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To: x
Maybe you were provoked, but you do defend slavery.

No, I do not, and if you've been paying attention you would know that. Oh, wait -- you do know that, you're just smearing me. What, run out of argument so quickly? Or are you just feeling lazy today?

You certainly have excused segregation as a way of protecting the White population.

The Southern one, or the Northern one, hypocrite?

We're talking about people who lived 140 years ago, not today. This is another example of your trying to crib a cheap arguing point and play "Blemish"/ad hominem by accusing people who lived in the past of failing to measure up to modern moral predilections -- which include, by the way, popularizing lesbianism and pederasty in the public schools, easy divorce, and endorsement by public figures of the use of recreational pharmacy that would have fried the brains of anyone living in 1870. The things we put up with in the way of bad deportment, moral slovenliness, and personal ethical cheesiness (think Bill Clinton), Victorians would have found beyond shocking -- they'd just stop talking to you, forever, if they thought you indulged that kind of thing.

I've told you guys before about playing this game. I'm not going to let this go. Stop it now -- it's morally bankrupt and intellectually dishonest. You know as well as I do that you cannot lay your own moral compass on people separated from you by so large a distance in time, customs, laws, and manners. You know better than this.

2,550 posted on 02/12/2005 9:27:24 AM PST by lentulusgracchus ("Whatever." -- sinkspur)
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To: lentulusgracchus
More to come. Back later.
2,553 posted on 02/12/2005 9:33:14 AM PST by lentulusgracchus ("Whatever." -- sinkspur)
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To: lentulusgracchus
We aren't having this debate in 1860 but in 2005. I can certainly understand the positions people took a century and a half ago, and I've got more important things to do than to stigmatize on either side or reproach the people of that day for not believing in the same things we do now.

The kind of radical historicism that you espouse can be dangerous though, as it may lead some to deny that there are lasting moral values.

But beyond that, it looks pretty cheesy to try to make the moral landscape of the 1860s permanent and to argue that we can't come to our own judgments about how historical events and movements look to us today in light of how we understand those moral values. For it is also "morally bankrupt" to argue that some era or cause is beyond question or judgment. If eternal moral values justify condemnation of our era for some reasons, it's hard to see how antebellum America could be permanently excepted from similar censure for its own faults.

And beyond that, it's tiresome to hear people argue that we must withhold judgment on slavery but morally condemn protective tariffs as the devil's work. Or to hear them pound away at the idea that Northern racism always makes Southern slavery or racism more excusable or pardonable without considering that sometimes perhaps the reverse is true, that the North may sometimes have the advantage in such things. Or that late 19th century expansionism or Indian wars (conducted by Republican Presidents) are wrong, while the expansionism and Indian wars conducted by Jeferson, Jackson, Polk (and other Southern Democrats) earlier in the 19th century were justifiable and excusable. In other words, most people don't share your kind of extreme relativism. They use it to excuse what they've already come to disapprove of, and discard it to condemn what they approve of -- and that is clearly a double standard.

If you keep arguing that one institution is forever to be removed from the possibility of condemnation, are you not in some way supporting or promoting or protecting it? My question to you still stands unanswered: how would your view of 19th century American history be different if you were avowedly "pro-slavery" than it is with you being whatever it is that you think you are?

2,559 posted on 02/12/2005 10:15:40 AM PST by x
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