Things Noted Here & There

by Cliopatria

Mary Beard responds to the question:"Would it have been better had some surviving works of ancient authors been lost?" Guardian, 25 September.

Belinda Cooper,"New Birth of Freedom," NYT, 24 September, reviews Samuel Moyn's The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History.

Francie Latour,"New England's hidden history," Boston Globe, 26 September, looks at New England's foundations in slavery.

Carolyn See for the Washington Post, 24 September, review Mae Ngai's The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America.

Paula J. Giddings reviews Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration for the Washington Post, 26 September.

David Greenberg,"Rewinding the Kennedy-Nixon Debates," Slate, 24 September, looks at the debates after 50 years.

Michael Dirda reviews Donald Sturrock's Storyteller: The Authorized Biography of Roald Dahl for the Washington Post, 23 September.

Kwame Anthony Appiah,"What will future generations condemn us for?" Washington Post, 26 September, asks a troublesome question.

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Jonathan Jarrett - 9/29/2010

I liked Mary Beard's piece (which was written, for the benefit of other readers, as a response to the legendary All Soul's College Fellowship examination) but I think mainly because I like to stress the same problems of preservation with my evidence. The <em>Guardian</em> printed much more of Will Self's answer to a different question (about the importance of sport to society) and it is jaw-droppingly sharp. I don't like everything he writes at all, but it would have got a pass mark from me as examiner, no trouble. It's also at the link that Ralph gave.

Chris Bray - 9/27/2010

Very compelling questions from Kwame Anthony Appiah, but it seems to me that he misses some of the history when he sets up his argument. He writes that, with regard to customs that later generations regard with horror, "defenders of the custom tend not to offer moral counterarguments but instead invoke tradition, human nature or necessity. (As in, 'We've always had slaves, and how could we grow cotton without them?')"

But defenders of slavery did make moral counterarguments -- arguing, for example, that old slaves were cared for after they could no longer work, while old wage laborers were on their own. And defenders of slavery argued that slaveholders were giving a gift to a primitive race of people who couldn't properly care for themselves.

As a result of that narrative, one of the widespread post-emancipation beliefs among defenders of slavery was that newly freed slaves would be the last Africans in America -- their children would die off, helplessly, without the guiding hand of slavery. IIRC, Leon Litwack's "Been in the Storm So Long" has lots of good stuff on that narrative.

This is where we get the scene in "Gone With the Wind" where Scarlett comes back to Tara to find her family's slaves starving to death. They tell her there's no food, and she establishes through a series of questions -- Did you dig up the sweet potatoes? Did you look in the woods for the livestock that we drove away when we heard the Union soldiers were coming? -- that there's plenty of food to be had, if there's a white person around to show the helpless Africans where to find it.

So: Emancipation? Why would you be so cruel to the poor Africans, you heartless monster? Don't you have any sense of moral decency at all?

There are probably plenty of other examples to be had. Defenders of Spanish colonialism in the Americas also argued that Bartolomé de las Casas cruelly and heartlessly wanted the Spanish to abandon the poor natives to the fires of hell. Sure, we kill a few, and yadda yadda, but it beats perdition -- whatever we do in support of our efforts to deliver the light of Christ is necessarily less cruel than whatever physical harm we may cause to people as a result.

It would be interesting, then, to examine the moral arguments for something like the contemporary American mania for incarceration. I'm sure they can be found.