational economic decisions in the world as it then existed. We are not morally superior to them — simply living under different conditions.
As an aside, I had my first trip to China earlier this year — supposedly backwards Western China. I was dealing with professionals in office environments & the field rather than on factory floors. But I spent as much time as I could looking around outside any bubbles. All I can say is I was very impressed with China and the living conditions for Chinese people. San Francisco could learn lessons from Chengdu. China is not really a Third World nation anymore — although they like to argue they are when foolish Westerners talk about mitigating alleged Global Warming!
I deny it. 🙂
If Mr Williams had meant that England would never have developed the industrial revolution had it not long before become a society of free citizens (no serfs or slaves), he’d have a point. Alas, Williams is serving political correctness, and much offending against actual correctness, by reversing cause and effect in making England’s 18th century domination of the Atlantic trade a cause rather than an effect of England’s growing power.
The Spanish assiento did not give Spain, or any they leased it to, an industrial revolution. Portugal began trading slaves earlier than England and went on trading them longer, but did not have an industrial revolution – on the contrary, England’s industrial revolution gave the strength to compel the reluctant Portuguese to stop. The Arab world imported more negro slaves than the entire western hemisphere (plus huge numbers of caucasian slaves) without having an industrial revolution.
Everything in that paragraph is wrong. The timeline is wrong: the first steam engine patent in England was 1696. The investment source is wrong: pushing the figures to their limits still does not let as much as 2% of English capital in the maximum period be derived from slave estates, and the idea that its owners invested any significant fraction of that small proportion in the industrial revolution is contradicted by much evidence (including extensive contemporary comment, supported by records, that they tended to spend it on riotous living, often resulting in debts rather than funds to invest). The Quakers – who refused to have anything to do with slaves – were the investors and innovators at Ironbridge – which did not require that much investment, let alone more than the internal UK could easily provide. And above all, the claim that Caribbean slaves lived for 5 years is worse than merely wrong. If Williams pushes than line, his profession is not that of historian.
As you may have guessed by now, I feel pretty sure about it. 🙂
Lby ticking the Politically Correct box and being vocally opposed to long-gone slavery
@bobby b
I think you’re being too hard on GW.
He was a slaveholder who owned and brutalized hundreds of slaves. I’m not sure he deserves to have any slack cut to him. But perhaps you disagree.
Of the 55 delegates to the US Constitutional Convention, 27 owned slaves. 19 of them owned multiple slaves and relied upon that labor for their livelihood.
Sure, and honestly, in an exception that proves the rule kind of a way, I think this is more supportive of my position than the one against which I am arguing. Many of those who did not only not own slaves, but were vehement abolitionists. And Washington spent a great deal of time debating them philosophically, the issue of slavery being one of the prominent issues. So the idea that Washington was blithely ignorant of the slavery issue, that he just believed what society told him and had never really weighed the issue is plainly not true. He had been fully exposed to the arguments in opposition to slavery and yet continued to own, buy, sell, steal from and brutalize those whom he had kidnapped and imprisoned. In fact his presidency indicates that he longed to leave the society that eschewed slavery to return again to one that embraced and adored it. Once again, the data seems fairly clear that Washington did not ignorantly engage in slavery, but that he did so knowing full well the evils of it (or at least the arguments that said that it was evil.)
The prevailing social view of blacks up to that time was that they were not fully human beings.
But returning to my third argument, I don’t agree with that at all. The prevailing social view among the elite ruling slave holding classes may have been that. However, I doubt very much that the black population agreed with that. So there was plenty of social context to appreciate the unfairness of that view. Moreover, that might work in some small part to the planter class in Virginia, but Washington’s experience was much broader than that. There were many people to whom he was exposed who did not hold that view, or did not hold to it as strongly as the Virginians. So Washington cannot simply say “I didn’t know any better” because plainly, he did.
I’d also point out that Washington dealt with slaves every day he was at Mount Vernon. He talked to them, interacted with them, used them for his purposes. Now for sure they were generally uneducated and lacking refinement (the reason of course being that they were stolen as children and forced into labor before they had a chance to get an education — and of course they probably couldn’t have an education anyway since it was illegal in many places to teach blacks to read and write.) Washington though, no doubt dealt with many low class white people too whose manners, education and behavior would have been similarly unrefined. So he had plenty of opportunity experientially to judge the idea that blacks were sub human.
and we all know that people change major philosophical paradigms rarely. Generally, paradigms only change as adherents die off.
I don’t agree with this either. After all, Washington was, at the beginning, a loyal servant of the king, and yet his view changed to a rebel leader, and eventually an anti monarchist. So plainly his views did change. I can also speak from personal experience that my views have been changed by convincing arguments too. As a matter of fact you, personally, have changed my views on a couple of things. So I do not find the “you can’t teach old dogs new tricks” argument especially convincing, especially so when the particular old dog to whom you refer evidently did learn many quite transformative tricks.
Maybe think of him as unfortunate to have lived during a time when the major paradigms were so at odds with those we hold to be true now, but remember that morality has to have a context
I think your argument would hold a great deal more water were Washington some parochial Virginia planter, unexposed to a “moral context” different than that narrow society. But he was not, and he consequently cannot be excused by this argument. As I said before, to commit a sin ignorantly is one thing, to commit it knowingly, quite another.
I’d also say that the case against Jefferson is much stronger. Jefferson was much more vocal about his thoughts on slavery than the often laconic Washington. Coupled with his specific attempts at remediation while still personally profiting, seems to offer him in a very negative light indeed.
Having said that, I try not to make the mistake of which I accuse others of having only a “good man” or “bad man” bucket. Washington and Jefferson are complex and conflicted individuals. Men who did terrible things in the lives of hundreds of individuals in the personal sphere, but who did history changing things to benefit the lives of billions of those who followed in the political sphere. A simplistic assessment of their character (or that of MLK, FWIW) is to trivialize a complex subject to sophomoric sound bites.
@Nullius in Verba
But all alternative businesses have the same problem. If all your competitors are using slaves, and you’re paying a wage, you can’t match their prices and you go out of business.
Businesses in Massachusetts weren’t using slaves. He could have moved his business there. He could have used his considerable capital to take advantage of the massive business opportunities in the growing west. He could have stayed in the south and built a business around technology rather than labor, and perhaps a hundred other options. The American economy was exploding at that time. The idea the his only economic option was to continue to exploit the stolen labor and bodies of others is not sustainable.
Would his income and wealth have been less? Perhaps, but bank robbers who give up their stealing too are less well off for having done so (in an environment when bank robbery is not considered wrong.)
I don’t know about Washington, but by this standard that ought to be difficult for any libertarian.
Why? Do you think that Libertarians are opposed to a country having a military? If so you’d be mistaken. How to fund a libertarian government is a massive tangent that I’m going to not go off on. However, there are various ways to do so, some better than others, nonetheless libertarians generally are not opposed to any government, and the need to have some small government (and some small military) does indicate that need to raise money to pay for it. So, no, government raising funds is not the same as slavery at all. In fact the comparison is rather jejune.
Indeed, getting paid at all poses a problem, since everyone wants to do it with the government’s worthless fiat money, which is to participate in that evil deception.
Honestly, I think you are deflecting the argument from the brutal evil of slavery to minor points of libertarian philosophy. Money doesn’t have to be fiat. So what does that have to do with anything?
It was that resisting would achive nothing but to destroy a good person, and leave the world with one good person fewer.
I didn’t even especially advocate resisting, I just advocated not participating. Let’s say you are a movie exec and all the other male execs regularly pressure young actresses into sleeping with them in exchange for parts. You have three options.
1. You can blow the whistle, try to correct the moral wrong, and probably make no difference and get fired.
2. You can say nothing, but keep your pants zipped and give actresses parts based on their merits
3. You can get a bit of action yourself and enjoy all that this ugly subculture offers.
I’m asking why Washington didn’t chose 2 over 3. Perhaps 1 was too much to ask, but was 2 too much to ask?
There is nobility in sacrificing yourself to do good. But what good is done by sacrificing the virtuous in exchange for nothing at all?
Nothing at all? Washington lived in a society that valued their virtue, character and good name above all else. Was a sacrifice to remove the filthy blot of slavery from your character not worth a sacrifice?
The rest of your lengthy reply seems more of the same, so I’ll let it stand at that, with you defending spelling changes as the moral equivalent of the emancipation of a whole race of people. Suffice it to say I find that comparison inappropriate.
@Gavin Longmuir
I guess we will just have to disagree on that point. There is no moral clarity in this situation
But Gavin what you are now arguing is that the free market system is intrinsically immoral. That is a completely different argument than the slavery one. Perhaps you are right that it will prevail, and 100 years from now they will tut tut at us for using such an immoral system as “free markets”. After all, the trend in America certainly seems to be away from the free market system that has pulled us up from the poverty stricken middle ages to our breathtaking wealth today (a wealth that the average European from the 14th century would look on your poor modern Vietnamese with eye popping jealousy.) But that is one I would be happy to defend in that dock in the future in the unlikely event I am still around then.
However, the whole argument over the morality of the free market system is such a massive tangent in this already tangent laden thread, that I think, if you don’t mind, I’ll take a pass on. It is something that is examined at great length in the literature and in many other threads on this blog. So perhaps we can take it up another time.
Having defended my own view of why GW’s character can be respected despite his being a slaveowner, Niall pedant Kilmartin will now quarrel with the differently-justified defences of others.
bobby b (June 2, 2019 at 5:40 pm), while ‘souls on board’ a slave ship may have meant the Africans were not Christians, once they arrived in the old south, efforts were made to convert them, enable them to have churches, etc. – efforts which had great success. IIRC, in the 1850s, the two richest negroes in Savannah were not legally free – they were preachers in negro churches and still legally slaves, but their owners left church funds alone. Doubtless it would not have been prudent for a negro at that time to go around singing “It ain’t necessarily so”, but there is superabundant evidence that conversions were sincere – and that the white community knew their Christianity affirmed that negroes had souls. As I noted above, I do not claim the degree of deep decades-long study of 1700s America that I do of 1800s, but I know no evidence that Washington questioned this.
Nullius in Verba (June 2, 2019 at 6:11 pm), it was not at all the case that society would destroy Washington if he freed his slaves or that he had no choices. Washington’s quote about it being the task of the legislature, not him, refers to his having no power, as president, to free all slaves. His own slaves – his own property – he could indeed free. John Randolf freed his slaves in his will and bought land for them to live on. Lee freed his slaves in accord with his father’s will. By 1860, Virginia contained more free negroes than it did slave-owners. Some of these came from elsewhere because the culture of Virginia was friendlier to them than that of the deep south, but clearly a good many Virginians freed a good many slaves. I noted above that tobacco farmers – many Virginians were tobacco farmers – found it necessary to evolve slavery to have employment-like aspects. (This tendency was also noticeable where negroes worked in factories – Virginia was by far the most industrialised of the southern states.)
I do not know how far, if at all, George Washington (a Virginia tobacco farmer) had gone as regards any of the above but, IIUC, the behaviour of some others then or soon after, shows that in his life or in his will he certainly had options. (One minor thing I do know. George Washington held his farewell dinner to his officers at the end of the revolutionary war in a tavern owned and run by a free negro.)
@Niall
I didn’t notice your defense of Washington, so I went back and had a look. But I don’t think your position is much different than mine. I have gone to some lengths specifically to state that I do not subscribe to the “GW kept slaves so burn all respect for him.” On the contrary, I’d say I was more advocating that “GW set up the Republic, therefore we should whitewash his slave holding” is an equally untenable view.
It seems your primary argument in his favor is that the southern society implicated him in its guilt, and so built systems to make it hard for him to be righteous. But to me that misses the point: refusing to do evil even when it costs you something is the very essence of what it means to have good character. So a defense of his character that uses as its basis “choosing to do right would have cost him a lot in social standing or money” is self evidently an invalid defense.
Those who are blithely ignorant of their evil doing perhaps may have their sentence mitigated, but those who did so knowingly must surely be judged with that as an aggravating factor.
If I have mis-characterized your position, please excuse, it was not done intentionally.
Niall, Sunday at 8:41 a.m.:
Which proves yet again that there is still plenty of gold to be mined in older Samizdata discussions and postings. 😀 *applause*
And this one, be it noted, was begun on May 29, yet your comment above was left on June 2, and mine will hit the stands on June 3 in the U.K. So, “older” indeed!
Even the ones from clear back 17+ years ago.
…One would note also that part of the Marxist/neo-Marxist/other-Marxisms/Proggie/SJW and most Lefty agendas are big on pushing this anti-self-confidence viewpoint. I b’lieve that guy who wrote some book with a date as its title noted this last.
.
I have been beating the drum about America’s loss of moral self-confidence in dealing with our enemies both foreign and domestic for at least 15 years now — and this is relevant to the UK and even Europe (!) as well.
But Miss R. cautioned about this as well, at least indirectly, as did Jean-François Revel (Last Exit to Utopia: The Survival of Socialism in a Post-Soviet Era , and before that Anti Americanism) and various others.
Niall K: “The timeline is wrong: the first steam engine patent in England was 1696.”
With your historical knowledge, Niall, you probably understand better than any of us that things moved more slowly back in those days. Steam engines and other mechanical products were improving and becoming more widely adopted 50+ years later in the later 1700s when the Triangular Trade was still in full flood, with English ships taking slaves to the Caribbean and wealth to England. English slavery did not come to an end until well into the 1800s, which seems to fit the timeline rather well.
“The investment source is wrong: pushing the figures to their limits still does not let as much as 2% of English capital in the maximum period be derived from slave estates …”
As I mentioned, Niall, this hypothesis is new to me. If there are any sources you would recommend on the financing of the Industrial Revolution in England, they would be much appreciated. We are all on this Earth to learn!
Just a side thought on all of this. Today, we are all opposed to slavery — taking away a person’s liberty and whipping him to keep him in line. Question is: what was life like for a free man, say a white Englishman, during the same period?
It is easy to forget about the government Press Gangs which operated in England for nearly two centuries, right up until the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. An English fisherman who got drunk in a waterfront bar in the 18th Century was likely to wake up on board an English naval vessel and find he had been involuntarily enlisted for years of service. Unemployed free Englishmen were involuntarily impressed into naval service by local magistrates. If the man tried to escape from this involuntary servitude, he could be flogged — potentially to death. The Royal Navy did not end flogging its sailors until 1881, almost half a century after England ended its involvement in African slavery.
In our distaste for slavery, we should not lose sight of the comparable conditions faced by “free men” in the same era.
Niall,
From the link above, which certainly doesn’t whitewash Washington as a slave-“owner” (I find I’m now touchy about that usage — people are not entitled to own other people, period*, so I would prefer to say “slave-master”):
https://www.mountvernon.org/george-washington/slavery/ten-facts-about-washington-slavery/ ,
Point 10: George Washington left instructions in his will to emancipate the people enslaved by him, upon the death of [his wife] Martha [Custis] Washington.
Washington wrote his will [link at source] several months before his death in December 1799. At the time, he “owned” 123 slaves; the rest, 153 of them, were legally required to be returned to people in the Custis family when Mrs. Washington died, as they had come to serve Washington as “dower property” from the Custis family. From the site:
“In accordance with state law, George Washington stipulated in his will that elderly enslaved people or those who were too sick to work were to be supported by his estate in perpetuity.”
(It goes on to say that Martha Washington freed them as of Jan. 1, 1801. And that according to a letter from Abigail Adams to her sister, M.W. freed them herself because she was afraid of them with her husband gone.)
.
*Just to be clear: Yes, that’s a stricture in my morality and not everyone agrees with it; but “Sayin’ No don’t make it so,” according to me. Not everyone agrees that 19 Muslims brought down the Twin Towers, either, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t.
[Even so, “circumstances alter cases,” as my Dad used to say. (At the time, I knew that proved him unprincipled. Strangely, without changing his mind at all he became quite principled two or three decades ago. Go figure! *wry grin*) –I can now easily imagine a circumstance in which one might honourably claim “ownership” of another person. That may actually have arisen in history — where A claims ownership of B because if he doesn’t, men (or women) with guns will shoot B, or worse.]
“The idea the his only economic option was to continue to exploit the stolen labor and bodies of others is not sustainable.”
Well, as I already noted, I don’t know enough about Washington’s economic circumstances to argue. It was just how I interpreted his words.
I was motivated to briefly look up some of the background. According to the font of all knowledge:
The bit in the middle suggests that when he eventually came to hold those opinions (which was admittedly late), there were other reasons he felt he couldn’t do it – primarily that it would involve breaking up families. However, like I said, I don’t know enough to confidently comment.
“Why? Do you think that Libertarians are opposed to a country having a military? If so you’d be mistaken.”
Umm. This would be analogous to asking whether having problems with slavery means I think libertarians are opposed to cotton farming. It’s not having a military that’s the problem, it’s how it’s funded.
Taxes are extracted by force from the taxpayers. You don’t have an option. You can’t say ‘no’. It’s a form of partial slavery – slavery is a lot like a 100% income tax. Taxes are – from a property freedom point of view – plain theft. They are an evil. However, they are an evil we are willing to put up with because there are certain things that markets don’t do well and we want them. Like a military.
If we had an army of slaves (either literally, like the mamluk, or figuratively, as in National Service) you could make the same argument. We need a military. It’s hard to get the free market to pay for it (defence being a public good). The moral cost of taking people’s labour by force to supply it is worth paying for the benefit. It’s a lesser evil, but it’s still evil. The only difference is that with an army of slaves the slaves pay, and with a professional army funded by the state, this burden of forced labour is transferred from the army themselves to the taxpayers – most of the tax burden resting unevenly on those with the biggest incomes.
An argument can be made for it that tax-funded enterprises are morally akin to profiting from slavery, and *some* libertarians do. (Anarchists, particularly. Minarchists, possibly.) I take it that you’re not one of those. But for the sake of argument, would you agree that those that do could have the same problem with joining the military as you do with Washington growing tobacco and wheat?
“Honestly, I think you are deflecting the argument from the brutal evil of slavery to minor points of libertarian philosophy.”
No, I’m trying to make a rather major point of moral philosophy. I’m not trying to deflect the argument from ‘the brutal evil of slavery’. Within *our* moral system, that’s a statement of the obvious that I didn’t think I needed to repeat. Yes, it’s brutal and evil. To us.
However, it’s easily observed that there are multiple moral systems and in some of them it’s a brutal evil and in others it’s not. Philosophically, this is a far more interesting statement because it’s so common for people invested in only a single moral system to be blind to all the rest. Noting that there is more than one and that they all feel the same from the inside is new information to many people. It has implications they may not have thought about.
But when people are emotionally invested in a single moral system like that, they prefer to preserve the illusion that it’s the only one. To talk about any others as if they were somehow equally valid seems like a moral betrayal, an attempt to justify or defend their evil. But in discussing them I’m only talking about the ‘is’, not the ‘ought’ of it. I’m describing what human nature and human morality *is*. I’m not saying anything about what it *ought* to be. (The ‘ought’ of course is rather obvious – every moral system says it’s the only true one, and the one everyone ought to follow.)
The emotional responses that moral considerations evoke get in the way of clear thinking about what moral systems are. (And I emphasise again, I’m not talking about what they ought to be here.) Which is why the language example is so useful. The phenomena have much the same structure, but we don’t get emotionally fired up about defending our language, so we can see what’s going on without all the smoke and flames getting in the way.
But of course, for some people the smoke and flames are the whole point.
“Money doesn’t have to be fiat. So what does that have to do with anything?”
It doesn’t have to be, but it is. The point I’m making is that we all have to survive in a society that contains many things that we as libertarians don’t agree with, or oppose as evils. But we have to participate in them if we want to eat.
Gavin, that’s a point sufficiently interesting to arouse me to comment.
While such a thing as the government’s flogging or kidnapping persons for being drunk-and-disorderly or for being a vagrant, that still would allow those who can manage to avoid those (and for all I know other) proscribed behaviours “free,” just as incarceration, house arrest, and community service punishments in our legal system do curtail the convicted perps’ liberty, they don’t affect those of us — the overwhelming majority, after all — who somehow avoid felonious behaviour by restricting our self-determination.
The same when, whether at criminal or civil law, financial payment of some sort is exacted.
While the situation here is nowhere near the maximum practical liberty that we should have in as libertarian regime as the Great Frog has seen fit to let us have, we are still not “owned” in toto by the State. Nor were the British people in 1881, as near as I can make out anyhow.
A small point, in a way, but true slavery — the near-absolute loss of self-determination, whether legally by way of conviction for lawbreaking, or by private parties, which might not, theoretically at least, be illegal — is far from what most of us Westerners have to put up with today. Although from what I gather, the situation in Britain may actually be worse than it is here; apart from drug-dealing and usage, anyway.
Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t fight for a better system, of course. :>))
Nullius,
Oh yeah? You read any of my postings on the topic? 😈
@Gavin Longmuir
In our distaste for slavery, we should not lose sight of the comparable conditions faced by “free men” in the same era.
Although your sentiment here is correct, I did want to point out that “impressed” is just a fancy word for “enslaved” in a specifically naval context, although this type of slavery was less horrible than the one we are talking about (for example, the Royal Navy did not claim ownership of the seaman’s children, and in theory at least the impressed seaman had an end date on his slavery.)
@Nullius in Verba
June 3, 2019 at 1:47 am
In 1788, Washington declined a suggestion from a leading French abolitionist…
Thanks, this quotation I think offered considerably illumination. What did it say? Washington plainly knew slavery was wrong, and he was perhaps moving toward doing the right thing. Nonetheless he didn’t until he died (and his wife retained some slaves for a while afterward too.) It is patronizing, is it not, that he felt the need to organize the circumstances of their liberation rather than just recognize that he had not right to enslave them. If he felt and obligation to them (as perhaps he should) he could have offered them a job, or offered those unable to work a pension. But rather, in true slave holding fashion, he decided to decide their fates for them. Like I say, the quotation seems to indicate that he was moving in the right general direction, but is hardly an absolution. I’d appreciate a reference so I can read more on this.
Taxes are extracted by force from the taxpayers. You don’t have an option.
Like I say, I suggest you do a bit of reading on how libertarians propose funding their government rather than imagining that your suggestion of taxes are the only possible solution. In Washington’s day there were very few taxes.
I take it that you’re not one of those. But for the sake of argument, would you agree that those that do could have the same problem with joining the military as you do with Washington growing tobacco and wheat?
No I favor funding a military in a voluntary fashion, but my view is entirely irrelevant. The subject matter is alternative ways of making a living available to Washington, and plainly he was perfectly OK with a military career given that he already had had one.
However, it’s easily observed that there are multiple moral systems and in some of them it’s a brutal evil and in others it’s not.
For sure, that is why I have consistently judged Washington by HIS OWN moral system. So again, you are just deflecting from the main point here.
Philosophically, this is a far more interesting statement because it’s so common for people invested in only a single moral system to be blind to all the rest.
But you are attributing to me something that plainly isn’t true. At the very beginning of this discussion I said that I did not think there was any absolute moral system, which is why for the most part I have judged him by HIS OWN moral system. (There is a secondary argument that we can also judge people by our moral system retrospectively, it was my second argument above, but I fear introducing this argument into this discussion will confused and misdirect. So let’s stick with point 1 and 3 for now.)
But when people are emotionally invested in a single moral system like that, they prefer to preserve the illusion that it’s the only one.
Again you are talking in the philosophical abstract here. AFAIK NOBODY in this discussion thread has done that at all. I think we are all rather to wise to fall into that trap.
So, to be honest NIV, I feel your whole argument is a straw man. You start out with a great quote which really rather demonstrates my point that Washington was well aware of the fact that his slaving holding was wrong, by his own moral system. And then from there you go on to argue against something that nobody is suggesting — namely that we shouldn’t judge someone by contemporary moral standards. This is the very definition of a straw man.
So let me assert again my view on this: Washington had a major blot on his character because he enslaved people, bought them, sold them, stole their labor, stole their children and beat then into compliance, and he did all this when he PLAINLY knew it was wrong for him to do so. When your behavior does not match your moral convictions then your character is stained.
Nobody is arguing that, by today’s standards his behavior was wrong, I am arguing that by HIS OWN standard his behavior was wrong. I’m not sure how to say it more clearly than that.
To me this seems to be an indisputable fact, so I don’t even understand what we are arguing about.
Julie near Chicago (June 3, 2019 at 12:23 am), one might summarise in the poet’s words:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre,
The falcon cannot hear the falconer.
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand.
Surely the Second Coming is at hand!
…
But now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?
******
Chilling, isn’t it. 1919…
Perhaps the very first poem that really shook me, when as a teenager I began reading serious poetry.
To your point: Yes, I am afraid so.
Gavin Longmuir (June 3, 2019 at 1:12 am), I agree it is very sensible to look at what was treated as fair between free men at the time when assessing the treatment of slaves. Indeed, it is basic due diligence if one is advocating a historical thesis, though I would not demand that standard of a mere samizdata thread comment. (On that point, Nullius in Verba, June 3, 2019 at 1:47 am, thanks for the information about Washington’s will. I’ve known the “fount of all knowledge” to be anything but the whole story even in summarising wills – e.g. of Lee’s father – when they touch on this subject, but what does not err on the side of PC is usually reasonably factual.)
Huckleberry Finn is one very readable source for how flogging was viewed back then. Huck treats the ‘lickings’ he gets from the Widow Douglas and Aunt Polly as mere jokes – which they are when compared to the floggings his father inflicts (Huck decides to run away because “Pap was getting too handy with his hickory – I was all over welts.”).
The book has a grim undertone which its skilled comic writing only rarely lets surface, e.g. when his father’s comical drunken political rantings are succeeded by a delirium tremens that Huck is lucky to survive, or the eventual riding-on-a-rail of ‘the King’ and ‘the Duke’ that upsets Huck, though he has much cause to dislike them. This incident was prefigured by the sweet heroine Mary Jane, whose gentle manner switches to, “Right, let’s not waste a minute, not a second – we’ll tar and feather them and ride them on a rail” the moment Huck warns her about them* – and then, as comically, flips instantly back again under the code of southern manners. (I think it no accident that all Huck’s descriptions of her are unconsciously abrasive: “She was full of grit”, “She had the most sand of any girl I every knew”, etc. “It sounds like flattery but it ain’t no flattery”, says Huck of how he talks about her – and I think the author meant it. 🙂 )
After the miseries and deaths inflicted by white men on white men during the first two-thirds of the book, the comical misfortunes Jim suffers as Tom guides his escape from slavery “according to the best European models” in the final part make a very lighthearted contrast – though even there, Twain has a point to make. Having brutally presented US society (mostly southern but he gets his digs in at the north too), Twain does not want his readers to do a Henry James and turn to supposedly sophisticated Europeans for answers.
[All quotes are from memory and may well not be word perfect though I will answer for their being close.]
*[One may note a slight MeToo aspect about Mary Jane’s reaction. The exact moment of her explosion of vengeful rage is when Huck’s account inadvertently makes her aware that ‘the King’ tricked her into kissing a man who was not a relation.]
“I’d appreciate a reference so I can read more on this.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington#Abolition_and_slave_emancipation
“Like I say, I suggest you do a bit of reading on how libertarians propose funding their government rather than imagining that your suggestion of taxes are the only possible solution.”
I wasn’t imagining taxes are the only possible solution. But that they’re not only re-emphasises my point. Is it acceptable for libertarians to earn a living from taxes, by working for our current tax-collecting government? It is currently fashionable in our society to condemn slavery, and accept taxation as a necessary evil. Perhaps in former times people accepted slavery as a necessary evil in the same sort of way? It puts us in the same situation as those who lived just as slavery was becoming unfashionable. We’re starting to think it wrong, but the new moral attitude is still mixed up with the old attitude and old arguments finding it an acceptable, necessary evil.
“For sure, that is why I have consistently judged Washington by HIS OWN moral system.”
But are you? You seem to have picked up a couple of comments from his later life and concluded that he recognised the evils of slavery with full force in the same way that we do today. Having skimmed through Wikipedia’s biography, it looks to me like he was born and raised with the slave-owning morality, and only very late on, and in an intellectual sense following the arguments of political allies, slowly and haltingly changed his mind. He switched from one moral system to another.
To switch to the language analogy, it’s like he was born and raised a Englishman, speaking only English, but in his mid-forties he started learning French. When adults learn a new language, they’re often very bad at it. You get misapplications and malformations and mispronunciations galore. They don’t speak it the same way a native speaker does.
So as a native French speaker, on hearing that George Washington speaks French, you expect him to sound like you do. But he doesn’t – there are hesitations and wrong words and bits of mangled English scattered throughout it all. It’s Franglais, not French. Is it reasonable to complain that he made a very bad Frenchman? Or should we praise him for being among the first to even make the attempt?
As a native recogniser-that-slavery-is-evil, you hear that GW recognised it too, and you expect him to act as you would. But he doesn’t – there are hesitations and bits of his former slave-owning morality mixed in. Are you judging him by his standards, or by yours?
But are you? You seem to have picked up a couple of comments from his later life and concluded that he recognised the evils of slavery
But that is far from the only argument I have made on this. I have said it at least half a dozen times, so if you are interested I’ll leave you to review my earlier comments, for example my recent reply to bobby b discussed this at some length.
Julie: “… slave-“owner” (I find I’m now touchy about that usage — people are not entitled to own other people, period*, so I would prefer to say “slave-master”):”
Master? Owner? A distinction without a difference. The slave owner paid hard-earned cash for her slave, and then provided shelter, clothing, food to her slave. She presumably thought of herself as an owner.
I may have mentioned this before on this blog — but let me repeat the story of the only time in my life that I came face-to-face with a slave owner; or, to be precise, a former slave owner. He was a pleasant educated sophisticated Arab whose family had owned slaves for generations to work the family farm. As long as the British controlled the Gulf Emirates, slavery was legal. When the Emirs set up the United Arab Emirates (Dubai, Abu Dhabi, etc) in 1971, slavery was declared illegal. His family’s slaves were made free men — but chose to continue living and working on the farm. The implication is that, at least for those slaves, conditions as a slave were not much different from conditions as farm laborers.
Today, we have a grossly simplified view of life in earlier eras — Slavery Bad, Freedom Good. Probably, reality was more complex. There were slaves who became rulers of empires (Mamluks of Egypt) and free men whose lives were effectively bondage (eg the Scottish Highlanders who were driven off the land they had occupied for generations and shipped to North America as indentured servants). There were African slaves in the American South who accumulated capital, bought their freedom, and became slave owners themselves. And there were those poor English fishermen who woke up with a hangover and an involuntary naval enlistment, with nothing to look forward to except the occasional flogging. Let’s not even talk about conscription, where free men were involuntarily sent into the line of fire and lost their lives — something that happened in our lifetimes.
All I am suggesting is that the world has always been a lot more complicated than today’s Political Correctness would suggest. Accordingly, we should be careful about condemning historical figures for making decisions which we (ever so fortunately) are not faced with today.
@Gavin Longmuir
He was a pleasant educated sophisticated Arab whose family had owned slaves for generations to work the family farm.
Bad people are often quite pleasant, well educated and charming. However, I certainly cut him more slack than Washington, since there is reason to believe he knew no better, and I really love that word “former”.
All I am suggesting is that the world has always been a lot more complicated than today’s Political
Correctness would suggest.
Nobody has ever accused me of being politically correct. But I think you are mixing things up and so confusing the issue. Just because other bad stuff happened hundreds of years ago doesn’t mean that one particular bad thing, namely slavery, is any less bad. And also as I said before, slavery and poverty are entirely orthogonal issues. With respect to Washington, as I have said many times, even though he did some very bad things (namely owning, buying, selling, and stealing the labor of hundreds of people) that doesn’t mean that he didn’t do anything good. On the contrary he did some very greatly good things.
Anyway, after, what 50,000 words on this I think I will tap out. They say you can’t win a debate on the net, and I suppose if you can’t convince people of such controversial notions as “slavery is bad” and “slave holders are bad people” then perhaps they are right. However, “winning” was never my goal. What I wanted to do was to present a case that the concerns of the left on this are not lacking merit. And that those who recognize the great things Washington (or Jefferson, or MLK) did should not make the same mistake of saying “bad” or “good”, but rather recognize that they are all real people, with nuanced lives, patchworks of different things. For me, I think these three men were profoundly important and transformative figures that made the world a better place for millions, even billions, but, on the flip side in their personal lives made life horrible for hundreds of people.
Gavin Longmuir (June 3, 2019 at 5:10 pm), would I be right in thinking that this account of things came from the “pleasant educated sophisticated Arab” former slaveowner?
After the British empire had more or less ended the Atlantic trade, they started in on the east-coast of Africa and the red sea. The Royal Navy and friends put a lot of effort into fighting it, hampered by the fact that muslim culture was the most determined of all to keep it; historians write about the ‘end’ of slavery in various western and American continent but the ‘decline’ of slavery in the Arab world. After WWI, the transfer of various areas from Ottoman to British control permitted work against slavery in these new areas in the 1920s and 1930s, but facing much local resistance.
If a “pleasant educated sophisticated Arab” former slaveowner told me how the British empire tolerated slavery and the Arabs then abolished it, but found the slaves were delighted to carry on working as before – well, I would be, let us say, cautious.
Fraser O: “… if you can’t convince people of such controversial notions as “slavery is bad” and “slave holders are bad people” …”
I do not recall anyone on this thread arguing that ‘slavery is good’ — so we can set that aside as non-controversial in the 21st Century.
We need to get tenses correct. There are very few slave holders in most of today’s world — some Africans holding other Africans in slavery is about it. Any slaves is too many; personally, I wish that those African slave holders would stop it, but likely some of the more woke people in today’s world would criticize me for not being sufficiently sensitive to other people’s cultures.
Getting the tense right, it is not even clear that we disagree about the statement “slave holders were bad people”. You seem to be able to criticize those long-dead slave holders for having had slaves while also recognizing that owning slaves did not define them as “bad people”. It might not be too much of a stretch to say you hate the sin, not the sinner.
Where we may part company is that I recognize life has been fairly rough for almost everyone throughout most of history. In the 18th & 19th Centuries, conditions for most people were bad whether one was slave or “free”. The English woman working in the dark satanic mills of Manchester had a fairly miserable life, just like the African slave of the English lord toiling in the Caribbean sugar plantation. My view is we should be a little more understanding of just how different those times were, and not be too quick to condemn 18th Century figures by 21st Century standards.
Gavin,
To me there is a big distinction between “slave-owner” and “slave-master.” One can only be the owner, properly speaking, of rightfully acquired property; but people, humans, are not property and never can be. Whereas “master” doesn’t necessarily imply ownership. One may master mathematics, but one doesn’t own mathematics; and when we say “he has mastered the cello,” we mean he plays the cello very well indeed. Or not so very long ago, the pupil often referred to his teacher, or the apprentice to his boss-cum-trainer, as his “master.” But that didn’t mean he was the slave of his “master,” nor owned by him.
So although this may seem merely an idiosyncratic distinction, the problem with “slave-owner” is, again, that it makes the ownership of people sound plausible; it gives the idea a gloss of legitimacy, but in fact it’s a category error to talk about “owning” people.
That’s why I make the distinction.
Julie near Chicago (June 4, 2019 at 1:56 am), prior to the 13th amendment, slavery was legal and indeed constitutional in the U.S. When speaking of those days, referring to slaves and their owners seems to me proper usage, just as it does when discussing the Roman empire or classical Greece, or the kingdom of Dahomey whence many were sold and bought and taken to the US.
Law is not morality. I can talk of the ‘hate speech’ laws in the UK, and of people being convicted and sentenced under them, without it lessening my contempt for those who stole my free speech rights.
I wrote that and then found myself reflecting on why I put ‘hate speech’ in quotes – as I usually do. I suppose that, in a time and place where some writer’s (or some reader’s) opinion could be in doubt, I might put ‘owner’ in quotes (not that I doubt either in samizdata 🙂 ).
Agreed; and if those laws are ever repealed, we would still appropriately refer to the ‘hate speech laws of the early 21st Century’, presumably, without concern that we condone them or that it legitimises them.
Julie: “One can only be the owner, properly speaking, of rightfully acquired property …”
Julie, since we have already wandered into the penumbra the original topic, can I say that I sympathize with what you are probably trying to say — but maybe we should not scratch the surface of the meaning of ownership too deeply. For example, the Normans arrived in what is now England, kicked the then-inhabitants butts, and took over. Was the Normans’ property in England “rightfully acquired”?
Clearly, the Normans took the property by force, and thenceforth behaved as owners and wrote laws which treated themselves as legitimate owners with rights. Today, if another bunch of Viking descendants arrived in England and seized Buckingham Palace by force, we would not regard it as “rightfully acquired property”. On the other hand, if a government decides to seize a piece of property (and maybe even pay the owner some inadequate compensation), we do regard that as “rightfully acquired property”, at least from a legal standpoint.
To echo Niall, “law is not morality”, and law is ultimately based on whoever can summon & use the largest serving of violence. Sadly, Mao was correct.
This interesting discussion of how the truth is true separate from who tells it is relevant enough to this thread to be worth linking (h/t instapundit).
Just BTW Gavin Longmuir (June 4, 2019 at 5:24 pm) “Sadly, Mao was correct” echoes nothing that I believe. It was of all people Hans Frank who, in a moment of doubt about Nazism, wrote, “History teaches that systems based on law last for centuries whereas those based on force last but a short time.” Law is no more capricious force than it is morality. A system of rules with some predictability has therefore some capacity to restrain the immediate whim of the ruler, and conversely arbitrariness destroys law.
What Wretchard says is (most always) true and worth reading. His point here was in conformance with what Fraser Orr has been saying about our unwillingness to separate out the person from the message, and I agree with both.
But humanity has an emotional need for symbols that can rally to a cause. We look to unsullied heroes in Washington and King even though there’s no unsullied man. It’s unreasonable, sure, but it carries us through the dark nights and helps beat back the cynicism.
Let’s not destroy our totems just so we can say we aren’t prisoners of totems. I can easily accept a conflicted good/bad Washington or King. But I’d rather we not lose the social value of the totem that we find in both.
Niall — My apologies if you thought that the structure of my sentences made it seem like I was claiming that you are a proponent of Mao’s dictum ‘All power comes out the barrel of a gun’. That was certainly not my intent. The second sentence there was my continuation of your comment that ‘law is not morality’ to my own view that law is based on the credible threat of violence.
“History teaches that systems based on law last for centuries …”. That does not really pass the historical smell test. Whether we are talking about absolute monarchies or democracies, the law is always in a state of flux. As only one of the more trivial examples, homosexuality in much of the West has gone in a period of only a few decades from being illegal and punishable to being legal and indeed a protected activity which brings benefits to its practitioners. Law is about power — always has been, as far back as Hammurabi.
Gavin Longmuir (June 5, 2019 at 2:12 am), no need to apologise. Your phrasing was not in fact ambiguous – I was just clarifying (a chance to express my disdain for Mao is a chance I will take when I can). More generally, ‘systems of law’ and ‘laws’ are not quite the same thing. Like many, I see Trump’s presidency as a good thing for the US supreme court and therefore for the system of law in which the US constitution means what it says rather than whatever the PC pretend. At this point in so long a thread, I guess we can let (any remaining) readers decide for themselves between our views.
bobby b (June 4, 2019 at 7:49 pm), I’m not focussed on what humanity may or may not have an emotional need for, but I do care what is true and (unless contrary evidence turns up on either side) I think it true that
and also Lee though (here I parallel Wretchard) I’m glad Lee’s cause lost and King’s cause won.
And now I will attempt to exert my own moral character by resisting the temptation to comment further in this long thread. 🙂
A lot of discussion of slavery in the thread – which is odd as the Reverent Doctor Martin Luther King did not free any slaves.
There was slavery in the life time of Martin Luther King – including public slave auctions. But it was in Islamic countries – not the United States.
Martin Luther King had nothing to do with the end of slavery in the United States (which ended long before he was born) or anywhere else.
As for Segregation – again the key legal judgements (such as that of 1954) were nothing much to do with Martin Luther King.
“Rosa Parks!” I do not believe this woman was kicked off a bus and murdered (as has happened to some people, but no one cares about them because they have the “wrong” skin colour – i.e. they are white). Rosa Parks was CORRECT that it is wrong to prevent black people sitting in certain seats in a bus. The United States Federal Government and the national media (and so on) were actually on her side – not that is presented in Dr Who episodes (any more than they represent old white men being killed for the “crime” of trying to use an American bus today).
The Economist magazine (still advertising on television – as the establishment elite have vast financial resources) claims that the FBI found no evidence of “Reds under the beds” in relation to Dr King in the 1960s – that is just NOT TRUE (as Dr King was spouting just about anything the Reds fed him by that time – although he did not understand it, they just fed him “anti war” and “pro poor” talking points and Dr King pushed them out without understanding that he was being USED). The Economist magazine also claims that Dr King was the greatest American was the “greatest American of the 20th century” – a claim for which they present no evidence.
Slavery is wrong – but Dr King had nothing to do with ending it.
Segregation is also wrong – but the part Dr King played in ending it is vastly exaggerated.
Nor has Segregation ended – for example many of the leading universities (including Harvard) are now encouraging black people to live apart and have separate ceremonies.
The GOOD side of Dr King was his OPPOSITION to such things. For the modern “liberal” elite (with their “identity politics”) to claim some sort of connection with Dr King, makes no sense.
I like to think that at least Dr King would be against the modern Segregation movement.
The level of ignorance in the 1960s (the age of Dr King) can be summed up by a young boxer of the time.
He changed his name from “Cassius Clay” to “Muhammed Ali” because Cassius Clay was just “some slave owner” whereas Muhammed-Mohammed was one of “our people”.
In reality the 19th century Cassius Clay of Kentucky was a passionate foe of slavery – who survived many attempts to kill him, personally killing pro slavery people with his Bowie knife (when a firearm was not to hand) and who defended his home with privately owned cannons.
Whereas Muhammed-Mohammed was well known to be a WHITE man (that is how one picked him out in a group – Muhammed-Mohammed was the pale person) who called black people “raisin heads” and claimed that they looked like Satan. He also dealt in black slaves all his life and left instructions (which he claimed came from God) that slavery (and raping female slaves) was totally fine. Do not hold your breath waiting for there to be a “Dr Who” episode on this.
In the 1960s there were public slave auctions – but they were not going on in the United States.
Was the young boxer interested in what was really happening to “our people”? No he was not. The boxer made no serious effort to educate himself – and just repeated anti American Talking Points (Talking Points he was fed – just as someone else was USED).
What about Dr King? I have no idea about whether he organised protests against the enslavement of black people in various Islamic countries or not – perhaps he did.
If anyone is still interested enough to read another, long, comment on this ancient topic, I find that I can’t let it rest quite yet.
Contention: There is no such thing as a slave-“owner,” though there certainly have been and are slave-masters from forever right up until this moment.
.
First and foremost, a fundamental postulate of the moral law (as I understand the moral law to be) is that each human being has an absolute right to his own self-determination. (This is the proper meaning of “a right to life” — not that one has a right to be taken care of by another person at the expense of the latter’s own life or a part of it, except in the case of children who can’t fully take care of themselves; and even then, not at the expense of their parents’ entire lives.)
But the concept of property applies only to things which can be used precisely and only as their owner sees fit.
If a human being, a person, were property, then he would have no right of self-determination, because as property, he would have to do as his owner required, regardless of his own will.
Thus from the instant of a person’s conception to the last moment of his life, he is not and cannot be property. To say that anyone “owns” him is a contradiction in terms, regardless of misguided or sloppy or conventional terminology.
.
Argument: “But slaves were property in the U.S. up until roughly 150 years ago.”
Rebuttal:
Statute law, i.e. the statements of what is legally permissible or prohibited, I think (and I assume no one here disagrees) properly aims state in words as clearly and closely as possible what the moral law — the “natural” law — means in various circumstances, and what, if anything, should be done to encourage people to follow it. So statute law, what is legal, is constrained partly by what lawmakers think it appropriate to make legal or illegal, and partly by how well they can state their idea in words.
But that a rule makes behaviour or condition X legal does not make it right or moral or even logically consistent or true to the concepts that its words purport to mean.
It is said that in ancient Rome, unwanted babies were simply tossed into the garbage. Why not, if people are property? Surely I can throw out my doggie-bag of gefilte fish that I promise you I don’t want and will never eat.
In the very next posting after this one, on May 31, at least two commenters pointed out that people are not property.
All of these things are shortcomings of law, language, and legal philosophy (which is a branch of applied ethics, which is a branch of morality).
.
Argument: And people from pre-Revolutionary times have talked about “slave-owners.” It’s established usage!
Rebuttal:
So the fact that a century ago, or even today, the term “slave-owner” is in use doesn’t make the concept of the ownership of persons — the concept of human beings as property — legitimate (here, meaning “logically and linguistically appropriate”). All it does is to muddy the waters as to what “ownership,” “property,” and “human beings” actually mean.
. . .
S why do I make such a fuss about this? Well, for one thing of course, I have a nature, just as does the scorpion. But the fact is that words are important, what they mean is important (for all that there’s much dissension about the meaning of words), the concepts that words supposedly refer to. When we do our best to use words appropriately (an unreachable ideal, but we ought to reach toward it just the same), we have the best chance of thinking clearly and communicating successfully with other people.
And while acting on autopilot is often convenient and pretty safe, as when you’re collecting the mail, there are times when thinking clearly about what you’re doing or saying is actually important.
Topics in political, moral, ethical, epistemological most definitely call for it.
One of the lefty habits about which we so often complain is the way that they take over words like “liberal” and twist them so they come to mean the exact opposite. In fact, the more word-twisting the better!
Here endeth the disquisition. I hope that all that clarifies what I was trying to get at.
Julie — Sorry, your exposition is sincere, but it sounds a little like angels dancing on the heads of pins.
When the 18th Century English merchant paid gold or trade goods to an African chief for his captives, he thought he was buying property, i.e. he considered himself to be an owner. When he shipped those slaves across the Atlantic to the Caribbean and sold them to an English sugar plantation owner, the two of them thought they were selling and buying property — transferring ownership.
If I understand your reasoning, it is based on the premise that “each human being has an absolute right to his own self-determination”. While all of us today would agree with that premise and apply it to the whole human race, the two Englishmen back in the 18th Century would have applied it only to fellow Englishmen, preferably of their own class; they did not see the African’s chief’s captives as being fully human. Nor did the African chieftain, who probably thought of his captives as unworthy defeated enemies. And the African chief had certainly demonstrated his contempt for the self-determination of his captives by defeating them in battle, capturing them, and enslaving them.
If we could go back into the minds of the Ancient Egyptians who enslaved the Jews, we would probably find that the Egyptians thought of the Jews as somehow sub-human. The Ancient Greeks made extensive use of barbarian slaves — ‘barbarian’ being the Greeks condescending imitation of the unintelligible (to a Greek) sounds made by these sub-humans when they attempted to communicate.
Slave owners throughout millenia of history thought of themselves as owners — in most cases, as owners of a life-form that was not fully human; you might not consider them as owners, but they themselves did. We always have to remember the context — just as killing a human being could get someone a cell on Death Row or a Victoria Cross medal, depending on the circumstances. Or like ordering the killing of an innocent Brazilian in a London tube station could get the perpetrator sent to jail or promoted to head of the Metropolitan Police — he said, drifting off into the outer reaches of the topic of how today’s society treats an individual’s absolute right to self-determination.
Paul Marks (June 8, 2019 at 3:24 pm), like you, I noticed long ago the absurdity of Cassius Clay renaming himself from a prominent abolitionist to a notorious supporter of slavery BTW, the original Cassius Clay played a key role in ensuring Lincoln, not Seward, would be the Republican candidate in 1860. He therefore probably played a key role in ensuring the north won the civil war. IIRC the original Cassius Clay was a competent knife fighter. As a noted abolitionist in ante-bellum Kentucky, he found it a prudent skill to acquire.
Julie near Chicago (June 11, 2019 at 8:56 pm), Mansfield ruled that English Common Law did indeed wholly refuse to recognise people as property but he also ruled that statute law could, in the constitutional conditions of his day, override this to the point of maintaining as slaves those who entered the domain of English colonial law in that status. I see no point in complicating the historical discussion of the latter case.
I’m not talking about what the guys in the 18th C. thought was a person. I’m talking about what we, today, know is a person. I’m not talking about history at all. They said what they said, they thought what they thought, nothing any of us can do about it. I’m making a philosophical point to try to persuade people today to use appropriate language when discussing one aspect of a misbegotten belief held in the past by some people, but far from everyone, so as to keep thought and communication clear.
I quite understand that statute law was what it was, and that under statute law in the U.S. at least, some people whom we today recognize as human beings and distinctly not property were considered property, and as such could, literally, be owned.
At one time the seat of intelligence was thought to be the heart, but it wasn’t so then and it isn’t so now (even though it plays a part in intelligence). So should people talking, however casually, about medicine today consider it appropriate to keep saying that we think with our hearts (except perhaps in a figurative or poetic sense, as when we say “the heart has its reasons”)?
This particular discussion grew out of the fact that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson kept slaves. Certainly they did, no argument. I’m only asking for factual accuracy: They didn’t own them except in the term-of-art sense of the word “own” used in some but not all statute books, and in the misguided minds of some but not all people, because human beings aren’t ownable. Some thought so and the law said so, but that don’t make it so.
And in fact G.W. and T.J. their very own selves knew very well that slave-keeping was wrong, as did many others of the Founders.
Niall, Mansfield ruled as he did, but you didn’t write anything about slave-owning, and what I’m concerned with is only that particular terminology. Slavery is to me a sickening concept, but a legitimate one. And I am glad that he “wholly refused to recognize people as property.” Good for him — he got it! :>)
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Shockingly, I guess I’ve failed yet again to get my point across about the importance of calling things by their right names (or not calling them by wrong names) — not a new experience for me *g*. So I don’t mind changing the subject to something more interesting, perhaps over a nice cold beer (but have yours at room temp if you like, Niall). Charles Lamb’s essay on Roast Pig?
Julie — it seems that we are in violent agreement on the main point, namely that no human being can own another human being. Corollary is that today no-one should be called a slave and no-one should be called a slave owner. Complete agreement on that.
Where we disagree is changing the names that people called themselves for all of human history up to the Industrial Revolution (and even beyond). There were slaves, and there were slave owners. This continued until Mauritania finally banned the practice of slavery in 1981. And we know that illegal slavery continues (mainly in Africa) right up to the present day — although for some strange reason the people who get all hot under the collar about statues of long-dead General Lee don’t seem to care about today’s slave markets in Libya.
We all oppose slavery. Changing the contemporary name ‘slave owner’ to today’s ‘slave master’ in a historical context seems too close to Political Correctness — like those BBC historical dramas where a rather high proportion of the population of bygone England seems to have been of African descent.
Thanks, Gavin. I understand your point and I can also understand that my terminology feels a little “PC” to you. In fact when I fully realized that the “-owner” part bothered me (it’s taken awhile for me to figure out exactly what’s wrong with it), it made me feel a little PC-ish myself; it wasn’t till I’d analyzed exactly why the terminology is wrong that I stopped feeling that way.
But for myself, since I do understand it now (in my own judgment anyway), and since I really do think it’s important to not to call things by incorrect names even if the incorrect terminology was conventionally used in the past, it’s therefore important not to carry the incorrect term forward into our own everyday language. Because doing that helps to perpetuate the underlying idea, that people can be property. After all, if people were ownable in the past, why are we insisting that they can’t be owned now?
To me, it’s like describing mediæval epileptics as being “possessed by demons” even though nowadays we know better, on the grounds that that’s how people talked about the malaise in those days and sometimes used horrible methods to try to exorcise the demons.
Anyway, I imagine you felt it necessary to try to be sure you got your point across to me, and indeed you have done so; and I thank you for it. Also, our own discussion about this has helped me to understand my own position more clearly, so it’s been very worthwhile, and I thank you for that too. 🙂