National Review’s definitely not happy about statue removal following the Charlottesville incident, judging from their front page. My patience with their material is limited, so I selected at random the piece by Victor Davis Hanson, and found he apparently thinks citing inconsistencies across historical personages and waving a finger constitutes a sophisticated argument. An example paragraph:
President Woodrow Wilson ensured that the Armed Forces were not integrated. He also segregated civil-service agencies. Why, then, does Princeton University still cling to its Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs? To honor a progressive who did a great deal of harm to African-American causes?
It might be helpful to dig out the hidden assumption Hanson is using but won’t tell us about. It’s the primary artery of his post – that progressives & liberals only care about racism. Of course, this is not true, and so the fatal flaw in his argument is that he enumerates a number of famous people, sure, even icons, and then adjusts his lens to only focus on their attitudes towards race. In fact, his own example betrays him, because while Wilson may have been a retrograde old coot when it came to racial relations, he was a liberal leader when it came to international relations. Was it not Wilson who looked at the new horrors of the Great War battlefields, and championed the League of Nations as a new approach to resolving those matters which traditionally led to war? And what is the name of this Princeton institution which now bears his name? The Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.
The point is that morality has numerous facets.
But the perception, or understanding, of proper moral behaviors – and make no mistake, we’re talking about the moral systems of conservatives vs liberals (I’ll just settle on that term for the balance of this post) – is not an unchanging quality. Without addressing the question of whether morality itself is immutable or not, I think it should go without question that our perception of proper morality, of how we should treat each other, has changed over time. It used to be a knife in the back of anyone not of our tribe, then stoning those thought to be witches, then violently enforced slavery for those perceived to be of an inferior civilization, and now today, when slavery is considered horrific.
The perception of moral behaviors is a shared, community project; that is, if we didn’t have a shared basis of moral behavior, we would have chaos and a shattered, non-functional society. That said, this project can change as the scholarship of moral behavior makes progress in understanding how our treatment of each other leads to general improvements in society. This latter statement may be redundant with the previous paragraph, but seems appropriate to reinforce.
Keeping this in mind, let’s talk about iconic people who disappoint the conservatives. Without a doubt, advancing oneself beyond the cultural matrix in which one is brought up is an extraordinary thing. If everyone else holds some local ethnicity in loathing, then there’s a strong social pressure that you, too, spit on them, and not to diverge from that social habit.
But certain extraordinary individuals do push themselves beyond those pressures to conform, changing or even improving our perception of moral behavior, an evolution which has been known under other names, of which the best known may be “enlightened thinking.” Often, they think beyond the habits of the day and ask themselves whether, in a truly just system, the behavior in question should be encouraged.
This leads to the second criticism of Hansen’s post. Those people he, or his allies, would criticize and even equate to the Confederates, such as Washington and Jefferson, were inevitably products of their time. When I say they are extraordinary, it is a relative measure, relative to their native cultural matrix. Yes, they’ve advanced; but how far can they be expected to drive themselves, especially in a moral landscape which is new and unexplored?
Comparing Wilson to today’s liberals ignores both the different measures and the differences in cultural matrices; it is enough to say that Wilson led the way in trying to find ways to avoid the bloody slaughter of the new weapons of war, and for that he is recognized.
But to better illustrate the point, and because the moral turpitude of the author of the screed equating the Confederates to Washington and Jefferson really annoyed me for flunking such an easy test, let’s apply these concepts to that very question: if both the Confederates and some of the most famous Founding Fathers had slaves, then shouldn’t the statues of the Founding Fathers be following those of the Confederates into the trash heap of history?
Well, let’s look at the facts. There’s a nearly century gap between the Founding Fathers and the Confederacy. During this time, the cultural matrix, both local and international, changed. During, or just prior to, this time period, many major countries outlawed slavery; moral perceptions changed in the United States until the nation was metaphorically divided by the Mason-Dixon line. But at the beginning of this period, at the Founding, the idea of slavery was ingrained, and changing the practice was a matter of some import, especially for Virginians such as Washington and Jefferson; that Jefferson arranged for the freedom of his slaves on his death is a matter of some controversy (was it progressive to do so, or selfish to wait to do so?), but represents at least his striving to leave his social matrix’s flaws behind.
For, after all, Washington, Jefferson, and the Founding Fathers were busy creating a new governmental structure, one not based on a God-selected monarchy, full of self-important men with inherited diseases and an arbitrary will. They helped construct a new approach to government which would bring prosperity and peace to its citizens. That’s why they are liberal icons. They had flaws, of course they did. But we recognize them for what they overthrew, not for those burdens forced upon them by society. We cannot expect everyone, or even anyone, to be Supermen. To see substantial moral improvement is the best we can hope for.
The Confederacy? The Confederacy, despite the efforts of revisionists, was part & parcel with slavery, and by the time the Civil War began, the shared social moral perceptions of slavery had changed, been put to the fire of intellectual criticism, and emerged as a relatively well accepted part of the moral basis of society: slavery was vile and evil, so that some men were willing to risk their lives to remove it from society, such as the abolitionist John Brown. The Civil War, fought over that moral perception as if the agony of a people is not as important as the culture of the South, represents the failure of the moral behaviors of the Confederates, a failure so total that they instigated the Civil War that nearly destroyed the nation, killing thousands of our best young men, and brought about great resentment for decades following.
The moral reasoning was no longer novel, but instead spoken from the pulpits. The Confederates chose to disdain it, to mock it, to denigrate the black man for the condition forced upon him by those same white men who would make up the Confederacy. It’s all there in the speeches of Confederate politicians.
So when we talk about the statues celebrating specific Confederate icons, these are celebrations of their moral failings. They believed in slavery. They fought for it. They died for it. And the statue therefore endorses slavery, because that’s why the war in which they fought, found martial glory, and died, came into existence. For that moral failing.
The Founding Fathers? They were moving forward, out of their morass, and working on liberal government. For all their failures, they were glorious successes in one great experiment.
The Confederates, on the other hand, should be in museums, where the horrid truths of their war, their poor moral choices, and all that goes with it can be soberly studied by future generations.
And not glorified by folks who’ve failed to understand basic morality.
