A Muslim family in America. Source: The New York Times.

Today’s New York Times has a front-page article titled “U.S. Muslims Ask, Will We Ever Belong?“

The family described in the article seems perfectly nice, so I’d like to answer that question with an unqualified “yes.”

But sadly, the truthful answer is, “yes and no.”

To the extent that Muslims adopt Western culture, customs, values, and behaviors, yes, they do indeed belong. A society is a group of people who share those things.

And there’s the rub. Whatever its merits or demerits as a religion, Islam is not a significant part of Western history and culture except as an antagonist. Muslims stand outside the Western tradition.

It’s important to understand what that means and what it does not mean.

It does not mean that Muslims are bad people or that they are necessarily our enemies. It does not mean that they can’t contribute to our society and be accepted in most contexts. It doesn’t even mean that Islam itself has nothing to offer us in religious insights or examples of faith and courage.

What it does mean is that by their answer to one of the most important questions of life, “What’s it all about,” Muslims stand apart. They do not belong. And depending on how they interpret their faith, it means that they disagree with some of Western civilization’s fundamental conclusions about justice, individual rights, freedom of religion, the role of government, and the relationship between humanity and God.

It also means that most Western people will regard them with just a little bit of doubt. The more values and beliefs that people share, the more they feel confident that they understand each other and can trust each other. Don’t blame me for it: that’s just the fact. There are both valid and invalid reasons for it.

And it has nothing specific to do with Islam. It applies to all differences between people. The more extensive and important the differences, the greater is the potential for distrust, misunderstanding, and hostility.

Difference is not a license to treat anyone with less than the respect and love that all people deserve. But it’s foolish to pretend that the difference doesn’t exist.

Criticize former U.S. Senator Alan Simpson all you want.

As the Republican co-chairman of the Cat Food Commission, Simpson is an inviting target. His comment that Social Security is a “milk cow with 310 million tits,” and that medical treatment for disabled veterans is too costly, make him an easy target.

But Simpson’s argument is irrefutable:

1. The U.S. government has limited resources. It cannot do all the things that people want it to do.

2. Therefore, it must prioritize how it uses those resources.

3. It isn’t going to stop bombing, invading, and occupying other countries. It isn’t going to close the more than 700 military bases it has around the world. It isn’t going to stop giving hundreds of billions of dollars to military contractors and security companies.

4. It isn’t going to increase tax rates on the wealthiest Americans back to the levels of the 1940s-1990s, when economic growth was higher and unemployment was lower than today.

5. It isn’t going to cut the fat benefits it pays to, for instance, former U.S. Senator Alan Simpson, who unlike most Americans has a defined-benefit pension and free medical care in addition to his personal wealth.

6. Therefore, it has to cut benefits to some other groups of people who lack political power to stop the cuts.

7. Therefore, it has to cut benefits to the retired, the disabled, and the unemployed.

I’m reading the Sunday New York Times and drinking coffee at McDonalds while I procrastinate about doing the real work of the day.

The Sunday print edition of The Times is about half the size that it used to be. The pages are smaller, there are fewer of them, and whole sections have been eliminated. Partly, it’s because of the recession. Mostly, it’s because there are fewer readers and thus lower advertising revenue. But it’s still a substantial newspaper, one of the few remaining examples of the species.

It’s also, as Churchill said of Russia, a mystery wrapped in an enigma.

During the Bush-Cheney nightmare, The Times slavishly suppressed any stories that the administration wanted to keep secret, such as torture, illegal wiretapping, and anomalies in the official story of the 9/11 attacks. At the same time, it enthusiastically front-paged administration propaganda that it knew, or should have known, was false, such as the myth of Iraqi WMDs and various provocateur-fabricated “terror plots.”

Now, however, The Times is printing secrets all over the place. Partly, it might be because Executive Editor Bill Keller is ashamed of his actions during the Bush-Cheney years. Partly, it’s probably because he isn’t as afraid of the Obama administration as he was of Bush and Cheney.

Machiavelli, Nixon, and Obama

The Bush-Cheney regime asked a simple question to get people’s cooperation: “If you cross us, would you prefer to have your back broken or your neck broken?”

The Obama administration, however, wants to sit down and reason with you. If progressives say that white is white and Wall Street Republicans say that white is black, Obama’s instinct is to split the difference and say that white is gray. But as soon as he makes that concession, Wall Street Republicans insist that gray is black, and the negotiations begin again. Inch by inch, compromise by compromise, working Americans get scr*wed.

It’s not for nothing that Machiavelli said it’s better for a prince to be feared than to be loved.

We can see the difference not only in news media but in Congress, where obstructionist Republicans and spineless Democrats blocked or weakened legislation vitally needed by working and unemployed Americans. They’re not afraid of crossing the Obama administration as they were of Bush-Cheney. They’re more afraid of Wall Street, Fox News, and Glenn Beck.

Another brilliant political thinker, less admired than Machiavelli, was — believe it or not — disgraced U.S. President Richard Nixon. As president, he tried to make people think he was slightly crazy, so that they believed his actions were not rationally predictable: “If you set him off, Heaven knows what he’d do: he might start a nuclear war!” Nixon called it his “madman theory.” Of course, it was a variation on Machiavelli, whose work Nixon had read.

Obama suffers from the opposite fault. He seems very calm and rational, so his actions and reactions are quite predictable. It enables his adversaries to play him like a violin.

Reporters Sneak Facts Past Censorship

The Times still carries water for the government, if less consistently than it did during the Bush-Cheney era. Having worked as a newspaper reporter in Washington DC, I can see that Times reporters often try to “sneak” forbidden facts past management censorship.

One news story about the collapse of the World Trade Center towers after the 9/11 attacks noted, far down toward the end of the article, that (a) in addition to the two towers, WTC Building 7 collapsed but hadn’t been hit by anything; and (b) no comparable buildings before or since 9/11 have ever collapsed due to fire or airplane impacts. The reporter knew.

Another news story about the recent Wikileaks release of Afghan war documents dutifully parroted the government’s line that Wikileaks had not sought the Pentagon’s help in redacting potentially harmful information. But further down in the article, near the bottom, it recounted how Wikileaks  contacted the Pentagon and sought its help to do exactly what the same article earlier said Wikileaks had not done. The reporter knew.

It’s how things work sometimes. When I was a reporter, I once wrote an important article about government security measures that was accurate and had no classified information. The newspaper’s editor re-wrote the first two paragraphs to say exactly the opposite of what the rest of the article documented. The theory was that most people wouldn’t read the entire article, which still had my byline. Anyone who read the whole article must have thought I was nuts.

Bringing Democracy to Iraq

On the other side, there’s still plenty of propaganda in The Times.  A “Week in Review” article about “Winning, Losing, and War” states:

As the last officially designated American combat forces left Iraq, television cameras caught the exultation of a soldier finally heading home.

“We won!” he yelled. “It’s over! America, we brought democracy to Iraq!”

When I first read that, I thought of the incident years earlier when news media reported that Iraqis had spontaneously pulled down a statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad. Of course, the whole thing was staged by the Bush-Cheney administration for propaganda purposes, and many of the people pulling down the statue weren’t even Iraqis, having been flown in as actors for the “unreality TV” show.

Did a soldier really yell that nonsense about bringing democracy to Iraq? Possibly. Was the soldier instructed to say it, and was the incident staged for propaganda purposes? Almost certainly, and the reporter had to know it.

Fearless Leader Bush

But of course, we all remember how Fearless Leader Bush called Americans to arms in 2001-2002, saying that “it’s time we brought democracy to Iraq.”

Oops. He didn’t say that. He said that dat debbil Saddam Hussein, whose only difference from Bush and Cheney was that they dress better, had nookular bombs and anthrax-spraying aerial drones that he was going to unleash on American cities. Darth Cheney went on TV to say that “we know where the weapons labs are.”

General Colin “Uncle Tom” Powell went before the United Nations with a faked slide show purporting to prove that Iraq was bristling with illegal WMDs. Administration officials and surrogates also peddled the false story that Saddam Hussein had been involved in the 9/11 attacks, thereby to provide a fig leaf of legality to an otherwise naked act of aggression.

The Bush-Cheney regime didn’t invade Iraq to make it into a democracy. Bush and Cheney lied and frightened Americans into supporting the war:

• Because they wanted to conquer and loot the country.
• Because Dubya wanted the glory of being a “war prezadent.”
• Because they wanted to enrich their friends and military contractors.
• Because they wanted to regain control of Iraqi oil resources for themselves and their friends in the oil industry.
• Because they wanted to satisfy their perverse lust for murder and destruction.
• Because they wanted to increase the threat of terrorist attacks, real and imaginary, so that they could destroy the tattered remains of Constitutional protections for ordinary Americans.

Saddam Hussein is dead. Bush and Cheney are still walking around free, and they will be supported in luxury by taxpayers for the rest of their evil lives. You couldn’t write this stuff as fiction. Nobody would believe it.

Brand Blanshard (1892 - 1987)

Today, August 27th, is Brand Blanshard‘s birthday. If he were still with us, he would be 118 years old.

In college and graduate school, he was my mentor and inspiration.

Though little known outside of academic circles, he was one of the giants of 20th-century philosophy. His ideas, writing, and teaching set an example of clarity, insight, and scrupulous dedication to the truth that few other philosophers of that or any century can equal.

Born in 1892, he entered the University of Michigan in 1910 and, after his junior year, won a Rhodes scholarship to complete his studies at Merton College of Oxford University in England. Many years later, in his autobiography, he wrote:

I despair of putting in words what Oxford meant to me. It surely meant far more than to some who were better prepared to take it in stride … To a youth straight from the Middle West it was overwhelming.

At Oxford, his tutor was H.H. Joachim, an eminent philosopher of the Absolute Idealist viewpoint. His own mentor and inspiration was F.H. Bradley, a philosopher who towered over late 19th and early 20th-century philosophy in much the same way as Professor Blanshard towered over the middle part of the 20th century.

For much of his life, he was Sterling Professor of Philosophy at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. He wrote his last book (Four Reasonable Men) at the age of 92, and died in 1987, at the age of 95.

Professor Blanshard’s magnum opus was The Nature of Thought (1939), a far-ranging two-volume work that he wrote from 1923-1938, much of his time spent at a carrel in the reading room of the British Museum. I have a photograph of the place in the British Museum where he worked. Mrs. Blanshard sent to me after he passed away.

He is probably best-known for his devastating critiques of logical positivism in epistemology and emotivism in ethics: critiques which, by exposing the central errors of those theories, were almost single-handedly responsible for their abandonment.

I remember all that about Professor Blanshard, and yet, there are other things about him which to me are just as precious. He was a kind and inspiring teacher; a loving husband to his wife, Roberta Yerkes Blanshard; and a noble gentleman of the kind no longer known by this world.

He was also my friend, and I miss him. I comfort myself with the thought that I will one day see him again. I’m sure that we will have a lot to talk about.

For the most part, higher education has been replaced by vocational training. That transition has been driven by two main factors.

First, our society puts a dollar value on everything. The “value” of higher education is measured principally by the difference in lifetime income it can produce.

Second, our society espouses the myth that everyone should have and can benefit from higher education. That results in a massive influx of students who have neither the aptitude nor the inclination to pursue traditional subjects. To serve those students, colleges and universities change their curricula to incorporate more job training.

The real “villain,” if there is one, is the irrational esteem that society gives to university degrees as a measure of personal worth. A good, honest, hard-working ditch digger with a high school diploma is just as important as a university professor with multiple doctorates. There is no need to force everyone into the “higher education” path, and we shouldn’t do it. But we do.

Stoning a blasphemer in ancient Israel. A scene from the film "Monty Python's The Life of Brian." The rabbi (John Cleese) is about to get bonked in the head.

What’s so bad about stoning?

All right, it’s a rhetorical question. I oppose capital punishment of any kind, and that includes stoning.

Questions about what people “deserve” for various crimes are impossible to answer. How much punishment should they get? What kind? And who has the right or the duty to inflict the punishment?

In an insightful book called Without Guilt and Justice, philosopher Walter Kaufmann (1921 – 1980) showed that those questions are much more difficult than you might think. The only defensible justifications for punishment are deterrence and rehabilitation. Under our current for-profit prison system, those goals are rarely achieved. But I digress.

Much of the current publicity about stoning comes from the need to justify the U.S. government’s continued occupation of Afghanistan (which kills a lot more people than stoning). Neoconservatives also use it to demonize Iran in anticipation of an Israeli attack on that country (which would kill a lot more people than stoning).

However, Sunday’s New York Times revealed some facts about stoning of which I was previously unaware. As horrendous as stoning is, some of the laws governing it seem to embody a certain amount of common sense. It’s not the unmitigated exercise in barbarism that some political writers make it out to be. Not unmitigated, at least.

First, stoning is not prescribed by the Qur’an, the Muslims’ central holy book (they also recognize the Jewish and Christian scriptures). Instead, stoning is prescribed by Islamic legal traditions called hadiths, which are something like the interpretations of Jewish law contained in the Talmud. The hadiths apply it mainly to the crime of adultery.

As is often the case, religious traditions develop laws based on the needs and customs of the society in which they arise. Because lineage and family were so important in Middle Eastern cultures, adultery was considered a very serious crime. The religious tradition prescribed a correspondingly serious penalty.

Second, just as with Jewish and Christian religious law, very strict standards were established for proof of guilt. To prove adultery, four male eyewitnesses had to testify that they witnessed the act. That makes adultery difficult to prove because it is usually carried out in secret. As a result, stoning for adultery could be expected to be rare.

Moreover, the four eyewitnesses had to give the same account of the facts. If their stories differed in any detail, they would be subject to punishment. That would discourage accusations of adultery unless the witnesses were quite sure about what had occurred and very serious about testifying. Yes, sometimes witnesses might collude. But getting four men to tell the same story, in the face of punishment if they’re found out, is a barrier to false accusations that would not exist if only one witness was required and if perjury was treated lightly.

Third, the people responsible for convicting someone of adultery had to take personal responsibility for carrying out the punishment. If the adulterer confessed, then the judge had to cast the first stone. If witnesses proved the adulterer’s guilt, then one of the witnesses had to cast the first stone. For most people who are morally normal, the idea of injuring another person by stoning is horrendous. That, too, would discourage false or uncertain accusations.

Of course, those are the Islamic laws and traditions governing stoning. Thugs and psychopaths don’t care about laws and traditions, so they’ll stone anyone they dislike and feel great about it. But that’s not unique to Islamic countries.

The article mentioned one other fact I hadn’t heard:

The former head of Iran’s judiciary made several recommendations to judges not to impose or implement stoning sentences, but all have been ignored.

Much like the United States, where it’s hard to rein in “conservative” judges who want to impose cruel and unusual punishments on anyone who falls into their clutches.

Stoning is still wrong. It’s still barbaric, but so is all capital punishment. At least stoning seems to be governed by some sensible, if not failproof, safeguards.

Sarah Palin reads crib notes written on the palm of her hand. Source: The New York Times.

What do President Obama, mosques, Cuba, and Sarah Palin’s hand have in common?

No, it has nothing to do with how many Republicans it takes to screw in a light bulb.

I might be over-thinking a few things here, so take this as speculation.

President Obama didn’t need to take a public stand about the building of a mosque near “ground zero,” where some of the 9/11 false-flag attacks took place. But he did.

A lot of Fox-addled Republicans already think that Obama is a secret Muslim, so that move was guaranteed to confirm their suspicions and drive them (more) nuts. Many “moderate” voters, seeing them on television, will recognize how crazy they are. Did Obama plan it that way?

Obama didn’t need to ease travel restrictions to Cuba. But he apparently plans to do it.

Most of the same Fox-addled Republicans who think that Obama is a secret Muslim also believe that he’s a Godless Communist™, so that move was guaranteed to confirm their suspicions and drive them (more) nuts. Many “moderate” voters, seeing them on television, will recognize how crazy they are. Did Obama plan it that way?

Meanwhile, Sarah Palin didn’t need to write crib notes on the palm of her hand, where TV cameras would be guaranteed to show them to the world.

Most of the people who admire Sarah Palin seem to have low self-esteem and very little education. They believe (often incorrectly) that they’re stupid. Sarah Palin’s crib notes were guaranteed (a) to be noticed and (b) to tell her followers, “See? I’m stupid, just like you! I’m one of you!”

Ms. Palin is certainly ignorant and interested only in self-promotion, but I don’t believe that she’s actually stupid. In general, people who aren’t her fans already think she’s stupid, so her crib notes won’t change their opinion. However, people who are her fans seem to think that they, themselves, are stupid. Palin’s crib notes confirm that she represents them. Did Palin’s puppetmasters plan it that way?

As I said, maybe I’m over-thinking this. But it seems possible that President Obama and Palin’s puppetmasters are playing a very tricky game with these moves.

As an aside, let’s have a show of hands: Does anyone believe that Palin writes her own Twitter tweets? Or that she wrote any of the books, articles, or speeches attributed to her? No, of course not.

What caused the American “Civil War”?*

That question provoked a serious, thoughtful debate between readers of this blog. In the Comments section of my article, “The Hijab and the Flag,” they exchanged views, arguments, and more facts than I had ever known about the Civil War.

One of the readers, who hails from Canada, thinks that slavery was the paramount reason for the Civil War. Another, who lives in Virginia, thinks that economic and Constitutional issues were most important.

The official reason for the war, as the story is told today, was to eliminate the undisputed evil of slavery. As the saying goes, “history is written by the victors.”

Because most people have little interest in history beyond graduating from high school, they accept that explanation without question. And even some people who do think about history conclude, based on their reading, that slavery was the cause of the war.

People in former Confederate states, however, are less inclined to accept the official explanation. The reader in Virginia is one of them. And when I mentioned the dispute to a software engineer from Louisiana, he agreed that “of course,” economic concerns were paramount and that slavery was a side-issue.

Identifying Causes

But it’s not as easy to identify “the cause” of a historical event as many people believe.

It’s difficult enough to identify “the cause” of an event in a laboratory. Identifying “the cause” of a historical event is particularly difficult. Almost all events have multiple antecedent factors that can be identified as causes: historical events are particularly complex. Which factor we identify as the most important cause is not entirely subjective, but there’s a large element of subjectivity and interpretation.

Consider a simple case. One billiard ball hits another billiard ball, and the second ball then rolls into a pocket of the billiards table. What caused the second ball to roll into the pocket?

Without hesitation, most people would say that the collision between the two balls was the cause. But what about the player’s deft use of the cue to start the first ball rolling toward the second? What about the perfectly-flat surface of the table, without which both balls would roll in unpredictable directions? And what about the bet that the player made with a friend that he could make the second ball roll into the pocket?

All those factors, and many more, were required for the second ball to roll into the pocket. Which factor we identify as the cause of an event depends on several factors. We tend to say that the cause of an event is:

• Something that closely precedes it in time.
• Something close to it in space.
• Something in the situation that changes.
• Something in the situation that we can control.

It also depends on what kind of story we’re telling and for what purpose. If we’re teaching a college physics class and explaining vectors, then we focus on the relative directions, mass, and velocity of the balls. If we’re doing surface integrals in calculus, we focus on the surface of the billiards table. If we’re discussing psychology, we talk about the motivations of the players. And so on.

Our Purpose Influences Our Choice of a Cause

The point is that in even the simplest situations, there are many causes involved in producing a single effect. And historical situations are almost never simple.

Moreover, our goals and interests determine which causes we consider most important. It is thus unsurprising that historians beholden to the Union emphasize slavery as a cause: they want to justify the Union’s invasion and subjugation of the Confederacy. Confederate historians are in a similar situation. They want to justify the Confederate states’ secession and independence. Therefore, they emphasize economic issues and the states’ Constitutional right to secede, just as they downplay the issue of slavery. Neither side is being dishonest. Both are merely interpreting the evidence in light of their own world-view, values, and assumptions.

Similar reasoning appears in other contexts. In medicine, for example, doctors tend to identify the cause of an illness as a factor that they can treat, such as a bacterial infection. Other causal factors are involved, of course — such as nutrition, the general health of the individual, and so forth — but doctors can usually do something about a bacterial infection. So they identify the cause pragmatically, since they can prescribe a drug for it. Other factors are more or less ignored.

The most we can fairly say is that slavery, economic issues, the Southern states’ Constitutional right to secede, and the political dominance of the Northern industrial states were all causes that led to secession of the Confederate states. They were also causes of the Union government’s war on the Confederate states. Note that the war is separate and independent of the states’ secession, which the Union government could have allowed as the U.S. Constitution required.

Thus, to ask “what caused the American Civil War?” is too vague a question. One factor might have been the most important cause of the Confederate states’ secession, and a completely different factor might have been the cause of the Union’s decision to invade and subjugate the Confederate states. We really must separate those two questions.

Dispelling Myths About the Confederacy

To help understand why Confederate states seceded from the Union, it’s important to dispel a few myths about the Confederate states, racism, and slavery.

Myth: Confederate racism was unique

Many, perhaps most, people in the Confederate states were racists in that they considered blacks inferior to whites. Historian David M. Potter notes in his book The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861:

This was the doctrine of the inherent superiority of whites over Negroes. The idea was not distinctively southern, but it did have a distinctive significance in the South, for it served to rationalize slavery …

As Potter observes, the belief in white racial superiority was not unique to the South. It was quite common among those of European ancestry until very recently. The Scottish economist Adam Smith, considered the father of modern economics, makes a side comment in The Wealth of Nations (1776) that the wealth of a European peasant:

…exceeds that of many an African king, the absolute master of the lives and liberties of ten thousand naked savages.

(Book I, Chapter I, at the very end of the chapter)

The English writer Walter Bagehot said in his book Physics and Politics (1872) that

The mixture of persons of different race in the same commonwealth, unless one race had complete ascendancy, tended to confuse all the relations of life …

(Chapter 1, “The Preliminary Age”)

And of course we have the words of “the great emancipator” himself, U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, who said that:

I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races. I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people. And I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe forever forbids the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.

And as much as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.

(Lincoln-Douglas debates, debate at Charleston, September 18, 1858)

Those are shocking statements today, but they were common beliefs of white Americans until the middle of the 20th century. They were not unique to the Confederate states.

Myth: Most Confederates fought to defend slavery

A very poignant statement of most Confederates’ reasons for going to war was given by Robert E. Lee in April of 1861.

Lee, who was a colonel in the Union Army, had been offered command of all Union military forces. Instead, because he considered himself first and foremost a citizen of Virginia, he resigned his commission and took command of Confederate military forces. In his resignation letter of April 20, 1861, Lee wrote to Union Army General Winfield Scott:

[My resignation] would have been presented at once but for the struggle it has cost me to separate myself from a service to which I have devoted the best years of my life and all the ability I possessed. During the whole of that time, I have experienced nothing but kindness from my superiors and the most cordial friendship from my comrades …

Save in defense of my native state [of Virginia], I never desire again to draw my sword.

(Annals of America, Volume 9, pp. 258-259)

On the same day, Lee wrote to his sister, Anne Marshall:

With all my devotion to the Union and the feeling of loyalty and duty of an American citizen, I have not been able to make up my mind to raise my hand against my relatives, my children, my home. I have, therefore, resigned my commission in the Army and, save in defense of my native state, I hope I may never be called on to draw my sword.

(Annals of America, Volume 9, pp. 258-259)

If the leader of the Confederate military forces thought that slavery was an issue, he did not consider it an important enough issue to mention.

My point is not that slavery was a non-issue. It clearly was an issue for some people on both the Confederate and Union sides. However, many other people in Confederate states considered their states’ self-defense and right to self-determination (as sanctioned by the U.S. Constitution) to be the most important issue.

Myth: Most Confederates approved of slavery

If many Confederate citizens went to war to defend their states and their communities, rather than to defend slavery, then the idea that they supported slavery becomes less of an obvious corollary.

In fact, many southerners did disapprove of slavery and expected it to be abolished peacefully. The most important factor in their disapproval of slavery might have been the ideals of human equality that they professed and genuinely believed. Potter notes that:

[Racism] furnished southerners with a way to avoid confronting an intolerable paradox: that they were committed to human equality in principle but to human servitude in practice. The paradox was a genuine one, not a case of hypocrisy …

Southern leaders of the late 18th and 19th centuries had played with the idea of some day eliminating slavery. That was, in part, why the South had acceded to the exclusion of slavery from the Northwest Territory in 1787 and to the abolition of the African slave trade in 1808. It was why a limited number of southerners had emancipated their slaves …

(Potter, op cit, p. 459)

One of the people who despised slavery was none other than Robert E. Lee, who wrote to his wife in 1856:

In this enlightened age, there are few but what will acknowledge that slavery as an institution is a moral and political evil in any country.

Lee both hoped and expected slavery to be ended peacefully, as it had been in other countries:

Emancipation will sooner result from the mild and melting influence of Christianity than from the storms and contests of fiery controversy.

Given the prevalent anti-African racism in the South (and the North, and pretty much everywhere else), it would be foolish to deny that some people did support slavery. But enlightened people did not support it, whether they fought on the Confederate side or on the Union side.

Myth: War was necessary to eliminate slavery

The institution of slavery was not unique to the Confederate states. It was also legal in the Union states of Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri, as well as in the District of Columbia. The U.S. Supreme Court had found it Constitutional in 1857. And, of course, slavery had existed all over the world for thousands of years: in the Middle East, in Greece (where slave labor made possible the otherwise enlightened moral and philosophical life of Athens), in the Roman Empire, in Asia, and of course in the countries of Europe. As the Encyclopedia Britannica observed:

The economic regime of every society which has recently become sedentary is founded on the slavery of the industrial professions.

(Encyclopedia Britannica 11th Edition (1910), Vol. 25, p. 216, “Slavery”)

When the American Civil War took place, slavery had already been eliminated peacefully in most European countries and their colonies. Britain abolished slavery by an act of Parliament in 1833. France did it in 1848, Portugal in 1858, and Holland in 1863. Latin American and South American countries were a little ahead of their European mentors: Argentina did it in 1813, Columbia in 1821, and Mexico in 1829.

As noted earlier, many Confederate leaders opposed slavery. Because slavery had been abolished peacefully in other countries, there was every reason to believe that the same thing would happen in Southern states. The fact that war, destruction, and massive bloodshed were not needed to abolish slavery does not make it impossible as a motivation for some Union government officials. But it does make it less rational.

As Usual, Many Causes

Where do we look for the causes of the American Civil War? Do we look at the views of a majority of people in the Union and the Confederacy? Or only at the views of politicians and newspaper editorial writers? Or do we restrict it to people with real power to make war happen or to avoid it?

Like most historical events, the American Civil War had multiple causes. There were good and bad people on each side. On each side, some hated black people while others, like Confederate General Stonewall Jackson, regarded blacks as the spiritual brothers and sisters of white Americans. For some people, slavery was the one and only issue, just as today, there are “single-issue voters” who care only about abortion or war. For other people, Constitutional concerns, self-determination, or the preservation of the Union were paramount.

It seems to me that the whole enterprise of attempting to find a single cause for a large and complex historical event is mistaken. What we should do is admit that it has multiple causes, and then try to learn whatever we can from what was one of the most destructive and tragic episodes in American history.

———————–
* I call it a “civil war” only because that is the phrase almost universally used to describe it. In fact, of course, it was a war of secession like the American Revolution. Confederate states wanted their independence but the Lincoln administration, acting against the U.S. Constitution, refused to allow it.

Our new Supreme Court justice Elena Kagan: gay or straight? Nobody cares.

The headline of today’s New York Times editorial about gay marriage trumpets the conclusion supposedly reached by all right-thinking people:

“Marriage is a Constitutional Right”

Okay, fine. As the Germans would say, schwamm drueber. It’s a done deal, unless the Roberts Supreme Court decides to equivocate so that Republicans can keep using gay marriage as a campaign issue.

But I have a simple question:

What right, exactly, does marriage provide that cannot be provided by civil unions?

It’s not tax preferences for married couples. Civil unions can do that. It’s not spousal rights or inheritance. Civil unions can do that. It’s not even national recognition of non-traditional unions, so that gays would have the same civil-union rights in every state. A national civil-union law, pre-empting state laws, could do that.

So what’s the right at issue?

Look, I know lots of gay people. My family includes at least one of them. They’re perfectly good people, and I wish them well. Some of them are up in arms about gay marriage, and others don’t care about it.

But in the absence of any information to the contrary, I’m forced to conclude that all the hoopla about gay “marriage” has nothing to do with equal legal rights for gays.

Instead, it has to do with deconstructing an institution that our civilization and others before it have had for thousands of years. It’s mainly so that the minority of gays who want to call their relationships “marriages” — a minority of a minority — will feel better about themselves. It’s also to put society’s imprimatur on the belief that gays should be treated exactly like straights. Finally, it’s to get revenge on the straight majority, which some gays blame (not completely without cause) for their unhappiness.

No reasonable person wants gays to feel bad, and all reasonable people want gays to be treated fairly. But it’s disingenuous to pretend that such a significant social change has no cost.

Concentrated Benefits and Dispersed Costs

The situation is not unique to the gay-marriage debate. It often happens in society that a tiny minority strongly supports an idea and raises holy hell about it. An equally tiny minority strongly opposes the idea but lacks the resources and media access of the idea’s supporters. And the vast majority of people mildly oppose the idea but have jobs, families, and other responsibilities that limit their time to do anything about it.

It’s also why corporations and the rich have so much influence over law and policy. The phenomenon is called “concentrated benefits and dispersed costs.”

A change in the law might bring billions of dollars in new profit for BP or Goldman Sachs but cost each American citizen only fifty cents. As a result, those corporations throw everything they’ve got into lobbying, pressuring, and bribing government officials to get that change in the law.

But how much time can you take off from work to travel to Washington and lobby against something that’s going to cost you fifty cents? Especially when it’s fifty cents for this law, fifty cents for that law, fifty cents for another law, on and on for hundreds of laws and regulations each year? It’s more than a full-time job just to keep track of all of them, let alone to do anything about them. Corporations and the rich have the money and the time. The majority of people — who will bear the cost — have neither of those things. That’s why they’re getting nickel-and-dimed to death.

In the case of gay marriage, the interests of the minority and of corporations are in sync. Gay-marriage activists want to feel better about themselves by appropriating the word “marriage,” and they don’t want to hear any backtalk about it from the straight majority. Corporations find traditional Western culture to be a nuisance, so they’re busy dis-assembling it.

The Most Important Issue

However, the most important issue in the debate is something that almost nobody talks about. Yes, there are good reasons to keep “marriage” as a heterosexual institution, and to guarantee equal rights through adequate civil-union laws. Yes, some of the arguments for gay marriage are bogus. Yes, some of the gay activists are motivated by hostility toward the straight majority rather than concern about equal rights.

But still, there’s something else at stake. Regardless of Constitutional issues, regardless of what’s legally required or not, there remains the question:

What kind of society do we want to have?

Do we want a society that, intentionally or not, consigns some citizens to second-class status? Or do we want a society that embraces everyone who wants to belong to it? Whether or not civil unions are legally equivalent to marriage, they are inevitably perceived as “separate but equal” by both gays and heterosexuals. That sends a message that gays are not full members of our society. It says that we do not grant them the acceptance and brotherhood that they deserve.

I know that there are costs. I know that a lot of the arguments for “gay marriage” are specious. But for me, inclusion is the bottom line. It trumps the other issues.

Gays work with us, live next door to us, and go to our churches. They’re our brothers and sisters and friends and, sometimes, even our parents. If we reject them, or if we tell them they’re not quite as good as heterosexuals, then we also reject what’s best in ourselves and our society.

I won’t reject those things. And I won’t reject or belittle the gay members of society. If they want to get married, and call it “marriage” instead of civil union, then they have my blessing.*

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* This was not always my view. My niece, who attends college in Massachusetts, argued me to a standstill and convinced me to change my mind.

Alexander Pope's Essay on Man

Let’s take a break from current events to contemplate some truths that will out-last the next news cycle.

You’ve probably heard this quote, but you might not know its source:

Hope springs eternal in the human breast.

That’s the only line most people know from “Essay on Man” by the English poet Alexander Pope (1688-1744). The more complete version of the quote hints at the wisdom contained in the rest of the poem:

Hope springs eternal in the human breast:
Man never is, but always to be, blest.

In other words, people are never satisfied with what they have. We always hope for a “blessing” that is yet to come. Rich people want to be richer, or to be loved; tyrants want more power; humble people wish for more material comforts or security. What we have is seldom good enough for us. We always want more, and we think ourselves ill-used because we don’t have it yet.

Pope’s “Essay” is replete with such insights, beautifully and often poignantly expressed.

About the complexity of human nature, he writes:

What would this man? Now upward will he soar,
And little less than angel, would be more;
Now looking downwards, just as grieved appears,
To want the strength of bulls, the fur of bears.

But Pope has a prescription for all that discontent:

Presumptuous man! The reason wouldst thou find,
Why form’d so weak, so little, and so blind?
Ask of thy mother earth, why oaks are made
Taller and stronger than the weeds they shade.

Then say not man’s imperfect, Heaven in fault;
Say rather, man’s perfect as he ought.

Who finds not Providence all good and wise,
Alike in what it gives and what it denies?

Pope recommends an attitude of serenity and acceptance toward things we can’t control. In this, he anticipates the serenity prayer written by 20th-century theologian Reinhold Niebuhr:

God, grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot change;
Courage to change the things I can;
And wisdom to know the difference.

Pope  saw that people are not merely thinking beings, as some contemporary writers insist. They are also buffeted by self-love, emotion, and instinct that bias their judgment:

Two principles in human nature reign:
Self-love, to urge, and Reason, to restrain.

Self-love and Reason to one end aspire,
Pain their aversion, pleasure their desire;
But greedy that its object would devour,
This taste the honey, and not wound the flower.

If only the executives of BP had used their reason to “taste the honey without wounding the flower,” the Gulf of Mexico wouldn’t have been damaged by BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill. But like all of us, the people running BP fought an internal battle. In their case, the battle was joined between self-love (the desire for more, more, and more profit regardless of consequences) and reason (understanding the importance of protecting the Gulf, its people, and its other living creatures).

The same principle applies to Wall Street banksters who wrecked the world economy. In a different way, it applies to politicians who lead their countries into wars of aggression to enrich themselves and their friends by destroying other nations and killing hundreds of thousands of people.

Even if it’s sometimes hard to overcome self-love, reason gives us the ability to see and do the right thing:

This light and darkness in our chaos join’d,
What shall divide? The God within the mind.

But we need to be careful how we live and what we do, because repeated exposure to evil can make it seem normal:

Vice is a monster of so frightful mien,
As, to be hated, needs but to be seen;
Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace.

Every person is vulnerable to the siren song of self-love, so we must be on our guard against it:

Virtuous and vicious every man must be,
Few in the extreme, but all in the degree;
The rogue and fool by fits is fair and wise;
And even the best by fits what they despise.

Pope alludes to the joys and the brevity of human life:

Behold the child, by Nature’s kindly law,
Pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw.
Some livelier plaything gives his youth delight,
A little louder, but as empty quite.
Scarfs, garters, gold amuse his riper stage,
And beads and prayer-books are the toys of age.
Pleased with this bauble still, as that before,
Till tired he sleeps, and life’s poor play is o’er.

What insight he packs into those eight lines! All through our lives, one trifle after another catches our attention. Shallow and stupid as they often are, such trifles fill our days with joy. And though the toys get more expensive as we get older, mostly they’re still just toys, whatever ponderous nonsense we tell ourselves about them. We love them not because they’re precision instruments, or because they’re important, but simply because they make us happy.

We occupy ourselves with rattles, then romance, and early or late with religion. At the end, as Shakespeare says, we fly away to “the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns,” our life’s poor play over at last. And we barely pause to take a bow before the curtain falls on our little drama:

Hope humbly, then; with trembling pinions soar,
Wait the great teacher, Death, and God adore.
What future bliss, He gives not thee to know,
But gives that hope to be thy blessing now.

We live with our little joys for the moment and with our giant hope for the future. It’s less poetic than Pope, but “what’s not to like?”