In Defense of Self-Government

Prompted by the resignation of Jack Hunter (a.k.a., the Southern Avenger) from Sen. Rand Paul’s staff, the writers at the libertarianish collaborative site The Volokh Conspiracy ran a series of posts on the Confederacy, the upshot of which was that the South had it coming.

I am neither a libertarian nor an uncritical defender of the South.  But while these posts are varied in quality – a few have barely risen above point-and-sputter regarding slavery – two in particular stood out as particularly good.  The first was by Randy Barnett

The first, by Randy Barnett, gives chapter-and-verse on how decidedly non-libertarian and indeed non-“States Rights”-affirming the antebellum South actually was.  Reading it, I was struck by the extent to which the South had given the northern states ample cause to secede from the federal Union themselves, so much so that I’m vaguely curious as to why that never actually happened.

The second post, by Ilya Somin, quotes extensively John Stuart Mill’s writings on the Confederacy and whose thoughts are especially interesting given that he wrote them while the war was still in progress.  Mill’s main point is that the defense of slavery motivated secession, subsequent revisionists notwithstanding.

But he also writes something I found troubling:

But we are told, by a strange misapplication of a true principle, that the South had a right to separate; that their separation ought to have been consented to, the moment they showed themselves ready to fight for it; and that the North, in resisting it, are committing the same error and wrong which England committed in opposing the original separation of the thirteen colonies….

I am not frightened at the word rebellion…. But I certainly never conceived that there was a sufficient title to my sympathy in the mere fact of being a rebel; that the act of taking arms against one’s fellow citizens was so meritorious in itself, was so completely its own justification, that no question need be asked concerning the motive. It seems to me a strange doctrine that the most serious and responsible of all human acts imposes no obligation on those who do it, of showing that they have a real grievance; that those who rebel for the power of oppressing others, exercise as sacred a right as those who do the same thing to resist oppression practiced upon themselves…. Secession may be laudable, and so may any other kind of insurrection; but it may also be an enormous crime. It is the one or the other, according to the object and the provocation. And if there ever was an object which, by its bare announcement, stamped rebels against a particular community as enemies of mankind, it is the one professed by the South.

I need to parse the phrase “sufficient title to my sympathy”.  If by this Mill means a cause meriting the provision of material aid, then I would go even farther than he does:  the only causes meriting such aid are ones that advance the interests and well-being of the citizens of the state offering the aid, slavery or no slavery.  But Mill almost certainly doesn’t intend this.  Rather, he would evaluate claim to independence on moral grounds, and finds the South’s lacking.

As I said, I am not a libertarian, but I do believe in territorial self-government, and I advocate this with few reservations.  I have little admiration for how any nation runs its affairs (including, lately, my own) but I would not interfere in how even the obscurantists of the Taliban govern their own country – as surely they will if ever the U.S. removes its military props to the corrupt Karzai regime.  Afghanistan is for the Afghanis, and I only reserve the right to keep such people outside the borders of America.

But isolationism is out of favor, so let me put this another way:  in practice, Mill’s is an “exception” big enough to drive a truck through.  I would go so far as to say that any would-be imperialists, seeking to deny a people weaker than themselves the opportunity to live under laws of their own choosing, could find some moral fault to justify its denial.  They might even find a moral fault on libertarian grounds:  libertarian fantasists to the contrary, all the world’s nations choose a mix of tradeoffs between freedoms and restriction, trade-offs exemplified by the writers at Volokh.  Who among them can cast the first stone?

An argument for tolerance in the context of self-government also may not be sufficiently persuasive to those who, like Somin and perhaps Mill, possess sufficient confidence in the ascendance of their preferred policy mix in what may yet be the most powerful country in the world.  Why should they fear outsiders turning their own taste for imperialism against them?

On Hating the South

I don’t like the South.

There.  I said it.

I was born in the South and lived in a succession of Southern states before heading off to South America for high school.  I went to college in the South, and my first job was in the Southwest.  So my not-liking-the-South is based on extensive first-hand experience.

I will refrain from making any generalizations here about the Southern character.  I do this to forestall its partisans insisting Not-All-Southerners-Are-Like-That.  Whatever.  My not-liking is based on an unassailable observation:  after years of trying, I failed utterly to make its social system work for me in a constructive way.

Yes, this might have been true anywhere.  Whatever.  We only get one life to live, and this one’s mine.  I saw a fair amount of the social landscape, and it didn’t matter whether it was high or low.

I got married in the first non-Southern state in which I had the opportunity to live.  To a Yankee.  “My Southern boy,” she calls me.  I guess I make an okay Southerner as long as I’m not actually living there.

We are now settled happily in the upper Midwest, and as of this month, I have lived here longer than any other single place.  The vicissitudes of employment being what they are, perhaps work will require me to return some day.  That said, I can think of no reason why I would otherwise choose to live there.

However . . .

I do not hate the South, or Southerners as a class.  I especially have no truck with that brand of sectional hatred for which the Southern history is an occasion for moral preening.  I am in that respect the exact opposite of the Southerners surrounding, say, National Review, writers bearing some cultural affinity for the South yet quickly denouncing it for its sins, real and imagined.

Let there be no mistake:  hindsight being 20/20, with the war and occupation fully in view, the Southern secession was mistaken.  Mistaken, too, was its pre-war political agenda almost perfectly calculated to antagonize the North (the Fugitive Slave Act, the Dred Scott decision).  My only point is that I can think of no legal or moral obligation requiring the South to continue to be governed by Washington if it chose not to be so, nor a moral or legal right on the part of the North to attempt to govern it against its expressed will.

In hindsight, of course, the trans-Atlantic slave trade was desperately wrong-headed, and may yet be our undoing.  Had there not been black slaves, there would be no black Americans.  No black crime.  No black intergenerational entitlements.  No black riots.  No affirmative action or disparate impact lawsuits.  No hollowed-out inner cities or ruined schools.  There would be no Trayvon Martin, and perhaps no George Zimmerman.

And most importantly, there probably would not be the Civil Rights paradigm where an ever longer list of aggrieved groups receive special legal immunities at the expense of the white majority.  There might still be a Barack Obama and Eric Holder, but they would never have been given the power they presently wield.  So . . . yeah, slavery was bad.

What slavery is not, however, is some special moral stain on the South, or America as a whole.  It was a long-standing worldwide practice that would have required extraordinary effort to keep away from our shores.

For me, not-liking-the-South means not wanting to live there.  That’s the long and short of it.

On Slavery and Christianity

Megan has this exactly right:

[T]he northern church played a causal role in the abolition movement. There is no reasonable reading of history that attributes a similar causal role to the southern church. Indeed, the cause runs the other way--there was considerable selection pressure on southern churches, with churches that spoke out against slavery (there were some) seeing their membership transfer to more amenable congregations.

Think of it this way: if religious people had not been driven by their faith to come out against slavery, the abolitionist movement would have, at best, come into being much later and much weaker than it did. Had the the southern churches said nothing about slavery, would slavery have collapsed? It's unlikely to have had any effect. I am well aware that the southern church provided revolting justifications for slavery, but it's very hard to read the relevant history and conclude that these did much to strengthen an institution that had very strong self-interest behind it, as well as the universal human tendency towards xenophobia. If you hadn't been debating ridiculous religious texts, you would have been debating equally ridiculous eugenic claims, or cultural arguments. People have a powerful way of finding reasons to believe what they want to.

I'm an Adam Smith kind of guy in the sense that I believe voluntary cooperation and contract to be a superior form of economic organization when compared to its alternatives, not just (or even) in the moral sense, but also in its ability to generate wealth. But this is a non-obvious point; indeed it was considered controversial at the time Adam Smith made it. In contrast, the belief that it is in a man's own interest to force someone else to do his work for him is intuitive, even if that intuition is in error. So the bottom line is that I don't need a reason to engage in slavery; I need a reason not to.

The absence of such a reason was why slavery was a common feature of the world until relatively recently. If your tribe, nation, or empire had the power, it could conquer and enslave the populace of other tribes and nations. And why not? After all, they would (and often did) happily do the same to your tribe or nation given the opportunity.

My understanding of history is that non-African slavery began to recede in the Renaissance era, not because of moral enlightenment, but because European nation-states became strong enough to resist the efforts of others (specifically, the Ottomans) to enslave them. This left Africa as the last and only source for Muslim and, later, European slave merchants to procure slaves. That the slavers were Muslim and Christian were, in this context, an accident of history.

What was not an accident was how the African slave trade, and specifically the trans-Atlantic slave trade, came to an end. The African nations never became strong enough to resist their own enslavement as the European nations did; on the contrary, they happily sold each other into foreign slavery, and still practice it in some quarters. No, the end of the slave trade was a specifically European Christian (and, even more specifically, an English Protestant) undertaking, as the life of William Wilberforce demonstrates. Yes, there were some secularists who opposed slavery, but the notion that the abolitionist movement was animated by their contribution is a tortured version of history.

Megan and Ta-Nehisi have been going back and forth as to the moral justification for slavery, discussing the role in which concepts of "humanness" and "personhood" played in sustaining (or not) the institution. Without being a historian of slavery, I doubt such considerations played much of a role. Slavery was simply what the strong (we) did to the weak (you). Why would the strong (we) clutter this simple paradigm with abstract nonsense about "personhood"? Who cares?

Nonetheless, the usual suspects wish to indict Christianity, or at least the Christian church, with being somehow responsible for slavery (and particularly African slavery) because it occurred on the Church's watch, and they point to the "Curse of Ham" as providing its theological justification.

I have commented before that the "Curse of Ham" was always theologically weak and historically ignorant, but according to its Wikipedia entry it has a long pedigree. Secularist wet-dreams to the contrary, I am skeptical of the claim that the church was ever so all-powerful that slave interests had to approach it, cap in hand, seeking its permission to engage in the slave trade. More likely, it was either more-or-less instructed to approve of it, or those clergymen willing to approve it for their own reasons did thereby profit at the expense of those who did not.

But as I said, I'm not an historian, and I could be wrong, so allow me to stipulate, for the time being, that the church played the role that its enemies accuse of it.

It should be obvious that the only reason this would matter is because the church generally upheld the ethic that being among the strong was not the end of the argument, that "might" did not by definition make "right". The church held that morality was transcendent and universal: it was given by God and binding on all men in their relations with all other men. To the extent that it gave slavery (and much other evil) a pass, it was granting a waiver of this general rule. That it should not have done so is now obvious to everyone, including Christians, but we should not mistake cause and effect: this would not be significant except for the general rule.

Which brings us to abortion.

Here, again, the strong (pregnant women and their abortionists) do to the weak (the unborn child) as they will, and powerful political and social interests permit them. Why clutter this simple paradigm with abstract notions of "personhood"? Who cares?

Answer: the heirs of William Wilberforce.