Why Study Philosophy?

By James FallowsWhy Study Philosophy? 'To Challenge Your Own Point of View'

An interview with Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, author of Plato at the Googleplex
At a time when advances in science and technology have changed our understanding of our mental and physical selves, it is easy for some to dismiss the discipline of philosophy as obsolete. Stephen Hawking, boldly, argues that philosophy is dead.



Not according to Rebecca Newberger Goldstein. Goldstein, a philosopher and novelist, studied philosophy at Barnard and then earned her Ph.D. in philosophy at Princeton University. She has written several books, won a MacArthur “Genius Award” in 1996, and taught at several universities, including Barnard, Columbia, Rutgers, and Brandeis.



Goldstein’s forthcoming book, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away, offers insight into the significant—and often invisible—progress that philosophy has made. I spoke with Goldstein about her take on the science vs. philosophy debates, how we can measure philosophy’s advances, and why an understanding of philosophy is critical to our lives today.


You came across The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant as a kid. What were your first thoughts?



I grew up in a very religious Orthodox Jewish household and everybody seemed to have firm opinions about all sorts of big questions. I was interested in how they knew what they seemed to know, or claimed to know. That’s what I would now call an epistemological question. I was allowed to read very widely, and I got the book The Story of Philosophy out. I must’ve been 11 or 12. And the chapter on Plato… it was my first experience of a kind of intellectual ecstasy. I was sent completely outside of myself. There were a lot of things that I didn’t understand, but there was something abstract and eternal that underlay all the changing phenomena of the world. He used the word “phantasmagoria,” which is one of those words I had to look up, and probably one of the few times I’ve encountered it. I couldn’t quite understand what I was reading, but I was hooked.



When did your formal education in philosophy start?



I didn’t think I was going to study philosophy. I also loved science, and took out lots of books about science as a kid, and, oh gosh, I ruined my mother’s kitchen by trying to do do-it-yourself chemistry experiments. There were all kinds of things that interested me. One of the things about philosophy is that you don’t have to give up on any other field. Whatever field there is, there’s a corresponding field of philosophy. Philosophy of language, philosophy of politics, philosophy of math. All the things I wanted to know about I could still study within a philosophical framework.



What did your religious family think about your pursuit of philosophy?



It made my mother intensely uncomfortable. She wanted me to be a good student but not to take it too seriously. She worried that nobody would want to marry such a bookish girl. But I ended up getting married at 19. And I wasn’t an outwardly rebellious child; I followed all the rules. The problem was, I was allowed to think about whatever I wanted to. Even though I decided very early on that I didn’t believe in any of it, it was okay as long as I had freedom of mind. It was fine with my family.



How early do you think children can, or should, start learning about philosophy?



I started really early with my daughters. They said the most interesting things that if you’re trained in philosophy you realize are big philosophical statements. The wonderful thing about kids is that the normal way of thinking, the conceptual schemes we get locked up in, haven’t gelled yet with them. When my daughter was a toddler, I’d say “Danielle!” she would very assuredly, almost indignantly, say, “I’m not Danielle! I’m this!” I’d think, What is she trying to express? This is going to sound ridiculous, but she was trying to express what Immanuel Kant calls the transcendental ego. You’re not a thing in the world the way there are other things in the world, you’re the thing experiencing other things—putting it all together. This is what this toddler was trying to tell me. Or when my other daughter, six at the time, was talking with her hands and knocked over a glass of juice. She said, “Look at what my body did!” I said, “Oh, you didn’t do that?” And she said, “No! My body did that!” I thought, Oh! Cartesian dualism! She meant that she didn’t intend to do that, and she identified herself with her intentional self. It was fascinating to me.



And kids love to argue.



They could argue with me about anything. If it were a good argument I would take it seriously. See if you can change my mind. It teaches them to be self-critical, to look at their own opinions and see what the weak spots are. This is also important in getting them to defend their own positions, to take other people’s positions seriously, to be able to self-correct, to be tolerant, to be good citizens and not to be taken in by demagoguery. The other thing is to get them to think about moral views. Kids have a natural egotistical morality. Every kid by age three is saying, “That’s not fair!” Well, use that to get them to think about fairness. Yes, they feel a certain sense of entitlement, but what is special about them? What gives them such a strong sense of fairness? They’re natural philosophers. And they’re still so flexible.



There’s a peer pressure that sets in at a certain age. They so much want to be like everybody else. But what I’ve found is that if you instill this joy of thinking, the sheer intellectual fun, it will survive even the adolescent years and come back in fighting form. It’s empowering.



What changes in philosophy curriculum have you seen over the last 40 years?



One thing that’s changed tremendously is the presence of women and the change in focus because of that. There’s a lot of interest in literature and philosophy, and using literature as a philosophical examination. It makes me so happy! Because I was seen as a hard-core analytic philosopher, and when I first began to write novels people thought, Oh, and we thought she was serious! But that’s changed entirely. People take literature seriously, especially in moral philosophy, as thought experiments. A lot of the most developed and effective thought experiments come from novels. Also, novels contribute to making moral progress, changing people’s emotions.



Right—a recent study shows how reading literature leads to increased compassion.



Exactly. It changes our view of what’s imaginable. Commercial fiction that didn’t challenge people’s stereotypes about characters didn’t have the same effect of being able to read others better, but literary fiction that challenges our views of stereotypes has a huge effect. A lot of women philosophers have brought this into the conversation. Martha Nussbaum really led the way in this. She claimed that literature was philosophically important in many different ways. The other thing that’s changed is that there’s more applied philosophy. Let’s apply philosophical theory to real-life problems, like medical ethics, environmental ethics, gender issues. This is a real change from when I was in school and it was only theory.



In your new book, you respond to the criticism that philosophy isn’t progressing the way other fields are. For example: In philosophy, unlike in other areas of study, an ancient historical figure like Plato is just as relevant today.


There’s the claim that the only progress made is in posing problems that scientists can answer. That philosophy never has the means to answer problems—it’s just biding its time till the scientists arrive on the scene. You hear this quite often. There is, among some scientists, a real anti-philosophical bias. The sense that philosophy will eventually disappear. But there’s a lot of philosophical progress, it’s just a progress that’s very hard to see. It’s very hard to see because we see with it. We incorporate philosophical progress into our own way of viewing the world. Plato would be constantly surprised by what we know. And not only what we know scientifically, or by our technology, but what we know ethically. We take a lot for granted. It’s obvious to us, for example, that individual’s ethical truths are equally important. Things like class and gender and religion and ethnicity don’t matter insofar as individual rights go. That would never have occurred to him. He makes an argument in The Republic that you need to treat all Greeks in the same way. It never occurs to him that you would treat barbarians (non-Greeks) the same way.



It’s amazing how long it takes us, but we do make progress. And it’s usually philosophical arguments that first introduce the very outlandish idea that we need to extend rights. And it takes more, it takes a movement, and activism, and emotions, to affect real social change. It starts with an argument, but then it becomes obvious. The tracks of philosophy’s work are erased because it becomes intuitively obvious. The arguments against slavery, against cruel and unusual punishment, against unjust wars, against treating children cruelly—these all took arguments.



Which philosophical arguments have you seen shifting our national conversation, changing what we once thought was obvious?



About 30 years ago, the philosopher Peter Singer started to argue about the way animals are treated in our factory farms. Everybody thought he was nuts. But I’ve watched this movement grow; I’ve watched it become emotional. It has to become emotional. You have to draw empathy into it. But here it is, right in our time—a philosopher making the argument, everyone dismissing it, but then people start discussing it. Even criticizing it, or saying it’s not valid, is taking it seriously. This is what we have to teach our children. Even things that go against their intuition they need to take seriously. What was intuition two generations ago is no longer intuition; and it’s arguments that change it. We are very inertial creatures. We do not like to change our thinking, especially if it’s inconvenient for us. And certainly the people in power never want to wonder whether they should hold power. So it really takes hard, hard work to overcome that.



How do you think philosophy is best taught?



I get very upset when I’m giving a lecture and I’m not interrupted every few sentences by questions. My style is such that that happens very rarely. That’s my technique. I’m really trying to draw the students out, make them think for themselves. The more they challenge me, the more successful I feel as a teacher. It has to be very active. Plato used the metaphor that in teaching philosophy, there needs to be a fire in the teacher, and the sheer heat will help the fire grow in the student. It’s something that’s kindled because of the proximity to the heat.



What is it like teaching philosophy to students from a variety of backgrounds?



A good philosophy professor needs to be very aware of the different personalities in her class. I’ve had students who’ve become so very uncomfortable. They needed a lot of handholding. Some came from very religious backgrounds, and just the questioning sent them into a free-fall. We made our way through. Some of them ended up being my strongest students. Two of them are very successful professional philosophers. But they required a lot of extra time because they felt it so deeply. You’re being asked to rethink all sorts of opinions. And when you see that the ground is not very firm, it can distance you from your own family, your upbringing. I went through this. My own philosophical journey distanced me from my family, the people I loved most. That was very difficult, so I know what they’re going through. It can be a very intense journey.



What’s happened to the popularity of philosophy as a subject since you studied it?



It’s gone down. Our college students today are far more practical. When I was in college, which was in the last hey-day of the radical movement, it was a more philosophically reflective time. Now, they want to get good jobs and get rich fast.



Despite this, and the fact that so many students are facing massive debt and a bleak economy, how can you make the case that they should study philosophy?



I wouldn’t say that they must go into philosophy, and frankly, the field can’t absorb that many people, but I would say that it’s always a good thing to know, no matter what you go on to study—to be able to think critically. To challenge your own point of view. Also, you need to be a citizen in this world. You need to know your responsibilities. You’re going to have many moral choices every day of your life. And it enriches your inner life. You have lots of frameworks to apply to problems, and so many ways to interpret things. It makes life so much more interesting. It’s us at our most human. And it helps us increase our humanity. No matter what you do, that’s an asset.



What do you think are the biggest philosophical issues of our time?



The growth in scientific knowledge presents new philosophical issues. The idea of the multiverse. Where are we in the universe? Physics is blowing our minds about this. The question of whether some of these scientific theories are really even scientific. Can we get predictions out of them? And with the growth in cognitive science and neuroscience. We’re going into the brain and getting these images of the brain. Are we discovering what we really are? Are we solving the problem of free will? Are we learning that there isn’t any free will? How much do the advances in neuroscience tell us about the deep philosophical issues? These are the questions that philosophers are now facing. But I also think, to a certain extent, that our society is becoming much more secular. So the question about how we find meaning in our lives, given that many people no longer look to monotheism as much as they used to in terms of defining the meaning of their life. There’s an undercurrent of a preoccupation with this question. With the decline of religion is there a sense of the meaninglessness of life and the easy consumerist answer that’s filling the space religion used to occupy? This is something that philosophers ought to be addressing.

Obamacare Fiction

Search Feb 26, 4:28 pm 27A General Theory of Obamacare Fiction
by Paul Krugman
Conservatives appear to be really upset that liberals are actually taking on the facts in the anti-Obamacare ads they’ve been running. How dare you question whether the people in these ads are giving an accurate picture — they’re suffering!

OK, we’ve seen this kind of play before. Remember how anyone suggesting that Dick Cheney and whatshisname misled us into invading Iraq was attacking American’s brave fighting men and women?

But there’s a different kind of struggle anyone trying to point out the facts encounters — a barrage of anecdotes. You say that the Obamacare horror stories are fake, but I kind of know this man who is being told that he has to buy a policy he can’t possibly afford / I read this sad story in the Wall Street Journal / I heard this tale on the radio / etc..How do you answer that?

Well, it can’t be done retail. If the Koch brothers are pouring money into ads featuring a person, or the GOP response to the SOTU tells a story, then it’s worth trying to track down the particulars of this case. But to deal with the broader problem of anecdotes, what you need is a framework that tells you which anecdotes are almost surely wrong.

So here’s what you need to understand. The Affordable Care Act isn’t magic — it produces losers as well as winners. But it’s not black magic either, turning everyone into a loser. What the Act does is in effect to increase the burden on fortunate people — the healthy and wealthy — to lift some burdens on the less fortunate: people with chronic illnesses or other preexisting conditions, low-income workers.

Suppose, then, that someone comes to you with an anecdote about a cancer patient, or just an older person in poor health, and tells you that this person is about to lose the care she needs, or face a huge increase in expenses, under Obamacare. Well, it’s almost certainly not true — people like that are overwhelmingly beneficiaries of health reform, thanks to community rating, which means that they can’t be discriminated against because of their condition.

Or suppose that someone tells you about a struggling worker who had adequate coverage but is now being confronted with unaffordable premiums. You should immediately ask, what about the subsidies? Because the Affordable Care Act has subsidies that are there specifically to keep premiums affordable for lower earners.

If someone insists that he knows about someone in these categories who really is being grievously hurt, well, the burden of proof rests with the claimant. Basically, stories like that are going to be very rare.

Obamacare opponents could, of course, go with the real losers — people in the one percent paying higher taxes, healthy young men who are getting by with cheap, minimalist policies. But they want sob stories — the sick middle-aged woman facing tragedy. And so far, every single one of those sob stories has turned out to be false — because the very nature of the reform is such that such things hardly ever happen.

B & W to Color

.Those of us who lived thru the transition from black and white to color remember b & w fondly. We remember TV shows like Andy Griffith and Bewitched that switched over in the 60's. I remember the first person in our town to own a color TV. Some shows were initially color but most weren't. The neighbor said the thing cost $800. I was shocked. Probably $3000 in today's funny money. We remembe...r when black and white movies were still made like Psycho in 1960, and isn't the shower scene great in b & w? Colorization of old b & w movies should be punishable by death. We remember the first game videos in black and white in the 70's. Somewhere along the way Jesus's words turned red in the Bible. Yes, I am nostalgic this morning. I remember black and white fondly.

Kudzu Country

Chiggers, mosquitoes, brain eating amoebas, hurricanes & tornadoes, sink holes, humidity, kudzu everywhere. Sometimes I wonder if God likes The South.

Hurray!

by Paul Krugman

Hurray: President Obama has dropped his notion of using a change in the price index to cut Social Security benefits.


This is a big deal, not just because of the concrete implications for retirees, but because it signals the end of an era. BowlesSimpsonism is dead; “responsible” policy will no longer be defined as the search for a fiscal Grand Bargain.

We might even be on the path to grappling with America’s real problems.

Mercedes Bends 2

Mercedes Bends

Mercedes Marathon

Everyone's gone to the moon except for those of us headed to the Mercedes Marathon in downtown Birmingham to see my son set a scorching pace in this race. Look carefully if you are there because he'll run by you in a flash. I'm skipping Communion this morning but I'm counting on the Lord's understanding. I got my M&Ms and my OJ so I'm set. That's ah my boy there, you see? All you people get outta his way cause he's coming on thru.

After Valentine's Day

.Freddy is home from Little Rock for the weekend. He will run in the Mercedes Marathon tomorrow. We are so happy. Here's looking at you, kid.

Valentine's Day

.We swapped Valentine cards in elementary school. You might have written something special on the card for that girl you were sweet on. Later on we bought Russell Stover. That was the top of the line. We bought roses if the price was reasonable. We went out for a romantic dinner or romantically dined in. Not much has changed except handing out cards. My colleagues might wonder if I handed out Valentine cards at work. My foreman and shift manager might get the wrong idea.

Lynne Olson - Citizens of London

I am enjoying this book about World War II.  Freddy is home and he recommended it.  The WW II years were the most important of the 20th Century.  Those years were perhaps the most important in the history of Western Civilization.

The main thing I learned in this book is that US/British cooperation in the war was not automatic.  There was initial animosity both before and during the war.  FDR and Churchill had to warm up to each other.  They did not like each other initially.  Churchill had to court FDR and he did it well to get the US into the war.  He danced a jig when he heard about Pearl Harbor.  By the end of the FDR was drifting away from Churchill.

How London stood up to the Nazi bombing is beyond me.  It sounds like the city was all but leveled.  Londoners suffered much more than Americans.  The author makes it sound our country sailed thru the war with little hardship.

The author makes it sound like FDR thought he could deal with Stalin.  It seems that he was snookered by the Russian.

The author also makes it sound like FDR moved too slowly toward preparing the US for the war though he knew it was inevitable that we would get into it.

The story of the book is the three gentlemen who were in London preparing for our entry into the war.  I certainly did not know their story before reading this book.

Weather (2)

It's hard to believe that 2 days ago we had another round of heavy snow.  Then it melted yesterday and now we have a fine winter's day.  Such is the weather in Alabama.

Good Ole Clarence

larence Thomas Nostalgic for Race-Neutral Days of 1960s GeorgiaBy Jonathan Chait

Clarence Thomas, lamenting the race consciousness of modern American society, says America was better in this regard when he was a kid.



My sadness is that we are probably today more race- and difference-conscious than I was in the 1960s when I went to school. To my knowledge, I was the first black kid in Savannah, Georgia, to go to a white school. Rarely did the issue of race come up.



Right. But maybe the reason race came up so rarely was not that the racial situation was better in 1960s Georgia. Maybe the reason race came up rarely is that the racial situation in 1960s Georgia was extremely terrible.





For instance, for the first 14 years of Thomas's life, Georgia had zero African-Americans in its state legislature. Majority-black Terrell had a total of five registered black voters — possibly because African-Americans were so satisfied with their treatment that they didn't see any reason to vote, or possibly because civil-rights activists in Georgia tended to get assassinated.



So maybe "reluctance to bring up racial issues" is not, in fact, the best measure of a society's racial health.

Those Who Can

Those who can do, do. Those who can't do, teach. Those who can do neither, sell.

Weather

Another winter weather front sweeps across Alabama.  So far it's mostly north of us.  We have only cold rain.

The Beatles on Ed Sullivan

It was 50 years ago tonight when The Beatles first appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show.  Sadly, I don't remember it.  Where was I?

If You Work Hard, Will You Get into the One Percent?

BY Carol Costello

CNN

6 February 2014

 

Many wealthy, successful Americans regale us with stories of how they worked their rears off to get to where they are. Living proof, they say, that hard work can propel you to heights you cannot imagine.

 

I don't doubt their stories; I worked hard too. But along with that hard work came something no one seems to acknowledge -- luck.

 

Understandable, for luck says nothing about your smarts or talent or beauty. Luck is a happy accident. Seize it and make it work for you and nine times out of 10, you're golden.

 

I'm not saying only luck brings success. Hard work is necessary too, but it is not sufficient. Did I work harder or think better than hundreds of thousands of others? I would love to say yes, but although I tried to outsmart my competitors, I know I would not be sitting at CNN without Lady Luck on my side.

 

I know. I hear you. "You make your own luck!" Yes, you can, but it was a lot easier for me to "make my own luck" than it was -- is -- for many others.

 

Bear with me.

 

I grew up decidedly middle-class. My father was a steelworker, my mother an office manager and occasional bookkeeper. Neither parent attended college, but they managed to carve out a comfortable life for me, my brothers and sister. There was no money to set aside for college, but I knew my parents expected me to be a college graduate.

 

Lucky me?

 

Yes. Because my father, a high school graduate, was able to find a well-paying job. Back in the day, manufacturing jobs were plentiful, and they paid well, as did many traditional middle-class jobs. Today, not so much. An article in The New York Times on September 18, 1987, reported the average wage for an automaker was $13.50 an hour. In today's dollars, that's $28.47. (Annual inflation over this period averaged 2.8%.) More than two decades later, thanks to the 2008 recession and the erosion of union power, entry-level unionized autoworkers were paid between $14 and $17 an hour, while veteran workers earned between $28 and $38 an hour.

 

So, I was lucky to be born to parents who could afford to feed me, clothe me, house me and, as an added bonus, expect me to make something of myself.

 

Also, my mother was not an alcoholic, and my father was not an ex-con. We lived in a variety of middle-class neighborhoods -- some middle, some lower -- but there were no drug dealers on the corner, no gunshots in the street. There were no metal detectors at the doors or armed security guards patrolling the halls of any of the schools I attended.

 

I did work hard to get through college, though. I worked two jobs for minimum wage -- one in a cafeteria and another at SeaWorld -- to pay my way through school.

 

In addition to those jobs, I interned at WAKR in Akron, Ohio, for free and attended night classes to finish my degree.

 

Ah, you say -- finally -- proof that if you work hard enough you will escape that minimum-wage job and achieve your goals.

 

Except luck played a part here too. According to the College Board, there was little to no growth in college prices in the 1970s. College costs actually just started to rise in 1980, the year I entered Kent State University. I just missed the massive sticker shock students face today. Since I went to school, college costs have risen at twice and sometimes three times the Consumer Price Index.

Still, I was happy to apply and accept government grants and loans to help pay the bills.

That internship in Akron paid off too.

 

WAKR-TV hired me. I made minimum wage in my first professional job, but I was not a single mother and did not have to care for aging or sick relatives. I just had to worry about myself.

Luckily, a news director in Cleveland named Ron Bilek offered to mentor me and eventually hired me in Columbus, Ohio. Four jobs later, I was off and running for CNN.

So yes, I worked hard. I put in long hours.

 

But millions of others have as well.

 

Luck, by definition, means a chance happening of fortunate events. And I would argue that far too few middle-class Americans are now experiencing the same "happening of fortunate events" that I did.

 

The majority of middle-class people are struggling not because they don't work as hard as the most successful Americans, but because it takes more than sweat to succeed and the odds are tougher in 2014.

 

It's time for our leaders to help people turn their luck around.

Slavery in the Modern World

Slavery in the Modern World

David Brion Davis’s pathbreaking study of the problem of slavery.



Eric Foner January 28, 2014
This article appeared in the February 17, 2014 edition of The Nation. Share

The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation

By David Brion Davis.

Buy this book





.With this book, David Brion Davis brings to a conclusion one of the towering achievements of historical scholarship of the past half-century, his three-volume study of the “problem of slavery.” It must also set a record for the length of time—forty-eight years—between the appearance of the first and last works in a three-part series, a point I raise not to chide Davis for being dilatory but to commend him for perseverance. As in the previous volumes, Davis exhibits his command of a remarkable range of primary and secondary sources and of different nations’ historical experiences. And like its predecessors, the new volume reflects how scholarship on slavery has evolved, partly under the impact of the first two works in this trilogy.



The first volume, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (1966), offered a penetrating analysis of thinking about slavery from ancient times to the late eighteenth century. It posed an obvious but previously neglected question: Why did it take so long for a belief in slavery’s inherent immorality to emerge? In one form or another, slavery has existed since the dawn of civilization. Slaves, to be sure, have always known that slavery is wrong. But Davis’s concern was with the rise of a humanitarian sensibility among those who did not suffer under the institution. Slavery was long accepted as an imperfect part of a necessarily imperfect social system, one example among many of social hierarchies on which public order was thought to depend. Anti-slavery, as a coherent body of thought, emerged only in the eighteenth century, due to a revolution in moral perceptions. Central to this process were evangelical religion and Enlightenment thought, both of which placed a new emphasis on every person’s inherent dignity and natural rights and on the possibility of perfecting society.



As intellectual history, Davis’s book was pathbreaking. But perhaps its deepest impact arose from his demonstration of slavery’s indispensable role in the rise of the modern world. Previous historians, especially in the United States, had tended to see slavery as an exception, a footnote in a teleological narrative of progress. But Davis demonstrated that slavery became the key institution in the European conquest and settlement of the New World. The book inspired a spate of works that showed the centrality of slavery to American and Atlantic history.



Davis’s second volume, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (1975), again led scholarship in new directions. It discussed the Haitian Revolution as a pivotal episode of that era, a commonplace today but a revelation forty years ago. The index to R.R. Palmer’s influential two-volume study The Age of the Democratic Revolution (1959–64), for example, does not include the words “Haiti,” “Saint-Domingue” or “slavery.” Davis explored with great subtlety the views of Thomas Jefferson and other American founders and analyzed how the leaders of the French Revolution confronted slavery. But what generated the most attention among historians was the part of the book that sought an explanation for the rise of abolitionism in the realm of social relations, not simply ideas. Noting the close connection of British Quakers and other Dissenters with both the early Industrial Revolution and the movement to abolish the Atlantic slave trade, Davis suggested that the condemnation of slavery had the effect of legitimizing free wage labor at a time of deeply oppressive conditions in English factories. This was not a conspiracy theory, as some interpreted it—a capitalist plot to use the slavery issue to deflect attention away from the situation of the working class—but an analysis of the social functions, sometimes unintended, of abolitionist ideology. The book stimulated a wide-ranging and fruitful debate about capitalism’s relationship to the emergence of modern moral sensibilities.



In the decades since the second volume appeared, the focus of the study of emancipation has shifted again. Increasingly, blacks—not white abolitionists—occupy center stage. Slave resistance is now seen as central to the process of abolition in the United States, the Caribbean and Brazil. The crucial role of free blacks in abolitionist movements has been widely recognized. In this latest work, Davis—following in the wake of recent scholarship—makes the role of blacks as historical actors and catalysts of emancipation far more central than in his previous volumes.



* * *



The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation is considerably less comprehensive than its earlier companions. A “highly selective study,” as Davis describes it, the book focuses almost exclusively on the United States and Great Britain. For the end of slavery in Cuba and Brazil, the reader must turn to the work of other historians, most recently Robin Blackburn’s The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights. [See Foner, “Inhuman Bondage,” August 29, 2011.] Rather than a full history of abolition in the nineteenth century, Davis offers a set of erudite ruminations on questions central to the debate over slavery.



The book’s central theme is slavery’s tendency toward the “dehumanization” of its victims and the implications of this for abolitionist movements and the prospects for emancipation. Throughout the hemisphere, as Davis points out, black slaves were literally “treated like animals.” Legally, they were reduced to chattel, lacking both rights and a will of their own. They were disciplined and restrained as animals were, with whips and chains. Slave-sale broadsides often listed slaves and animals side by side, with similar prices and descriptions.



What interests Davis, however, is less the legal or physical treatment than the psychological implications for both whites and blacks of this “animalization.” In adopting this approach, he follows in the footsteps of Stanley Elkins’s Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (1959) and its discussion of the impact of total institutions on their victims. Like Elkins, Davis has a penchant for practicing psychiatry without a license. He briefly veers off on a not entirely helpful Freudian excursion, proposing that whites’ “projection of an ‘animal Id’” onto blacks became the key to racism, even as some whites “succumbed to the appeal of the ‘Negro Id’” by seeking to emulate black music, dance and other cultural expressions. More persuasively, he insists that by describing and treating slaves as animals, whites enhanced their view of themselves as rational and self-disciplined human beings. One wishes that Davis had also delved into Jefferson’s insight that exercising absolute command over other men and women warped the psychology of the slaveholders as much as the slaves, instilling in them a tendency toward authoritarianism and violence. More controversially, perhaps, Davis probes the extent to which slaves internalized their own dehumanization and how black abolitionists sought to counter this tendency.



The emphasis on the dehumanization inherent in slavery helps explain what may strike many readers as the surprising amount of space (four full chapters) that Davis devotes to the movement to “colonize” freed slaves outside the United States. As he points out, although barely remembered today, colonization was a mainstream movement before the Civil War. Prominent white Americans from Jefferson to Lincoln (at least until he issued the Emancipation Proclamation) believed that with the end of slavery, blacks should be encouraged or even required to leave the United States. Moreover, a remarkable number of black leaders at one time or another embraced the idea of seeking a homeland elsewhere. For its white advocates, colonization would remove a people who had become so brutalized that they posed a menace to the social order if allowed to remain in this country in freedom. For blacks, separation from the American environment would allow former slaves to overcome the psychological effects of being treated like animals.



For supporters of colonization, white and black, Davis argues, the biblical narrative of Exodus imbued the idea with millennial significance. More recent precedents also existed: the expulsion of Moors and Jews from Spain and the deportation of the Acadians from the Canadian Maritime Provinces by Great Britain in 1755, not to mention Indian removal in the United States. A considerable number of American blacks migrated to Haiti in the 1820s, although many returned after finding that island nation less of a utopia than they had hoped. As conditions for free blacks in the United States worsened in the 1850s, emigrationist sentiment revived. If black Americans, in the words of the black abolitionist Martin Delany, constituted a “nation within a nation,” then logic suggested that they deserved a nation state of their own. Davis makes the point that unlike white colonizationists, Delany did not advocate the emigration of the entire black population; indeed, he and others insisted that the establishment of a powerful black nation overseas would help those who remained in the United States to win citizenship rights.



Nonetheless, Davis acknowledges, emigration was always a minority impulse among black Americans. Liberia, established in West Africa by the American Colonization Society, failed to attract a large number of colonists. (Those who did go, he writes, frequently acted like “high-handed imperialists” in their relations with the native population.) The establishment of the Colonization Society in 1816 produced an immediate backlash among ordinary free blacks, leading them to assert their Americanness and to articulate a vision of the United States as a land of equality before the law, where rights did not depend on color, ancestry or racial designation. The black mobilization against colonization became a key factor in the rise of a new, militant abolitionism in the 1830s. Compared with previous anti-slavery organizations, mostly led by whites and promoting gradual emancipation, the new abolitionism was different: immediatist, interracial, and committed to making the United States a biracial nation of equals.



Davis offers a thoughtful discussion of the role of free blacks in abolitionist movements and their relations with slaves. That relationship differed from society to society, but free blacks everywhere occupied an ambiguous and marginal place in slave systems. Disdained by whites, they often tried to establish an identity separate from slaves. But sometimes, as in revolutionary Haiti or the northern United States, they made common cause with those in bondage.



Free blacks were “the key to slave emancipation,” but in a double sense. Their work was essential for the abolitionist movement, but they bore a great burden—demonstrating in their own lives the slaves’ capacity for freedom. Consequently, Davis argues, even the most militant abolitionists chastised many free blacks for poverty, intemperance and violations of the Sabbath. They worried that evidence of the impact of “dehumanization” on the black population might make emancipation seem inadvisable.



David Walker, whose Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829) in some ways launched the new abolitionism, spent part of that radical manifesto berating slaves and free blacks for accepting and internalizing their inferior status. Frederick Douglass called on free blacks to prove themselves “men” by working hard, rising in the social scale and, during the Civil War, enlisting in the Union Army. Unlike some recent scholars, however, Davis stresses that rather than being a conservative impulse—an attempt to impose elite values on a Dionysian lower-class black culture—the campaign for “racial uplift” formed part of the movement to demonstrate to white America the fitness of black people for freedom. Its aim was “empowerment,” not repression.



In this context, the Haitian Revolution took on sharply different meanings among whites and blacks. The very existence of a black nation founded by a slave revolution challenged every slave regime in the hemisphere. Among whites, the alleged “horrors” of Haiti, including massacres of white residents, not only produced “alarm and terror” but also offered evidence of the bestial nature of the rebel slaves and the need to strengthen slavery where it still existed. For blacks, free and slave, Haiti was an inspiration. It demonstrated black “manhood,” Douglass would later declare. The example of Haiti inspired the leaders of the Barbados insurrection of 1816, Denmark Vesey’s conspiracy in Charleston in 1822, and slave rebels in Cuba. Walker urged his readers to study the history of Haiti, “the glory of the blacks and terror of tyrants.”



* * *



Davis devotes a revealing chapter to another form of slave resistance—running away from slavery—and its political impact in the United States. In some ways, however, this discussion seems to cut against the argument about the impact of slavery on slaves. The fugitives’ courage, ingenuity and self-reliance challenges the idea of widespread psychological “dehumanization.” William Still, a free black and the key operative of the underground railroad in Philadelphia, wrote that his encounters with fugitives led him to realize how many slaves had “deeply thought on the subject of their freedom.” Speeches by fugitives, including Douglass, Henry H. Garnet, Henry Brown and many others, attracted large audiences in the North and Great Britain. Fugitive slave narratives—accounts written by runaways of their ordeals and accomplishments—emerged as a popular literary genre and an effective argument for abolition.



“The fugitive slave issue,” Davis writes, was “absolutely central in bringing on the Civil War.” At the most basic level, running away from slavery gave the lie to proslavery propaganda about contented slaves. The actions of fugitives forced onto the center stage of American politics intractable questions about the balance between federal and state authority, the extent to which the laws of slave states extended into the North, and the relationship between the national government and slavery. Washington’s active efforts to assist slaveholders in their attempts to reclaim fugitives reinforced the abolitionist contention that the Slave Power effectively determined national policy. None of this would have happened without the actions of slaves who sought to escape to freedom.



If Haiti inspired black radicalism, Parliament’s abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1833 convinced American abolitionists of the practicality of immediate emancipation. Yet, Davis points out, this moral triumph was also the product of political negotiation and compromise. Britain liberated 800,000 slaves, but rewarded their owners with £20 million in monetary compensation—an immense sum, amounting to 40 percent of the national budget. (Because of a regressive tax system, the British working class paid most of the bill.) Moreover, as former slaves took up small plots of land to grow food for their families, Caribbean sugar production plummeted. By midcentury, respectable opinion on both sides of the Atlantic had concluded that emancipation was a failure. Thus, ironically, the British experience hardened opposition to abolition in the United States, stoking fears that it would lead to economic disaster.



Nonetheless, August 1, 1834—the date the British law went into effect—was celebrated as a “turning point in human history.” For free African-Americans, August 1 replaced July 4 as a day of annual celebration. Their admiration for Great Britain put abolitionists (black and white) in a complicated position when they lectured in the British Isles during the 1840s, just as the Chartist movement was drawing attention to political and economic inequalities there. In a brief discussion that to some extent modifies his earlier analysis of the ideological relationship between chattel and wage slavery, Davis points out that Garrison and Douglass did express sympathy for Chartist demands. Yet Davis also notes that despite the success of speaking tours by American abolitionists, there was a remarkable degree of support for the Confederacy in England during the American Civil War—not only among the aristocracy, which despised democracy, but also journalists, reformers and clerics.



The abolition of slavery appears, in retrospect, so inevitable a part of the story of human progress that it may seem jarring when Davis emphasizes that there was nothing predetermined about it. He endorses the view advanced by recent scholars that, far from being retrograde or economically backward, slavery in the mid-nineteenth century was a dynamic, expanding institution, with powerful support everywhere it existed. “Never was the prospect of emancipation more distant than now,” the Times of London observed in 1857. Despite abolition in the British Caribbean and Spanish America, there were more slaves in the Western Hemisphere on the eve of the Civil War than at any point in history. Had the Confederacy emerged victorious, which was entirely possible, “it is clear that slavery would have continued well into the twentieth century.” Contingency, even accident, produced the end of slavery in the Old South, the greatest slave society the modern world has known.



Davis is well aware, of course, that emancipation did not usher in the abolitionist dream of a society of equals. The end of slavery in the Caribbean was succeeded by new forms of unfreedom, as planters brought in indentured workers from Asia to replace the blacks who had abandoned the plantations. Davis notes that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments, adopted in the United States immediately after the Civil War to guarantee the civil and political equality of the former slaves, are virtually without precedent in other post-emancipation societies. Yet Reconstruction was soon succeeded by a new system of racial inequality. Did emancipation, then, make any difference in the United States?


In a moving personal reflection that opens the book, Davis dates his interest in studying the history of slavery and racism to his experience in 1945 as an 18-year-old draftee on a troop ship headed to Europe. He was shocked to discover that hundreds of black soldiers were jammed together in the hold, in conditions reminiscent of what he imagined a slave ship during the Middle Passage must have been like. When he reached Germany, he had to listen to racist diatribes by US Army officers. Three hundred pages later, Davis ends by acknowledging that, in various forms, slavery persists in the world even today.



Davis is fully aware of the moral ambiguities involved in the crusade against slavery, the process of abolition and the long afterlife of racism. Nonetheless, in a rebuke to those historians today who belittle the entire project of emancipation, he insists that the abolition of slavery in the Western Hemisphere was one of the profoundest achievements in human history, “a crucial landmark of moral progress that we should never forget.” His monumental three-volume study helps to ensure that it will always be remembered.

Willful Stupidity

Opinion Writer Willful stupidity in the Obamacare debate

by E.J. Dionne Jr., Published: February 5E-mail the writer

One of the best arguments for health-insurance reform is that our traditional employer-based system often locked people into jobs they wanted to leave but couldn’t because they feared they wouldn’t be able to get affordable coverage elsewhere.



This worry was pronounced for people with preexisting conditions, but it was not limited to them. Consider families with young children in which one parent would like to get out of the formal labor market for a while to take care of the kids. In the old system, the choices of such couples were constrained if only one of the two received employer-provided family coverage.



.Or ponder the fate of a 64-year-old with a condition that leaves her in great pain. She has the savings to retire but can’t exercise this option until she is eligible for Medicare. Is it a good thing to force her to stay in her job? Is it bad to open her job to someone else?



By broadening access to health insurance, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) ends the tyranny of “job lock,” which is what the much-misrepresented Congressional Budget Office (CBO) study of the law released Tuesday shows. The new law increases both personal autonomy and market rationality by ending the distortions in behavior the old arrangements were creating.



But that’s not how the study has been interpreted, particularly by enemies of the law. Typical was a tweet from the National Republican Congressional Committee, declaring that “#ObamaCare is hurting the economy, will cost 2.5 millions [sic] jobs.”



Glenn Kessler, The Post’s intrepid fact checker, replied firmly: “No, CBO did not say Obamacare will kill 2 million jobs.” What the report said, as the Wall Street Journal accurately summarized it, is that the law “will reduce the total number of hours Americans work by the equivalent of 2.3 million full-time jobs.”



Oh my God, say opponents of the ACA, here is the government encouraging sloth! That’s true only if you wish to take away the choices the law gives that 64-year-old or to those parents looking for more time to care for their children. Many on the right love family values until they are taken seriously enough to involve giving parents/workers more control over their lives.



And it’s sometimes an economic benefit when some share of the labor force reduces hours or stops working altogether. At a time of elevated unemployment, others will take their place. The CBO was careful to underscore — the CBO is always careful — that “if some people seek to work less, other applicants will be readily available to fill those positions and the overall effect on employment will be muted.”



The CBO did point to an inevitable problem in how the ACA’s subsidies for buying health insurance operate. As your income rises, your subsidy goes down and eventually disappears. This is, as the CBO notes, a kind of “tax.” The report says that if the “subsidies are phased out with rising income in order to limit their total costs, the phaseout effectively raises people’s marginal tax rates (the tax rates applying to their last dollar of income), thus discouraging work.”



But the answer to this is either to make the law’s subsidies more generous — which the ACA’s detractors would oppose because, as the CBO suggests, doing so would cost more than the current law — or to guarantee everyone health insurance, single-payer style, so there would be no “phaseout” and no “marginal tax rates.” I could go with this, but I doubt many of the ACA’s critics would.



The rest of the CBO report contained much good news for Obamacare: Insurance premiums under the law are 15 percent lower than originally forecast, “the slowdown in Medicare cost growth” is “broad and persistent” and enrollments will catch up over time to where they would have been absent Obamacare’s troubled rollout.



The reaction to the CBO study is an example of how willfully stupid — there’s no other word — the debate over Obamacare has become. Opponents don’t look to a painstaking analysis for enlightenment. They twist its findings and turn them into dishonest slogans. Too often, the media go along by highlighting the study’s political impact rather than focusing on what it actually says. My bet is that citizens are smarter than this. They will ignore the noise and judge Obamacare by how it works.

Pleasing the Court

.If it please the court I would like to request a continuance of my case. I can't locate either of my witnesses, I can't find my cell phone, and my bursitis is acting up. Besides that I've forgotten what the charges are and my lawyer has resigned. Thank you, your honor, for considering my request.

Super Bowl (2)

I ran across a fella today who sported a New Orleans sweatshirt. "The Saints weren't in the Super Bowl this year, were they?" I teasingly commented to him. "Neither were the Broncos," he replied. Good point!

Superbowl

.Call me UnAmerican but I don't care about the Super Bowl. First of all, I don't drink. Second of all, I don't like chicken wings. Thirdly, I don't like watching football with a group. Fourthly, I have no strong feelings about Peyton Manning, Eli Manning, Archie Manning, or the Hunchback of Notre Dame. Fifthly, I have no strong feelings about the Seahawk player who spouted off after that last game. Sixthly, I don't like Tim Tebow. That has nothing to do with the Super Bowl. Just thought I'd throw that in for good measure.

Reconstruction

Sunday Book Review


Liberated and Unfree

Douglas R. Egerton’s ‘Wars of Reconstruction’By ERIC FONER  JAN. 31, 2014
As the 150th anniversary of the Civil War heads toward its conclusion, the anniversary of Reconstruction, the turbulent era that followed, looms on the horizon. Properly commemorating it poses a challenge, since for no period of American history does a wider gap exist between scholarly understanding and public consciousness.

For much of the past century, historians portrayed Reconstruction as a time of corruption and misgovernment, the lowest point in the saga of American democracy. The supposed heroes of the story were Lincoln’s successor, President Andrew Johnson, who sought to defend constitutional government against Radical Republicans bent on punishing the defeated South, and the Ku Klux Klan, which fought to restore “home rule” (that is, white supremacy). The chief mistake of Reconstruction was conferring the right to vote on African-­Americans, who, it was said, were incapable of exercising it intelligently.

This interpretation has long since been abandoned by historians, who now see Reconstruction as a laudable, if flawed, effort to build an interracial democracy on the ashes of slavery. But the old view retains a remarkable hold on the popular imagination, including the pernicious idea, of which one hears echoes today, that expanding the rights and powers of blacks constitutes a punishment to whites. This is unfortunate, because understanding issues that continue to roil American politics — the definition of citizenship, the meaning of equality, the relative powers of the national and state governments — requires knowledge of Reconstruction. For this reason alone, the appearance of Douglas R. Egerton’s “The Wars of Reconstruction” is especially welcome. The book offers little that will surprise scholars of the period, but its dramatic account will challenge and enlighten those who still cling to the older outlook.



Launch media viewer Matt Rota In some ways, “The Wars of Reconstruction” defies current trends in Reconstruction scholarship. Recent historians have sought to embed Southern events in a national and international context, bringing into the story the development of the West and the imperial ambitions of the reunited nation (during Reconstruction, the United States purchased Alaska and sought to annex the Dominican Republic). But Reconstruction’s central story, Egerton insists, takes place in the South, in the struggle of former slaves to breathe substantive meaning into the freedom they had acquired.

Egerton, a professor of history at Le Moyne College, pays a price for this local emphasis. Those seeking a clear, chronological narrative will not find it here, nor will they get a full sense of the legal revolution that rewrote the laws and Constitution to grant equal citizenship to every person born in the United States. But it has striking benefits as well. Drawing on an array of scholarly monographs, local newspapers and other sources, Egerton paints a dramatic portrait of on-the-ground struggles for equality in an era of great hope and brutal disappointment.

The core of the book relates the efforts of black Americans and those Egerton somewhat anachronistically refers to as their “progressive” white allies to lay the foundations for a black community enjoying social, economic and political equality. He devotes particular attention to the establishment of schools in the South by the Freedmen’s Bureau, an agency created by Congress to oversee the transition from slavery to freedom. Egerton is fully aware that bureau agents and white teachers could be “patronizing” in hectoring blacks about middle-class mores. Yet he rejects the view, advanced by some scholars, that freedmen’s education was simply a form of social control. To former slaves, he observes, Northern teachers were dedicated, resourceful and courageous.

Egerton underscores the significance of the Southern constitutional conventions of 1867 and 1868, the first racially integrated governmental bodies in American history. They produced forward-looking documents that established the region’s first statewide public school systems, eliminated racial distinctions in voting and, in some cases, guaranteed citizens equal access to public transportation and accommodations. There followed the South’s first truly democratic elections, which produced governments in which black officials played a role at all levels, from sheriffs and school board officials to members of legislatures and Congress. The new governments sought, in Egerton’s words, to reform “every aspect of society.”

Of course, these changes also produced a violent reaction. As his title suggests, Egerton devotes considerable attention to the actions of homegrown “terrorists” like the Ku Klux Klan and kindred organizations, which systematically targeted local political leaders and teachers and were probably responsible for the deaths of more Americans than Osama bin Laden. Egerton makes the important point that the old idea of the South being subject to an overbearing military occupation is a myth. The Army was rapidly demobilized after the war ended.

“Reconstruction did not fail,” Egerton states, “it was violently overthrown.” Yet elsewhere, he seems to argue that the entire experiment was doomed even before it began. As the Civil War ended, he claims, traumatized white Southerners were prepared to accept “whatever terms the victorious North saw fit to impose.” But Johnson immediately handed power back to leading white Southerners, opening the door for the region’s “aggressive reactionaries” to try to reduce blacks to a condition as close to slavery as possible.

There is no question that Johnson — a deeply racist, inflexible political leader — lacked Lincoln’s qualities of greatness. But as the historian Michael Perman showed many years ago in “Reunion Without Compromise,” it is a serious mistake to exaggerate the spirit of acquiescence in the white South in 1865. Egerton’s own evidence of sweeping violence against the freed people suggests that the failure of Reconstruction cannot wholly be blamed on Johnson. Moreover, his account directs attention away from the North’s own retreat from the ideal of equality.

Egerton makes the valuable point that speaking simply of the failure of Reconstruction ignores the era’s accomplishments, including “spectacular gains” in black literacy and the success of some former slaves in acquiring land. Nonetheless, the abandonment of Reconstruction was a disaster not only for black America but also for the national commitment to democracy. It was followed by “a new campaign in the wars of Reconstruction,” this one over history. Through the writings of some historians and in films like “The Birth of a Nation” and “Gone With the Wind,” a deeply racist image of Reconstruction achieved widespread circulation. Its alleged horrors became justifications for the disenfranchisement of black Southern voters. Internationally, although Egerton does not make this point, Reconstruction’s “failure” was invoked in places as far-flung as Australia and South Africa to demonstrate the incapacity of nonwhite people for self-government.

“The Wars of Reconstruction” ends with the recent controversy about erecting a monument to Denmark Vesey in Charleston, S.C., where he plotted a slave insurrection. Egerton might have reflected more fully on the abysmal state of Reconstruction itself in public history. Of the National Park Service’s hundreds of historical sites, only the Andrew Johnson Homestead in Tennessee deals centrally with Reconstruction (in what can charitably be called a dated manner). Monuments to Confederate heroes, including leaders of the Ku Klux Klan, dot the Southern landscape, but virtually none to black officials of Reconstruction. It took South Carolina until 1998 to install a portrait of the black justice Jonathan J. Wright in its Supreme Court building, alongside likenesses of the other members of the court in the state’s history.

The Denmark Vesey monument remains unfinished. So, in many ways, does Reconstruction.

THE WARS OF RECONSTRUCTION



The Brief, Violent History of America’s Most Progressive Era



By Douglas R. Egerton



Illustrated. 438 pp. Bloomsbury Press. $30.