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The shoe is never again going to be on the other foot with respect to people who believe so strongly in hereditary racial hierarchies that they think Confederacy-style slavery is the best way to organize society.
This question in particular is one the very rare exceptions where we can be extremely confident what the "right side" actually is. There are in fact certain values that are so obviously wrong that you don't have to extend any charity at all to them and it's ok to be as cruel as possible to those that support them. Whatever led to confederate-style slavery is one of them. Kill-all-non-Aryans Nazism is another. Almost nothing else is like this, but it's important to recognize the very special cases where you can make such strong statements.
When we're talking about things like actual 1940's-Germany Nazism and the the literal Confederacy, we're so far away from any normal political question that we really don't have to worry about slippery slopes. It's like saying taking antibiotics is a slippery slope of normalizing killing that will end in murder.
I realize that people have abused the words like "Nazi" so much that this kind of statement pattern-matches to something that's very worrisome and not true, but we can't let the corruption of the word make us unable to consider the concept---there were historical cultures in Virginia in 1850 and Germany in 1940 that really were that horrible. If the moderation team actually believes that insulting these specific historical cultures isn't ok here, then please ban me. I'm really not interested in discussing with any hypothetical poster that actually agrees with their tenets.
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Except that I was not talking about betrayal in the abstract. I was specifically referring to the very particular issue of whether Lee's actions merit a statue, and even more particularly whether his taking up arms against the govt constitutes "treason." You seem to want to talk about something else.
Then apparently I am not a progressive.
Again, then apparently I am not a progressive
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It gets tiring repeating this to you, but I’m not woke or progressive by any stretch of the imagination. I’m only in this because of the analogy to nazi germany and the prussian military tradition, as a german I’ve had to think long and hard about what it means to act justly within an unjust system, and I don’t think it can be done. The loyal dog of an evil master is not a good dog. So no, I do ponder constantly what to do when you’re on the ‘wrong side’. Frankly you guys are mindkilled, you’d defend anyone to get back at the woke.
You think Lee should be vilified. You think he should be vilified because he chose to fight for his native society, which was built on slavery. You think it should have been obvious to Lee that his native society was not worth fighting for because it was evil, because slavery is self-evidently evil. Only, slavery obviously wasn't self-evidently evil in the sense you mean to either Lee or his contemporaries, almost all of whom spent large portions of their lives coexisting with slavery. It certainly wasn't self-evident to their predecessors, who accepted slavery as a price worth paying to get the united states off the ground. Many of them could recognize that it was evil, in the sense that they wanted it to stop, without being able to agree that it was evil enough to sacrifice or even risk everything else of value in an attempt to end it, which is what you appear to be arguing.
What makes your moral assessments different from those of Lincoln or Grant or any of the others on the Union side, who thought Lee worthy of considerable respect despite having literally had to fight him? Could it be that your moral standards have... progressed?
Bonus question: I think abortion is an abomination, roughly equal to slavery. Do you consider me liberated from any concerns of loyalty to my fellow countrymen, given that they have maintained this vile practice at the cost of 60 million innocent lives? Had I the opportunity to contribute significantly to the military subjugation of my society, with a reasonable expectation that this would result in large-scale death, ruin and immiseration for my fellow Americans, should I do so?
That's all I'm saying, that it was recognizably evil, not self-evidently evil.
What actually happened is that Lee and co sacrificed and risked everything of value in an attempt to maintain it - see the difference? Good honorable men have a duty not to fight for a recognizably evil cause. If lee had gone on a trip to europe for the duration of the war, I would have no problem with him.
My assessments are substantiated, coherent and elegant. I don't respect their opinions any more than I do those of living experts and ordinary people.
So have yours and Hlynka's.
If there is ever a civil war between abortionists and anti-abortionists, I suggest you do not fight for the abortionists just because your home state is blue. As I said, morality in general, not just my morality, trumps the petty understanding of honor and loyalty lee used to justify fighting on the side of evil.
No, because it’ll end up a communist civil war type deal, where the deaths are front-loaded, and after that your goals will fail and it will go on as usual. But what should stay your hand is morality, not loyalty to your home state, or ‘basic human decency’ (in the sense of ‘being a good neighbour’), or legality.
No, they sacrificed and risked everything to protect and preserve the society that was attempting to maintain it. Slavery was a fundamental part of the South, but it is a mistake to reduce everything in the South to slavery, just as it would be a mistake to round everything in our current society to abortion or racism or whatever hot-button issue one considers important. They fought to preserve the lives and prosperity of millions of their tribe, despite the fact that their tribe was committing a great evil, because they thought that the good within their society was worth preserving, despite the evil.
Our disagreement is over what constitutes a "recognizably evil cause". Lee did not recognize the South as "recognizably evil" in the sense you seem to be using it, and in fact neither did Lincoln, Grant, Sherman, or myself. This is not because we are moral relativists, but because we recognize that all societies contain significant amounts of evil and injustice, and that attempts to solve large-scale injustices can have absolutely horrific unintended consequences, especially when those attempts bulldoze positive-sum norms. Accepting significant levels of evil and injustice is often preferable if no clean resolution is available. Even when conflict can't be avoided, limiting the scope of that conflict as much as possible is extremely valuable. The values that put Lee on the wrong side in the conflict are also the values that help him limit the scale of the conflict and bring it to an end, which is why they, and he, should be respected.
...And notably progressive compared to those who came before you.
In what way? Feel free to provide examples. If you can't do that, you should consider that your values are in fact to some degree progressive, and our values are not, and this is the difference we keep trying to point out to you. You seem to think that there's an easy solution available, and so anyone who ends up on the other side is just irredeemably evil. I think that the world is complicated, and those on the other side, even in war, are still redeemable, even respectable, provided they conduct themselves well. The fact that they are willing to fight is much less important than how they fight. Individuals rarely have much control over whether a war happens, but they have considerable control over their conduct in a war, and they can have a lot of influence on how the war ends.
The question was whether you expect me to sit the war out because I'm an American. You're arguing that it's not a choice of evils, but rather a choice between good and evil. If the anti-abortion side is credibly threatening to bomb New York City into the stone age, are my choices either to join them or to sit it out, or might I conceivably conclude that their ends aren't worth their means, and fight against them?
And likewise, Abolitionism resulted in a civil war where the deaths were front-loaded, most of their goals in fact failed, and then it went on as usual. Blacks remain a crime-ridden, poorly-educated underclass, and every attempt to change that fact has failed. Lee did not contribute significantly to that unfortunate reality, and his actions gave the attempt to make it otherwise as much help as could be asked for. The civil war was quite decisive; it is not clear how a worse, less honorable commander could have made it significantly more decisive, or improved the results of the aftermath.
You and the other progressives are angry that your preferred outcome didn't happen. You believe that it should have happened, because your theories say so, and further say that the only reason it didn't happen is because people got in the way. And in fairness, people did get in the way: Lee commanded the southern armies, and southerners refused to abandon their racism for a century or more after the war concluded. But your preferred outcomes didn't happen in the North either, because your theories are in fact wrong. Slavery and Racism are bad in and of themselves, and we are well-rid of them, but they are not the reason why Blacks More Likely. You don't want to admit that your theories are wrong, or that you have no idea what to do now, and so you attempt to scapegoat those different from yourself. This will not solve the problem either, but it will burn social cohesion and convince people who might otherwise work with you that you are incapable of cooperation.
I'm happy to go with culture within the black community, the deconstruction of our mechanisms of family formation, the effects of no-fault divorce, the general Moynihan Report thesis.
The problem with the standard narrative on race is that we detect racism through disparate outcomes, but by that measure there doesn't appear to be a detectable racism gradient between deepest Red and deepest Blue regions. Nor has fifty years of herculean social interventions actually moved the needle. Whatever causes the bad outcomes, it doesn't change whether black people grow up in Mississippi or California, it works exactly the same post-Black Panther as it did when the hard-R was common vernacular in the fifties, and it is immune to everything we've tried from at least the civil rights era till today. Also, it got way worse within weeks of the BLM protests starting.
That data is completely incompatible with the narrative by which racism, structural or individual, oppresses Blacks and causes them to have worse outcomes, but we can fix the problem through diversity initiatives/media representation/affirmative action/whatever the intervention du jour is. If it's racism, it doesn't work anything like the standard model, or even the pessimistic versions of radicals like Coates. If it's social dysfunction, it's not anything like the standard social model we've been focused on for the last half-century. There is no reason to continue to pretend that the interventions that have monotonously failed to date will magically start working if we try just one more time. And at this point, given the way the BLM fracas shook out, there's no reason for Reds to continue to cooperate with the current system, where we cooperate in good faith with the solutions and then are given sole blame for the inevitable failure.
BLM happened because Blues disseminated an obvious lie about black people being killed by the police in massive numbers, resulting in nation-wide riots and a collapse in policing. The result has been that the thousands of murders they lied about are now actually happening as a pure black-on-black phenomenon, due to an apparent collapse in policing and an attendant skyrocketed murder rate. And the kicker is, no one involved will admit what actually happened, and instead they blame Reds like me. So fuck every part of that. None of this is any reason to be hostile to blacks, but it's a very good reason to be hostile to Blues.
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Right, they failed, and if they had succeeded, it would have perpetuated a great evil. Hence my question: what decent man would fight and kill his countrymen for that payoff matrix?
This is a ‘both sides’ argument for refusing to fight in any war, it doesn’t justify lee and rommel’s actions.
Really what bothers me the most is the complacency with which otherwise decent men said ‘let’s go to war then’, over their own moral reservations (not mine!) . It would be of great benefit to humanity if the ideas they used to justify it (‘honor’ and duty to your state) would decrease in prestige so that this never happens again.
I do consider them traitors, but not in a formal sense, not to a state (as I said I care very little about duty to the state when it conflicts with morality). No, to their own conscience, to the side of good, to which their natural inclinations would have guided them without the aforementioned memes. If rabid nazis or the southern gentlemen culture which supported the caning of senatur sumner goes on an evil path, that’s business as usual, I expect that. But good men were not supposed to follow them there.
Cthulu swims left, and your opinions and Hlynka”s are considerably more progressive than that from an an american from 70 years ago, let alone grant and lee. Examples: blacks and women’s right to vote, your views on misgeneation , homosexuality, personal freedom, what constitutes fighting words, etc.
So the north are now terrorists killing millions of civilians unprompted. This is how ridiculously far you have to stretch your analogies to maintain your defense of lee.
That's one way to frame it. Is abolitionism alone to blame for the civil war? If friends Jack and Joe get into a fistfight over a disagreement, it's not Jack's fault alone for disagreeing. Both chose to escalate. And sure they were both equally insulted, their honor was on the line. And perhaps it would have been better if they'd bury the hatchet and avoided bloodshed. But if Jack was morally right, he had no duty to yield first.
I have no idea what you’re trying to say here. Did you confuse me with somebody else? I never implied slavery and racism make blacks more likely, you and I have discussed HBD and other possible causes of black underachievement. Do I also refuse to admit that resisting the nazis was wrong and that their victory would not have changed anything?
If they succeeded, they also would have perpetuated much good. With hindsight, we recognize that the evil could be unwound without immediate disaster; from their perspective, there were good reasons to suspect that wasn't possible. So they can fight to protect the good, and they can fight to forestall what they see as a worse evil. That's two understandable reasons. I can disagree with those reasons, even to the point of being willing to kill them over the dispute, without losing my understanding of their fundamentally honorable motivations, nor respecting those motivations. You should do the same.
Neither Rommel nor Lee thought they were fighting to perpetuate evil, and that was in fact a reasonable conclusion for them to draw, even if we are confident that their assessment was wrong. You don't seem to be able to comprehend how this could be, but that's how it was, as their contemporaries recognized.
Yes, it is a "both sides" argument, because no war I can think of has ever been a straightforward contest of Good vs Evil. If you believe that wars are commonly Good Guys vs Evil Guys, I'm not sure what to say to you, other than that your view is childish and naive in the extreme. Wars involve too many people acting in too many ways for too many motivations to shake out to simple "good vs evil" narratives, even when they involve remarkably evil acts on the part of their participants.
Why does this bother you?
War is part of the human experience. It has been a constant part of the human experience for all of observable history. It's one of the bedrock examples of how nothing in humans actually progresses, of how we are as we have always been as far back as the record goes. It's not a mistake, it's not straightforwardly avoidable, it's not some tragedy that we can or should eradicate through careful technocratic social engineering. Like death, it is an inevitability that one must understand and accept if anything in our experience and history is to make sense.
You seem to perceive war as something to be avoided at all costs, which makes you hate the people on the other side whom you see as forcing a conflict through their intransigence. I see it as a thing that happens, has happened before and will happen again, to be avoided if possible, and embraced if not. Your attitude leads to the sort of bitterness that perpetuates conflicts. Mine, I think, leads to durable peace. If you resent those who've fought you, how can you make peace with them?
What you are advocating is not some untested idea. We've tried it before, and the results are uniformly awful.
The instructive example here would be the Russian revolution, which systematically rejected the concept of honor or loyalty to existing structures, and resulted in the rule of highly concentrated evil lasting decades. The people who perpetrated its atrocities thought exactly as you do: "Do the right thing, be the good guys, and to hell with anything or anyone that gets in the way". They sacrificed everything to a core moral axiom, and created hideous atrocities thereby. Lee balanced competing principles against each other, and so committed no atrocities: he fought a war, lost, surrendered honorably, and helped secure the following peace.
Over and over again, you revolve back to the central idea of fixing everything by just being correct. The problem is that being correct is not easy, and sometimes is not possible but by luck. People are not good at figuring out what the right thing to do is, so telling them to just do the right thing will often result in them doing the wrong thing instead, with disastrous results.
Good men didn't, because war isn't evil.
I won't speak for Hlynka, but you are straightforwardly wrong in my case. I do not particularly value the right of blacks, women, or for that matter myself to vote, nor the right to vote in general. Miscegenation is not something my forebears two hundred years ago believed was wrong, my opinion of homosexuality is not different from theirs either, nor what constitutes fighting words. Not one of your listed examples is accurate. Cthulhu might swim left. I am pretty confident you do as well. I do not.
I think you misread the question. In this scenario, New York City is attempting to preserve the practice of abortion, and the Anti-abortion forces are about to bomb the city back to the stone age. My question is whether, even if I think abortion is wrong, I might nonetheless think that bombing New York City back to the stone age is not a good solution, to the point of being willing to defend a society I think is perpetuating serious evil, because the alternative seems worse.
As I understand it, your position is that I could in good conscience join in on the bombing of New York City, or I could stand aside and do nothing, but defending New York City would be straightforwardly evil; they've embraced and perpetuated evil, and they'll continue to do so if they aren't defeated, so fighting for them is unconscionable, correct?
Of course not, any more than the South is alone to blame. It takes two to fight.
And yet, even if I think Jack is morally right, I can still recognize that other people see it differently, without assuming that they are evil for doing so.
I'm responding to the current narrative on Lee, that he fought to perpetuate evil and was therefore evil himself. This is the narrative you're arguing for. If you aren't concerned with racism and the legacy of slavery, why do you care about Lee at all?
I care about Lee, because I consider the Civil War to be a foundational part of our national history. We should not have accepted slavery as part of our society. Having made the mistake of accepting it, allowing it to sink its roots deep into the nation, it seems inevitable that we would have to pay the price for our acquiescence to evil. I'm glad that the abolitionists pushed to end the practice, and while I wish that the practice might have ended peacefully, it's easy to understand why that wasn't possible. Given that decisions made centuries earlier made a conflict all but inevitable, I'm glad that the southern half of the conflict was prosecuted, in the main, by honorable men who fought bravely and honorably and laid the foundation for a durable peace. I think the Union's glory is enhanced by the character of their opponents, and I do not resent those on the other side who fought for their homes and families, as soldiers always do. I have no problem heaping scorn on their political leadership; Davis and his associates were very fortunate not to have been hanged. But soldiers and generals serve a purpose that we can neither deny nor dispense with, and the honor and obedience that your scorn are to me hard-won social technologies that ward off an unspeakable array of atrocities. A few thousand more dead in this war or that one is a small price to pay to avoid armies guided by their own ad-hoc moral instincts, or worse yet no army at all when one is sorely needed.
Disagree. I just stumbled across this survey, which says over 50% of americans agree with “we should all be willing to fight for our country, whether it is right or wrong.”Source . You’re constantly making it seem as if I’m imposing my 21st century morality on people, and who am I to say that my morality is correct etc . But lee and rommel , like the people in the survey, know they are perpetuating evil when they do it. Do you agree with them on the survey question, and if you do, how can you claim that valuing lee is valuing peace? They value neither peace, nor morality. I do.
My point is, if you truly believe that there is no good side, the correct course of action is simply not to fight. Otoh, if there is a good side, the least you can do is not to fight against it.
I feel like the reason I can’t pinpoint your political position is that you’ve been cagey about what your position actually is. When I was defending the Enlightenment and classical liberalism during our discussions, I asked you more than once, ‘so are you an absolutist monarchist then, a theocrat, an anti-enlightenment reactionary? ‘ , and you just refused to answer, content to take potshots at other positions and implying that there was an undefined third way. You often present and act as an ally of @HlynkaCG ’s, who sees himself as a besieged supporter of the american republic, a position incompatible with the one you take here.
No. First, I don’t understand why the ‘good’ side in your hypothetical is killing civilians by the millions. I don’t endorse that, it’s pretty much the worst thing you can do. That kind of atrocity reverses the moral polarity. So it’s fine to fight for the new yorkers. I think you should consider the possibility that you have misinterpreted my position. Condemning lee does not imply crushing “evil” by any means necessary.
Of course in our real-life examples, in the civil war no one was doing that, and in WWII it was the ‘bad side’, rommel’s side, which was doing it. That’s why I called your hypothetical a convenient, massive stretch.
To illustrate my moral position on the killing of civilians, I think Hiroshima was justified because an invasion or just a blockade of Japan would have caused even more civilian deaths. And for examples of the failures of monarchy, and of the worship of a monarch’s authority as the impersonation of the state, you don’t need to look further than the staggering incompetence and casual evil of such figures as Nicholas II, Victor Emmanuel III, and, especially, Hiro Hito.
No one could accuse the japanese of not valuing “honor”, duty to their fatherland, and obedience. And yet, even the crimes of a stalin pale in comparison to theirs. So contra your ‘the honor and obedience that you scorn are to me hard-won social technologies that ward off an unspeakable array of atrocities‘, those social technologies have not only failed to ward off that unspeakable array, they contributed to it. While it is true that some atrocities have been committed for morality, people have done at least equally terrible things for god and country. And at least the moral man thinks about what he's doing and gives himself a chance to catch a mistake, instead of blindly obeying orders 'whether it is right or wrong'.
I told you why, because of the analogy to rommel, to the Imperial japanese army , and to the butchers of WWI. Lee’s defense is rommel’s defense.
I reject this political-military distinction, every man bears his own cross, he doesn’t get to pass it on to the president/ Führer because he wears a uniform. He’s not a responsible moral actor in one sphere, and an irresponsible tool in another. Somehow a common southerner should be condemned for his political decisions, but praised for his actions as a soldier? The decision to fight is eminently political.
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