If you needed more evidence that racism is alive and well in America (yeah, as if) look no further than a Louisiana judge's recent decision to deny a black man his right to an attorney because he didn't ask like a white person would.
And then there's John Kelly, who was supposed to be the grown up in the room, saying that "the lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War." That the chief of staff to the president of the United States should be so profoundly ignorant of history would be shocking, except that the bar on ignorance in Trumps White House is already so low that not even cockroaches can slither under it any more.
I wonder: exactly what kind of compromise would Kelly advocate on the question of whether or not black people can be held as property by white people?
ReplyDelete@Ron
>I wonder: exactly what kind of compromise would Kelly advocate on the question of whether or not black people can be held as property by white people?
Is that because in your black and white thinking that there was no alternative to war? [Are you sure you aren't splitting?]
Slavery was abolished in every country in the Western world by 1888. Slavery was well on its way to being eliminated at the time of the Civil War.
> Are you sure you aren't splitting?
ReplyDeleteNo. Tell me, exactly what kind of compromise would you propose to reconcile the position that black people can be held as property and the view that they can't? Maybe white people should only be able to hold black people as property for limited times? You tell me.
> Slavery was well on its way to being eliminated at the time of the Civil War.
Yes, that's a big part of the reason the southern states seceded. They saw that slavery was on its way to being eliminated, and they thought this was a *bad thing*. They thought it was so bad that they enshrined the right to negro slavery into their constitution. They went to war to preserve (and expand!) negro slavery.
> Tell me, exactly what kind of compromise would you propose to reconcile the position that black people can be held as property and the view that they can't?
ReplyDeleteThe word "compromise" is very broad. I can think of at least two "compromises" that would not have been as you describe:
(1) Pay off the slaveowners in exchange for the abolition of slavery.
(2) Allow the South to secede (or even, as abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison advocated, have the North secede first), and thereby take away the North's obligation to obey the fugitive slave provision in the US Constitution. And then focus all of the North's efforts on inducing slaves to flee to the North.
Neither of these would have compromised the ultimate objective or the principle on which it was based. But it is at least arguable that they would have accomplished that objective with much less loss of life. And it certainly seems like they would have been considered "compromises" by the faction that insisted on war with the South as the only way to abolish slavery. (Note that even after the South had seceded, it would still have been possible to simply let them go and follow strategy #2 above, instead of fighting a war. The insistence on war at that point was, as Lincoln said, to preserve the Union at all costs, not to abolish slavery. That only became a war aim later.)
@Peter:
ReplyDeleteThere's no way to know what would have happened if the South had been allowed to secede. But they wrote the right to negro slavery into their constitution. They clung to discriminatory Jim Crow laws until forced to abandon them by the Civil Rights Act. Institutionalized and systematic disenfranchisement of blacks continues to this day despite the voting rights act. Institutionalized prejudice against black people continues to this day, as evidenced by the court case cited in the OP. So I see no reason to believe that the South would have given up slavery. Indeed, I think there is a significant cadre of people in the South who would bring it back if they could. Some of the people flying the rebel flag have to know what it really stands for. Unlike the holocaust, the Southern endorsement of negro slavery was not a secret.
Also, the South shot first.
A minor correction:
ReplyDelete> Unlike the holocaust
Actually, the holocaust wasn't really a secret either. But the nazis never published a full-throated endorsement of genocide. The Confederacy, by contrast, enshrined the virtues of negro slavery into their founding documents.
> There's no way to know what would have happened if the South had been allowed to secede.
ReplyDeletePlenty of Southern leaders believed, and stated in speeches and in writing, that secession would be the end of slavery--for just the reason I mentioned, that it would relieve the North of any obligation regarding the return of fugitive slaves. That is a major reason why the South took so long to secede.
> I see no reason to believe that the South would have given up slavery.
The question isn't whether there was any way to get the South to give up slavery happily, without protest. Clearly there wasn't.
The question is whether there was any way to get the South to give up slavery without it having to cost a million lives. Yes, it's impossible to go back and re-run history with a different choice being made. But the fact that no other developed nation had to pay that cost to end slavery surely ought to give us pause before we just say, oh, well, and accept the cost we paid without questioning the choices that led to it or considering alternative possibilities.
Ron, are you aware of the UK's Slavery Abolition Act 1833? Do you think the means employed were wrong on principle?
ReplyDelete> are you aware of the UK's Slavery Abolition Act 1833?
ReplyDeleteI am now.
> Do you think the means employed were wrong on principle?
Do you mean paying off slaveholders? That depends on what you mean by "on principle". On principle, I think it is wrong to treat people as property, and so I think it is wrong to reward someone for holding someone else as property. So I guess the answer to your question is yes.
However, if the alternative is war, I might accede to paying off slave holders as the lesser of two evils.
AFAIK that was never an option in the U.S. The South did not defend slavery merely for economic reasons. As I keep pointing out, they enshrined it in their founding documents as a fundamental right. Southerners are proud people. It seems unlikely they could have been bought.
But this is not purely a hypothetical. The culture of the confederacy seems to be very much alive and well today. Do you think we could put an end to, say, racial gerrymandering by offering to pay states to stop it? Do you think we could convince gun advocates to repeal the second amendment if we offered them enough money? It worked in Australia, but I'll give you long odds against it working in the U.S.
You might be right that there was no way to compromise with the South that would have the trajectory being toward "no slavery", such that 620,000 Americans didn't have to die in the process (but such that slavery didn't continue for significantly longer). But why couldn't we then say that there was still a failure to compromise? Am I missing some interpretation of Kelly's comments which is unambiguously agreed upon by all parties? (e.g. that the North was being unreasonable)
ReplyDeleteI don't think buying off racial gerrymandering would work, because the power differential there is probably more valuable to people than the money would be. I doubt one could buy a repeal of the second amendment, but maybe one could buy some classes of firearms. But I think buying off slaves is rather different than these two, as they deal with the livelihoods of people who will certainly fight to the death to avoid going bankrupt en masse.
> But why couldn't we then say that there was still a failure to compromise?
ReplyDeleteBecause that implies that the South's position had merit. It didn't.
I see, so any time that I compromise, I necessarily admit that the other side has some sort of merit? That would explain some of the polarization we see today.
ReplyDelete> any time that I compromise, I necessarily admit that the other side has some sort of merit?
ReplyDeleteNo, not *necessarily*. But look at Kelly's statement in context:
"I would tell you that Robert E. Lee was an honorable man. He was a man that gave up his country to fight for his state, which, 150 years ago, was more important than country. It was always loyalty to state first back in those days. Now it’s different today. But the lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War. And men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had to make their stand.”
It is clear that Kelly is assigning blame on both sides. But he neglects to mention the fact that Lee chose to be loyal to a state that defended slavery, as if that's completely irrelevant to the question of Lee's honor. So there are only two possibilities: he is either profoundly ignorant of history, or he believes that slavery is morally defensible. Either way it's abhorrent.
Read this passage from Texas's articles of secession:
“...in this free government ALL WHITE MEN ARE AND OF RIGHT OUGHT TO BE ENTITLED TO EQUAL CIVIL AND POLITICAL RIGHTS [emphasis in original]; that the servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator, as recognized by all Christian nations.”
If those words don't sear your soul, there is something wrong with you. Your moral compass is broken.
So I talked to my pastor and a few friends about this when we were hanging out and they agree there is no way to rescue Kelly's statement. But I still think there is a rhetorical strategy which is more likely to lead to a healed nation than yours. It is to suggest that there was a possible compromise—financially compensate slaveowners after Britain's example—which the South eschewed. The South was the party which refused to compromise. They were too invested in slavery, not just economically but socially, politically, and spiritually. Alexander H. Stephens made this much clearer than Texas's articles of secession:
ReplyDelete>> Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. (Cornerstone Speech)
(Stephens was Vice President of the Confederacy from Feb 22, 1862 – May 11, 1865.)
The NT describes Jesus as the "chief cornerstone". To substitute slavery for Jesus seems to be about as blasphemous as one could be. Freedom is replaced with domination.
> I still think there is a rhetorical strategy which is more likely to lead to a healed nation than yours.
ReplyDeleteI'd rather have a broken nation than permit the idea to linger in the public sphere that there was the slightest shred of merit in the South's position. The legacy of slavery is not behind us. The fight for freedom goes on every day in America if you're not white.
> The South was the party which refused to compromise.
No. The South was the party that refused to *concede*. To this day the South's defenders refuse to concede that it was founded on evil and sin. Fuck compromise. The South needs to confess and repent. It needs to get down on its knees and humble itself before the descendants of its millions of victims and beg forgiveness. Before that happens there can be no healing.
> I'd rather have a broken nation than permit the idea to linger in the public sphere that there was the slightest shred of merit in the South's position.
ReplyDeleteDid I suggest there was any merit in their position?
> > The South was the party which refused to compromise.
> No. The South was the party that refused to *concede*.
I think you're stuck on the historical form of 'compromise', whereby political power would be kept balanced between slave and free. I was advocating a sneaky new kind of 'compromise', modeled after the UK's Slavery Abolition Act 1833, whereby the agreed-upon plan would be to bring an end to slavery, but via the distasteful mechanic of financially compensating slaveowners. This would indeed be a concession that slavery needs to end; the compromise would be on the means.
> To this day the South's defenders refuse to concede that it was founded on evil and sin. Fuck compromise. The South needs to confess and repent. It needs to get down on its knees and humble itself before the descendants of its millions of victims and beg forgiveness. Before that happens there can be no healing.
Does this only apply to "defenders"? (I'm guessing you mean people who actively defend the Confederacy, post-secession.)
P.S. I'm interested in what guilt you think lay in those Northerners who bought slave labor goods. Slavery wouldn't be profitable if there weren't buyers of its labor.
> Did I suggest there was any merit in their position?
ReplyDeleteNo, but you've not exactly been condemning them either. Instead, you focused on my rhetoric:
"I still think there is a rhetorical strategy which is more likely to lead to a healed nation than yours."
Implying that the goal here is to heal the nation. Well, that is not my goal. My goal is to drive the moneylenders out of the temple, or in this case, the racists out of the public sphere and back into their caves. You can be a racist in the privacy of your own home if you really feel the need, but if you do it in public you will feel the wrath of my uncompromising scorn for as long as I can draw breath.
> I was advocating a sneaky new kind of 'compromise'
I know you were. And I'm rejecting it. When it comes to racism I will settle for nothing short of unconditional surrender.
It's not just about ending slavery. We did that. But the racism that made slavery possible in the first place is very much alive and well today.
> Does this only apply to "defenders"? (I'm guessing you mean people who actively defend the Confederacy, post-secession.)
It applies to anyone who thinks that there was anything honorable about the South, who thinks that there are any substantive differences between the South and Nazi Germany. I don't know if it applies *only* to them, but you've gotta start somewhere.
> I'm interested in what guilt you think lay in those Northerners who bought slave labor goods.
Hard for me to say, I don't know enough about the history. It's certainly plausible that there is culpability there too. But buying things made with slave labor is in a different league than advocating for the principle that owning negro slaves is a fundamental right of white men, and taking up arms in support of that cause.
Did you seriously entertain that I meant racism to exist within "a healed nation"?
ReplyDelete> Implying that the goal here is to heal the nation. Well, that is not my goal.
ReplyDeleteThis makes your position a lot clearer. It also IMO should have been the first statement in your post. In big, bold letters. Because this position of yours, IMO, helps a lot to explain why we are still having problems that should have gone away a century and a half ago.
The people who imposed harsh Reconstruction on the South felt the same way you do: the South was just evil and they felt no impulse whatever to concede them anything. Result: a decade in which conditions in the South did not really improve, even for the freed slaves. And then a corrupt bargain that put Hayes in the White House in exchange for ending Reconstruction and giving us almost a century of Jim Crow.
The same viewpoint prevailed in the decades before the Civil War; you comment regarding paying off the slaveowners that "AFAIK that was never an option in the U.S." Why not? Because the South didn't suggest it? Or because the *abolitionists* were so fixated on their moral position that they refused to consider the practical option of achieving the same goal by distasteful means? After all, by your own showing the abolitionists at that time were the only adults in the room: the only ones who really understood that it was wrong to treat humans as property. So as the only adults in the room, wasn't it incumbent on *them* to be the mature ones and find a practical solution, even if they had to swallow their pride to do it?
In short: do you want to hate on racism, or do you want to fix the problem? Because I don't think you can do both. That experiment has been run; ever since the 1960s we have been trying to extract "unconditional surrender" from racists, and it hasn't worked, any more than it worked during the decades leading up to the Civil War or during Reconstruction. Isn't the definition of insanity trying the same thing over and over and expecting different results?
@Luke:
ReplyDelete> Did you seriously entertain that I meant racism to exist within "a healed nation"?
Yes, that's what advocating any kind of compromise sounds like to me.
@Peter:
> > Well, that is not my goal.
> This makes your position a lot clearer.
Let me rephrase: I would love for the nation to heal, but not at the cost of tolerating apologists for slavery. That is too high a price to pay.
The reason reconstruction failed in the American South is not because it's impossible. Look at Japan and Germany, which were successfully de-radicalized after WWII. The reason reconstruction failed in the U.S. is because it was sabotaged by the Johnson administration after Lincoln's assassination.
> I don't think you can do both.
I think you can. And I think you start by simply by teaching history: every American student should be required to read the confederate constitution and the articles of secession.
Also, I don't want unconditional surrender from *racists*. I know that's not possible. I want unconditional surrender from *racism*. I want to drive it out of the public sphere. I know I can't eliminate racisim or racists. But I think it's an achievable goal to build a world where racism is ashamed to show its true face in public. I'll settle for that.
We did it for smoking and communism and even cruelty to animals, so I don't think it's an unreasonable goal.
@Ron:
ReplyDelete> > Did you seriously entertain that I meant racism to exist within "a healed nation"?
> Yes, that's what advocating any kind of compromise sounds like to me.
In that case, we're back to what I wrote earlier:
> Luke: I see, so any time that I compromise, I necessarily admit that the other side has some sort of merit? That would explain some of the polarization we see today.
The only "merit" that the South would have is the "merit" that Weimar Republic Germans during the deterioration of their economy: they would do pretty much anything to save their existence. Had the West not imposed such great sanctions on them, the Nazis may never have risen to power and the Holocaust may never have happened. But what sane person would encounter this reasoning and do anything other than place more of the blame on the Germans of that time?
I've been thinking about your response here:
> Luke: P.S. I'm interested in what guilt you think lay in those Northerners who bought slave labor goods. Slavery wouldn't be profitable if there weren't buyers of its labor.
> Ron: Hard for me to say, I don't know enough about the history. It's certainly plausible that there is culpability there too. But buying things made with slave labor is in a different league than advocating for the principle that owning negro slaves is a fundamental right of white men, and taking up arms in support of that cause.
If we want a situation where it goes far past "plausible", we can consider how consumers of child porn increase the demand for child porn. This belief is encoded in severe punishments for those found to possess child porn. I also think the perceived gap between consumer of child porn and producer of child porn is greatly decreased; both are widely considered to be classes of terrible human beings. But somehow, the consumer of slave goods, who is actively supporting slavery via purchasing them, is not "obviously" culpable—just "plausibly". It sounds like you're hesitant to allow that the complicity of the North (and the UK) in sustaining the South's slave-based economy may well have strengthened the South's resolve to protect slavery. I don't think it's out of the realm of possibility that said strengthening made impossible something like the UK's Slavery Abolition Act 1833.
> The only "merit" that the South would have is the "merit" that Weimar Republic Germans during the deterioration of their economy
ReplyDeleteI'm not asking for economic sanctions on the South. All I'm asking for is public consensus that the Confederacy had no redeeming qualities, and that racism has no place in civilized society. It's no different than asking for public consensus that smoking is bad, or that women deserve the vote, or that anthropogenic climate change is a real problem.
> we can consider how consumers of child porn increase the demand for child porn.
Child porn is an issue that is so fraught with emotion that it is nearly impossible to have a rational conversation about it. The debate is saturated with the assumption that anyone who gets turned on by someone under 18 is irredeemably sick and should be branded with a scarlet P. This assumption is false: people don't have control over what turns them on. Pedophilia is no more a choice than homosexuality. It also leads to legal absurdities. For example, in Texas the age of consent is 17, so an adult can legally have sex with someone who is 17, but cannot legally possess a nude photo of their partner, even if the underage partner is the one who took the photo. (I actually read about a case like that not too long ago but I can't find the reference just now.)
There are those who argue that *cartoons* of children having sex should be banned on the theory that this will lead pedophiles to crave the real thing. It seems to me that this gets it exactly backwards: if you give pedophiles a way to get their rocks off without hurting anyone they will be *less* likely to abuse actual children. But the issue is so fraught you probably can't even get a grant to do a proper study. I could be risking my own reputation by even *suggesting* such a thing.
In any case, I absolutely reject your conclusion that consumers of child porn are as culpable as its producers. If the blame lies anywhere, it is with people agitating to lock up the pedophiles and throw away the key rather than recognizing the issue as part of the human condition and searching for constructive solutions. Cartoons, for example, or CGI, could just as well turn out to be part of the solution as the problem if we as a society would simply choose to find out rather than steeping in our moral indignation.
Let me be clear: I am absolutely not defending child porn here. Sexual abuse of minors is abhorrent, and the demand for child porn definitely promotes that abuse, just as the demand for illicit drugs promotes their production. Both child sexual abuse and drug abuse are real problems. But the addicts are NOT the villains, and casting them in that role just makes the problem worse.
> I'm not asking for economic sanctions on the South. All I'm asking for is public consensus that the Confederacy had no redeeming qualities, and that racism has no place in civilized society. It's no different than asking for public consensus that smoking is bad, or that women deserve the vote, or that anthropogenic climate change is a real problem.
ReplyDeleteDid the South (≠ Confederacy) have no redeeming qualities? My very strategy relies on presupposing that the antebellum Southern way of life need not essentially rely on slavery, and the Southern way of life now need not essentially rely on racism. I then enlist my interlocutor's help in figuring out how to chart the best course out of slavery and then out of racism. The point is that there is plenty good without slavery and without racism. It becomes a cooperative effort to irradiate a cancer while harming as few healthy cells as possible, instead of condemnation where I get my pound of flesh (or at least groveling).
> Child porn is an issue that is so fraught with emotion that it is nearly impossible to have a rational conversation about it.
I'm happy to restrict the discussion to adults greater than 30 consuming pornographic images of children younger than 10.
> In any case, I absolutely reject your conclusion that consumers of child porn are as culpable as its producers.
That was never my conclusion.
> But the addicts are NOT the villains, and casting them in that role just makes the problem worse.
In that case, why not say that Roman Catholic priests were helplessly addicted to molesting young children, and why not say that slaveowners in the South were helplessly addicted to dominating fellow human beings, or at least helplessly addicted to the economic profits which came from owning human beings?
BTW, I'm quite willing to entertain the possibility that pedophiles exert rather less agency than is currently assumed. I actually think most humans exert less agency than is currently assumed. But I do not think it is zero; I think there are moments where one realizes that what one is doing is wrong, and at those times one has the option to continue in the wrong and avoid painful change and painful consequences, or to face the music. If you want to say that the small efforts that such people can make are rendered inert by society placing too high a bar for change, then I ask you to consider whether that may have been done to the South wrt slavery, for example via allowing their economy to be so reliant on slave labor.
> Did the South (≠ Confederacy) have no redeeming qualities?
ReplyDeleteThe South -- i.e. the geographic region and its associated culture -- had and continues to have many redeeming qualities. That's why I'm trying to be careful to say the Confederacy when I'm being strident.
> I'm happy to restrict the discussion to adults greater than 30 consuming pornographic images of children younger than 10.
I don't think that's going to help make the discussion any less emotional.
> That was never my conclusion.
Sorry, I probably should have said "implication".
> why not say that Roman Catholic priests were helplessly addicted to molesting young children
I have no trouble saying that if it's true, but I doubt that it is. I suspect that the problem with priests is not that they are "hopelessly addicted" but rather that they have normal human sexual urges which the institution they work for expects them to suppress. But that's not realistic. Evolution has worked hard to make sexual urges really hard to suppress. Priests are "addicted" to molesting young children in the same way that they are addicted to breathing. Cover someone's nose and mouth long enough and they'll do all kinds of crazy things that they would not otherwise do.
The solution to the problem in the Catholic church is simple: let priests get married.
> > I'm happy to restrict the discussion to adults greater than 30 consuming pornographic images of children younger than 10.
ReplyDelete> I don't think that's going to help make the discussion any less emotional.
It voids a number of your objections. Not all.
> > That was never my conclusion.
> Sorry, I probably should have said "implication".
Nor did I intend any such implication. What I said is "the perceived gap between consumer of child porn and producer of child porn is greatly decreased". The point was to introduce something stronger than "plausible" guilt on the part of those who pay for goods and services which had slave labor input.
> > why not say that Roman Catholic priests were helplessly addicted to molesting young children
> I have no trouble saying that if it's true, but I doubt that it is. I suspect that the problem with priests is not that they are "hopelessly addicted" but rather that they have normal human sexual urges which the institution they work for expects them to suppress. But that's not realistic. Evolution has worked hard to make sexual urges really hard to suppress. Priests are "addicted" to molesting young children in the same way that they are addicted to breathing. Cover someone's nose and mouth long enough and they'll do all kinds of crazy things that they would not otherwise do.
Ahh, so there was institutional support of the heinous behavior. It seems like economic demand for slave labor output would also constitute institutional support. If you make evil too lucrative or too tempting, you override whatever small efforts humans can muster to resist.
> The point was to introduce something stronger than "plausible" guilt on the part of those who pay for goods and services which had slave labor input.
ReplyDeleteSo just how much culpability do you think consumers have? On a 10-point scale, where 0 is complete innocence and 10 is the culpability of the producers, I'd give them maybe a 2.
> It seems like economic demand for slave labor output would also constitute institutional support.
Except that an economy is not an institution.
> So just how much culpability do you think consumers have? On a 10-point scale, where 0 is complete innocence and 10 is the culpability of the producers, I'd give them maybe a 2.
ReplyDeleteAt least a 5, probably maxing out at 8. Had the Southern economy not depended on slave labor, they probably would have been amenable to being bought out like the UK managed. But the North and UK and who knows who else were quite happy to buy the products of slave labor.
> Except that an economy is not an institution.
What you need is behavioral inertia and behavioral reinforcement. The RCC has those things and any given economy does as well. Unless I'm missing some aspect of 'institution' which is (i) relevant to this discussion; (ii) applicable to the RCC; (iii) not applicable to economies?
@Luke:
ReplyDeleteI don't know what RCC is. But this story just hit the papers:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2017/11/09/alabama-state-official-defends-roy-moore-citing-joseph-and-mary-they-became-parents-of-jesus/
Apparently not everyone agrees that child sex abuse is bad.
> I don't know what RCC is.
ReplyDeleteRoman Catholic Church
> But this story just hit the papers:
Pretty atrocious. It reminds me of Roman Polanski's "Everyone wants to f*** young girls!" (WP: Roman Polanski sexual abuse case) Remind me of how he has been treated by Hollywood? We aren't as … 'evolved' as we'd like to believe.
> Roman Catholic Church
ReplyDeleteAh. (Duh.)
> What you need is behavioral inertia and behavioral reinforcement.
Maybe, but what distinguishes an institution from (say) a culture or an emergent phenomenon (like an economy) is a set of *written policies*. So the Confederacy and the RCC both qualify, but a non-government-controled economy doesn't.
Exactly what do you expect someone to do to avoid moral culpability as a consumer? It's simply not possible to vet the entire supply chain every time you buy a pair of pants at Target.
@Ron:
ReplyDelete> I would love for the nation to heal, but not at the cost of tolerating apologists for slavery.
"Apologists for slavery" is not the same as "racism". Slavery is an action, that is outlawed now; it's perfectly reasonable to say that apologists for an action that is outlawed should not be tolerated. But racism is not illegal, and it's not an action, it's a belief: the law can't control what people believe, and expecting it to is unreasonable. So is not tolerating it, as a belief: in any free country, people are going to have all kinds of offensive beliefs. That's the price we pay for having a free country.
*Actions* that violate people's rights are a different matter: the Lousiana judge's action was clearly wrong and he should be at the very least censured for it. But not because it was "racist": because it clearly denied a citizen the equal protection of the laws, which is guaranteed to him by the Fourteenth Amendment. That's all that should need to be said.
> The reason reconstruction failed in the U.S. is because it was sabotaged by the Johnson administration after Lincoln's assassination.
Reconstruction didn't "fail" after Lincoln's assassination. Reconstruction *happened* after Lincoln's assassination. That's the "Reconstruction" I was talking about.
What would have happened had Lincoln not been assassinated is hard to judge, since the people who wanted to punish the South severely (of whom Johnson was by no means the most radical--I'm thinking more of people like Thaddeus Stevens) would still have been there and I suspect Lincoln's political capital would have declined markedly after the end of hostilities. But there's no way to really know.
> Look at Japan and Germany, which were successfully de-radicalized after WWII.
> I think you start by simply by teaching history: every American student should be required to read the confederate constitution and the articles of secession.
If we're going to teach history, we should teach all of it. If we're going to require every American student to read the confederate constitution and each state's articles of secession (which I have no problem with doing), we should also require them all to read what it took to de-radicalize Germany and Japan after WWII, for example:
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/JCS_1067
> We did it for smoking and communism
If we did it for smoking, how come adds for vapes are all the rage now?
If we did it for communism, how come there is no Commucaust museum on the Washington mall, ten times the size of the Holocaust museum (to reflect the relative order of magnitude of the number of people killed)? How come, when we talk about what happened after WWII, we talk about de-radicalizing Germany and Japan, but we don't talk at all about not even trying to de-radicalize the USSR, which was worse than either Nazi Germany or Japan?
@Ron:
ReplyDelete> Maybe, but what distinguishes an institution from (say) a culture or an emergent phenomenon (like an economy) is a set of *written policies*. So the Confederacy and the RCC both qualify, but a non-government-controled economy doesn't.
Why are written policies relevant to whether it was considered moral or immoral to consume goods with slave labor input? Actually, I expect written policies to only come into play if the judgment of 'immoral' is affirmed; wee see that show up with blood diamonds. There generally aren't going to be written policies that it's OK to buy good X from producer Y. I'm not sure what your point is wrt "a non-government-controled economy"; see WP: Blood diamond § Policy responses or the 2016-02-25 AP article Obama bans US imports of slave-produced goods.
> Exactly what do you expect someone to do to avoid moral culpability as a consumer? It's simply not possible to vet the entire supply chain every time you buy a pair of pants at Target.
It's much harder to do now than it was for Northerners and the UK prior to the Civil War. Globalization makes things incredibly complex. Consumers might have to convince the government which ostensibly represents them to mandate transparency from all the various parts of the supply chain. There would be many opportunities for corruption. You would probably need people of more robust character than seems to be on offer these days. So maybe it's just easier to relax back in your chair and change it to 99.999% culpability producer, 0.001% culpability consumer.
The above might seem harsh, but I suspect very similar logic can be applied to the Holocaust—that without individuals doing hard work to avoid being swept up into evil, the evil is night inevitable.
An alternative would be to reverse the great shift push toward glorifying greed which Albert O. Hirschman documents in The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph. We could realize that an overall priority on self-interest, no matter how enlightened, allows for constantly taking just a little bit more than what is 'fair', like the fraction of a cent scheme in Office Space. But I don't know how we could pull this off without a non-pathetic vision of what we could do as a human species, such that contributing to excellence and beauty and goodness and knowledge is more attractive than accumulating wealth. Try as I may, I haven't figured out a vision other than more science, more technology, the elimination of poverty, medical care for all, impartial justice, and internet for everyone.
@Ron:
ReplyDeletePeter's response asking about a Communism museum with size commensurate with its death toll made me revisit the following:
> Also, I don't want unconditional surrender from *racists*. I know that's not possible. I want unconditional surrender from *racism*. I want to drive it out of the public sphere. I know I can't eliminate racisim or racists. But I think it's an achievable goal to build a world where racism is ashamed to show its true face in public. I'll settle for that.
>
> We did it for smoking and communism and even cruelty to animals, so I don't think it's an unreasonable goal.
I too am flummoxed by your comment about Communism. One of my favorite quotes about alleged "scientific rationality" comes from a famous American sociologist in 1992:
>> Another exaggeration may have been the conventional view of the reach of scientific rationality. One does not have to look at religion only in order to find this thought plausible. It is amazing what people educated to the highest levels of scientific rationality are prepared to believe by way of irrational prejudices; one only has to look at the political and social beliefs of the most educated classes of Western societies to gain an appreciation of this. Just one case: What Western intellectuals over the last decades have managed to believe about the character of Communist societies is alone sufficient to cast serious doubt on the proposition that rationality is enhanced as a result of scientifically sophisticated education or of living in a modern technological society. (A Far Glory, 30)
In Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline (2001), judge Richard Posner observes that few such intellectuals have suffered much or recanted.
Adding to the above, I've been watching some videos by Jordan Peterson, a clinical psychologist who teaches at the University of Toronto. One of his focuses is on a more realistic view of human nature, crucially including its violent tendencies. He cites Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and has found that his students frequently do not know of the enormous death tolls from Communism in the USSR and China. I'm betting those same students are well-aware of the death tolls from the Holocaust.
So, what is your evidential basis for saying that we've obtained unconditional surrender on the matter of Communism?
@Peter:
ReplyDelete> Slavery is an action
I started to write a response to that but it got so long that I decided to turn it into a separate top-level article which I will try to finish later today. But in the meantime, a few miscellaneous things which I can dispense with briefly:
> Reconstruction didn't "fail" after Lincoln's assassination. Reconstruction *happened* after Lincoln's assassination.
Of course it *happened*, in the sense that something happened which we refer to by the label "reconstruction". But the "reconstruction" that happened after the Civil War didn't really reconstruct anything, it simply papered over deep fissures which persist to this day. That is what I was referring to when I said it failed.
> If we're going to teach history, we should teach all of it.
That's a tall order. There's an awful lot of history.
> we should also require them all to read what it took to de-radicalize Germany and Japan after WWII, for example:
I read the article you pointed to and didn't see anything there that seemed particularly noteworthy. What did I miss?
> If we did it for smoking, how come adds for vapes are all the rage now?
Because vaping != smoking. Vaping produces vapor, not smoke. That's why it's called vaping rather than smoking.
Vaping is substantially less obnoxious than smoking. I think it's actually a pretty cool technological solution to a very difficult social problem.
> If we did it for communism, how come there is no Commucaust museum on the Washington mall
Because what we did was make communism so unfashionable that no one claims to be a communist any more, not even actual communists.
> How come, when we talk about what happened after WWII, we talk about de-radicalizing Germany and Japan, but we don't talk at all about not even trying to de-radicalize the USSR, which was worse than either Nazi Germany or Japan?
Because the USSR was our ally in WWII. That made the post-war relationship between the US and the USSR fundamentally different than between the US and Germany, and hence the accompanying rhetoric was different. (Also, it's not clear that the USSR was de-radicalized, or if it was, that we did it. The worst parts of USSR athoritarianism seem to me to be very much alive and well in Russia today.)
But Americans do speak of the "defeat" of the USSR with pride. It's one of Ronald Reagan's signature "accomplishments."
@Luke:
> So, what is your evidential basis for saying that we've obtained unconditional surrender on the matter of Communism?
When was the last time you saw an American politician openly advocate communism?
@Ron:
ReplyDelete> I started to write a response to that but it got so long that I decided to turn it into a separate top-level article which I will try to finish later today.
I saw it, I'll take responses to that particular discussion to the comments for that article.
> the "reconstruction" that happened after the Civil War didn't really reconstruct anything, it simply papered over deep fissures which persist to this day
I know. That was my point. Reconstruction was supposed to do to the South what denazification did to Germany after WWII: punish them so severely for both slavery and secession that they would repent and recant all of their former beliefs. It didn't work.
In fact, denazification (and the similar efforts in Japan after WWII) are the only historical examples I can think of where something like that *did* work. So we should be viewing those as the exception, not the rule.
> That's a tall order. There's an awful lot of history.
In other words, we have to pick and choose. All I'm saying is that, if our picking and choosing is going to include the confederate constitution and the ordinances of secession--i.e., to include manifestos of the "bad" side (presumably so all children will read them and realize how bad they were and vow not to be bad themselves)--we should also include similar documents from the "good" side (so the children will understand the costs of doing "good").
> I read the article you pointed to and didn't see anything there that seemed particularly noteworthy.
It didn't strike you as noteworthy that the Allies ran a totalitarian police state in Germany after WWII? That's what JCS1067 describes. (And the US regime in Japan after WWII was similar.)
> Vaping is substantially less obnoxious than smoking.
I personally don't think it is less obnoxious, but of course that's just my opinion. And since it apparently isn't a majority opinion, I guess I just don't get to claim that vaping should be condemned the way smoking is, do I? At least not until enough people agree with me.
Or let's approach it from another direction. Let's say vaping is in fact substantially less obnoxious than smoking. That doesn't change the fact that it's a way for people to give themselves a harmful drug. Now that one way of getting that drug--smoking--is socially ostracized, people have found another way--vaping. But the underlying problem--that people are giving themselves harmful drugs--hasn't changed at all.
Which nicely segues into your next point:
> I think it's actually a pretty cool technological solution to a very difficult social problem.
What social problem? The problem of drugs? No, vaping doesn't solve that problem at all--it perpetuates it, for the reason I just gave above.
Perhaps it "solves" the social problem of other people having to endure second hand smoke (although I question how healthy it is to get second-hand vapor), but all that means is that people don't really care about solving the real problem--drugs--they just want to make sure they don't personally have to witness the consequences. I'm not sure I call that a "solution".
ReplyDelete> Because the USSR was our ally in WWII. That made the post-war relationship between the US and the USSR fundamentally different than between the US and Germany, and hence the accompanying rhetoric was different.
These are all descriptions of symptoms. They don't address the underlying disease at all.
Why was the USSR our ally in WWII? When WWII started, Nazi Germany had not yet undertaken any executions on a large scale. The Holocaust didn't start until a few years into the war. Whereas Stalin's USSR, in the 1930s, had *already* killed millions (if not tens of millions) and sent millions more to Siberia. What kind of sense does that make?
Why did WWII start? Because Germany invaded Poland, and Britain and France decided that they had to honor their treaty obligation to keep Poland free from tyrannical dictatorships. But at the end of WWII, Poland was in the hands of the USSR, an even worse tyrannical dictatorship. (Similar comments apply to the rest of Eastern Europe--the only difference is that Britain and France somehow didn't feel able to honor their treaty obligations in those other countries.)
So to me, saying that the USSR was our ally in WWII, so of course we had to be nicer to them, doesn't solve the problem I was pointing out; it just highlights it. Why is there a watermelon there?
> Also, it's not clear that the USSR was de-radicalized
I never said it was. I agree that it isn't, in any practical sense. My point is, nobody talks about it--it's like Russia being the way it is is just a law of physics, like gravity, whereas Germany being Nazi was something we had to fight a huge war to fix. That doesn't make sense to me given the relative numbers of people killed by those regimes.
@Peter:
ReplyDelete> It didn't strike you as noteworthy that the Allies ran a totalitarian police state in Germany after WWII?
Ah. Given that it was temporary and the U.S. eventually voluntarily withdrew and left behind one of the world's premier liberal democracies, I'd say it's noteworthy mainly as an illustration that sometimes the ends justify the means. In any case, I certainly have no objection to having this taught in history classes.
> What social problem? The problem of drugs?
No, the problem that cigarette smoke *stinks*, and that for decades (perhaps centuries) the noxious smell was *everywhere*. You could not escape it if you were out in public. Nowadays I can go to a restaurant or even a bar and still be able to breathe. When I was growing up that was not possible.
Baby steps.
> Why is there a watermelon there?
Because without the watermelon we would have lost the war, or at least the people making the decisions at the time had a good-faith belief that this was the case.
> the problem that cigarette smoke *stinks*, and that for decades (perhaps centuries) the noxious smell was *everywhere*. You could not escape it if you were out in public.
ReplyDeleteThis was not a social problem for centuries. It was only a social problem in one century: the 20th. (And not for all of it.) Before that, smokers had a social contract with non-smokers: smoking was confined to certain places (that's why houses had smoking rooms), and smokers took precautions to avoid bringing the smell into other places (that's why they had things like smoking jackets). It was not socially acceptable to just light up anywhere you liked.
That social contract had broken down by the time you and I were growing up. (One interesting theory as to why it broke down is that, up until the early 20th century, only men smoked, and the social contract was enforced by women refusing to tolerate the smell. Then women started smoking in significant enough numbers and this enforcement mechanism no longer worked.) Now we have reached a different one, where it's socially acceptable for a person to indulge a drug habit in public as long as they don't create an offensive smell.
@Ron:
ReplyDelete> without the watermelon we would have lost the war, or at least the people making the decisions at the time had a good-faith belief that this was the case.
So this is another case of the end justifying the means? It was ok to condemn tens of millions of people to death or concentration camps, in order to win a war that never should have started in the first place?
> what we did was make communism so unfashionable that no one claims to be a communist any more, not even actual communists.
ReplyDeleteEven if this is true (I'm not sure it is--see below), how does it excuse ignoring the historical reality I referred to? I thought you were in favor of teaching history.
> But Americans do speak of the "defeat" of the USSR with pride. It's one of Ronald Reagan's signature "accomplishments."
The scare-quotes you use here indicate to me that you, like most liberals, do not view this as an actual accomplishment worthy of speaking of with pride. Which just underscores my point.
> When was the last time you saw an American politician openly advocate communism?
What American politician ever openly advocated communism? There was no "unconditional surrender" on that point because there was nothing to surrender.
However, "communism" as a term can be misleading, because communists in the US mostly didn't call themselves by that term. (The exception is the members of the American Communist Party, which never had any significant political clout and so can be ignored here.) They called themselves "progressives", and there are plenty of American politicians, now and for the past couple of centuries, who have openly advocated progressivism. No one in the US would feel the slightest bit of shame or social disapproval for saying they were a progressive; quite the reverse.
Another test is to look at what happens to American politicians who try to actively oppose communism, not in the USSR, but here in the US. The most famous example, of course, is Senator Joseph McCarthy. If communism had really made an "unconditional surrender" in the US, then McCarthy today would be hailed as a hero who was ahead of his time--because the claims he made, that there were high US officials in positions of trust and responsibility who were communist sympathizers and were feeding classified information to the Soviet Union, were *true*. But instead, his name is a byword for evil.
@Ron:
ReplyDelete> When was the last time you saw an American politician openly advocate communism?
You seem to be changing the goalposts; recall that you wrote earlier:
> Ron: All I'm asking for is public consensus that the Confederacy had no redeeming qualities, and that racism has no place in civilized society.
Something tells me you would have a very serious problem with the Confederacy being praised by a non-minuscule number of academics. Institutions of higher learning most certainly are a place in civilized society.
@Peter:
ReplyDeleteInteresting history lesson about smoking, thanks.
> It was ok to condemn tens of millions of people to death or concentration camps, in order to win a war that never should have started in the first place?
Given the plausible alternatives? Yeah, I'd say it was a defensible decision. It's also not clear to me that there was any way to know how bad Stalin was at the time (see NYT citation below).
(I don't quite understand why you're belaboring the point that WWII should not have started. Yes, it's true, the treaty of Versailles was a colossal blunder. I think everyone agrees on that. As soon as we figure out how to build a time machine we can go back and fix it.)
> Even if this is true (I'm not sure it is--see below), how does it excuse ignoring the historical reality I referred to?
I don't know that it does. If you want to argue that WWII history is not taught as well as it could be, you'll get no protest from me.
> > But Americans do speak of the "defeat" of the USSR with pride. It's one of Ronald Reagan's signature "accomplishments."
> The scare-quotes you use here indicate to me that you, like most liberals, do not view this as an actual accomplishment worthy of speaking of with pride.
Only because I'm skeptical that our actions had much to do with the outcome. I definitely celebrate the fall of the USSR, but there is good reason to believe it would have collapsed under its own weight regardless of anything we did.
> There was no "unconditional surrender" on that point because there was nothing to surrender.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/29/opinion/sunday/when-communism-inspired-americans.html
@Luke:
> You seem to be changing the goalposts
I don't see how.
> Something tells me you would have a very serious problem with the Confederacy being praised by a non-minuscule number of academics.
Indeed I would. So? I don't see how that contradicts anything I've said.
@Ron:
ReplyDelete> (I don't quite understand why you're belaboring the point that WWII should not have started. Yes, it's true, the treaty of Versailles was a colossal blunder. I think everyone agrees on that. As soon as we figure out how to build a time machine we can go back and fix it.)
I'm not @Peter, but it seems that a harsh stance of punishment—in the same spirit of what you wrote:
> Ron: No. The South was the party that refused to *concede*. To this day the South's defenders refuse to concede that it was founded on evil and sin. Fuck compromise. The South needs to confess and repent. It needs to get down on its knees and humble itself before the descendants of its millions of victims and beg forgiveness. Before that happens there can be no healing.
—is a key part of what caused WWII. I myself have offered a way for those in the South to participate in eschewing their racist past/present and their slavery past, but it very intentionally doesn't have them getting on their knees and begging. Instead, it has them writing slavery and racism out of the essential part of their identities and historical past. That is, what is essential to them is not slavery and racism. It is from this position that condemnation can be generated by them, instead of just by people like you and the State.
> > You seem to be changing the goalposts
> I don't see how.
If no politician in the US has openly advocated Communism for 20 years, that does not imply that "we've obtained unconditional surrender on the matter of Communism". Unless "unconditional surrender" means something other than "has no place in civilized society"?
> > Something tells me you would have a very serious problem with the Confederacy being praised by a non-minuscule number of academics.
> Indeed I would. So? I don't see how that contradicts anything I've said.
Shall we look at the praise of Communism among those who teach our children in US institutions of higher education? At least, I take your words to mean we won't find more than a handful of professors sympathizing with Communism.
@Luke:
ReplyDeleteSorry, I still don't follow you. I think you may need to ELI5.
@Peter, P.S.:
Progressive != Communist. Communists want to eliminate private property and have everything owned by the state. Progressives don't.
@Ron:
ReplyDeleteR: I want to stamp out racism.
L: Ok, but I question your strategy.
R: We did it to Communism.
L: Wait, we did?
R: When did the last US politician openly affirm Communism?
L: But that isn't the same thing as being stamped out.
This is my definition of "stamp out":
> Ron: All I'm asking for is public consensus that the Confederacy had no redeeming qualities, and that racism has no place in civilized society.
> It's also not clear to me that there was any way to know how bad Stalin was at the time (see NYT citation below).
ReplyDeleteYour NYT citation pretty much kicks the ball into your own goal: A 2017 opinion piece in the New York Times, saying how wonderful it was that we had Communists for so many years.
Also, the NYT article says that many American Communists did not know how bad Stalin's regime was until Khruschev revealed it. That nicely slides past two inconvenient truths: first, that Western intellectuals had plenty of opportunities to know, and to tell the truth to the Western world, starting in the 1920s, and failed miserably; and second, that the US government (specifically FDR and his administration) certainly knew by the mid 1930s, and carefully refrained from informing the American people.
Finally, note the "No True Scotsman" attitude of the author of the piece, describing his reaction to the Khruschev revelations. (He uses the word "socialism", not "communism", but that's just another of those little language shifts--more on that below.) This is typical when Western journalists and intellectuals talk about the USSR and communism. It does not seem to me like an indication that communism is unfashionable or socially unacceptable.
> Progressive != Communist. Communists want to eliminate private property and have everything owned by the state. Progressives don't.
First, you capitalized the words Progressive and Communist. Note that I did not.
Capitalized, those words refer specifically to two different political parties in US history: the Progressive Party and the Communist Party. You are quite correct that those parties had different platforms and advocated different policies.
However, what I said was that "progressive" and "communist" (note the lower case) basically mean the same thing, because the people that were called "communists" by their enemies mostly called themselves "progressives". Furthermore, while it is true that progressives today do not advocate for everything being owned by the state as a matter of legal title, they certainly advocate for a level of micromanagement on the part of the government that gives it effective ownership in a practical sense of almost everything. It's just that the micromanagement is exercised through regulation of business processes and products, so it is not easily visible to most people, since most people do not own businesses.
Similar remarks could be made about the word "socialism". Capitalized, Socialist refers to another political party in US history, which never got a very large percentage of the vote, yet most of its policies are now so mainstream in Western countries that there is no substantive debate about them at all. Those policies include micromanagement of business processes and products, so "socialism" (lower case) is basically equivalent to "progressivism" and "communism" in a practical sense. Keeping legal title to businesses in private hands is analogous to a virus mutating its surface proteins to avoid being attacked by antibodies.
Oh, and one other comment on the word "socialist": what does the third "S" in "USSR" stand for?
ReplyDelete@Ron:
ReplyDelete> I definitely celebrate the fall of the USSR, but there is good reason to believe it would have collapsed under its own weight regardless of anything we did.
Fair enough. I think our actions played more of a role than you appear to, but I agree it's a judgment call.
@Luke:
ReplyDeleteSee the last paragraph in my reply to Peter.
@Peter:
> So to you, denial of rights is only worth talking about as a "symptom"?
Of course not. But in this case the power imbalance is by far the bigger problem.
> Anyway, I think you have it backwards. The denial of rights is the fundamental problem. The power imbalance is the symptom.
No. Slavery was *legal*. According to the law at the time, no one's rights were being denied. To the contrary, the Southern states seceded because they thought the North was trying to deprive white men of their fundamental right to own black slaves!
This is something conservatives seem not to understand. Rights are not consequences of the laws of physics, nor are they ordained by God. They are decided by people, specifically by people in power.
> Your NYT citation pretty much kicks the ball into your own goal: A 2017 opinion piece in the New York Times, saying how wonderful it was that we had Communists for so many years.
Don't conflate the opinion being expressed in that piece with the facts the author cites to support that opinion. And don't confuse the author's opinion with my opinion. Just because I cite something doesn't mean I agree with everything it says.
> First, you capitalized the words Progressive and Communist. Note that I did not.
You're reading way too much into my typography. I capitalized three of the four occurrences of those words because they were at the beginning of a sentence, and the fourth just because it was in an equation and I thought it looked better that way.
> However, what I said was that "progressive" and "communist" (note the lower case) basically mean the same thing, because the people that were called "communists" by their enemies mostly called themselves "progressives".
Lots of words have changed meaning over time, and lots of people have abused terminology over time. Today, at the time we are having this conversation, the words "communist" and "progressive" do not mean the same thing, and attempts to conflate them are generally a political tactic, an attempt to smear progressives with the negative baggage attached to communists.
But, as ever, I really don't want to quibble over terminology. The point is simply that there was a time in America when advocating a fundamental shift in our economic policy to collective ownership of the means of production was fashionable, and now it is unfashionable. I don't care what label you attach to it, except insofar as the vilification of the word "communist" played a big part in the process. The fact of the matter is that this shift happened, and it's a model for how we can make racism equally unfashionable if we choose to.
@Ron:
ReplyDelete> The point is simply that there was a time in America when advocating a fundamental shift in our economic policy to collective ownership of the means of production was fashionable, and now it is unfashionable. I don't care what label you attach to it, except insofar as the vilification of the word "communist" played a big part in the process. The fact of the matter is that this shift happened, and it's a model for how we can make racism equally unfashionable if we choose to.
That's very different from what you desired:
> Ron: Fuck compromise. The South needs to confess and repent. It needs to get down on its knees and humble itself before the descendants of its millions of victims and beg forgiveness. Before that happens there can be no healing.
Did such bended-knee confessing happen with smoking or support of Communism? To my knowledge, the answer is "no".
@Luke
ReplyDelete> The South needs to confess and repent. It needs to get down on its knees
You are familiar with the concept of a metaphor, yes?
> Did such bended-knee confessing happen with smoking or support of Communism?
Communism bent its knees when the USSR collapsed. Smoking bent its knees in 1998:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1998/01/30/contrite-tobacco-executives-admit-health-risks-before-congress/79379b1b-f2c8-48b2-9376-dd73e822cd04/
@Ron:
ReplyDelete> You are familiar with the concept of a metaphor, yes?
Yes. I was connecting it to the need of the North to exact such behavior from the South after the Civil War, as well as the Allied Powers' need to exact such behavior from Germany after WWI. You clearly weren't ok with the South reconstructing its identity without slavery or Southerners reconstructing their identity without racism—you wanted more. I would like to open up the possibility that you are demanding too much and that by doing so, you help perpetuate the problem instead of bring it to an end.
By the way, it's quite possible that if the identity reconstructions are done—such that neither slavery nor racism is seen as essential to the goodness of those identities—it would be a lot easier to do the kind of repentance you demand. But the initial change would not happen via righteous people telling sinners to repent (and make reparations?).
> Communism bent its knees when the USSR collapsed. Smoking bent its knees in 1998:
I can definitely see your link as smoking bending its knees, but why does the economic failure of the USSR qualify as repentance? That's like arguing that Napoleon following the French Revolution showed that democracy is a failure. Was there a general recognition that doing away with private property just doesn't work given human nature? How about a general recognition that vanguardism doesn't work—if by "work", one means "doesn't leave millions dead"?
> Rights are not consequences of the laws of physics, nor are they ordained by God. They are decided by people, specifically by people in power.
ReplyDeleteAh, I see; we are using different definitions of the word "rights". What you are calling "rights", I would call "laws", or more precisely "statutes".
The reason I make this distinction is that there are arguments independent of any human choice of laws (and also independent of any religious beliefs) for rights being "natural". (The most general term I know of to describe the basis for such arguments is "game theory", but it's not really a very good term.) So it is important to keep them conceptually distinct from the specific choices of statutes that humans make. Perhaps a better term for this discussion would be "natural order" (though that term has drawbacks too).
With that distinction in mind, what I have been calling "denial of rights" could be described as "making choices of statutes that don't respect the natural order". This is the only principled way I know of to respond to the belief that might makes right--which is the belief that your statement that "rights are decided by people in power" promotes, and which I reject. No, properly speaking, rights are *not* decided by people in power; if you have a society in which they are, then your society is broken and needs to be fixed.
Of course you could respond that, by my criterion, just about every human society in history has been broken. Yes, I agree. That doesn't mean we should just accept that brokenness as, to use your terms, a "consequence of the laws of physics" or "ordained by God".
> I don't quite understand why you're belaboring the point that WWII should not have started.
ReplyDeleteLet me give an analogy: saying that you had to take drastic measures to put out a fire, and ended up destroying a lot of valuable things, is one thing if you're just the fire department. It's quite another if you're also the arsonist who caused the fire.
> there was a time in America when advocating a fundamental shift in our economic policy to collective ownership of the means of production was fashionable, and now it is unfashionable
You are focusing on one particular thing--who, on paper, owns the means of production--while ignoring everything else.
Also, the one particular thing you are focusing on was never fashionable to begin with. The only Westerners who advocated that particular thing were the American Communist Party, who were never fashionable (and never, as I mentioned before, had any significant political clout). The Western intellectuals who praised the USSR at the same time it was killing tens of millions didn't do so because the USSR had collective ownership of the means of production. They did so because they thought the USSR was the first practical realization of the utopian visions described in works like Bellamy's Looking Backward or Trueblood's The Federation of the World.
The key feature that made them believe that was government by intellectual elite--that the USSR was designed by intellectuals, who supposedly knew better how to build a society and would construct it so that it would magically make everything work right, and there would be no more war and no more conflict. And *that* belief is as fashionable now as it is then, if not more so--even though on the evidence of the 20th century it is obvious nonsense.
@Peter:
ReplyDelete> With that distinction in mind, what I have been calling "denial of rights" could be described as "making choices of statutes that don't respect the natural order".
But that just begs the question. Instead of defining the word "rights" you now have to define what is the "natural order", and there is no consensus on that. The antebellum South believed that slavery was part of the "natural order", and it's actually quite a defensible position: up to that point, slavery had always existed in human society. The Bible endorses it. People with dark skin really are better suited to working in the sun. The suggestion that there was anything wrong with slavery was quite the radical notion in 1860.
> That doesn't mean we should just accept that brokenness
Actually, it does. We actually don't have a choice. There is a fundamental problem with trying to derive moral principles from the "natural order", and that is that the "natural order" does not yield a unique quality metric. It's kind of like a Gödel's incompleteness theorem for morals. See:
http://blog.rongarret.info/2015/04/drawing-line-making-case-for-idea-ism.html
> You are focusing on one particular thing--who, on paper, owns the means of production--while ignoring everything else.
ReplyDeleteBecause that one particular thing happens to be the defining feature of the word I'm using.
But if it will short-circuit this argument, I will concede that communism is not the best example. I'll stick with smoking for now, and I'll add a few more ideas that used to be fashionable within the last 100 years but no longer are:
1. Women should not be allowed to vote
2. Gay sex should be a crime
3. People of different races should not be allowed to marry
4. "Separate but equal" is a reasonable way to implement equal protection
5. There is something horribly wrong with cohabitation
6. A Catholic should never be president of the United States
@Luke:
ReplyDelete> I would like to open up the possibility that you are demanding too much and that by doing so, you help perpetuate the problem instead of bring it to an end.
Fine, I'll concede that I might have gone a little overboard in my rhetoric. But to quote Barry Goldwater, extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. (That's actually not true -- it runs afoul of Ron's First Law. I just thought it would be fun to quote a Republican in my own defense.)
> It's kind of like a Gödel's incompleteness theorem for morals. See:
ReplyDelete> http://blog.rongarret.info/2015/04/drawing-line-making-case-for-idea-ism.html
This seems to be the end of quite a series of related posts. I'll take a look at them.
> This seems to be the end of quite a series of related posts.
ReplyDeleteIt is, but the relevant portion, the part that describes the problem, is more or less self-contained.
@Ron:
ReplyDeleteWhile you said "I will concede that communism is not the best example", I think it might be worth pushing toward some more clarification on the term 'communism' for future discussions, while this one is still in random access memory.
> Peter Donis: You are focusing on one particular thing--who, on paper, owns the means of production--while ignoring everything else.
> Ron: Because that one particular thing happens to be the defining feature of the word ['communism'] I'm using.
Did the workers ever own the means of production in any of the governments commonly described as 'Communist'? As far as I'm aware, that was the long-term hope, but the workers just weren't up for it at first, requiring a revolutionary vanguard. If it's fair to say that the vanguard never disbanded, then @Peter Donis' characterization is accurate: Communism is where the people who think they're smart dictate the order of society, including the economy. Maybe add the moral veneer: "for the workers", kind of like "for the children".
@Peter also seems correct when he pointed out that USSR = Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. That term, when understood in the economic sense, is almost certainly more technically accurate in describing any large nation which has been described as 'Communist'. The real debate is then over how much control the government gets of the economy. I don't know how useful it is to insist on a binary where the State either owns none or all of the means of production.
And so, when you say that "the vilification of the word "communist" played a big part in the process", I'm not sure how much that matters. What seems to matter a lot more is that we be forever skeptical of centralized power, especially where that power makes promises to the masses that it has their best interests at heart. That idea seems to be at the heart of Communism and Socialism and it's not at all clear to me that we've purged that idea from our working set.
> the relevant portion, the part that describes the problem, is more or less self-contained.
ReplyDeletePerhaps, but it clearly arose from a larger body of thought that you have spent quite some time developing and defending against criticism, so I want to understand that context before trying to respond to this particular piece of it.
> What seems to matter a lot more is that we be forever skeptical of centralized power, especially where that power makes promises to the masses that it has their best interests at heart. That idea seems to be at the heart of Communism and Socialism and it's not at all clear to me that we've purged that idea from our working set.
ReplyDeleteThis is a very good quick summary of one of the main points I have been driving at.
> I want to understand that context before trying to respond to this particular piece of it.
ReplyDeleteHaving said that (and I'm still working my way through the longer series of posts), there is one question I might as well ask now. You (@Ron) said:
> There is a fundamental problem with trying to derive moral principles from the "natural order", and that is that the "natural order" does not yield a unique quality metric. It's kind of like a Gödel's incompleteness theorem for morals.
So far I have not been able to find this, either in the post you linked to or in the longer series. Can you give a more specific reference?
> We actually don't have a choice.
ReplyDeleteI also wanted to ask for clarification on this: are you saying we don't have a choice about accepting that might makes right?
> are you saying we don't have a choice about accepting that might makes right?
ReplyDeleteNot quite. The actual referent was "rights are decided by people in power". That's not quite the same as "might makes right" because the people in power can decide to adopt some moral principle other than might-makes-right. Evolution produces both selfishness and altruism in individuals. But in the face of otherwise intractable disagreements, the views of the powerful will always prevail. (This is actually a tautology if you think about it.)
> > There is a fundamental problem with trying to derive moral principles from the "natural order", and that is that the "natural order" does not yield a unique quality metric. It's kind of like a Gödel's incompleteness theorem for morals.
> So far I have not been able to find this, either in the post you linked to or in the longer series.
I was being a bit glib when I used the word "theorem" because it's not a theorem, just an observation. The TL;DR is:
1. Drawing a boundary between an organism and its environment is fundamental to life, and the basis of all moral decisions, including the idea of "rights".
2. Once evolution invented brains, the dynamics of drawing boundaries changed radically because brains can *choose* where to draw boundaries in ways that are very far removed (but not entirely divorced) from the underlying laws of physics.
Throughout human history we have chosen to draw boundaries around progressively larger and larger groups: the family, the tribe, the city-state, the nation-state, the race, the species ("All men are created equal"), the phylum ("save the whales"), and in extreme cases, the kingdom (in the biological sense, not the political one -- Jainism is an example of this extreme).
It is not possible to go any further than that without technological advances because our survival currently depends on consuming plants, so anyone who decides to advocate plants-rights goes extinct.
(Note that it is also not possible to go beyond the village in the opposite extreme. It is not possible for a single human to reproduce, and even a single mating pair or isolated family cannot survive because inbreeding. The minimum viable reproductive unit for humans is a village.)
> The actual referent was "rights are decided by people in power". That's not quite the same as "might makes right" because the people in power can decide to adopt some moral principle other than might-makes-right.
ReplyDelete"Might makes right" is not a moral principle. It's a simple acceptance without protest of the fact you describe:
> in the face of otherwise intractable disagreements, the views of the powerful will always prevail.
In other words, if moral principles fail, there is always brute force to fall back on. Yes, that's true. But recognizing it as an unpleasant truth is one thing. Accepting it without protest as the normal state of affairs is another.
> (This is actually a tautology if you think about it.)
If you define "power" as "the ability to enforce your will on others whether they like it or not", then yes, I agree. But then we are out of the realm of morality and into the realm of brute force. The whole point of morality is to have some standard of what is right other than what the people with brute force on their side say is right.
> I was being a bit glib when I used the word "theorem" because it's not a theorem, just an observation.
So then the "incompleteness theorem" would be the observation that there is no unique way to draw the boundary line between Us and Them?
> Once evolution invented brains, the dynamics of drawing boundaries changed radically because brains can *choose* where to draw boundaries in ways that are very far removed (but not entirely divorced) from the underlying laws of physics.
ReplyDeleteThis is true, but it can be taken further than you take it: brains can also choose to draw boundaries in ways that are very far removed from the biology and history of the entities involved, not just the underlying laws of physics. All of the categories you mention come from biology and history: family, tribe, state, race, species, etc. But nothing requires our categories to depend on such things.
For example, here is a suggested drawing of boundaries for morality: "Us" consists of all entities who will reliably execute the tit for tat strategy in an iterated prisoner's dilemma. "Them" is everything else. (Note that it does not matter whether this property of an entity comes from being hardwired by genes, "soft-wired" by learning and formation of habits, conscious adoption of some moral rule that leads to this behavior without the entity understanding why, or explicitly drawing all of the relevant conclusions in real time whenever the entity is confronted with a prisoner's dilemma situation.) To make clear what "will reliably execute" means, here are a couple of sample classifications:
(1) Someone halfway around the world whom I have never met, from whom I purchase an item over the Internet, who ships me the item as advertised when I have paid and my payment has cleared, is an Us. Someone in my own city who vandalizes my property, with no previous interaction with me, is a Them.
(2) Middle class workers who gave a fair day's work for a fair day's pay, paid their taxes, put money aside in their retirement accounts, and never thought about wider issues, are Us. Government officials and investment bankers who tanked the economy and stuck taxpayers with the bill are Them.
At least in case (2), the "Them" are certainly intellectually capable of understanding the tit for tat strategy and the arguments in its favor; they just chose not to play that strategy anyway. So "will reliably execute" does not just mean "capable of", it means "will reliably choose to, even in the face of temptation to choose otherwise".
Why do I bring this up? Because of this:
> our survival currently depends on consuming plants, so anyone who decides to advocate plants-rights goes extinct.
> The minimum viable reproductive unit for humans is a village.
My point is that survival and reproduction, for creatures like us that have brains and can make choices, do not just depend on biological things like what we need to eat or what support structure we need to reproduce. They also depend on what choices we make--and particularly on what choices we make in prisoner's dilemma-type situations, where the incentives of short term individual gain and long term survival and reproduction conflict. I know you've written about this in the past, and you even refer to it in the series of posts that end with the one you linked to earlier in this discussion. But I'm not sure if you've considered its implications for boundary drawing.
@Peter Donis:
ReplyDelete> > What seems to matter a lot more is that we be forever skeptical of centralized power, especially where that power makes promises to the masses that it has their best interests at heart. That idea seems to be at the heart of Communism and Socialism and it's not at all clear to me that we've purged that idea from our working set.
> This is a very good quick summary of one of the main points I have been driving at.
I had a sneaking suspicion. :-) The problem is that definitions which are too clear and precise work well for nerds but not so well for real-world affairs, especially politics.
To apply this back to the topic of racism, I think that an idea at the heart of racism is that one group is better than another group, noting that the word 'better' is multivalent. It never seems to end well. But instead of attacking the idea at its core and understanding why human nature seems so attracted to it, we target only specific examples. One reason for doing this is if in secret, maybe not even known consciously, we believe we're in one of the 'better' groups. It may no longer be identifiable by skin color or gender. They might be 'deplorables' while I'm a good-hearted person interested in helping people.