John Holbo recently delved into the pro-slavery writings of the American South from about 1830 to 1860, and he discovered something fascinating: that the pro-slavery arguments I was shown in high school turn out to be… atypical.
At one point in our US History, I remember we students being assigned to read George Fitzhugh, who reads a bit like William F. Buckley, standing athwart history shouting “STOP!” Fitzhugh earnestly believed that there were two classes: masters and slaves, and that all labor had to be cast into an enslaved state or the world would disintegrate. Fitzhugh believed in nature red in tooth and claw, and his books were the MAGA and Q-Anon of his time, convincing poorly-educated southerners that their lot was better with slavery that without.
In our time, we have a number of moral revolutions underway, or at least we hope we do:
In each of these cases, there’s always a cadre of middle-class writers who craft themselves as “in the middle” or “centrist thinkers” or “moderates” who will say, “Yes, this violent cop was bad, but was every cop in his department bad?” Or, “Yes, it’s a shame that black communities are ‘sacrifice zones’ bearing the cost of unpriced corporate externalities, but can you imagine the disruption you’re asking for in undoing the damage?” Or, “Yes, it’s very sad that so many people died of COVID in meat processing plants, but are you really going to tell people to stop eating steak even for a few months?” Or “Yes, it’s going to be a problem when sea levels rise, but those people can just sell their homes and move to higher ground.”
What Holbo discovered was that in the popular press, that being read by the middle class, in both the North and the South, the discussion about slavery fit exactly that same mold. Yes, slavery is bad, but changing the system would be worse. Yes, it’s a deep moral stain, but imagine how inconvenient it would be without the economic output of slavery. Yes, it’s horrifically anti-human to enslave people, but at least Southerners are “good men” who are “taking care” of their property, it’s almost as if they were family! Look at how badly supposedly “free” children are treated in Northern textile mills: are you sure the whipped back of a black child picking cotton is worse than the lost fingers of a little white girl at a weaver’s station? Besides, if we admit slavery was bad, we’re going to have to admit that how we treated the Native Americans was bad, and are you really ready to go down that road?
Holbo calls this “morally complacent arguing.” And, as he points out, it got bad enough that we ended up fighting a war over it. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fiftheenth Amendments to the Constitution, the Reconstruction Amendments, completely re-wrote the rules about citizenship; some argue that they represent a re-founding of the United States.
Only moral monsters would argue that the United States should return to slavery. But morally complacent people will argue that the neo-feudalist system emerging in this country, in which the lucky identify with their corporations and the desperate end up trying hard to land a gig long enough to stay alive, in which the color of your skin determines how well you’ll be treated by the police or even the quality of the air you breath, is probably fine, that corporations aren’t really going to be careless with “our” lives (just “those” people over there, who, you know, probably chose to sign on for the risk, right?), and that our government is really still for “us” and not for the corporate interests that dominate every politician’s donation queue.
Every revolution begins by challenging the dominant culture’s comfort. The dominant culture, as Holbo discusses, always pushes back by claiming that their comfort cannot be disentangled from their honor; to attack that which makes them the dominant culture is to insult them.
Well, insult them.
It’s ironic that I found Holbo’s essay shortly before Desmond Tutu died. Tutu’s most famous quote is “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” Lots of people have chosen the side of the oppressor.
Don’t be one of them.
At one point in our US History, I remember we students being assigned to read George Fitzhugh, who reads a bit like William F. Buckley, standing athwart history shouting “STOP!” Fitzhugh earnestly believed that there were two classes: masters and slaves, and that all labor had to be cast into an enslaved state or the world would disintegrate. Fitzhugh believed in nature red in tooth and claw, and his books were the MAGA and Q-Anon of his time, convincing poorly-educated southerners that their lot was better with slavery that without.
In our time, we have a number of moral revolutions underway, or at least we hope we do:
- The disproportionate treatment of the Black communinity in America is a vast moral stain that must be addressed.
- The militarization of the police has turned them from peace officers into warriors; they’ve become an intolerable threat to some communities, especially communities of color.
- The economic system in this country has advanced to a point where a large portion of the population can no longer afford to do anything but work and sleep.
- Our overall planetary ecology is heading toward some sort of catastrophe or collapse, and in the tension between doing something about it and maintaining profits, no major corporation will put themeselves at a disadvantage, so the “doing something about it” is shelved until later.
In each of these cases, there’s always a cadre of middle-class writers who craft themselves as “in the middle” or “centrist thinkers” or “moderates” who will say, “Yes, this violent cop was bad, but was every cop in his department bad?” Or, “Yes, it’s a shame that black communities are ‘sacrifice zones’ bearing the cost of unpriced corporate externalities, but can you imagine the disruption you’re asking for in undoing the damage?” Or, “Yes, it’s very sad that so many people died of COVID in meat processing plants, but are you really going to tell people to stop eating steak even for a few months?” Or “Yes, it’s going to be a problem when sea levels rise, but those people can just sell their homes and move to higher ground.”
What Holbo discovered was that in the popular press, that being read by the middle class, in both the North and the South, the discussion about slavery fit exactly that same mold. Yes, slavery is bad, but changing the system would be worse. Yes, it’s a deep moral stain, but imagine how inconvenient it would be without the economic output of slavery. Yes, it’s horrifically anti-human to enslave people, but at least Southerners are “good men” who are “taking care” of their property, it’s almost as if they were family! Look at how badly supposedly “free” children are treated in Northern textile mills: are you sure the whipped back of a black child picking cotton is worse than the lost fingers of a little white girl at a weaver’s station? Besides, if we admit slavery was bad, we’re going to have to admit that how we treated the Native Americans was bad, and are you really ready to go down that road?
Holbo calls this “morally complacent arguing.” And, as he points out, it got bad enough that we ended up fighting a war over it. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fiftheenth Amendments to the Constitution, the Reconstruction Amendments, completely re-wrote the rules about citizenship; some argue that they represent a re-founding of the United States.
Only moral monsters would argue that the United States should return to slavery. But morally complacent people will argue that the neo-feudalist system emerging in this country, in which the lucky identify with their corporations and the desperate end up trying hard to land a gig long enough to stay alive, in which the color of your skin determines how well you’ll be treated by the police or even the quality of the air you breath, is probably fine, that corporations aren’t really going to be careless with “our” lives (just “those” people over there, who, you know, probably chose to sign on for the risk, right?), and that our government is really still for “us” and not for the corporate interests that dominate every politician’s donation queue.
Every revolution begins by challenging the dominant culture’s comfort. The dominant culture, as Holbo discusses, always pushes back by claiming that their comfort cannot be disentangled from their honor; to attack that which makes them the dominant culture is to insult them.
Well, insult them.
It’s ironic that I found Holbo’s essay shortly before Desmond Tutu died. Tutu’s most famous quote is “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” Lots of people have chosen the side of the oppressor.
Don’t be one of them.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}