God and Las Vegas

Out of the whirlwind:

Some people have been asking how, in a world they say is governed wholly by me, Stephen Paddock was able to shoot hundreds of people this week, killing dozens. They seem to think I was AWOL. Some accused me of actual dereliction of duty, saying that yes, I was present, but simply didn't bother to intervene. I saw everything that happened as it happened, they say. In fact, I knew what would happen even before it happened. When Paddock bought the first rifle of dozens, I already knew what he would do with them.

And yet I did nothing but watch, uninterested.

This is far from the first time such accusations have been made against me. You sing in praise of me that I sit on the throne of heaven, yet you seem to call me to the dock more often than you approach me on the throne. I get indicted every day. I have known church people who accused me in their hearts of unfaithfulness to them because I didn't fix the Powerball lottery so they'd win tens of millions of dollars. I have had high school seniors accuse me of uncaring dereliction when they didn't get accepted to their first college choice. Or grown men when they get fired from their job or even when they don't get a coveted promotion.

Let me get something straight with you: I am not your fixer. Yes, I want to have a personal relationship with you but I want it to go both ways. I already have such a relationship with you on my end, but believe me, I know what being kept at arm's length is like. 

You need to understand something: I am not your buddy, I am not your pal. I am your God, your Creator, your redeemer, your savior and your judge. As I have said before, my ways are not your ways, my thoughts are not your thoughts.

Let me put this bluntly: I operate on a different level than you do. I have a longer view of the horizon than you. I have been around a lot longer than you. So: what have I done to you? How exactly, have I wearied you? I would like an answer.

I don't recall that you were around when I big-banged the universe into existence. Nor were you there to advise me when I set the earth on its course, set the limits of the sea and the moon in your sky. I gave the hawks and eagles their flight. I gave the lion his power and invented how nature renews and reproduces itself. The seasons come, the seasons go because that is the way I set it up. Where were you when I did that? Your world supports your life and the lives of innumerable creatures. Do you think I had nothing to do with that? I set up life itself. It is in me that you live and breathe and have your very being.

But you tell me that I do not know what I am doing.

Very well, let us reason together. Get a backbone and listen. You want to know why I did not intervene in Las Vegas. And my answer is: I did. I did intervene, countless times and in countless years.

I have told you, O mortal, what is good and what I require of you. It is very simple: do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with me. You seem to scoff at my moral commandments. You think you can order your lives and societies better than I can. You acknowledge me with your lips, but your hearts are far from me. You worship me on your holy days and the next day treat your workers, or customers, or partners, or family members - the list is endless - with scorn or dishonesty. You divide yourselves into tribes or identity groups or political parties, all of them at war with one another. You reject my rules but you cannot live rule-free, so you make up your own.

How has that worked out for you?

Listen closely. Memorize this. Take it to heart, make it your daily ethic. An expert in my commandments once asked my Son what the greatest of all my commandments is. And my Son, being my begotten one, of course knew the answer. He didn't make it up on the spot. I had revealed it centuries before. My Son said, "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. And love your neighbor as yourself."

Is that complicated? No. Is it obscure? No. It is simple. It is direct. Why is it so difficult for you? I know the answer of course. It is because to obey me you must disobey yourselves, and it is in disobeying yourselves that you think obeying me is hard. But believe me, it's not hard to obey me. My yoke is easy. My burden is light. I liberate, not confine. I bring peace, not turmoil.

My teachings have been in your hands for millennia. Millennia! And yet today you ask why I was not on the job in Las Vegas. Where have you been for the last few thousand years?

Oh, believe me, I was at Las Vegas. It was a bitter night for me. But I was there.

There were a man and a woman listening to the concert when the shooting started. They did not know one another. They dived under a table. He was hit, yet he lay across the woman, shielding her with his wounded body.

A young man led 30 people to safety. He was shot doing so. There are many, many other examples. And thousands of people waited for hours on end to give blood.

Oh, you say, that's just human nature. We do not know whether those heroes and heroines even believe in a God. So? Where do you think human nature comes from? Why do you think my grace cannot operate preveniently even in the hearts of those who know me not? I am always leading every event of the world toward the good. But there are many other influences, too, such as the hardness of your hearts and the will to evil, the imperfection of your understanding, the finitude of possibilities in a world of limited resources and capabilities. Yet my will wins through more often than you know.

But why does Las Vegas prove my dereliction? Funny how no one accuses me of indifference over the murder toll in Chicago. But even that is not necessary. Just one child dying of hunger in any remote corner of the world serves just as well. (Although I might argue that it proves your dereliction more than mine.)

So before you interrogate me in the dock for not managing the world the way you think I should, I will suggest you are not actually thinking about it at all.

Shall I answer affirmatively to every prayer? Should everyone who ask me to give them the lottery win? Should every person who prays for me to heal a loved one of auto-accident injuries be granted?

Shall I prevent every illness? Every injury? Why stop there? So much of the harm you suffer comes from your own vanity, your own injustices, your own incapabilities and frankly, your own stupidities. Where do you want me to intervene?

Not long ago a young man atop a tourist center in the Alps was walking and texting. He walked right off the side of the mountain, fell 250 meters and of course did not survive. Could I have intervened? I suppose so; I could have suspended gravity and floated him gently through the air back to the platform. Or I could have made him just bounce at the bottom with no ill effect. Or I could have made it impossible for human beings to walk while texting. One or the other, never both. Or I could have just made sure that smart phones were never invented to begin with.

Here's the thing: You do not get to choose. You are not God. You have no power for miracles so you don't get to tell me how to work them or when or how.

Imagine, really try to imagine, a world in which no one ever makes a bad decision, no one ever gets a cold, no one ever suffers want or need, no relationships are ever broken or even unhappy, no woman ever turns down a marriage proposal, or no man as the case may be, no employee is ever denied a raise or promotion, no business ever fails, no inventions with potential harmful effects are ever conceived, no student ever fails, no one ever suffers harm, injury or for that matter death - or if they do die, no one mourns or grieves or feels devastated by the loss. So there are no hospitals, doctors, no medical science, no funeral homes. There are no criminals, no aggressions, no evil. But there are no doers of good deeds, either, and no charity, no compassion, no kindnesses. There is no despair but no triumph. There are no losers so there are no winners. No one has too little money in retirement because I compel everyone to invest in retirement funds from the first dollar they earn - and the market never falls, unemployment never rises, wages never fall, and I decide what everyone's occupation is, not you. After all, I am the only actually-capable central planner that there ever can be. And that means there are no dictators, no monarchs, no oligarchies, and no democracy, no elections and no politicians to elect anyway because you have no self government. I make all your decisions because I know you cannot possibly decide anything - Any. Thing. - better than I can.

What kind of world is that? That world is Hell, all of humanity living in The Truman Show. If you sometimes don't see the point of this present world, you would never see the point of that one. And neither would I, because the fundamental reality of the universe is love, and love is an act of free will and decision, not robot programming.

More than anything right now, I urge you to understand this: You and all your have constructed is under my judgment. But that has always been so. Two thousand years ago I begot the Second Person of my Trinity as a baby in a manger in Bethlehem. Sure, celebrate it with parties and cantatas and gifts, fine. But remember that his birth was an act of judgment upon the world. Why would a Savior be born if the world did not need saving?

Here is my judgment: that I so loved the world that I gave my only Son, and that anyone who accepts and follows him as the guarantor of life now and for eternity, will never perish. That is my judgment, that my Light has come into your world of darkness, but you love the darkness rather than the Light.

Even so, I will never stop loving you, never stop reaching to you, never stop being who I am. I am your Creator, your Sustainer, your Redeemer, your Savior. And all of these things are my judgment upon you, for I adjudge you in love to be in my image, I adjudge you in love to be adopted as my sons and daughters, I adjudge you to be able to spend eternity in my company, I adjudge you to be able to love me and one another both in this life and the next, I adjudge that you can do all things good and holy through my strength. I adjudge that you are both loved and love-worthy, and I adjudge that you can live with a peace that you will always enjoy even if never fully understand.

I will never redact this, never revoke it, never turn my back on you, never change my mind. And remember, I have a fuller knowledge of what "never" means than you do.

But when necessary to drive a point home, remember this, too: The severest judgment I ever lay upon you is simply to let you have what you want. That never works out well for you.

I have told you, O mortal, what is good and what I require of you: Do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with me. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. And love your neighbor as yourself.

The triumph of human life is that it really is so simple as that. The tragedy of human life is that even the simple things can be very difficult.

Confederate monuments: part 2, the myth of "noble Lincolnism"

In part one of this series I offered a reflection on the significance of Confederate monuments past and present, and perhaps some insight into why they have become such a flash point today. I wrote that perhaps, 

... we can assess both the war and its memorials with some dispassion – although higher passion seem to be the order of the day now.

First, let us dispense with all the “Lost Cause” nonsense Southern apologists invented after the war.

But there is another shoe to drop. I think I'll call it "noble Lincolnism," the idea that Abraham Lincoln and by extension the Union cause were morally pure and wholly admirable. In fact, Abraham Lincoln was a racist bigot and it is by no means unfair to say he was a white supremacist through and through. So:

Second, let us dispense with all the nonsense that Lincoln and the Union army were moral paragons who fought to free the slaves. 

Why do we consider this man great?

In her book, Team of Rivals, about Abraham Lincoln's presidency, Doris Kearns Goodwin made a most astonishing claim: 

"Armies of scholars, meticulously investigating every aspect of [Lincoln’s] life, have failed to find a single act of racial bigotry on his part." -- Doris Kearns-Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, p. 207. 

Some armies of scholars they must have been to have overlooked what Lincoln said in 1858:

"I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races, that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people . . . . I as much as any man am in favor of the superior position assigned to the white race." -- Abraham Lincoln, First Lincoln-Douglas Debate, Ottawa, Illinois, Sept. 18, 1858, in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln vol.3, pp. 145-146.

That Lincoln deeply opposed slavery cannot be gainsaid. It is laughable that he thought African Americans (they could truly be called that, then) should or even could gain legal, social or moral equality with whites. However, that did not distinguish him from about 99 percent of American whites, North or South, of his day. It was chattel slavery Lincoln opposed bitterly. He never made the leap that freed slaves should be equal citizens of the Republic. He did not think they could and did not think they should. 

In fact, in his first inaugural address, Lincoln endorsed the a proposed 13th amendment to the Constitution, called the Corwin Amendment after Ohio Republican Thomas Corwin. This amendment, which was never ratified, specifically forbade altering the Constitution in any manner that would enable the Congress to interfere with slavery "within any state." The Corwin amendment's wording was ridiculous, but its intent was clear: slavery was to be enshrined in the Constitution forever. Here is what Lincoln said:

I understand a proposed amendment to the Constitution--which amendment, however, I have not seen--has passed Congress, to the effect that the Federal Government shall never interfere with the domestic institutions of the States, including that of persons held to service. To avoid misconstruction of what I have said, I depart from my purpose not to speak of particular amendments so far as to say that, holding such a provision to now be implied constitutional law, I have no objection to its being made express and irrevocable.

Observed John A. Lupton, Associate Director and Associate Editor for The Papers of Abraham Lincoln Project, 

By tacitly supporting Corwin's amendment, Lincoln hoped to convince the South that he would not move to abolish slavery and, at the minimum, keep the border states of Maryland, Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, and North Carolina from seceding.

The amendment obviously never proceeded, but why would Lincoln endorse such a measure? He uttered the answer plainly:

The Union must be preserved, and hence all indispensable means must be employed.

Preserving the Union was more than Lincoln's policy goal. It was his fetish, a religious-type quest. The South's argument in favor of its secession was based on a contract view of the Constitution. The Constitutional contract, they claimed, had been broken, hence they could withdraw from the Union if they wished. Lincoln's theoretical foundation for destroying the Southern states to compel them to stay within the union was based on his elevation of the Declaration of Independence and other founding documents above the Constitution. Lincoln said this explicitly in his first inaugural address:

The Union is much older than the Constitution. It was formed, in fact, by the Articles of Association in 1774. It was matured and continued by the Declaration of Independence in 1776. It was further matured, and the faith of all the then thirteen States expressly plighted and engaged that it should be perpetual, by the Articles of Confederation in 1778. And finally, in 1787, one of the declared objects for ordaining and establishing the Constitution was "to form a more perfect Union." 

But if destruction of the Union by one or by a part only of the States be lawfully possible, the Union is 'less' perfect than before the Constitution, having lost the vital element of perpetuity.

The Union, he held, was a binding covenant between the states, not a contract, and that covenant could neither be negated nor nullified.

There is no doubt that for Lincoln preserving the Union was vastly more important than the rights of blacks, including their liberation. In his first inaugural, Lincoln endorsed enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act, which as I explained in part one was a contributing cause for the South's secession because several free states refused to enforce it. In the first inaugural:

One section of our country believes slavery is 'right' and ought to be extended, while the other believes it is 'wrong' and ought not to be extended. This is the only substantial dispute. The fugitive-slave clause of the Constitution and the law for the suppression of the foreign slave trade are each as well enforced, perhaps, as any law can ever be in a community where the moral sense of the people imperfectly supports the law itself. The great body of the people abide by the dry legal obligation in both cases, and a few break over in each. This, I think, can not be perfectly cured, and it would be worse in both cases 'after' the separation of the sections than before. The foreign slave trade, now imperfectly suppressed, would be ultimately revived without restriction in one section, while fugitive slaves, now only partially surrendered, would not be surrendered at all by the other.

Every Civil War historian knows that Lincoln did not commit the US Army to battle against the Southern states to free the slaves. Freeing the slaves was of little consequence in his mind. Writing to influential New York editor Horace Greeley in August 1862, Lincoln explained why (Lincoln's italics):

As to the policy I "seem to be pursuing" as you say, I have not meant to leave any one in doubt. 

I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored; the nearer the Union will be "the Union as it was." If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause. I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors; and I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views.

What about the Emancipation Proclamation? 

There were actually two proclamations. The first was issued in September 1862, the second on Jan. 1, 1863. It is the second one that historians usually refer to as "the" proclamation. Here is the National Archives' explanation of the scope of the order:

President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, as the nation approached its third year of bloody civil war. The proclamation declared "that all persons held as slaves" within the rebellious states "are, and henceforward shall be free."  Despite this expansive wording, the Emancipation Proclamation was limited in many ways. It applied only to states that had seceded from the Union, leaving slavery untouched in the loyal border states. It also expressly exempted parts of the Confederacy that had already come under Northern control. Most important, the freedom it promised depended upon Union military victory.  Although the Emancipation Proclamation did not immediately free a single slave, it fundamentally transformed the character of the war. ...

It did indeed transform the character of the war. Even so, the idea that Lincoln changed the emphasis of the war from preserving the Union intact to freeing the slaves because of elevated ideals is highly problematic - in fact, rebutted using Lincoln's own writings.

Here is the timeline:

• July 1862 -- the first draft of the first emancipation proclamation is written. Lincoln's cabinet advises him that he must wait to release it until the Union army has won a significant victory, else the issuance will be seen as a desperate act to shore up support for the war amidst fading fortunes on the battlefield. The proclamation is shelved, awaiting such a victory. 

• August 1862 -- Lincoln writes in his own hand the letter to Horace Greeley, quoted above, stating that freeing the slaves is a matter of indifference to him.\

• September 1862 -- On the 17th, Union and Confederate forces fight near Antietam creek, Md. It was the bloodiest one-day battle of the War with almost 23,000 soldiers of both sides killed, wounded or missing. Lee turned his army back toward Virginia. Despite the spectacular ineptitude of Union Gen. George B. McClellan in allowing Lee's army to escape, Lincoln decides that the outcome is sufficient to issue the proclamation drafted in July, and he does so on the 22nd. 

The September proclamation was not one of action. It was a warning to the seceded states that he would order the emancipation of all slaves in any state that did not end its rebellion against the Union by January 1, 1863. None did, so in January Lincoln issued what basically amounted to an "execute" order of the September proclamation.

The relevant part of the September proclamation to this discussion is that it specifically said that the purpose of abolishing slavery was to restore the Union. In it, the federal government promised to help states pay for the "gradual abolishment of slavery within such State or States---that the object is to practically restore, thenceforward to be maintain[ed], the constitutional relation between the general government, and each, and all the states ..." (link).

Lincoln was politically compelled to change the focus of the war effort to emancipation because Northern support for the war was melting away. Its costs in lives, treasure and time was magnitudes more than anyone ever imagined. By the end of 1862 there was an active peace movement in the North that grew stronger even after the Proclamation was issued.

There was serious (though ultimately unfounded) concern in Washington that Britain would openly side with the South because of the Union blockade of Southern ports cut off Southern cotton to the backbone of England's economy, textiles. Jeff Davis's government made the same miscalculation, but at the time both North and South thought the threat was very possible.

Issuing the Proclamation was a mainly political act that was first of all intended to signal Great Britain that to side with the CSA was to ally with a slavery state and take sides against the slaves' proclaimed, but not yet accomplished, liberation. This Britain would never have done (and economically did not need to do anyway).

The second thing the Proclamation did was turn the North's casus belli from political to holy. Lincoln did not become an abolitionist until he understood that the the North would never suffer the abattoir of the Civil War merely to preserve the Union, but it would bleed profusely "to make men free," as Julia Ward Howe's hymn urged.

Remember, Lincoln wrote his letter to Horace Greeley after the first proclamation had been written, which spins it somewhat differently than Lincoln the great humanitarian liberator. Clearly, considering both the first proclamation and the letter to Greeley, written so close together, Lincoln saw abolition as a means to achieve his never-changed goal: the Union of states must be preserved. Abolition was never an end in itself. It was not abolition for the sake of abolition nor even for the sake of slaves!

In the movie Gods and Generals, there is a scene where Union Col. Joshua Chamberlain (Jeff Daniels) tells his brother, also a Union officer, that if they both have to die to free the slaves, then so be it, even though abolition was not an original aim of the war.

It is the Northerners kind of war that Americans have waged more utterly than any other. As military historian T. R. Fehrenbach wrote in This Kind of War, "Wars fought for a higher purpose must always be the most hideous of all." War is such an awful thing that it must be entered into for only the most transcendental purposes. Hence, any war - as opposed to a punitive expedition, such as Panama, 1989 - that Americans engage in must be a crusade, because only crusades can justify the costs and the suffering. War is to be waged only reluctantly, even sadly, but waged ferociously.

Gen. Douglas MacArthur said, "In war there can be no substitute for victory," because when war is entered into for supreme purposes, to stop short of victory is to betray that purpose. In American Holy War, the political end is secondary to the military victory. Political structures are imposed by Holy War's victorious conclusion, they do not determine the conclusion. The role of politics is to pick up the pieces when total victory has been won.

This was Lincoln's insight: that absent a morally transcendent cause, the North would not continue the war. He provided the cause, but to him it was all smoke and mirrors, indeed it was politically-calculated trickery. There was indeed a powerful, morally-centered abolitionist movement in the northern states. But their cause was never Lincoln's cause.

And so he led the American nation deeper into an abyss of bloodshed that ultimately took the lives of two percent of its population, the equivalent of 6,460,000 dead today. Why anything about the Civil War is glorified or memorialized is quite beyond me, and I find it utterly incomprehensible that Abraham Lincoln is considered a great president.

Update: Joel W. emails,

I think you were too harsh on Abraham Lincoln. He was a great president: He kept the Union together, which was his main goal. The United States today would not be the country it is if the country had split during the Civil War. I believe that the United States, for all its faults, is the greatest country in the world, and possibly in history. If we had become two countries, we would not be as great.

Although I had not done as much research as you, I realized long ago that Lincoln's main goal was the preservation of the Union, not the emancipation of the slaves, and certainly not the elevation of the former slaves as full citizens.

One point you did not mention was that until he was assassinated, he was hated by many - in the North. (And most of the South, of course). Once he was killed, he became a martyr - and was elevated to the high status that many see him in today. If John Wilkes Booth had not done his work, it is possible that Lincoln could have ended up being impeached, rather than Andrew Johnson.Who knows? Johnson, a Democrat, had much harsher views of the ex-slaves than even Lincoln did.

I do not take much issue with any of Joel's points. Lincoln was a complex man. But for perspective, would we expend 6.5 million American lives today to keep California in the Union, or any other set of secession-minded states there is?

Lincoln was more than willing to see no end of bloodshed to preserve the Union, he said it and proved it. In his second inaugural, Lincoln pointed out, accurately, "Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained." Then he claimed that the war and the Union cause was God's will! And so the war must be continued unabated:

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

These are not the words of a moderate man. Of course he could not foresee in April 1861 the slaughterhouse that the war would become. But in March 1865, he said that did not matter, that even if he had seen clearly the ocean of blood to be spilled, he would have spilled it anyway, God's will be done!

How can we possibly ascribe a moral cause to a president who --

• firmly declared the inferiority of black Americans, 
• stated he was indifferent and unconcerned whether they remained slaves or not,
• as president spoke in favor the terms of the Fugitive Slave Act,
• as president spoke in support of a Constitutional amendment that would have forbidden any kind of federal interference in slavery by the states,
• issued an impotent emancipation proclamation only when it was clear that Northern support for the war merely to reunify the states would not last,
• stated at the inception of his second term that he would never be dissuaded from his goal no matter the cost in human suffering, dying and physical destruction of American territory?

The Civil War ended legalized chattel slavery in the United States. But that was not why the North went to war. Abolitionists, a growing domestic peace movement, and Union generals in the field forced Lincoln's hand to declare abolition a war aim. It did not spring from his moral compass.

I would say that the North accomplished a mission, abolition, that it did not really set out to do but failed to accomplish the mission, reunify the country, that it did set out to do. Can anyone look at our country today and honestly say that "The Union has been preserved"?

Slavery could not have survived as an institution in the South. Alternative histories are always highly speculative, but a lot of prominent Southern figures realized this beginning as early as 1850 simply by assessing the economic realities of the slave trade and cotton production. For example, many Southerners pointed out that the South grew cotton, shipped it to the North where it was milled and made into clothing, and then the South bought the clothing to wear. As one Southern industrialist (there were not many) tried to explain, the South sold raw cotton to the North at a nickel a pound and then bought it back at double or more! (Lowell, Mass., had more looms than the entire South.) Many tried to diversify the South's economy but they were silenced by the pro-slavery PC codes of the day.

Britain's economy was at the time based heavily on its textiles industry, which was the most advanced in the world - so advanced the design of its machines were actually state secrets. Before the War, this industry was heavily reliant on Southern raw cotton. Both Lincoln's and Davis's governments thought that Britain's loss of supply of Southern cotton would be so severe that Britain would have to take active measures to restore the supply.

But Britain had not become the pre-eminent economic power in the world because it was run by fools. Britain's industrialists and government were much more aware of the weakness of their supply chain, and well before the Civil War. They started large cotton production operations of Egypt and India before the Civil War. By 1861, the quantity and quality of this cotton, especially Egyptian cotton, were so high that Britain managed the reduction of Southern cotton imports well.

Economically, in 1861 the South's problem was not wealth. It was actually far wealthier than the North. Its problem was getting capital because the South's wealth was highly illiquid. More than three-fourths of the South's Net Asset Value was in land and slaves; some historians say as high as 90 percent. Neither land nor slaves could be sold for cash quickly. This was a major impediment to industrializing the South and improving its infrastructure, although the South did make devoted attempts to do both in the 1850s and achieved great increases. But the North did more.

King Cotton turned out to be a tyrant monarch. At the end of the 1840s raw cotton prices had plunged to less than 5 cents per pound. But the next decade saw prices surge to almost 11 cents per pound. Profits from slave-labor cotton and sugar (where the South led also) convinced almost all Southerners that they could never face a financial threat. The 1850s was the era of King Cotton for the South, but for all the money being made, almost none was invested in materiel that could ensure the seceded states could ensure their success by force of arms.

In short, the South never actually prepared for secession even though it had been a popular topic for many years. The South imagined that secession would inevitably be successful and peaceful.

I do not encourage Gone With the Wind-ism, but this is not a bad half-minute summary:

Confederate monuments: So what? Now What?

Part one of a series on this topic

So what? Now what?

One of the bishops of The United Methodist Church has told of his son’s soccer coach. If one of his players made an outstanding play and then unduly celebrated, the coach would rejoin, “So what? Now what?”

Meaning, now that you’ve done that, what do you do next?

Workers remove a monument dedicated to the Confederate Women of Maryland
early Wednesday, after it was taken down in Baltimore.
Photo by Jerry Jackson / The Baltimore Sun via AP

In his book The Martian Chronicles, written in the height of the Jim Crow era, Ray Bradbury tells of a day on earth when all the black people board rockets that they’ve had built in secret. They are going to move to Mars. The white people don’t find out until liftoff day. The main character is a white man named Teece. He watches the stream of people heading toward the launch site with dismay and impotence, cursing at them and dismissing them in turns. And then (profanity snipped),

Far down the empty street a bicycle came.

“I’ll be [snip]. Teece, here comes your Silly now.”

The bicycle pulled up before the porch, a seventeen-year-old colored boy on it, all arms and feet and long legs and round watermelon head. He looked up at Samuel Teece and smiled.

“So you got a guilty conscience and came back,” said Teece.

“No, sir, I just brought the bicycle.”

“What’s wrong, couldn’t get it on the rocket?”

“That wasn’t it, sir.”

“Don’t tell me what it was! Get off, you’re not goin’ to steal my property!” He gave the boy a push. The bicycle fell. “Get inside and start cleaning the brass.” …

“You still standin’ there!” Teece glared.

“Mr. Teece, you don’t mind I take the day off,” he said apologetically.

“And tomorrow and day after tomorrow and the day after the day after that,” said Teece.

“I’m afraid so, sir.” “We got to leave now, Mr. Teece.”

Teece laughed. “You got one named Swing Low, and another named Sweet Chariot?”

The car started up. “Good-by, Mr. Teece.”

“You got one named Roll Dem Bones?”

“Good-by, mister!”

“And another called Over Jordan! Ha! Well, tote that rocket, boy, lift that rocket, boy, go on, get blown up, see if I care!”

The car churned off into the dust. The boy rose and cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted one last time at Teece: “Mr. Teece, Mr. Teece, what you goin’ to do nights from now on? What you goin’ to do nights, Mr. Teece?”

Silence. The car faded down the road. It was gone. “What in [snip] did he mean?” mused Teece.

“What am I goin’ to do nights?”

He watched the dust settle, and it suddenly came to him.

He remembered nights when men drove to his house, their knees sticking up sharp and their shotguns sticking up sharper, like a carful of cranes under the night trees of summer, their eyes mean. Honking the horn and him slamming his door, a gun in his hand, laughing to himself, his heart racing like a ten-year-old’s, driving off down the summer-night road, a ring of hemp rope coiled on the car floor, fresh shell boxes making every man’s coat look bunchy. How many nights over the years, how many nights of the wind rushing in the car, flopping their hair over their mean eyes, roaring, as they picked a tree, a good strong tree, and rapped on a shanty door!

“So that’s what the [snip] meant?” Teece leaped out into the sunlight. “Come back, you [snip]! What am I goin’ to do nights? Why, that lousy, insolent son of a . . .”

It was a good question. He sickened and was empty. Yes. What will we do nights? he thought. Now they’re gone, what? He was absolutely empty and numb.

Bradbury’s story continues, but the question remains: “Now they’re gone, what?”

Let us suppose every public statue or monument to the Confederacy is removed as fast as their opponents want. “So what? Now what?” Who exactly will be better off? Black unemployment will be unchanged. The risk of horrific war with North Korea will not be lowered. The near-total breakdown of civility in our political life will not be improved. The inability, indeed, unwillingness, of the parties in Washington to come together to govern well will not increase. Obamacare will continue to fail and there will continue to be nothing on the docket to replace or repair it. Al Qaeda will still attempt to carry out the attacks it recently promised against mass-transportation means in the United States.

What difference will it make, exactly?

It may be answered that deleting the monuments is a worthy thing in its own right. It may be that an “afterward” plan is not necessary to do a thing inherently good and desirable in itself. The presence of such statues and monuments has a meaning much diminished now from what their erectors intended. Black Americans, still living with the after-effects of 200 years or so of slavery in America, are constantly reminded by the monuments’ continuing presence that their status as Americans remains somewhat provisional as long as those statues remain.

In this I will not argue contrary. Practically none of the statuary concerned dates to just after the Civil War. Almost all were erected from the 1890s – 1940s, most completed well before World War II. The main objective in them was to comfort and reassure aging Civil War veterans (of both South and North) that their sacrifices were real, they were remembered, but they were not going to determine the future of a United States. In their day, the monuments served as implements of peaceful reconciliation – and it took decades of time and veterans’ old age before even that could occur.

Of course, no Civil War veterans are alive today and even Boomers like me are five generations removed from their Civil War ancestors. I had lineal ancestors who fought on both sides. A multi-great uncle of the CSA’s 11^th Tennessee was KIA at Stones River and another g3-uncle of the 45^th Pennsylvania lost both his legs at Chancellorsville. Another of my g2-grandfathers has the distinction of being the only American POW in history ever to be broken out of POW camp by his wife, a woman who personally brained a Union soldier who attempted to rape her in her Nashville home.

So, for me there is a personal connection, at least of sorts, to the War and to its monuments today. It is not a strong one. The great majority of Americans today, descended from immigrants arriving after the Civil War, have no personal connection to the War or to the monuments that memorialize it.

But black men, women and children in the country do have a personal connection to the war because they continue to live now with its consequences and legacies, regardless of whether they are descended from persons living in either North or South before or during the war.

Perhaps, though, with both whites and black people more emotionally distant from both the War and its aftermath, we can assess both the war and its memorials with some dispassion – although higher passion seem to be the order of the day now.

First, let us dispense with all the “Lost Cause” nonsense Southern apologists invented after the war.

There are some hard truths about the CSA. I am a Nashville native and grew up here. My family's roots in Middle Tenn. go back to just after the Revolutionary War. I have mentioned my ancestral-family members who fought (and some died) for the CSA on both my mom's and dad's side (also for the Union on my dad's). Alexander Stephens, vice president of the CSA, was my wife's great-great grandfather's brother.

I take no back seat to anyone for Southern heritage and upbringing.

Like probably most native Southerners of my generation, I was raised being taught that the real reasons for the Southern states' secession was to preserve states’ rights and that the northern economic lobby was choking the South's economy with high tariffs on Southern goods.

Slavery? Well, it was in the mix somewhere, but slavery was not the real reason for secession.

It is a lie, pure and simple.

The states’ rights and tariffs arguments are entirely absent from Southern apologia until after the Civil War. In 1860 and before, no one in the South was using those topics to justify secession. Furthermore, in 1860 federal tariffs on Southern goods were lower than they had been since 1816.

It was the Southern politicians who had actually attacked the concept of federalism and state rights when, some years before the Civil War, some non-slave states defied the Fugitive Slave Act and declared that when slaves were brought into those states by the masters, they could be declared legally manumitted by state law. Southern politicians fought that tooth and nail and applauded the Dred Scott decision of the US Supreme Court, which denied Dred Scott, a black man, the right to sue for his freedom in US courts even if he resided in a free state. (Seven of the Supreme Court's judges in the case had been appointed by pro-slavery presidents from the South. Five of the seven were from slave-holding families.)

Nor was the North's industrial power significant at all in the secessionists' decisions. In 1860, Southern goods accounted for 75 percent of all American exports' dollar value ("King Cotton" being the main export) and the market value of the slaves across the South was greater than the entire Net Asset Value of the combined industrial base of the North.

The North's industrial revolution had begun in the 1840s, but was hardly in full speed in 1860. The war great accelerated it, leaving the North economically ascendant afterward, but before the war the South was the dominant economic section of the country (and it was economically wrecked by 1865).

Why did the Southern states secede? To protect slavery, period.

Read the 11 seceded states' actual acts of secession, beginning with South Carolina's, and you will see that slavery was the sole reason for secession. South Carolina's act makes this very unambiguous: protection of slavery was the only topic presented as driving secession. Same with Mississippi. And the others.

There were four sections of S.C.'s secession act. The opening section claims and justifies the right of the state to secede in the first place. Then:

The next section asserts that the government of the United States and of states within that government had failed to uphold their obligations to South Carolina. The specific issue stated was the refusal of some states to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act and clauses in the U.S. Constitution protecting slavery and the federal government's perceived role in attempting to abolish slavery.
 The next section states that while these problems had existed for twenty-five years, the situation had recently become unacceptable due to the election of a President (this was Abraham Lincoln although he is not mentioned by name) who was planning to outlaw slavery. The declaration states the primary reasoning behind South Carolina's declaring of secession from the Union, which is described as: 

... increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the Institution of Slavery ...

Then  the final section was simply the declaration of secession. There are no issues presented to justify secession except slavery. Note the contempt of "states right" in the secession act, in its denunciation of "... the refusal of some states to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act... ." The other 10 seceded states' enactments are not significantly different.

The Confederate States of America was founded to do one thing only: to preserve the power of one class of people to literally own as chattel property another class of people. There is no other reason the CSA existed.

That would be bad enough on its own. But it's worse. David Goldman, an economist (Ph.D., London School of Economics), has some facts and thoughts (read the whole essay):

Southern slaveholders were rapists. We know this because only 73% of the DNA of African-Americans is African; the rest is Caucasian with a small fraction of Native American. Most of the admixture of DNA, a McGill University study concludes, occurred before the Civil War, that is, when slaveholders and their white employees could use female slaves at will. Keep that in mind the next time Foghorn Leghorn sounds off about the honor of Southern womanhood. To own slaves is wicked; to rape female slaves and sell one's children by them is disgusting in the extreme. Yet that is what the Old South did, and the DNA evidence proves it.

That is the "heritage" that CSA flag defenders are really defending; I hope, truly, that most of them do not know that.

Southerners must not defend the indefensible

To defend the Confederate States of America is to side with the abjectly, morally indefensible. To use the CSA's battle flag or national colors as a symbol of Southern pride should be deeply, deeply offensive to modern Southerners, who are the most racially harmonious people in the nation (by no means has the year of Jubilee arrived, but jeepers, just compare to practically any Union-states- heritage city).

Have Southerners nothing to display as an emblem of regional heritage and pride but the flag of a irredeemably corrupt and thankfully temporary regime?

God save us.

Endnotes: 

1. You can read all of Bradbury's chapter here. Be advised that there is rough language and that the book, written in 1950, envisions no change in race relations between 1950 and the year of its setting, 2003. But then, the narrative is not really about 2003 or Mars at all. 

 2. The number of Southerners who display the Confederate flag in any way is vanishingly small. So why we are letting this particular issue practically control the national public agenda sort of escapes me. That we have a president who practices public buffoonery, and a media apparatus that long ago went full ideologue, does not help matters. 

Next installment: "The issue isn't the issue." "the myth of 'noble Lincolnism'."

How to Get Even the Right Way

Have you ever wanted to get even with someone? I mean, have you ever felt you were so wronged or betrayed that you actually imagined ways to turn the tables, to exact retribution, to shame the other and emerge victorious and triumphant?

I've been there. But I learned something through the years. It does not have to be that way and when I chose to set that kind of thinking and acting behind me I found a sense of peace and freedom that I will never surrender merely for a moment's satisfaction or self-justification. It's not worth it.

Some of you with excellent memories may recall the passage from last week’s reading of part of Romans 12. At one point, the apostle Paul quoted Proverbs passage as part of his instruction to Christian on how they should live morally according to the commandments of God. Proverbs says:

Proverbs 25.21-22

21 If your enemies are hungry, give them bread to eat;

    and if they are thirsty, give them water to drink;

22 for you will heap coals of fire on their heads,

    and the Lord will reward you.

It will be helpful, I think, to understand what the context was of the teaching and especially why Paul quoted it. If Paul was arguing for this moral conduct, then he was necessarily arguing against another. What was it?

Paul was writing to the single church in Rome, whose members were both Jewish expatriates and Roman former pagans. The morals Paul was teaching were Jewish morals, and so were the moral teachings of the other apostles – and in fact of Jesus himself. In fact, every one of Jesus' moral and ethical teachings are found in the Old Testament. Paul's instructions to church in Rome would have been familiar to its Jewish members, but not so much to the Roman members because the contrast between Roman ethics and Jewish ethics was stark.

Ancient Romans held that mercy, compassion and unmerited kindnesses to others were vices, not virtues. Roman parents beat their children for showing compassion or mercy to others, even their friends. To win, to prevail, to improve one’s standing even by trampling on others was admired and encouraged in the Roman world. When a Roman was wronged by another it was mandatory that he get even. Better yet, that he retaliated more harshly than he had been wronged.

The ancients’ social system was that of honor and shame. It is the oldest system of human behavior there is. An honor-shame system means that nothing is more important that where one believes he or she stands in society. One’s place on the totem pole is paramount because that social standing affects absolutely everything else. Honor-shame systems have been deeply embedded across the Middle East for thousands of years and still rule there, except in Israel.

An Iraqi explained what it meant this way:

Our sense of honor pervades everything we do. This isn’t the Western definition of honor, it’s more like Hispanic honor of machismo. Perception of manhood is vital and in fact it can be a matter of life and death. A man without honor gets no wife, often no work, and in Iraq he may be shunned or even killed by the own family depending on how grave the offense is. Defending honor is part of our cultural heritage. It is the focal point of everything we do and is jealously guarded. Honor means influence and power, our foremost concern. Less power means fewer contracts, less money, less food, angrier families. We must regain lost honor any way we can, even if it means violently attacking the ones who dishonored us.

This is the way that almost every society in the world was organized for thousands of years. Whether Japanese, Chinese, African, Norse, Southern European or Native American, honor – one’s standing in the order of human relationships – was of supreme importance.

Jesus preached consistently against honor codes and the sinful habits of pride they cause. Luke 14 tells of a day Jesus went to the house of a Pharisee leader to eat a meal on the Sabbath. He saw all the other guests jockeying to sit near the host, the place of honor. He told them that they were risking dishonor because someone more  important might come in and kick them out.

“But when you are invited, go and sit down at the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he may say to you, ‘Friend, move up higher’; then you will be honored in the presence of all who sit at the table with you. For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”

Across all human societies, people protect their status one way or another. Social climbing, power grabbing and the jealous guarding of one’s privileges or position are often paramount.

Jesus said no to all that: “For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.” The one-upmanship games and mutual back-scratching or back-stabbing ways of the world have no place in relationships founded upon Jesus’ teachings. After all, he ate with sinners and tax collectors, spoke in public to prostitutes and other low-lifes, and died strung up between two thieves.

Jesus emphasized rejecting worldly standards by his conclusion of the teaching:

He said also to the one who had invited him, “When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, so that they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”

Alan Culpepper wrote, “Those who live by kingdom standards and values now will not only bear witness to the kingdom but also will be rewarded in ‘the resurrection of the righteous.’ Righteousness, not social position or the esteem of others should be our goal.”

God is not interested in where we put our place tag on the tables of life. “Instead, God looks to see that we have practiced the generosity and inclusiveness of the kingdom in our daily social relationships.” The old order offers merely the temporary reward of social position. The new order brings the eternal reward of God’s favor.

So what does it mean to pour heaping coals upon the head of one’s enemy? For a long time I thought Paul meant that when I return kindness for another’s hostility, the other person couldn’t stand being treated kindly instead of meanly and would burn with resentment. But Paul can’t mean that because in Romans 12.9 he says, “Love must be sincere.” We cannot sincerely, lovingly gloat over causing others to seethe with indignation at us -- even if they are jerks!

Let’s take a look at Psalm 140[1], which begins,

Deliver me, O Lord, from evildoers;

    protect me from those who are violent,

2 who plan evil things in their minds

    and stir up wars continually.

Then in verses 9-10 we read this:

Those who surround me lift up their heads;

    let the mischief of their lips overwhelm them!

10 Let burning coals fall on them!

    Let them be flung into pits, no more to rise!

Pretty rough stuff! The psalmist is using the image of burning coals falling upon his enemies to symbolize the judgment of God upon the wicked.

Now, here is Paul in Romans 12.

Dear ones, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.” 20 No, “if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads.” 21 Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

The coals symbolize the judgment of God in both Proverbs and Romans. I think Paul is telling us that the commandments of God to treat one another with loving kindness do not depend on how others treat us. Everyone is liable to a judgment of God, so we must control our own passions first lest burning coals fall on us as well.

The teaching is a Jewish one, so I asked my friend, Israeli Rabbi Daniel Jackson, for an interpretation. He sent back that we are not dealing merely with human enemies here. We are also set upon by temptation to sin. Daniel wrote, “The intention of Proverbs 25 is to direct our attention to ourselves to control our passions, to ensure that in all our ways, we are reminded that we are to be Holy in all our actions and relations.” He wrote:

“If your enemy is hungry, feed him bread, and if he is thirsty, give him water to drink.” Honor him; treat him with Holiness. … We are dealing with the Evil Inclination and its cravings. If your evil inclination is hungry and wants you to sate it with “sins”, then feed it the Bread of Torah [The Word of God, the Scriptures-DS]; if it is thirsty, sate it from the Eternal Spring of the Divine.

Then, you are putting coals on its head, which is to say, you have begun the refining process of separating out the dross from the silver.

"Submit yourselves to God," wrote the apostle James. "Resist the devil and he will flee from you" (James 4.7). The most persistent and cleverest enemy we have is the temptations to abandon righteousness as a way of life and holiness as our goal. The way to resist and overcome is to choose godliness over ungodliness and feed the Bread of Life to our inclinations to evil and wrong-doing.

When our enemies are hungry and we feed them, when they are thirsty and we give them something to drink, we have done our duty to God and one another. The others might continue in ungodly hostility, but we have done all that we can do. Retribution, if any, is up to God, not us. Our calling to live as, and lead others to become, disciples of Jesus Christ, does not change.

A friend of mine once told me that he dreamed of standing before Jesus after Christ had come again in glory. He said he was prepared to recite the creeds, offer personal confessions of faith, confess his sins and prostrate himself before the Lord.

But it didn’t go like that. Instead, Jesus sat down next to him and said, “People live their lives as if they think I will ask them these questions on judgment day:

“Did you get everything in life that you thought you thought you were entitled to?

“Did you get even with the people who did you wrong?

“Were you worried about what other people thought of you?

“Did you hold on to grudges and imagine ways to hit back?

“Did you treat other people based on what they could do for you later?

“Tell, me, is that how you lived your life?”

My friend said that in his dream he had no reply but was filled with remorse. Then Jesus said, “Here is what I really want to know:

“Did my light shine through you in the way you lived?

“Did you forgive the people who did you wrong, even seventy times seven times?

“Were you worried about what I thought of you more than what other people thought of you?

“Did you pray for your enemies and do good to those who did you wrong?

“Did you treat other people on the basis that my love for them was as great as my love for you?

“Tell me, is that how you lived your life?”

I think that’s a pretty tough final exam, but one we need to make sure we pass.

21 If your enemies are hungry, give them bread to eat; and if they are thirsty, give them water to drink; 22 for you will heap coals of fire on their heads, and the Lord will reward you.

Which is to say, offer them the bread of life and the living water of God. Offer them Christ. It really is so simple as that.

---

[1] https://hermeneutics.stackexchange.com/questions/8406/what-is-the-meaning-of-heap-burning-coals-on-his-head

Why college grads don't know how to think

This does not mean what you probably think it does. Not any longer.

Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills -- Results of a standardized measure of reasoning ability show many students fail to improve over four years—even at some flagship schools, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of nonpublic results.

Freshmen and seniors at about 200 colleges across the U.S. take a little-known test every year to measure how much better they get at learning to think. The results are discouraging.

At more than half of schools, at least a third of seniors were unable to make a cohesive argument, assess the quality of evidence in a document or interpret data in a table, The Wall Street Journal found after reviewing the latest results from dozens of public colleges and universities that gave the exam between 2013 and 2016. (See full results.)

At some of the most prestigious flagship universities, test results indicate the average graduate shows little or no improvement in critical thinking over four years.

That's because the test the freshmen and seniors take are not designed to test the critical thinking that is taught them in high school and college. Nor is this result the least surprising.

Why College Graduates Still Can’t Think.

Traditionally, the “critical” part of the term “critical thinking” has referred not to the act of criticizing, or finding fault, but rather to the ability to be objective. “Critical,” in this context, means “open-minded,” seeking out, evaluating and weighing all the available evidence. It means being “analytical,” breaking an issue down into its component parts and examining each in relation to the whole. 

Above  all, it means “dispassionate,” recognizing when and how emotions influence judgment and having the mental discipline to distinguish between subjective feelings and objective reason—then prioritizing the latter over the former.

I wrote about all this in a recent post on The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Vitae website, mostly as background for a larger point I was trying to make. I assumed that virtually all the readers would agree with this definition of critical thinking—the definition I was taught as a student in the 1980s and which I continue to use with my own students.

To my surprise, that turned out not to be the case. Several readers took me to task for being “cold” and “emotionless,” suggesting that my understanding of critical thinking, which I had always taken to be almost universal, was mistaken.

I found that puzzling, until one helpful reader clued me in: “I share your view of what critical thinking should mean,” he wrote. “But a quite different operative definition has a strong hold in academia. In this view, the key characteristic of critical thinking is opposition to the existing ‘system,’ encompassing political, economic, and social orders, deemed to privilege some and penalize others. In essence, critical thinking is equated with political, economic, and social critique.”

Boldface added. What is the result? Where to begin? Well, how about where the overwhelming majority of American kids get their education, the public schools system. Education journalist Bruce Deitrick Price explains what happened when a parent had an unplanned, frank conversation with her child's principal:

Finally the principal, aggravated and arrogant, told me schools no longer believe in academic excellence because demanding subjects no longer appeal to the mainstream student or to his parents.

He proclaimed that his program, his syllabus, his teachers were all fully in compliance with local, state, and federal standards, and he wasn't going to change a single thing to accommodate me or my daughter.

He said proudly he is a "Progressive," he has a Ph.D., and he had "helped" develop and design many of those standards, and he believed in them.  He said any kid who wants a higher-level education for a professional career will have to get it somewhere else. 

And then they go college. Notre Dame Prof. Patrick Daneen writes,

My students are know-nothings. They are exceedingly nice, pleasant, trustworthy, mostly honest, well-intentioned, and utterly decent. But their brains are largely empty, devoid of any substantial knowledge that might be the fruits of an education in an inheritance and a gift of a previous generation. They are the culmination of western civilization, a civilization that has forgotten nearly everything about itself, and as a result, has achieved near-perfect indifference to its own culture. ...

At best, they possess accidental knowledge, but otherwise are masters of systematic ignorance. It is not their “fault” for pervasive ignorance of western and American history, civilization, politics, art and literature. They have learned exactly what we have asked of them – to be like mayflies, alive by happenstance in a fleeting present.

Our students’ ignorance is not a failing of the educational system – it is its crowning achievement. Efforts by several generations of philosophers and reformers and public policy experts — whom our students (and most of us) know nothing about — have combined to produce a generation of know-nothings. The pervasive ignorance of our students is not a mere accident or unfortunate but correctible outcome, if only we hire better teachers or tweak the reading lists in high school. It is the consequence of a civilizational commitment to civilizational suicide. The end of history for our students signals the End of History for the West.

Providence College Prof. Anthony Esolen describes what he and his peers are up against in “Exercises in Unreality: The Decline of Teaching Western Civilization.”

I now regularly meet students who have never heard the names of most English authors who lived before 1900. That includes Milton, Chaucer, Pope, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, Tennyson, and Yeats. Poetry has been largely abandoned. Their knowledge of English grammar is spotty at best and often nonexistent. That is because grammar, as its own subject worthy of systematic study, has been abandoned. Those of my students who know some grammar took Latin in high school or were taught at home. The writing of most students is irreparable in the way that aphasia is. You cannot point to a sentence and say, simply, ‘Your verb here does not agree with your subject.’ That is not only because they do not understand the terms of the comment. It is also because many of their sentences will have no clear subject or verb to begin with. The students make grammatical errors for which there are no names. Their experience of the written language has been formed by junk fiction in school, text messages, blog posts, blather on the airwaves, and the bureaucratic sludge that they are taught for ‘formal’ writing, and that George Orwell identified and skewered seventy years ago. The best of them are bad writers of English; the others write no language known to man.

Wall Street Journal editorialist Bret Stephens wrote in 2012,

A few months ago, I interviewed a young man with an astonishingly high GPA from an Ivy League university and aspirations to write about Middle East politics. We got on the subject of the Suez Crisis of 1956. He was vaguely familiar with it. But he didn't know who was president of the United States in 1956. And he didn't know who succeeded that president. ...

Many of you have been reared on the cliché that the purpose of education isn't to stuff your head with facts but to teach you how to think. Wrong. I routinely interview college students, mostly from top schools, and I notice that their brains are like old maps, with lots of blank spaces for the uncharted terrain. It's not that they lack for motivation or IQ. It's that they can't connect the dots when they don't know where the dots are in the first place.

Then there is Lucia Martinez, an English professor at Reed College who identifies as gay and mixed-race. She wrote, “I am intimidated by these students.”

Prof. Martinez

“I am scared to teach courses on race, gender, or sexuality, or even texts that bring these issues  up in any way—and I am a gay mixed-race woman,” she wrote. “There is a serious problem here… and I’m at a loss as to how to begin to address it, especially since many of these students don’t believe in either historicity or objective facts.” (link)

Noted British philosopher Roger Scruton explains one result:

Young people today are very reluctant to assume that anything is certain, and this reluctance is revealed in their language. In any matter where there might be disagreement, they will put a question mark at the end of the sentence. And to reinforce the posture of neutrality they will insert words that function as disclaimers, among which the favourite is ‘like’. You might be adamant that the Earth is spherical, but they will suggest instead that the Earth is, ‘like, spherical?’

Whence came this ubiquitous hesitation? As I understand the matter, it has much to do with the new ideology of non-discrimination. Modern education aims to be ‘inclusive’, and that means not sounding too certain about anything in case you make people who don’t share your beliefs feel uncomfortable. Indeed, even calling them ‘beliefs’ is slightly suspect. The correct word is ‘opinions’. If you try to express your certainties in a classroom today you are apt to be looked at askance, not because you are wrong, but because of the strangeness of being certain about anything and the even greater strangeness of wanting to impart your certainties to others. The person with certainties is the excluder, the one who disrespects the right we all have to form our own ‘opinions’ about what matters.

However, as soon as inclusiveness itself is questioned, freedom is cast aside. Students seem to be as prepared as they ever were to demand that ‘no platform’ be given to people who speak or think in the wrong way. Speaking or thinking in the wrong way does not mean disagreeing with the beliefs of the students — for they have no beliefs. It means thinking as though there really is something to think — as though there really is a truth that we are trying to reach, and that it is right, having reached it, to speak with certainty. What we might have taken to be open-mindedness turns out to be no-mindedness: the absence of beliefs, and a negative reaction to all those who have them. The greatest sin is a refusal to end each sentence with a question mark.

Ah, yes: it is objectively true that there is no such thing as objective truth. And critical thinking means you know how to denounce the system in proper Marxist terms.