PC Gone Too Far

I see. If I don't adopt your overly moralistic terminology then I'm guilty of yet another sin. It should by now be obvious to even you that there's no objectivity in your approach. This is just baseless rhetoric. There's no whiff of better remembering history in your approach. You're the one in favor of removing history, remember?--Percy

Soldiers are frequently the largest group of victims. The old idea of ending war by putting politicians on the front lines comes to mind. Maybe it could be part of a new article for the Geneva Convention. Ringo's characterization of my views was both true and false, depending upon your definition of "heroes". He meant "heroes" in the sense of "heroes fighting for their right keep slaves" who in his mind have no right to monuments in honor of their sacrifice, while I of course believe both sides fought heroically and deserve to be honored in equal measure.Ringo chooses to see conflict in terms of good and evil, and those he judges evil deserve no honor. He is aware of the subjectivity and inconstant nature of judgments of evil, even to the extent of turning against him, but seems unconcerned.--Percy

We're not deciding whether to commemorate anything by putting up a monument. People 120-years ago decided to put up a monument to Southern armies and war dead. We're deciding how to preserve a part of history. It should be done objectively and not according to the emotionalism of people who seem prepared to fight the Civil War all over again.--Percy

You're making the same appeal as NoNukes, Rrhain and Ringo, and I can only give the same response. Is there any broad agreement on what evil is, especially when applied to nearly all the people of an entire nation? Didn't both sides take up arms in defense of principles they felt important? Attempts at an answer quickly bring the realization that evil is highly subjective.People are making strong arguments that slavery as practiced in the South was evil, and while I disagree with the terminology I do largely agree. Owning another person is wrong, mistreating humans is wrong, and so forth.But even adopting the ambiguous terminology, there are few arguments that the rank and file of the Southern armies were evil, and even the arguments that certain individuals were evil are weak. Here again is the description of philosopher Paul Ricoeur's view: "Ricoeur agrees with many other thinkers that evil is not a thing per se, but rather exists in a sort of black hole of thought, an aporia [link to the definition aporia]."The point is that what is evil has no objectivity but is in the eye of the beholder. Many perpetrators of what we think evil (e.g., ISIS, the North Korean government, Osama bin Laden, etc.) think us evil. If you think an exploration of the facts will show they're wrong and that we're good and they're evil then a quick review of our history of intervention and interference should give pause.Speaking of intervention and interference, it can be argued that the main cause of the Civil War was the threat of interference by the North in Southern affairs. Whether slavery was right or wrong, it was an internal affair of each Southern state in which the North had no business. The argument that the wrongness (or evil as you prefer) of slavery justified Northern intervention was rejected by the North (including especially Lincoln) from the beginning of the war to nearly the end. At a political level the North was fighting to preserve the Union and the South to preserve States' Rights.--Percy

This might be something we can agree upon. If when you say that "southerners managed to deceive themselves" you think it okay that I equate that to my own belief that they believed their own rationalizations (as did the North), then fine. But I could never accept that the South was lying and knew it.The NYT had a recent editorial about Trump that describes the effects of being surrounded by people of like mind: Is the Trump Campaign Just a Giant Safe Space for the Right?. Would you say the Trump people know they're wrong but are saying it anyway (whatever "it" is, but too often apparently substitutes mindless epithets ("Hillary sucks!") for analysis). The point is that it isn't in most people's nature to express beliefs they know false, whatever the objective analysis might say about those beliefs. I have pretty much the same response as Xongsmith. No one here is accusing anyone of a lack of objectivity for concluding that slavery was not beneficial to slaves. I think we all agree that slavery wasn't beneficial to slaves. I have no idea why you said this.What's at issue is what Southerners truly knew and believed. I liked Xongsmith's point that we must not hide how mistaken Southerners were, because it serves as an example of how easy it is for any people, including especially ourselves today, to be wrong. We can't act upon blithely contrived accusations of evil while ignoring that this justifies the acts of others who have arrived at different conclusions of what's evil. We understand you agree that analysis is important, but summarizing the analysis under the single word "evil" is ambiguous and subjective.--Percy

Yes. In storage. A bit overstated but close enough, and I've also listed some valid reasons for altering the historical record in prior posts. Fighting again and again over the same things is precisely what Santayana warned against. History has taught you nothing. What you've learned is force and vengeance as a solution. Contrast the results of Reconstruction and WWI German reparations with the Marshall Plan and the Japanese treaty.--Percy

And my response is unchanged: views that slavery was beneficial pre-existed the antebellum South and did not originate there. Slavery proponents in Britain expressed the same views when Britain was going through the process of eliminating slavery.What changed was how the arguments came out in the balance. Northerners, horrified at the expansion of slavery, a monster thought destined to die, invented new arguments against slavery, such as that it denigrated manual labor. The South, witnessing the same expansion of slavery and seeing it accrue to their benefit, emphasized the benefits of slavery that they already believed, but with slave populations and the Southern economy growing, balancing all the factors delivered a different answer. The only truly new argument was that slavery was the foundation for a cultural elite dedicated to the betterment of mankind. Can you show me an example of Southern slavery proponents holding a different opinion prior to your year of demarcation of 1830 that slavery didn't bring Christianity to the Negro, protect them from dangers of rampant Northern-style capitalism (e.g., sweat shops, unemployment), and remove them from the dangers of tribalism in Africa? A Southerner of 1810 might likely say, "It's unfortunate we have to hold these souls in servitude, but they gain the blessings of Christianity, they're never destitute, and it's a big improvement from their situation in Africa." I so often make the accusation of biased thinking because you do it so often. There's nothing objective about "evil". 1830 wasn't some line of demarcation before which the South considered slavery evil and after which they didn't. It was a process of gradual change involving the economics of slavery and a changing of the guard. How both the North and South felt about slavery changed in reaction to changing circumstances. Prior to slavery becoming a foundation of the Southern economy both North and South viewed the practice as regrettable. With its expansion and its growing political power came an increase in the intensity of feelings on both sides, the North more intensely against and the South more intensely for.What's important to understand is that the nature of the argument over slavery didn't change suddenly. It was gradual. Just as the importance of slavery to the South increased gradually, so did the changes in how it was viewed changed gradually. The changes in opinion were a reaction to changing circumstances, just like what people do today and everyday throughout all the world and all time.--Percy

That's not a definition. That sounds like the Supreme Court in the 1960's telling us that they can't define pornography but they know it is when they see it. Well, good luck with that. Your emphasis on evil as a criteria is surprising given your legal background. How often do you see the term "evil" in a legal ruling? That you won't even define "evil" tells us that your interest is to denounce, not describe, to stigmatize, not characterize. Generalized, your position is that the memories of peoples you despise are less worth preserving than those you admire. But it's all part of history, all deserving of preservation. Modern emotional reactions have no place.The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has an article on The Concept of Evil. In one section it describes some of the same problems with the term that I have:

quote:

---

Another reason that ascriptions of evil can be particularly harmful or dangerous is that it isn't always clear what people mean when they use the term ‘evil.’ As Eve Garrard puts it the general obscurity surrounding the term makes some thinkers very reluctant to appeal to the idea of evil(Garrard 2002, 322). For instance, some people believe that to say that someone performed an evil action implies that that person acted out of malice (see e.g., Kekes 2005), while others believe that evildoing can result from many different sorts of motives, even good motives (see e.g., Card 2002). Given this ambiguity, it might be unclear whether an attribution of evil attributes despicable psychological attributes to an evildoer, and this ambiguity might result in an overly harsh judgment.

​

Other ambiguities concerning the meaning of the term ‘evil’ may be even more harmful. For instance, on some conceptions of evil, evildoers are possessed, inhuman, incorrigible, or have fixed character traits (See Cole 2006, 1—21; Russell 2006 and 2010; Haybron 2002a and 2002b). These metaphysical and psychological theses about evildoers are controversial. Many who use the term ‘evil’ do not mean to imply that evildoers are possessed, inhuman, incorrigible, or that they have fixed character traits. But others do. If evildoers have these traits, and thus will continue to perform evil actions no matter what we do, the only appropriate response might be to isolate them from society or to have them executed. But if evildoers do not have these fixed dispositions and they are treated as if they do, they will likely be mistreated.

---

I've quoted a philosopher and an encyclopedia about problems using the term evil, and the best you can do ask why we should debate definitions? It isn't like your agenda isn't clear. You want to stigmatize portions of history and then use that as a criteria for deciding which portions of history deserve preservation, or more specifically, you don't like the South and prefer its history not be remembered. I forget which historian said it, and even how he put it precisely, but it was something like, "If you destroy a people's history then you destroy them." Oh, poking about I guess I must be thinking of this George Orwell quote: "The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history."--Percy

I'm talking about how your tactic of demonization brings more conflict, not less. Do you think hate brings peace? Just as the Treaty of Versailles held within it the seeds of Nazism, your approach holds within it the seeds of future conflict. You say, "I am prepared to fight the Civil War all over again, though not necessarily by killing people," but that's the eventual result if we don't learn from history. They say the passage of time brings perspective, but for some of you here it's as if the Civil War and all the passions it inflamed happened yesterday.--Percy

Good grief, you're getting as bad as NoNukes, just making things up when you have no argument. I can't even find a post where I used the word "controversial", let alone in reference to genocide, and I have made abundantly clear in this thread that you're fairly determined in your confounding of language. You like words with emotive power and use them without regard to their actual meaning.Why don't you respond to what Bluegenes actually said?--Percy

Since evil has no objective meaning, what you're really saying is that when people do evil in your eyes it justifies violence against them. Who here wouldn't trade an Iraq still under Saddam's thumb for the current situation with American troops in harm's way and ISIS suicide bombing civilians across a broad swath of world? I'm suggesting that evil is a subjective criteria that will much more often lead you astray and away from sound decisions. That was one of the puzzling questions after WWII: How did fascism and Hitler happen to the German people? Are German people different from people elsewhere in the world, or could what happened in Germany happen anywhere? It's a current topic of presidential politics here in the States: If Trump is elected, will he be a Berlusconi or a Hitler? Hey, yah us, we're the evil stompers!What actually happens in the real world is that sometimes you stomp out evil and sometimes you're the evil. And people like you will accuse other people of things that are untrue. What's with the attack on objectivity? You're learning the wrong lessons from history. History isn't a sequence of morality plays. It isn't a battle between good and evil.--Percy

The book excerpt (not "the article") was quite explicit about what was driving change:

quote:

---

But the sense of evil had faded by 1830 as the growing world demand for cotton fastened the tentacles of a booming plantation economy on the South.

---

Yes, of course change was occurring before 1830. The excerpt says it, I've said it, welcome to the party.I understand you see the world in terms in good and evil, and Southerners as some kind of aberration of human nature, but if history teaches us any lessons it's that moralistic and subjective approaches do not lead to better outcomes, and that people are the same everywhere.--Percy

Boy, can your understanding ever go awry. You said, "Percy has admitted that the definition of genocide is controversial." No, he hasn't, not even close.You're misconstruing my correction of your other error. You had claimed there was a consensus in Canada that what happened to your aboriginal people was genocide. It turns out, as I described in Message 525, that it's much more equivocal, that they're debating whether it should be called genocide or cultural genocide or even something else. They *definitely* and in no uncertain terms are *not* debating the meaning of the word "genocide," and I *definitely* have *not* "admitted that the definition of genocide is controversial."You're arguing with the dictionary, Don Quixote.--Percy

I'm not making it up. I originally stated that your tactic of demonization brings more conflict, not less. Your answer so far has been, in effect, "No, it doesn't," which isn't very helpful, so I used the Iraq example to help draw out some detail of your views. Saddam was committing evil in Iraq. Can I assume you were against intervention and against Canada joining the coalition? So how are you to stop him without violence? How would you have stopped Hitler without violence?The problem with, "We have to stop evil, but without violence" has a next step that can best be described as, "Non-violent approaches to evil don't work, I guess we'll have to increase military pressure." The next step after that can best be described as, "Charge!"Anyone against both violence and evil will quickly learn that non-violence is ineffective. But violence is chaotic, often has unintended consequences, and can make things worse, like ISIS. So what to do? Well, if you're going to insist on the term evil, then you're going to have to learn how to get along with evil. What was really meant was that subjective criteria like evil hinder your ability to make sound decisions.But we certainly can't have anything as "universally evil" as slavery going on, can we. You should mount your horse and invade India. I support the preservation of all history everywhere, within constraints. If all the permits have been signed then the building or road goes up and history is destroyed. I frequently see news stories from New York and London of building excavations uncovering important history. Sometimes the history is important enough to stop work for a time, but generally the historians and archeologists have to work quickly before work resumes and history is destroyed.Your question also touches on something Caffeine asked earlier, monuments to despots always hated by the people, so see my Message 148. What on earth are you talking about? I support objectivity, not slavery. I'm arguing that firing up your passions with emotion-laden terms like evil will more often lead you to conflict rather than peace and resolution. There you go with another absurd claim. We'll add it to the list.You good/evil guys sound more and more like the religionists, but instead of "He's a good Christian" and "He's a bad Christian," you have "He's good" and "He's evil."--Percy

If you're going to post words beneath a request for a definition, then you need to in some way make clear you're not answering the question, else reasonable people everywhere will assume you're providing a definition. I don't think so. Where? I can give you the definition that applies best to its use in this discussion straight out the dictionary. As an adjective evil is "morally wrong or bad; immoral; wicked". As a noun evil is "the force in nature that governs and gives rise to wickedness and sin" or "the wicked or immoral part of someone or something". As a philosophical concept evil is an aporia. To me it is obviously subjective with no proper role in conclusions derived from objective analysis. Except for the quibble that you can't repeat this since you've never said it before, thanks for finally offering a definition. Does this include only physical harm, or also mental harm. In any case, you seem to understand the broad ambiguities. We all agree slavery is wrong, "morally unsound," as you say, but now you've left out your word "evil", which is the big problem. "Evil" as a classification of people is problematic not just because of the inherent ambiguity but also because of the overtones and connotations of wickedness and villainy, even savagery and depravity. Uh, NoNukes, the context is this discussion. You're trying to convince the other side that Southerners should be stigmatized due to their embracing of slavery, that they're evil and therefore deserving of no commemoration, particularly those who held positions of high responsibility in the Confederacy. Let he who is without evil (whatever that is) have the first monument.I'll answer a few of your other replies here. From your Message 625: In context, Xongsmith is talking about *your* motives and justifications. It is they that have no place in history, i.e., your judgment of Southerners as evil has no place in history. If the North thought Southerners evil then that would of course be included with the rest of the historical analysis. But that *you* think the South evil? Doesn't belong in history.From your Message 626: I've said pretty much the same thing a couple of times. From my Message 573: From my Message 608: More from your Message 626: Yes, pretty much consistent with what I've been saying and what one would expect as a debate of ideas unfolds. I was correcting your implication that I was only aware of changing views and not of changing circumstances. It works against finding common ground when you continually ask whether I think slavery okay, and continually use contemporary judgments of historical practices that I've argued have no place in historical analysis. We all agree slavery is wrong. If you're going to insist on "slavery is evil" then until you can come up with a definition of evil that is consistent with developing historically objective perspectives we're not going to agree. You keep bringing this back to slavery as if it were the main point of contention. It's not. Your position is that Southerners were evil and undeserving of commemoration regarding the Civil War, yet you instead keep defending your position that "slavery is evil," where our only difference is terminological.--Percy