What you say about Walter Williams is just not true. He can and does view human behavior through more than just an economic praxis.
I never said that slavery was not a cause. But it was not the most important cause.
If the South had the spirited folks we had in 1861 then I would indeed feel sympathy for modern Southern nationhood. But we like the North have been conquered by the junk culture of Hollywood so there is much less difference between North and South. The South lost a generation of its best men in the War and they as a whole are truly irreplaceable.
I do admire very much about Walter Williams very much-— not the least of which being the way he succeeds where all other men fail, that is, keeping his wife in line.
I probably shouldn’t have said Walter Williams sees all human behavior through an economic lens-— that was stretching it. However, I do think he too often misappropriates the public choice economics of Buchanan and Tullock to reduce his analyses of politics to purely economic incentivizing, much as Thomas Dilorenzo does, particularly in his analysis of Lincoln. I think public choice economics, and Williams’ notion of self-ownership taken from Locke are both too narrow to encompass the richness of the human action as it relates to Lincoln; Williams cannot distinguish between the principled Lincoln and the willy nilly FDR in their relative expansions of government because of this. Lincoln expanded government because he had to, FDR because he wanted to— two very different things.
To say slavery was the most important cause of the War may be hard to say with utter metaphysical certainty without at least an angel’s knowledge of causation. But we can certainly look at the ordinances of secession and the Confederate Constitution to see that the governments that formed the Confederacy saw the right to keep and bear slaves as a positive good, in fact a great thing well worth fighting for, and the their primary cause.
I also disagree that the 1861 generation was the “greatest generation” of the South, but then I tend to be skeptical of the whole idea of “greatest generations”. Robert E. Lee knew that slavery was not worth seceding over and considered fighting for the Union, but ended up fighting for the South becuase it was his home. I believe he would have better served his country by fighting for it rather than his geographic home, and that his choice was emblematic of the South in general, or at least its leaders. The fact that the South, by and large, is our most patriotic region— that its men and women have fought for the US in such great numbers, so shortly after the Civil War up to and including the the WOT-— this impresses the hell out of me, anyway.
Civilization and culture doesn’t proceed in a straight forward or even backward line, its two step forward, six back, eight sideways. What you say about Hollywood and its dulling, leveling effect no doubt has some merit. But the fact that Jim Crow is dead and the South is yet still known as “the Bible belt” has to count for something as well. Similarly, the United States, imo, while afflicted by a Hollywood, has yet to be conquered by it-— John Wilkes Booth and Rosie O'Donnell notwithstanding.