Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Mon Jul 09, 2018 3:28 pmLet's get to a specific, to see why this is so. Democrats in the 19th Century southern United States owned slaves, preferred to own slaves, believed it was good to own slaves, and that their way of life was elegant, beautiful and worth preserving permanently. They had power to keep it in place. Republicans like Lincoln thought slavery was not beautiful, and that the south should free their slaves. They believed that would be beautiful. They had power to fight for that, but no certainty they would win if they did. The two sides felt so strongly about the issue that they went to war.
My question to you is this: which side was right, and how do you know? Both had strong hierarchies of value, they had power, they believed in beauty, and they were both absolutely convinced they were morally right to hold their positions.
Here you establish a type of *game*.
No one today could defend slavery, it is simply too hot of a topic. However, if the culture of slavery -- the exploitation of a primitive class by a culturally advanced class of people in a radically different and far more advanced cultural state -- is examined fairly, or in any case more fully, the system and its function and effect can be understood
differently. It was certainly not
wholly bad or evil. Most of those who were or are apologists for Southern culture offer arguments and
pictures that describe a cultural relationship that had elements that *worked*. And not exlusively and obviously in a purely negative sense against those of African descent. It can therefore be
compared to, say, American Anglo exploitation of rural Meso-Americans. Not slavery, obviously, but with some comparable elements.
You make various statements in your opening that require more nuance. For example, not
all Southerners at any point were absolutely in pro of slavery. And there was a very strong endemic movement against the institution. Left to itself it could well have been resolved in an organic manner through a likely slower process of emancipation. To say "absolutely convinced they were morally right to hold their positions" is also false or misses the mark. Read Jefferson on his relationship to his own slaves.
Lincoln though very opposed to the notion of human slavery
was an absolute racist. Not partial but absolute. So any mention of the man, and what he did, or what he believed, must include this detail.
What he likely *felt* was less that the institution of slavery should be ended -- and is the secessionists would have stopped seceding he said he would accept the institution -- was that a rival power in the South, and at the headwaters of the Mississippi, could not be tolerated by a powerful, industrializing North. The historical antipathy between the Southern section and the Northern section also requires nuance and care. It is generally speaking nowhere to be found.
The two sides felt so strongly about the issue that they went to war
.
The real causes of the war were in a range of things, and not just one. So your argument's premise is skewed. And moral conflicts are always more involved than a surface analysis reveals.
My question to you is this: which side was right, and how do you know?
You *know* for a
range of different reasons, but not in any sense because the matter is cleared up through resorting to the Bible, and certainly not the OT. There is
a whole range of reasons why slavery -- and other exploitive systems -- have now become popularly indefensible.
It could well happen again that some similar system could be instituted. Indeed slavery has in no sense been abolished at the world-level.
Now, if people widely and universally are exposed to the education through which slavery is presented as an "absolute evil", and if this becomes universal (to the world I mean) the result will be much the same as what it is for us now. There will be no way to see it in any *positive light* or as having any advantage at all.
