I like that line; is it original, or a quote from somewhere?
No. Hating pizza yesterday and liking pizza today does not make me a hypocrite. Claiming to hate pizza while devouring it, or claiming to love pizza while growing furious at the sight of it would be hypocritical.
Believing something today that I did not believe yesterday does not make me a hypocrite, no matter how quickly I make that transition.
“It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone’s fault. If it was us, what did that make Me? After all, I’m one of Us. I must be. I’ve certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We’re always one of Us. It’s Them that do the bad things.”
I think (and hope) it’s the former: that everything else in clairobscur’s post follows from “With such a view” (that Blacks are mentally inferior to Whites).
From what I understand, a lot of people in the 18th and 19th centuries held similar views, even the ones who were against slavery; and it had an element of self-fulfilling prophecy to it. I can imagine myself, if I had lived in the “right” time and place, believing something like this, if I had never been exposed to evidence to the contrary.
Well, don’t forget, many of the FFs were slaveholders themselves, and most of the rest believed sincerely in the hereditary mental and moral (not necessarily the spiritual) inferiority of negroes.
Well, of course; he had to believe that in order to justify slavery. It’s no different than all the millions of men who throughout history convinced themselves that women were intellectually inferior and therefore weren’t their equals, despite talking to women on a regular basis and being outwitted by them as often as not. Willful self-delusion in action, and very common behavior then and now.
Considering that had this compromise not been made and abolition insisted upon, there would have no real Constitution or a strong central government in the United States, slavery would have lasted longer in the South without the forces of abolition operating.
I use to have a link to an extnsive list of Washington’s quotes about slavery, but it apparently was on a previous computer.Here’s another interesting link, though. There’s not much about his views of black people, but it still shows how uncaring he was.
His commitment to freedom is well illustrated by this part where a slave actually claims she would rather die than not be free. He juts wants his property back :
With the benefit of being French, which means I haven’t been indoctrinated to admire Washington, I’ve no belief that this man was exceptionally moral, not even very commited to freedom, except for himself and the small subset of people similar to him. I wouldn’t be the slightest bit surprised to learn that he despised the common people too, for instance (of course, you’re free to enlightnen me if I’m wrong).
Originally, I intended to answer to Der Thris that I could buy that his beliefs were genuine, since it’s easy to be deluded when everybody around you think the same, when for obvious reasons you lack counter-examples, that even though it’s morally more comfortable to think of yourself as a well-intentioned protective patriarch than as an opressor, the self-delusion doesn’t need to be conscious, etc… But after reading the excerpt I quoted above, where his slave claims her own commitment to freedom, I changed my mind. He couldn’t ignore that this commitment was exactly as strong as his own. So he had to be an uncaring bastard, content with his priviledges, and not particularly interested in extending them to other people if it were to cost him something. Instead of a well-intended, if misguided, Washington, I’ve now in mind, indeed, a careless hypocrite. I agree with Der Trihs that his self-delusion was, indeed, willful.
It’s a personal belief. I have no idea if my brain stole it from someone.
While that’s true when looking at the textual definition, from outside appearances both are the same. What would you assume if you liked that person? Oh, yeah. He changed his mind. And if you didn’t like that person? Well, now he’s a liar and probably a hypocrite, no matter Webster’s take on it. (And, if the story is media worthy, it’ll be ‘hypocrite’ all the way to drive sensationalism and sales.)
Here’s the thing about Washington and the other slaveholders, as I see it, and probably as they saw it. If you want to launch a revolution, or be a political leader or whatever, you need money. And if all your money is tied up in your land and the slaves to work the land, then there’s no profit in it to set your slaves free. Putting aside any moral questions, you’re talking about a lot of money here. What are they supposed to do? Impoverish themselves? And for people they think are their racial inferiors in the first place? I mean, morality is one thing, but there’s money involved.
No, that’s not remotely what I’d think. Using your earlier example, if someone had previously been spouting anti-gay rhetoric, and suddenly starts promoting gay rights, I’m not going to think, “Ha, what a hypocrite,” I’m going to think, “Hey, there’s a guy who’s willing to examine his preconceptions and abandon them in the face of sufficient evidence.” That’s a good thing. That’s something that should be encouraged.
If it were the opposite, and someone who used to be pro-gay turned rabidly homophobe? Still not a hypocrite! I’d feel some mixture of pity and disgust for the guy, but he wouldn’t be a hypocrite, because - again - changing your mind is not the same thing as hypocrisy. It’s not even in the same zip code.
It is interesting to see how American culture is so drastic in its condemnation of other cultures which are different and of its own past culture. Those slave holders were so selfish and immoral!
And yet American culture today compared to other advanced, western cultures, is extremely individualistic, selfish, greedy, violent. And no one seems to feel the disconnect. A culture where people have no guaranteed health care and if you can’t afford it that’s your problem, not mine. A culture where lots of people are locked up in prisons and society is just fine with that. A culture extremely xenophobic which wants to keep others out at all costs because they might depress wages. No one cares if those people are starving. That’s their problem. Just don’t let them in. Keep them out or lock them up. Forever if need be.
And yet you feel the need to condemn what others did centuries ago? Their lack of empathy. Why? How do you think your selfish attitudes of today will stand up to judgment a couple centuries from now?
Has it ever occurred to you that plenty of the Americans willing to make moral judgments about historical figures might also be critical of the aspects of American society that you mention here?
As someone who moved to the United States as an adult, and who makes a living teaching American history to university students, i have a personal and a professional interest in trying to understand the United States in all of its messy complexity and all of its apparent contradictions. It’s difficult, but i do my best.
And one of the things that often irks me most about some non-Americans, including some of my own acquaintances from places like Australia and the United Kingdom and Canada, is the way that they lump all Americans in together, as if every individual among the 300-or-so million people living in the United States thinks the same way.
It’s even more surprising when this sort of stupid generalization comes from someone who has been on these very message boards for nigh on 13 years, and who has seen myriad Americans discussing the very issues that you raised in your post. If you don’t realize, after more than a decade on this board, that the United States is not monolithic in its ideals and beliefs and politics, then you should probably just throw in the towel now, because you’re never going to get it.
I think this is the key point. Most of the founding fathers recognized that slavery was morally questionable at best. But they also recognized it would be a difficult problem to solve. So their attitude was essentially “We’ll work on gaining independence and building a government. We’ll put off solving slavery for a decade or two until things settle down.”
Obviously not the most morally enlightened position but you can sympathize some if you try to be objective. Slavery had been around for millennia; they didn’t feel an overwhelming urgency to tackle it right now.
And slavery was on the decline in their era. They hoped it would continue to shrink and become an easier problem to solve as a result. They didn’t anticipate that there would be a revival of slavery in the early nineteenth century.
…And prospective slave buyers, as well as importers and brokers, and those who were marginal competitors at agriculture, had an incentive to keep the imports coming in. Article 1, Section 9 was a compromise, just like the 3/5ths Compromise.
