April 19, 2011 · 10:22 am

Islam, secularism, and liberalism (part 2)

Here’s part one. And sadly I think there will need to be a part 3. Plus an additional post specifically on the whole Sharia law paranoia that’s gripped the imagination of the not-particularly-intelligent-or-imaginative. The whole thing is so long, and the arguments against Islam addressed so baseless, that you may very well want to wait until part three is ready, but I had to write this to get it down before moving on to more compelling arguments. It might be useful background at points for someone interested in but not fully engaged in arguments about secularism, secularization, and religions in the public sphere.

So here goes.

Secularism is a product of social developments in Protestant Europe and the political thinking that prodded and was prodded by them. At first a way for competing Christian persuasions to get along, it became an integral component to modernization, liberalization, and the development of the individual self as the primary arena of moral conflict and suasion, and it never quite lost its mooring in the Protestant ethics of individual choice and progress toward perfection. It is this vaporous religious substance trailing secularism that allows Robert Bellah to diagnose the presence in American civic life  the persistence of an attenuated Protestantism that he calls America’s “civil religion” and that remains in the public sphere, for good or for ill, in subtle tension with our Constitutional tradition of resisting any appearance of the establishment of an official state religion.

In the non-Western world, a key question for some time after the ebb of colonialism has been whether secularism is irredeemably a Western phenomenon – requiring too much of a Protestant worldview and ethic to be adaptable to other contexts – or whether its principles have become sufficiently general and universal that they might prove beneficial to all societies. My personal feeling is more the latter than the former, but I’m not going to get into that now. Instead I want to examine the recent liveliness of the other side of the question. One of the unexpected if now unremarkable consequences of the ebb of colonialism is the thorough cosmopolitanism of the West. And this is no longer a purely urban phenomenon, though it is certainly most concentrated and relatively problem-free in more urban areas. The question being asked now, in a variety of registers and with a various sophistication, is whether secularism can accommodate the non-Protestant.

Well, yes, of course it can. The two major problems for American secularism have been Catholicism and Judaism, and we seem to have reached a point where despite occasional difficulties, Jews and Catholics are largely considered citizens without much suspicion that the Catholic is under the authority of the foreign power of the Vatican or that the Jew places ethnicity higher than civic authority. But these religions were well in place in the Western world before our colonial adventures. What’s prompting the question now is the realization that Islam is a presence in American communities and the perception of Islam elsewhere as a geopolitical problem for the project of secularization. So is Islam here in America a threat to our secularism?

I think the instant response for most is that any answer yes to the question must be driven by Islamaphobic bigotry, and by and large that would be right. The always odious Bryan Fisher, for example, has stated that Islam does not qualify for First Amendment rights of the free exercise of religion because when the Bill of Rights was written solely to protect Christianity and its various observances. And that’s such obvious ignorance and distortion. It’s quite clear that the authors of the Bill of Rights and its antecedents had a conception of religion in general very much in line with our contemporary conception of religion as a cultural phenomenon variously expressed throughout all human societies, and that quite literally First Amendment protections encompassed, as Thomas Jefferson once put it, “the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and Infidel of every denomination.”

Another of these recently emerged and easily dismissed attempts to place Islam outside of the pale is the notion that Islam is not a religion, but instead is a political cult with a theology, “a violent political philosophy more than peace-loving religion,” according to Tennessee’s dimwitted Lieutenant Governor and failed candidate for the Tennessee GOP nod for the governor’s race. The Tea Party favorite was speaking in response to the shameful efforts of some Tennesseans to prevent the construction of a mosque in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. The problem with this approach, of course, is that it’s entirely possible to view Christianity in exactly the same manner. In fact, one of Carl Schmitt’s primary contributions to political philosophy is his notion that the entire modern state is a Christian political cult, in that “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts.” And violence is of course in modernity exclusively the legitimate domain of that state.

Regardless of one’s take on Schmitt’s notions of sovereignty, it’s not far off the mark to note that secularism itself as a secularization of Protestant theological concepts would mean that its refusal to accommodate, well, any form of religious expression might have to do more with the political continuation of Christianity than anything else, regardless of what happens outside the historical bounds of Christendom.

But I digress. Religion like so many human endeavors doesn’t afford tidy definitions, nor do all religions boil down to a specific set of categorical behaviors – the insistence, for instance, on confessional beliefs as the defining core of religious expression (“If you are X religion, then what do you believe?”) is itself a primarily Protestant concern fairly unintelligible in other religious contexts. So we assign the term religion instead according to family-likenesses of behaviors, beliefs, and attitudes, and in that arrangement Islam is clearly a religion, and quite resembles its older cousins Christianity and Judaism.

Religion plays an important role in societies, in their culture, and certainly in their politics, but religion is not integral to either society nor culture, even if it may seem at times not completely distinguishable. And Islam, like its cousins Christianity and Judaism, is what we term a “world” religion – a religion that is sufficiently free from cultural and ethical markers to be exportable to other groups, situations, and societies. And it has done so. There is no single Islamic politics, though there may be and are many approaches to politics that come with some Islamic rhetoric attached. Which makes it no different than Christianity or Judaism.

If it is in truth a religion and not a political cult, maybe it’s a religion with a significant enough difference from Christian sects or Judaism that would make it untenable in a secular society. That’s the approach seems to be the lowest common denominator in the recent flare-ups of Islamophobia, the most recent and prominent expression of it coming from Herman Cain, one of the many less-than-serious candidates for the G.O.P. presidential nomination for 2012. He stated, when asked why he’s uncomfortable around Muslims, that based on his “limited knowledge” of the religion he believes “they have an objective to convert all infidels or kill them” – that they have the First Amendment right to practice their religion, but that they are a unique threat because of a drive to enforce their way of life on everyone else.

I’m sure Muslims welcome conversion. Everyone would like to see others brought over to their point of view, particularly if they believe that point of view to offer considerable spiritual benefits. And every group is engaged in a political struggle at some level to place demands upon the public to further a specific spiritual agenda, hence the continual back-and-forth in the public sphere between Christian fundamentalism and secularists. There are points, then, when I wonder to what extent and at what points is secularism merely a political strategy of realism and achievable goals. Let’s take American groups that are aggressive proselytizers (which Muslims are not): Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons, both groups which have significantly higher numbers than American Muslims. Is it the secular modus vivendi that prevents them from threatening violent action against reluctant converts? If anything, I think that the relative lack of proselytizing efforts on behalf of American Muslims may be due to the perception that they would then be likely on the receiving end of the ensuing violence.

So, to sum up: the arguments that Muslims cannot participate in a modern secular liberal state because a) secularism never intended for the presence of Islam, b) Islam is not a religion, or c) that Islam is constitutionally incapable of participating in secular society are all quite unfounded, at least to the extent that any of these arguments would distinguish Islam as particularly unsuitable. And certainly to address these issues seems a bit pointless, as anyone who knows – even casually – American Muslims on a personal level recognizes that these objections are groundless and largely based in ignorance and hysterical fear.

But that brings me to what I’ll address in part 3. Although the arguments above don’t hold water, I do find the argument worth considering if ultimately not compelling that secularism itself as currently configured is deficient in accommodating the presence of Muslim communities.

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April 11, 2011 · 1:14 pm

What he said.

Matt Yglesias on student writing and the Internet:

The thing that you have to do if you’re in college is start doing the work. Follow writers you like on Twitter and use it to interact with them. Write your own blog, and even though it probably won’t have many readers take it seriously and write it like it’s intended to be read by total strangers. If you do internships, try to do them at places that hire young people for writing jobs (i.e., not the New Yorker). Think about what would be a good place for a first job, not a place where you’d dream of ending your career. If you do a post critiquing something someone you respect wrote (me, for example) then send an email and explain yourself—you might get noticed. If you get ignored, don’t get discouraged—you might suck, but the guy you wrote to just might have been busy that afternoon.

I’m going to add that writing faculty should be encouraging these activities, and that writing faculty should be taking part in them as well. Obviously.

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April 10, 2011 · 11:53 am

Islam, secularism, and liberalism (part 1)

One of the core values of liberalism is the notion of free speech, a notion which has a deep historical association with the freedom of conscience and worship. Indeed, secularism – and by secularism here, I mean the notion that each person should be free to follow the dictates of conscience – can and I believe should be seen as core to the development in the West of individual liberties. There are, of course, other secularisms, and even other strands in Western secularism that complicate application and adjudication of free speech and free worship.

A key facet in our notion of free speech, is that the free exchange of ideas is a form of a market. Rather than ban speech that is dangerous or offensive, we permit it, believing that it will have little currency in the larger market and, failing to gain purchase, will fade. Banning it, we believe, may allow it to fester – feeding it as the oppressed with the legitimacy it would drain from those who ban it.

So much of Enlightenment liberalism, of course, depends on a vision of us as rational actors capable of embracing a common good, and passion and sectarianism – what secularism meant to banish from the public sphere – frequently reveal our limitations and the blind spots in our confidence. Demagoguery has become a real danger in contemporary political discourse, and over the past few years, anti-Muslim demagoguery has become among the most visible expressions of it.

When Terry Jones threatened to burn the Koran on September 11 of last year as a public rebuke of Islam, it became an international media event, despite the fact that Jones is on the fringe of the fringe of hard-right Christianism and the leader of an almost laughably small church. The announcement inflamed many in Muslim communities and provoked widespread condemnation in the Western world. Jones eventually back down in the face of all this pressure.

At the time, many people, myself included, felt that Jones was well within his First Amendment rights to burn the Koran as a form of expression, vile that it may be. I still feel that way. But at the time, I felt that the media was giving him undue attention – that by hyperventilating over his threat, the impression given to the non-Western world is that Koran burning is a large concern and issue in Western public discourse. I don’t believe it is ever wise to determine a course of action largely on the basis of how extremist elements will interpret it, and that needn’t have been the thinking here. Instead, we seemed to be blowing the actions of one minor weirdo all out of proportion because of our concerns that it would allow Muslim extremists to do the same, libeling Western secular culture as irredeemably anti-Muslim.

I appears those of us who wanted the media to ignore Jones and his threats as insignificant and not having any real currency in the free market of ideas were wrong, or at least naïve. When Jones threatened to do it again this March, there was unbeknownst to the general public, a deliberate and active media blackout that refused to cover the event. So it came as a complete surprise to that public when Afghans rioted for several days in early April, resulting in dozens of death, most of them U.N. aid workers. Although only a few Americans were even aware of what had happened, it was not through a lack of effort on Jones’s part, and the story metastasized across the internet, appearing on the websites of Islamic extremists and the like until it became hyped by the perpetually embattled Afghan President Hamid Karzai, sparking the riots.

We can’t ban actions like Jones’s. We can’t, it would appear, simply ignore them and pretend that they won’t have an effect, because in our media and information saturated globe, they persist until they find their intended audience. Not unlike the Danish cartoon controversy: the satirical cartoon depictions of Mohammed in Jyllands-Posten inspired some local European reaction after their publication, but it took some time for them to come to the attention of the Muslim world, at which point they became a useful vehicle for inflammatory rhetoric. For Jones and his supporters, the riots prove the point they were setting out to make: their story reached its audience in the end, which were not so much the Muslims in the grip of extremist and violent rhetoric that set them upon the U.N. compounds, but us back in the U.S. Jones and Karzai alike point at the other and say to those whose support and attention they crave, “See. This is what we’re up against.”

I think that the only appropriate response, after the of course condemning Jones’s actions and the even more horrific actions of the Afghan mob, and the hope that there may be some justice for the violence, is a degree of resignation. Our lives will continue to affected by what Hasnain Kazim is calling the “clash of extremes,” militant demagogues on the Christian and the Islamic worlds attempting to gain power and influence by attacking the other side under the banner of an absolute truth. But neither are we completely powerless. These extremes threaten not only our safety but also the liberties of conscience secularism would guarantee, and in both cases it is that secularism that both extremes are at pains to eradicate, and secularism’s fragility, and the fragility of democracy, the expression of secularism in the political realm, in much of the non-Western world is a legitimate source of concern. If we can’t ignore the extremes, then we’ll have to face them, and talk about them. Confidence in the secular project may be the only best response.

Oddly enough, in reading the claims that Jones makes about the Koran in the rather silly mock trial his congregation put on to condemn it, what stands out are the great pains that the church goes through to damn the Koran and Islam on the basis of insufficient secularism. They write, “Islamic Law is totalitarian in nature. There is no separation of church and state. It is irrational. It is supposedly immutable and cannot be changed. It must be accepted without criticism. It has many similarities to Nazism, Communism and Fascism. It is not compatible with Western Civilization.” And then, “Islam is not compatible with democracy and human rights. The notion of a moral individual capable of making decisions and taking responsibility for them does not exist in Islam.” Is Islam incompatible with Western secularism? I’ll look at a few arguments of the arguments, from silly to serious, in part 2.

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April 6, 2011 · 9:24 am

My unfriendly neighbor

He lives in the nearby pond, along with a whole lot of bullfrogs. Every once in a while – usually when it’s stormy out – he pulls himself out of the muck and, for some reason, crosses the street.

Whenever anyone comes up on him, he just freezes in place. He doesn’t even seem to acknowledge any other presence, and so while it may simply be reptilian stupidity, it comes across as stone-cold defiance. I was heading out on an errand, and I tried to shoe him along out of the road, but to no avail. And unlike a box turtle, I’m sure as hell not going to try and pick up a snapper. So I made waving and scooping motions at his butt while telling him it would be in his own good to move along, and he just stared blankly off into space.

I figured I’d grab a shovel when I got back and dump him back into the pond if he was still sitting motionless in the middle of the lane. But there was no sign of him. Just a kingfisher cackling like mad from a tree hanging over the pond.

The walk back to the pond from the cottage wasn’t entirely wasted, though. I found that a clueless employee from the park rangers’ office had come up the road in front of the farm posting approved park activities signs along our fence – sorry, guys, at this point hiking and nature photography are definitely not permitted, at least not without the permission of the people who live here. At times it must seem to people passing by that the farm isn’t populated. But it is.

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April 5, 2011 · 10:36 am

More on the War

The New York Times’ coverage of the history of the Civil War on the 150th anniversary of secession has been astonishing, but not entirely surprising. With historians as a profession making now a concerted effort to explode the lingering states’ rights myth and bring the focus of the history to the central issues of the war and institution of slavery, it seems that we’re not only able to see the War more clearly, but there’s also a missionary-like drive to burn off pointless distractions and get at the real complexities and problems in our understanding of the war.

So while the South and the Confederacy become clearer – rather than trade and tariff rights, or other ill-defined economic concerns, we can now see the South as seceding primarily to preserve the institution of slavery and secondarily to establish a landed, and largely hereditary, “natural” aristocracy in direct refutation of Jeffersonian democracy – the role of the North and the Lincoln administration becomes foggier. While the North went to war initially and ostensibly to preserve the Union, the War became by degrees and then by fiat a war to end the practice of slavery. The New York Times Magazine this past Sunday had a fascinating article by historian Adam Goodheart showing that progression in microcosm within the federally-held Ft. Monroe in the days following Virginia’s decision to join the Confederacy.

As battle lines were being drawn, and in the case of Ft. Monroe, opposing fortifications were being built, slaves began to trickle into Union encampments seeking freedom. The law, the Constitution as generally understood at the time, and official Union policy was not to interfere with the legal institution of slavery, that the business of the Union was war not emancipation. General Butler, soon to be known as “Beast” Butler in the South, accepted the first few fugitives that arrived at Ft. Monroe on the grounds that they had been sent to work building fortifications to which they would likely be set back to if returned. So he ordered the slaves seized as “contraband of war.” It was only days before this particularly legal fiction embracing the Southern contention that the descendants of black Africans were property and not people became a widespread practice throughout Union encampments at the border of the Confederacy as word spread and entire families and communities of slaves began to arrive.

Butler quickly decided that to sort out and determine which slaves were able-bodied and likely to be used in the war effort from the others, what would seem to be logically and therefore legally required of the policy, would be against principles of common decency: “If I take the able-bodied only, the young must die. If I take the mother, must I not take the child?” Butler at first resisted counsel that he abide by the legal form of his decision to declare slaves contraband and select which slaves to accept and which to return, and then became more and more forceful that humanitarian grounds, not legalities, determine the appropriate course of action toward slaves and slavery.

The Emancipation Proclamation was given the following year, another legal fiction and expediency in the war effort that masked a broader humanitarian principle. Goodheart is quite excellent in his depiction of that at the close of his article:

When Lincoln finally unveiled the Emancipation Proclamation in the fall of 1862, he framed it in Butleresque terms, not as a humanitarian gesture but as a stratagem of war.On the September day of Lincoln’s edict, a Union colonel ran into William Seward, the president’s canny secretary of state, on the street in Washington and took the opportunity to congratulate him on the administration’s epochal act.

Seward snorted. “Yes,” he said, “we have let off a puff of wind over an accomplished fact.”

“What do you mean, Mr. Seward?” the officer asked.

“I mean,” the secretary replied, “that the Emancipation Proclamation was uttered in the first gun fired at Sumter, and we have been the last to hear it.”

On a side note, I’m grateful to see the Disunion coverage in the Times address how one of the more fruitful avenues of scholarship on American history that looks at gender and critical race studies to examine “white”-ness and masculinity has approached the history of secession, though the column they present doesn’t strike me as particularly remarkable or revelatory.

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March 29, 2011 · 12:17 am

The maturation of the South

Matthew Yglesias highlights an interview Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour did with Politico wherein Barbour concedes that the Civil War was fought over the issue of slavery, that abolition of slavery was an imperative, and that it required the Civil War to do it. What he said is not news, per se, but that fact that it’s a Mississippi state governor that’s saying it is.

Barbour has been highly visible in contemplating a presidential run, and it’s highly likely he’s been forced forced into the admission due to his series of public missteps on history and race. First, going back last year to the brouhaha over Virginia Governor’s McDonnell’s hamfisted proclamation for “Confederate History Month” that neglected to mention the issue of slavery, and McDonnell claiming after the fact that slavery wasn’t “significant” enough to honoring the history of Virginia’s involvement to merit mention of it, Barbour brushed off the controversy, claiming it was a “nit” and “trying to make a big deal.” That didn’t sell well.

Then he stepped further into it when he reminisced warmly about the racial harmony of his boyhood town of Yazoo City, Mississippi, claiming that the town’s prominent Citizen’s Council, an organization so maligned by northerners, was just a civic leadership organization that kept the KKK out of things. It was quickly pointed out that the Citizen’s Council’s raison d’etre was segregation, and even Barbour’s boyhood best-friend emerged out of the woodwork to describe how violent and powerful the Citizen’s Council was in pursuit of it, not only against blacks but whites to accepted blacks as customers, clients, and friends.

And when the particularly vile neo-Confederate organization Sons of Confederate Veterans proposed a license plate honoring Nathan Bedford Forrest, one of the key founders of the KKK, Barbour killed it, but then ruffled feathers by saying that he wouldn’t “denounce” the proposal. “I don’t go around denouncing people,” he said.

So Barbour’s sincerity can certainly be questioned. Why should we pay attention to Barbour’s recent admission about the nature of the Civil War? Because it’s been said, regardless of the reasons for saying it. It would be great if there were sufficient political pressure building inside Mississippi to force its utterance, but the fact that it’s coming from outside Mississippi means that we should be glad that it’s registering at all.

The notion that the Civil War was fought over issues other than slavery – states rights, taxation, or what have you – was a myth first put forward by the Confederacy in the last days of the war and then given the nod by historians so that the South could save face after provoking a war for a patently amoral cause upon which it attempted to build a new nation. The inability of the South to face up to this brutal historical truth has perpetuated a cultural and political immaturity throughout the former Confederacy, particularly in its white governing class. That the South is today largely governed by an infantile claque of demagogues is largely the result of that refusal to own up to the truth.

Outside of the Beltway, and perhaps his own state, nobody takes Barbour seriously as a presidential candidate. Mississippi has far too much baggage for its governor to claim any sympathy or allegiance from the rest of the nation. And that Barbour seems, even against his own intentions, to embody a stereotype to which that baggage is attached pretty much means his candidacy is over before it even begins. But that a politician from the South has to say finally the hard truths that the rest of the nation put to rest long ago means that maybe the South will be finally able to grow up and get to work.

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March 28, 2011 · 8:34 pm

First spring report

It is spring. Cormac’s birthday generally fall on or about the equinox, so the start of season is well-marked in the household. The weather’s taken a step back from full endorsement of it, but the season pushes on largely mindless it would seem to temperature shifts. I had my binoculars this evening to detect any new seasonal arrivals in the population at the edge of the fields, but my ears – at least at first – were what I relied on. A little part of me was hoping that I’d hear the end-of-day songs of the catbirds or wood thrushes that are so thick through here mid-spring, confirming the calendar and spiting the cold. And I thought I heard a thrush in the distance, but it was I think more longing than clear attention to the sound. As I got further out into the fields and closing on on the woods I heard it again as a plushy bunch of notes and a burr: song sparrows. So they’re here, and I can add them to the tally with the redwing blackbirds and the bluebirds.

As I closed around the far side of the fields I thought I saw a couple swallows perched atop mullein stalks near the line of woods. That would be a welcome sign. I brought the binoculars up, and realized how long it had been since I’d brought them along. The birds didn’t move as I was adjusting and readjusting the lenses and the hinge between the barrels, so much that I had half-decided they were tufts of leave fiber or remnants of flowers. But then I had the focus working, and it was clear that the tails were too long for tree swallows. As I moved closer, it was also clear that even accounting for magnification the birds were much larger than swallows. And then they took flight, and as I watched through the glasses it became clear that I was watching a couple kestrels come to see if the field mice were moving. Then three. I thought I had seen one in a sycamore the other day, and it was nice to have it confirmed that they were around.

Watching them watch for signs of spring would be a sign, if I needed it, but in truth kestrels are always around if usually out of sight. But I as I turned back I noticed even in the twilight that the underbrush in the woods had sprouted that green haze of new leaf that will soon render the entire woods somewhat blurry in aspect for about a week before leaves and then flowers begin to unfold with increasing force. Sign enough.

But not all of the winter birds have left, and on my way back a largish flock of several dozen juncos, or snowbirds, as some people apparently call them, crossed my path cheeping loudly.

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March 26, 2011 · 11:48 am

Report from the field

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March 25, 2011 · 1:56 pm

Responsibility

And old draft that I was never able to get back to and complete:

There’s nothing like being temporarily freed from a responsibility to remind us of our neglected other responsibilities. The first Tuesday in a while that I didn’t have to be on campus found me walking the fields with the dog and thinking of obligations I had set for myself that I had not met – foremost being the duty to post regularly to the blog on my job search, on writing, and on life on the farm. The first two can wait, as it is the last I’m prepared to do now. But I was thinking about writing in general, too–writing as fulfilling certain goals rather than an end in itself. One of the primary goals of writing is not only the transmission of knowledge, but its acquisition: through the process of solidifying one’s thinking into a formalized sequence of thoughts, that thinking becomes a bit externalized and is itself the object of critical thought, and though that self-reflexive and self-critical process is certainly possible without the concrete act of writing, it is not possible to the same degree. One not only becomes aware of the content of one’s though, but its limitations, both accidental omissions and places where it has not reached–has not reached or cannot reach. Continue reading →

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April 13, 2010 · 10:57 pm

One more time, because it’s worth getting it right.

Two things: 1) the Internet is absolutely amazing. Anyone with a rudimentary interest in American history and an avid interest in the Internet has received over the past week an incredible education in the history of the Confederacy, the Civil War, and slavery. McDonnell may be a dick – no, there’s no need to qualify, McDonnell is a complete dick – but his assholery has brought together in response a fascinating exchange of historical understanding and supporting documents on the Civil War. 2) at this point, we need to start moving beyond the notion that it’s a myth that the Civil War was primarily a war over states rights to the notion that it’s a deliberate lie. There’s simply far too much evidence in the historical record to excuse “Lost Cause” historians because of the complexity or the remoteness of the war and its surrounding events for mistaking the overt and blatant cause of the war.

The best summation of the evidence, and by far the best reflection on its implication, is Ta-Nehisis Coates’s discussion of it. Part of what’s so savory about Coates’s take is that, reading him slowly respond to it over the course of the past week, one would get the impression that he was very reluctant to engage the issue – the level of denial about the Civil War being so huge and leaden and the centrality of slavery to the War being so glaringly obvious to even the dimmest of schoolchildren. And then it becomes so insistent a question that he can’t not respond more fully, and he does, not with anger or indignation, but an enormity and graciousness of spirit. It’s worth reading for that, and then thinking of Mississippi governor Haley Barbour’s response to the controversy, claiming that not mentioning the issue of slavery in connection to the history of the Confederacy “doesn’t amount to diddly.”

Coates’s post starts off with Robert E. Lee and the enduring myth (repeated in Ken Burns’s docupic) that Lee was personally opposed to slavery, the implication being that only Lee’s bond to Virginia and the South and their honorable cause was what drew him into leading the army of the Confederacy. Not at all true: Lee owned slaves, felt that Africans could not and should not be free, that slavery was natural and God-given, and presided over an unruly population of slaves that resented his control over them and his brutal enforcement of discipline. There’s a profound need on the part of the South to redeem its heroes from the twenty-first-century view of their monstrosity, and Lee as its greatest hero is perhaps the individual that is most desperately needed to seem free from slavery’s taint. But it’s not possible to glorify them without violating the truth. We’re left with a complex, flawed individual rather than symbol of gentlemanly perfection.

The historical truth may invalidate the myth, but it does not invalidate the need to redeem history and through that its inheritors. Nor does it invalidate the complexity of the situation. One of the more interesting things to emerge from Coates’s post is the notion of the institution of slavery as a cumulative wealth, and so, in light of the exchange with tbudd, I thought it worth revisiting:

By 1860 there were approximately 4,000,000 slaves in the United States, the second largest slave society–slave population–in the world. The only one larger was Russian serfdom. Brazil was close. But in 1860 American slaves, as a financial asset, were worth approximately three and a half billion dollars–that’s just as property. Three and a half billion dollars was the net worth, roughly, of slaves in 1860. In today’s dollars that would be approximately seventy-five billion dollars. In 1860 slaves as an asset were worth more than all of America’s manufacturing, all of the railroads, all of the productive capacity of the United States put together. Slaves were the single largest, by far, financial asset of property in the entire American economy. The only thing worth more than the slaves in the American economy of the 1850s was the land itself, and no one can really put a dollar value on all of the land of North America.

That’s from David Blight, a major historian of slavery, but I don’t know the source – it’s quoted as such in Coates’s post. The Republican administration in the White House and the increasing anti-slavery sentiment in Congress was threatening enough to the South for it to join in secession from the Union. Apparently the South had something worth protecting, despite its declining ability to produce wealth, its declining population, and its loss of political influence.

So I thought I’d address another complexity that’s important for me, that of one of the most notable literary figures from the era who defends the humanity of slaves, Walt Whitman. As we move away from Whitman’s poetry to view him as a person, that sense that Whitman represents a strong condemnation of slavery’s degradation seems to evaporate. As a journalist deeply committed to the radical wing of the Democratic party in the 1840s, the so-called “barnburners,” Whitman was a vocal opponent of slavery and a free-soiler. He was not an abolitionist (or “ultra”), a position he viewed as extremist and as threatening to national unity, and the opposition of free-soilers to slavery was not based on humanitarian grounds but on rather more working-class considerations: free white men in the trades could not compete economically with slave labor, and the free-soil movement opposed allowing new territories to permit slavery because they believed a slave economy would discourage the free movement and economic opportunity of white workers. Whitman’s writing at the time even supported the institution of slavery as necessary and beneficial when confined to southern states: in his pro-temperance novel Franklin Evans, the protagonist visits Virginia, and Whitman has a planter lecture Evans on how slavery is beloved by the slaves as well as their owners, and demonstrates how childlike and governed by passion the slaves are – familiar stereotypical justifications for slavery and white supremacy.

As late as his Brooklyn Daily Times editorials in 1857 and 1858, Whitman was declaiming the impossibility of blacks and whites being able to work and live together, and that slavery might not be all bad. This was already a few years after he’d published Leaves of Grass. In that volume appears the persona of Whitman as the poet of sympathy, embracing all equally, black as well as white. He imagines himself in his central early poem, “Song of Myself,” as helping slaves to their freedom without fear or regret:

The runaway slave came to my house and stopt outside,

I heard his motions crackling the twigs of the woodpile,

Through the swung half-door of the kitchen I saw him limpsy and weak,

And went where he sat on a log and led him in and assured him,

And brought water and fill’d a tub for his sweated body and bruis’d feet,

And gave him a room that enter’d from my own, and gave him some coarse clean clothes,

And remember perfectly well his revolving eyes and his awkwardness,

And remember putting piasters on the galls of his neck and ankles;

He staid with me a week before he was recuperated and pass’d north,

I had him sit next me at table, my fire-lock lean’d in the corner. (section 10)

As the poem moves toward its climax of sympathetic identification with all American types, rejecting none, Whitman imagines himself setting a dinner and inviting even the lowliest to sit down with him, the adultress, the thief, the “veneralee,” and the slave (section 19). At its final point, Whitman imagines himself as capable of being the slaves racing for freedom:

The hounded slave that flags in the race, leans by the fence, blowing, cover’d with sweat,

The twinges that sting like needles his legs and neck, the murderous buckshot and the bullets,

All these I feel or am.

I am the hounded slave, I wince at the bite of the dogs,

Hell and despair are upon me, crack and again crack the marksmen,

I clutch the rails of the fence, my gore dribs, thinn’d with the ooze of my skin,

I fall on the weeds and stones,

The riders spur their unwilling horses, haul close,

Taunt my dizzy ears and beat me violently over the head with whip-stocks. (section 33)

And, of course, the rightly famous passage in “I Sing the Body Electric,” where he assumes the role of slave auctioneer to rework the slave’s economic value into a spiritual value:

A man’s body at auction,

(For before the war I often go to the slave-mart and watch the sale,)

I help the auctioneer, the sloven does not half know his business.

Gentlemen look on this wonder,

Whatever the bids of the bidders they cannot be high enough for it,

For it the globe lay preparing quintillions of years without one animal or plant,

For it the revolving cycles truly and steadily roll’d.

In this head the all-baffling brain,

In it and below it the makings of heroes.

Examine these limbs, red, black, or white, they are cunning in tendon and nerve,

They shall be stript that you may see them.

Exquisite senses, life-lit eyes, pluck, volition,

Flakes of breast-muscle, pliant backbone and neck, flesh not flabby,good-sized arms and legs,

And wonders within there yet.

Within there runs blood,

The same old blood! the same red-running blood!

There swells and jets a heart, there all passions, desires, reachings, aspirations,

(Do you think they are not there because they are not express’d in parlors and lecture-rooms?)

This is not only one man, this the father of those who shall be fathers in their turns,

In him the start of populous states and rich republics,

Of him countless immortal lives with countless embodiments and enjoyments.

How do you know who shall come from the offspring of his offspring through the centuries?

(Who might you find you have come from yourself, if you could trace back through the centuries?) (section 7)

I quote the entire section because there’s not one part I would remove: it retains all the power it had when it was first published (the text quoted here is from the last version of the poem as amended in the 1870s – Whitman added the historical marker as well as a few other modifications, especially that significant final line). It is also stunningly prescient, given the debates on race and rights in the century that will follow.

How do we reconcile the journalist whose opposition to slavery held no sympathy for the enslaved, and who it seems could not envision slavery’s end, only its containment, with the poet whose sympathy for all persons insisted on equal rights, equal consideration, and equal freedoms for the enslaved he would invite to work and eat side-by-side with his fellow citizens? If the journalist is to be condemned, then how do we read his poetry?

There is much to condemn in the Confederacy – it was an organized act of desperate treason, devised to defend what many found to be morally indefensible. Many soldiers in the Confederacy fought for other reasons – home, honor, pay, etc. Their officers and politicians seemed often to feel uncomfortable with what they were called upon to defend, and, particularly as the war was drawing to a close, spun a number of reasons and justifications for the war that many still cling to today, but those officers and politicians cannot be wholly and universally condemned. History gives us a range of possibilities to inhabit, but it’s mistaken to assume that we can freely and easily move among them: it’s often slow, painful, and difficult to do so. Even if it’s difficult to look back to the Confederacy and find heroes, there’s no need to look back and find nothing but monsters. It was a necessary passage, and likely necessarily violent, so while we can and all should take pleasure and pride in the defeat and loss of the Confederacy, it was not without purpose or meaning.

We should remember that even so, Virginia was not without her heroes. And Whitman remains a hero to me: somehow in his poetry he made things possible that could not be in his prose.

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