February 12
To Jerry Salyer and his blogpost about how Lord Acton, though opposing slavery, believed that the South should have won the Civil War. This appeared in the Imaginative Conservative blog.
There seems to be a contradiction that exists in Lord Acton's view regarding who should have won the Civil War. For on one hand, Acton opposed slavery and opposed the centralization that came with the Union; on the other hand he thought that the Confederacy, whose society was far more hierarchical than society in the North, should have won. And here we should include that that hierarchy was at least partially based on race. Acton opposed centralization because it stifled communities and individuals. But what did he think occurred in Southern society?
Certainly Whites weren't infringed on by the hierarchical society of the South like Blacks were. Whites had much more freedom of movement with the lowest of the Whites being recognized as superior to Blacks. Blacks had little to no freedom of movement. And their lack of movement was far more telling during Jim Crow than during slavery. Why? It is because while slavery was done away with; after reconstruction, the old Southern hierarchy returned and was going strong. How can one have any admiration for Southern culture, political and otherwise, if it use to be a driving force promoting slavery while one thought slavery was wrong? Should we ask whether Acton's relative blindness to the harm that Southern hierarchy did to Black communities and individuals after slavery while celebrating what White communities and individuals could enjoy indicates a racism on Acton's part? There is certainly at least one insurmountable contradiction that exists.
If we are going to use centralization as a motif by which we judge who should have won the Civil War, should we not object more to the hierarchy based society of the South, that enabled both slavery and Jim Crow than to the Union? Or did Lord Acton only object to slavery while embracing White Supremacy? Just because hierarchy in Southern states was a couple of steps below the hierarchy that came with the centralization that existed in the Union, there is no sufficient reason for favoring the South over the North--even though the North had plenty of warts itself. Rather, centralization can be judged both as a structure and by how the structure is used. And certainly, though the Union represented a greater centralization of power, its stewardship of power was far more moral than the stewardship of power exercised by individual elites in the Southern states.
My gut feeling is that any centralization of governmental power is opposed by religiously conservative Christians because the latter sees a turf battle between the reach of the government and the reach of the Church. And the inability or unwillingness to see the inherent contradictions of Lord Acton's views illustrates the compromises made by some in that turf battle.
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To Mark Malvasi and his blogpost that defines America and attributes its sins to individualism. This appeared in the Imaginative Conservative blog.
To attribute the abuses that occur in America to individualism seems to be the Achilles' Heel of the article. After all, like nationalism, individualism implies little. How people will express their individuality is a mystery. For Individualism doesn't tell us the motive for either good or bad behaviors. It simply indicates a freedom to not conform. And here the question must be asked, not to conform to what?
To assume that all our sins were do to individualism, is to imply that conformity is always righteous. But the reality of the situation is that from the beginning, defining America depends on whom we ask. Should we ask Native Americans who were ethnically cleansed from the land to define America? Or should we ask immigrants who have come to live in America to define America? After all, asking immigrants might be a better choice to ask than those who are born citizens because they came here for a reason and they have something to compare America with.
We could also ask those who were born citizens of America to define America, but there are problems with that. First, their definition of America might be skewed by their lot in life. Second, a person's pride and patriotism might also blind one from giving anything but an answer that invites worship of America.
If we define America by its founders, we cannot eliminate racism from the definition. For most, if not all of our founding fathers were racists and sexists. What was declared to be the God-given rights of all people were actually assumed to belong to white males only. And it took the literal blood and guts of many people to expand recognition of those rights to Blacks and other minority groups and then to women. And currently the LGBT community is working to gain full equality in society--something which the other groups have yet to fully enjoy.
Finally, it isn't individualism that drives us to exploit and abuse others even though one can sometimes point to it as a factor. Rather, it is greed and a sense of entitlement based on the assumption of superiority over others that lies at the root of exploitation and abuse of others. Greed and that sense of entitlement gave our forefathers permission to ethnically cleanse Native Americans from the land and to try to forever treat Blacks and others as being inferior.
In addition, fueled by that sense of entitlement fueled by American exceptionalism has given our leaders permission to rely on the rule of force, rather than the rule of law, to get what they can in the world. We've have consistently replaced democracies with dictatorships. And we have backed other dictatorships provided that they serve our national interests, which is a euphemism for the interests of our nation's largest businesses.
Yes, America has many different definitions, it has no single unified definition. One only needs to read Frederick Douglass's speech on the meaning of the Fourth of July to understand that there is no one definition of America (see http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/douglassjuly4.html )
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