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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29463 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 7, 2023

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So Rufo finds himself in a bit of a pickle. He's fully aware that he can't say "Thomas Jefferson, the man who believed blacks were inferior and held 130 of them in bondage, was not a racist" with a straight face.

The right move is to turn this around. YOU, Robinson, are doing something so totally heinous today that in 200 years all people will condemn you as a terrible bigot. But you can't even see what it is with your own eyes. Is the future right to condemn you?

There's an inkling of a good argument here. But it's not the kind of argument that'd work in Rufo's position, or more generally in a public debate without a lot of context. It feels like "okay, maybe I stole from the store, but aren't we all sinners in God's eyes?".

But you can’t even see what it is with your own eyes.

The tricky part here is that the Founding Fathers, including Jefferson, did consciously acknowledge that slavery was a real moral wrong. Not only is it not the case that the Founding Fathers couldn’t see what they were doing wrong in owning slaves, but they actively stated that slavery ought to end. Here’s Jefferson’s take:

A geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once concieved and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated; and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper. […] The cession of that kind of property, for so it is misnamed, is a bagatelle which would not cost me in a second thought, if, in that way, a general emancipation and expatriation could be effected: and, gradually, and with due sacrifices, I think it might be.

This isn’t even on the same level as, say, veganism, to which analogies are often made. Sure, maybe our descendants living centuries from now would condemn us for our meat-eating, but despite the existence of present-day vegans, it cannot be stated that there is a deep moral divide at the center of America (or any other country to my knowledge) between vegans and carnivores in the same way that there was in early America between slavery-enjoyers and abolitionists.

So it would be inaccurate, in this case, to say that Jefferson couldn’t even see what he was doing wrong by owning slaves.

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