Context is a word that I often assert is what’s missing from a false argument; long time readers are no doubt annoyed at how often I push it.
But this is what occurred to me as a controversy has broken out on the left side of the spectrum. The source? WaPo’s Charles Lane has the report:
Inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, cities and towns are belatedly but necessarily purging public spaces of the names and images of Confederate President Jefferson Davis and the soldiers who served his treasonous, pro-slavery cause.
Meanwhile, San Francisco’s school board has voted to start replacing the names of the Union’s president, Abraham Lincoln, and Union officers such as James Garfield and William McKinley (also former presidents) from public schools, ostensibly for the same cause of historical truth, equity and justice.
Why Lincoln?
Lincoln [is] to be scoured from an 80-year-old high school because, in 1862, he presided over the hangings of 38 rebellious Native Americans in Minnesota.
Lane is on the context problem:
Far from pursuing Native Americans in the Minnesota uprising, [Lincoln] took huge political risks to prevent federal troops from hanging many more of them (as my colleague David Von Drehle has shown). Yes, he wrote the Emancipation Proclamation as a war-winning measure as much as a liberationist one; he harbored anti-Black sentiments, which is why Frederick Douglass regarded him with mixed feelings.
Even Douglass, however, ultimately reached a positive verdict on Lincoln’s public acts and private attitudes, calling him “one of the very few Americans, who could entertain a negro and converse with him without in anywise reminding him of the unpopularity of his color.”
But legendary figures such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson are also on the chopping block. How should a liberal defend such figures?
Let’s begin with an assertion concerning morality. Morality changes; indeed, morality evolves[1]. As we observe, however messily, that a modification to the societal morality system in use improves that society, we adopt those changes; those changes that bring chaos and disaster are rejected.
Key to this understanding is that the constituents of society are not always agreed upon. A liberal may define society as all people present in a geographical location; a conservative may wish to exclude illegal immigrants; a white supremacist may wish to limit society to white people, or even white people who espouse white supremacy.
From each of these viewpoints the evaluation of a change to the morality system commences. For those who base their morality on a concept of justice being integral to a peaceful, prosperous society, changes towards bringing more justice are considered positively; for the American white supremacist, who grounds their alleged supremacy on a triviality, their societal position, and therefore power, will be threatened by such changes, and therefore rejected.
It is the clash of acceptance vs rejection which often fuels the culture wars, to which I’ll forebear to add more.
Next, let’s agree to admit that no one is perfect; about this point, I hope there is no disagreement. Equally trite and true, everyone is a product of their culture: the ultimate contextual statement. Many, or perhaps all, Founding Fathers had slaves. Most were racists. Just like everyone around them. Terrible, yes. While I feel a philosophical kinship with Jefferson, Washington, and Franklin for their basic liberal dispositions, I doubt I could hold a civil conversation with them. The contexts are too distant.
Most people are simply elements of their society; what marks a person as exemplary? I suggest it’s their magnitude and direction as an agent of moral change.
So let’s use this to differentiate between, say, Generals George Washington and Robert E. Lee.
Washington owned slaves, and no doubt punished them. Yes, he did. But, in concert with the other Founding Fathers, he acted, as an agent of moral change and someone who put life and fortune on the line for it, in effecting the transition for the colonists in America from the absolute monarchy of the English government, subject to the murderous and thievish whim of a member of a religiously-crazed monarchical family (see this link for more on them in the context of the importance of America being a secular society) to a self-governing society based on justice.
Government is a matter of utmost moral standing, because historically it has great capacity to do evil and to do good. The absolute monarchy has many examples of the former and few of the latter, and while representative democracy has had some truly dreadful moments, such as the slaughter of the American Indians, it has also had moments of reaching for the peaks of humanity’s goodness. More importantly, the mechanisms with which it’s implemented means it doesn’t depend on the goodness of a single person; and it has demonstrated the capacity for improvement, a characteristic saliently missing from the absolute monarchy.
The Founding Fathers were critical to that transition, and possibly none more so than Washington, although of course many made vital contributions. Washington’s actions as an agent of positive moral change within the context of his society, despite his tragic ownership of slaves to the day he died, marks a man who managed to emerge from his societal matrix and direct society along a path of improvement, through risk and self-sacrifice.
Moving on to Robert E. Lee, the principal general of the American Confederacy, let’s examine his context. In the eighty years that had passed between Washington’s participation in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War in which Lee filled a leading role, morality in Western Civilization had evolved to express revulsion at slavery, the issue at stake in the Civil War. The American South had stubbornly held on to its notions of slavery being a proper business, despite its own near-terror that they might see a slave rebellion result in the overwhelming of many slave-owning families. It was, despite its pretensions, a pocket of moral depravity, a pustule on America’s ass requiring removal if America were to continue to progress, morally speaking.
Historically, America was one of the last of the Western nations to ban slavery.
Lee, through his actions, defended the institution of slavery, and disputed the idea of racial equality. For those who dispute it, slavery is the endpoint, is it not? By leading the armies of the South, he defended those who believed slavery was a legitimate institution, and those who believed Blacks were subhuman.
Lee sought, consciously or not, to be a retrograde agent of moral change. That is, what he defended and advocated was, in the end, a negative contributor to societal morality. Sure, he was also a traitor to the United States, and, as a commissioned officer in the US Army, probably deserved death as a punishment. But it’s that, as his defining characteristic, he defended an institution widely regarded as being an institution of evil is the differentiator between him and George Washington – who was instrumental in birthing an institution widely considered to be a positive contributor to morality.
Nobody is perfect, and that common denominator gives all people the chance to achieve greatness. That they don’t do so in all aspects of their lives may be tragic, but it’s also unavoidable; the greatness lies in what positive and extraordinary contributions they do make, throwing off the shackles of their upbringing, to the understanding and implementation of a better morality, to the improvement of society for all.
If we demand perfection from our exemplars, then we’ll have no exemplars. A society without exemplars is a society without direction, without hope, without a future.
And a society with a lot of nameless schools.
1 For the reader appalled at the thought that morality can fundamentally change, implying an all-knowing Divine is changing its mind, let me observe that, much like Platonic ideals and their real-world instantiations, and assuming a Divine exists, its ordination of the rules of morality, and your perception of same, may easily be at variance. Morality changing as time passes is then simply humanity gaining a better understanding of those rules, not the rules themselves changing.
