And is the alleged disapproval of the Germans of the time anything but the historical revisionism of people who don’t want to admit that the Germans as a whole deserved blame ?
If you buy moral relativism, of course. Just like slavery, only the opinions of the victimizers count.
As for my opinion, to a large degree yes; it’s not like Stalin personally went house to house and brutalized people. However, it’s hard to tell in a society where debate is brutally suppressed how many went along willingly, or how many of those who were oppressed would have cheerfully done the oppressing, given a chance.
Using Mengele is an extreme hypothetical but it is related to another question having to do with the “goodness” having to do with people like Madison and Thomas Jefferson: does the fact these Founding Fathers were slaveholders who supported the institution of slavery taint their roles in helping establish the U.S.? About ten years ago, there was a debate, prompted by an 1996 Atlantic Monthly article by Conor Cruise O’ Brien, about whether Thomas Jefferson’s ownership of slaves and views on race (among other things) disqualified him from the pantheon of great Americans and that because of this, the contributions he made in the creation of the republic should be diminished or ignored.
The problem with O’ Brien’s argument was that Jefferson played such a large role as a Founding Father that expunging the record of his influence was not something that could be easily done with creating large gaps. The same is true with Madison who, more than anyone, is chiefly responsible for the Bill of Rights. Is it possible on both a logical and moral level to hold something like the Bill of Rights in high regard when its author, James Madison, was deeply involved in a deplorable institution like slavery? How poisonous is the fruit of a poisonous tree?
Very poisonous indeed. It took a civil war and the Civil Rights movement to expunge much of the poison, and it’s not done yet.
However, assuming that a bad man can only do bad, and that everything he touched is evil and must be destroyed is just silly. After all, even an evil man would do the occasional good things out of self interest, or even by mistake. And people are very good at hypocrisy; it’s quite easy for someone to write down a set of perfectly valid moral principles, and then turn right around and violate them.
I do think that the Founders were bad men who did bad things, and who created a country that also has committed great evils. In no small part because they wrote and theorized to a standard they were unwilling to meet, and because this country has almost always failed to adhere to it’s own alleged ideals.
Let’s look at it from a different angle. Bear in mind here that I’m an agnostic and don’t believe in reincarnation or any such stuff, but thinking about it this way is useful for hypotheticals…
Imagine that I am some minor Hindu God living in heaven, and I’m paying particularly close attention to one soul, let’s call him Joe. Joe gets born in a human body, lives, dies, comes back to heaven, and then we discuss what he did during that lifetime, what he could have done better, etc.
So one time Joe is born into late 20th century America, and, while in late 20th century America, doesn’t own slaves, doesn’t think women are his intellectual inferiors, and generally lives up to what are called “enlightened” social norms, but never really does anything extraordinary or saintly or noteworthy.
Another time, Joe is born into RapistMurdererIstan, and becomes a famous social reformer, advocating for great change, and perhaps eventually becoming a martyr for the cause, BUT his great change would have still ended with owning slaves (or comitting rapes or whatever), but in FAR better and more humane and decent conditions.
After which of those two lifetimes should I be more proud of Joe?
How would we know? They didn’t dare resist openly, or publish their opinions.
Well how do you feel about the war in Iraq? If you are against it, and you didn’t vote for Bush, do you feel morally responsible for it? I don’t. In a democracy we agree to relinquish matters of policy to elected leaders; I contend that we are not responsible morally for official policies we personally disapprove of. I don’t think it would be possible for anyone in America to fully approve everything done by the government. Under a repressive regime, where John Q. Public doesn’t even know half of what goes on, how responsible is he? How can we bring the average German to account when (a) he probably didn’t know about Mengele, and (b) couldn’t have done anything about it if he did, without putting himself and his family into grave danger?
I was asking if you would blame the average Russian of Stalin’s time with the actions of their leader.
There’s also the notion of “what exactly should Madison have done with his slaves?” He could not free them because, like most planter class, he lived in a non-cash based economy and they were mortgaged. If he had freed them, they would have to leave the state of Virginia. Free them in his will and Dolly’s destitute (she skirted the line anyway).
Madison and Jefferson were both students, admirers, and almost surrogate sons of George Wythe, a man who did free his slaves. Read about his murder and the subsequent trial and I think it’ll put you in their era a bit better- it involves free blacks who were unable to testify against white men and the fact that the murder in part revolved around Wythe’s inclusion of a mulatto lad [possibly his son] in his will.
I think that in 2000 it would have been difficult to think of a slaveholder as a good person. In 1800, yes, they could have been- some qualification of course, but they could have been. (Hell, Benjamin Franklin was president of one of the first Abolition Societies on American soil and HE was a slaveholder.)
CalMeacham mentioned Twain. I was also reading his autobiography recently and what he wrote about his mother, whom he regarded as one of the kindest women he ever knew though also practical (“She would drown the kittens when she had to, but first she would make sure the water was warm”), and her views on slavery (the Clemens’ owned 2 slaves when Mark was a boy, and exactly what became of them is uncertain- they were probably sold to relatives when the family was left impoverished [save for the 75,000 acres of land] by the death of his father:
Twain was by all accounts a racial liberal in his own time. He paid the tuition for several black college students, wrote one of the least humorous/most moving dialect pieces, A True Story, in American lit to that point, etc., and he was no fan of human nature. I am going to accept his verdict as a man who lived among slaves and their owners rather than a present one.
The other thing we should be clear about is distinguishing between “slavery is good/bad” and “this particular slaveholder is good/bad”. I think a lot of us are being sloppy in mixing the two.
And while it’s easy to get bogged down in the particulars of the slavery system in the Americas, the fact is that slavery has existed in every civilization until pretty recent times. It wasn’t a question of whether it or the slaveholder were good or bad-- it just was. Slaves could be freed and they would themselves become slaveholders. Few people wanted to be slaves, but few people refrained from owning slaves if they could afford them. Much like child labor, which we don’t accept today but was a part of everyday life 200 years ago, slavery was an institution built into human society that the enlightenment, the age of reason and science itself help to banish. It’s not so much that we are better than the people who lived before us, we just have more experience and more knowledge.
As others have said, no it wasn’t. There was no period where chattel slavery had near-universal acceptance. The only way you can reach that conclusion is to append “among those who weren’t victimized by it” to the statement. It drives me crazy when people assume that modification: in my opinion, it dehumanizes the slaves to exclude their opinions, continuing to treat them as objects rather than actors in the system.
At any rate, until someone invents a time machine enabling us to go back and lay some smackdown on slaveowners, I’m not sure what the point of this discussion is. One very good point of such a discussion is to help us figure out how we confront issues of morality in our society, especially a key question: can we condemn someone for practicing an act that is, in their community, considered acceptable? Can we condemn a frat brother who rapes a drunken sorority sister, if such behavior is accepted by his peers? Can we condemn a mother who mutilates her daughter’s genitalia, if such behavior is a family tradition? Can we condemn a guy who tortures a dog into insanity, drugs it, and then fights it to the death against another dog, if doing so is accepted in his neck of the woods?
I certainly think we can do so, and I think it’s an unpleasant postmodernist habit to forgive people for practicing atrocities when those atrocities are accepted in their culture. It creates a weird, arbitrary standard of morality that lets us turn a blind eye to horrors.
As to the OP, put it this way. I tremendously admire much of what Jefferson did. And if someone built the time machine for me and gave me the opportunity to go back and free Jefferson’s slaves, through force if necessary, I’d consider myself obligated to do so. He was a great man who participated in a great horror.
Even the basest criminals are considered “good” by someone (wife, mother, children, etc.) There are serial killers that are loving parents, tax cheats who give generously to charity, rapists who are devout Christians, and child molesters who are the sweetest people you’d ever meet. No one is overwhelmingly bad or good.
I worry that if we define “good person” as one who follows the mores of the land, then we become weak-assed moral relativists. If we can’t judge people from another time it also means we can’t judge people from another place, nor people who are from different backgrounds who live right around the corner. The street thug who thinks it’s perfectly normal to kill someone over a mild offense…does he get the “He’s probably a nice guy?” treatment? No. Because we know we wouldn’t want to bump into this guy in a dark alley or share an elevator with him. We know he’s not a nice guy, even if we know he would have turned out more respectable if he hadn’t been raised as a thug.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with saying the street thug is a bad guy, even if he is only a product of his upbringing. I look at it this way: If I grow a tomato plant in bad soil, the fruit will not be as good as if it was nurtured in good soil. I know enough about soil to judge the quality of the soil. I know enough about tomatoes to know the quality of tomatoes. Yeah, I can find the goodness in the bad tomatoes, hold them up to the light and downplay the bad qualities. But ultimately I should feel free to say, “These tomatoes aren’t good, and I don’t think I will enjoy eating them.” I look at most folks from the “olden days” as bad fruit from a bad society. I can enjoy learning about their lives and accomplishments, but I’m not going to call them good people just because they were a product of their environment.
All that rambling over, I don’t think “slaveowner” is tantamount to “most evil and vile person ever alive”.
Another question to consider: Can a person who buys clothing that they know was made by underpaid/overworked/abused people in sweatshops (whether that sweatshop is in 1912 NYC or in modern day southeast Asia) be considered a good person?
To play a slght devil’s advocate… do we know with certainty that those enslaved in the old south objected not only to being enslaved, but to the system? That is, if they’d been given a choice of living in a society with no slaves, or a society in which they themselves were rich slave-owners, but there was still slavery, do we know they would have picked the first?
I’d like to think it would be the first, but the-system-you-grow-up-with is something which has a powerful influence on what people perceive as normal and right and desireable.
I don’t think so. Plenty of people who were victimized by the system turned around and victimized others as soon as they had the chance. So, while they themselves didn’t want to be slaves, it’s unclear that they saw the institution and those who practiced it as particularly “bad” unless they were “bad” to them personally.
I’m sure a good number of them didn’t even object to being enslaved…if it is the only way of life you have been exposed to, it’s hard to imagine anything different. I’m not sure the opinion of the victim is necessarily a reputable barometer of whether something is wrong or not.
Considering that the worst forms of female genital mutilation are done by women who have had it done to their own daughters and nieces and granddaughters, I’ll vote a big, “No” on that one.
My opinion isn’t based on cultural relativism in the slightest. It’s based on the idea that not all forms of slavery throughout history are created equal, and there are a few I’d engage in myself - yes, as the slave. (Better than being stuck in a convent by a grumpy father, anyway.) “Freedom” is a mighty lofty ideal when you’ve got an empty belly and starving babies. If selling myself as a slave meant I’d get fed twice a day and my kids would be sold to good homes with good food and a chance at buying their freedom someday? “Freedom” just lofted right away…
I have to take serious exception to this. In the overwhelming majority of cases of persons being enslaved in the past, they were indeed, people who supported the idea of chattel-slavery.
Most of the people whom the Romans conquered and enslaved were peoples who, guess what, had at one time or another conquered other peoples and enslaved them. That was what you did with a conquered people back then, or at least one of the things. It often involved mass murder of the able-bodied men and enslavement of the women and children.
It’s always been near-universal that on an individual basis, almost no one wants to be enslaved (I’m sure there are actually many exceptions to that.) But it’s also been near-universal for a huge portion of human history that it’s okay to enslave others, as long as the conditions are right.
IIRC the Romans typically enslaved two types of people. One was recently conquered persons, people who had fought against Rome in any capacity and et cetera. The other were people who owed debts that they simply couldn’t pay. In both cases, if a debtor or a conquered slave were ever given their freedom, if they ever acquired high enough station in Roman society it’d be nigh-certain they’d own slaves of their own.
The very fact that the Romans had no moral qualms about slavery is why it was very different from slavery in the American South. The Romans didn’t have to invent ideas about certain races needing to be naturally enslaved for “their own good” because the Romans had no reason to justify what they were doing morally. Morally, what was good was what made Rome stronger, and if that involved enslaving locals in an unruly population, well, that’s what they did.
To frame my response to this differently, if your statement is to be taken as arguing that “something which victimizes others can’t be said to be universal if you don’t consider the opinions of the victims” then how do you explain say, carpet bombing in World War II? Did the British want to be carpet bombed by German bombers? Of course not. So can we then say that the moral acceptance of carpet-bombing wasn’t universal? No, because the British turned right around and carpet bombed the hell out of Germany.
In short, I think many people ignore the plight of the victims throughout human history because the lessons of human history suggest that the victims would have been all too happy to trade roles, if a slave truly opposes slavery, he will never own a slave if he’s ever freed. It’s easy to say you oppose slavery if you are yourself enslaved and have no prospects of owning slaves.
Even in the American South there are incidents in which freed blacks, who were formerly slaves, went on to own slaves themselves. I don’t have a name handy, but one of the wealthiest Southern slaveholders in (I think) South Carolina was a former slave himself, who owned something like 1,000+ slaves.
Anyway, I think it’s easy to judge societies. I can honestly say I think societies which allow women to be stoned to death for revealing their faces in public are abhorrent. But, I don’t extend that to believing everyone in that society is evil.
Was Rome an abhorrent society? Sure. But that doesn’t mean Rome didn’t do a lot of good things for the world, even if it was just incidental. Nor does it mean every single person born in the Roman Empire was a “bad person.” I don’t view someone as being necessarily bad when they are simply “normal” within their society.
Basically, I think that society changes over time by building on the lessons of previous members of society and of previous societies, through this continual change over time, societies can improve. People, however, remain homo sapiens, and are no better or no worse than their ancestors. We’re simply better advantaged than our ancestors, thanks in large part to the cumulative contributions they have all made. I agree with whatever psychologist it was who said he could make any child a criminal or a respected businessman.
The most common “yes” reply seems to be that we can’t use modern morality to judge earlier people. I’ll buy that.
Slavery was immoral during the American revolution, by the standards of the time. People defended it in order to gain more political power, or to get wealth, or to feed the subjugation urge that societies sometimes get, but the bottom line is that slavery has been considered a terrible crime for a long time. The American version of slavery was particularly vile, even compared with previous examples in history.
A major injustice isn’t made any less so just because a lot of people embrace it. The whole world knows (and knew, during the practice of American slavery) that American slave owners and those who defended slavery were monsters.
This is what I was thinking, sort of. There is a distinction to be made between whether an act is morally bad and whether a person can be held blameworthy for that action. Slavery was always bad, but given the crude level of thinking about human equality, given the entrenched nature of slavery, etc., the question to ask is, “Can a slaveholder in 1800 be held responsible for not knowing that slavery was morally bad?”
I think confusing these two issues is what is leading **Revenant Threshold ** and **Der Trihs ** to accuse **John Mace ** (wrongly) of moral relativism. For example, it was always bad to oppress homosexuals and pagans, but you can hardly hold a 15th-century Catholic responsible for not knowing this.
