Something that strikes me as original in Sowell’s thinking is the explanation of racial animosities in the United States through political-ideological polarization. As we saw in the last text, it all started with a demographic confusion between race and culture: the majority of blacks in the United States were from the redneck culture; they migrated from the agrarian South to the industrial North, and non-mixed whites, the majority in the United States, consider that all blacks are like that, disregarding the half-dozen free blacks that were there before the rural exodus. Such blacks, those from the North, studied in schools along with whites and enjoyed citizenship, since the US Constitution does not speak of race.
Sowell’s theory is the following: being the West an exceptionality in the history of slavery, there was a tendency towards the gradual abolition of such an institution in the United States. This process ceased to be peaceful because of the Abolitionist Movement, which emerged among the puritanical whites of the North.
There is a great confusion of terms there, mainly because of the peaceful connotation that the term “abolition” has in Brazil. Our abolitionists were peaceful and moderate; they weren’t advocating taking up arms to invade states or anything. It was all sewn together, there was no war, and when Princess Isabel’s final stroke came, few Brazilians were still slaves. Both because of the large number of blacks who managed to buy their own manumission, and because of the persuasion of the abolitionist campaign, which led the masters themselves to free their slaves.
To have an idea of the virulence of the original Abolitionist Movement, the information brought by Sowell suffices that Frederick Douglass was blamed for having bought his own freedom and getting even with the law, because in this way he “legitimized” slavery. The consequences Douglass would face as a legal fugitive were simply beside the point; what mattered was to reaffirm one’s convictions, without any regard for the cost and benefit of actions.
Another important difference in relation to Brazil is that the Abolitionist Movement was regional; it was from one region of the country against another. The urban and puritanical North, made up of those fanatical religious communities, decided that the rural and promiscuous South had to end slavery. The result was a bloody Civil War, which, according to Sowell, killed one person for every six freed slaves. It was the war that caused the most casualties in the entire history of the country.
So being an Abolitionist and being in favor of ending slavery were different things. Lincoln and John Randolph were not from the Abolitionist Movement, but both were in favor of ending slavery at some point. Without children, both left their crops and manumission as an inheritance for their slaves.
Exceptionality of the West
One of the premises of his theory is obvious and ululating, yet denied by tireless revisionist propaganda: slavery was a banal fact of human societies across the globe, until the West decided to end it. The first organized religion to decide that slavery had to end were the Quakers, and the first country to spend a lot of money to stop the slave trade was England.
One thing he doesn’t mention, but is noteworthy, is that the idea of ending slavery has its origins in Ancient Greece. Popper addresses it in “The World of Parmenides”. Plato’s “Menexenus” would be a slave response to Pericles’ anti-slavery proposals. Popper reads Plato as an apologist for Sparta and a saboteur of the Enlightenment ideals of Athens.
According to Sowell, the historical revisionism that paints black slavery as a unique phenomenon, and that puts bad whites on the hunt good negroes, opened with the novel “Roots: The Saga of an American Family”, by Alex Haley, published in 1976 . Haley himself said that he wasn’t too concerned with facts, as he wanted to give black people a myth to go by. Yet an ignorant historical novel is treated in American schools as representing historical truth.
But to convince the reader of the peculiarity of the West, he compares the day when The Golden Law came out in Brazil on the day slavery was abolished in Turkey. Here, there was widespread celebration in the streets. As happy as they were, however, Brazilians never ceased to be ashamed of being the last western country to end slavery. In the Ottoman Empire, in 1855, the mob murdered the Sultan’s emissaries charged with announcing the ban on the slave trade and the law did not catch on. In 1860, when there was a new attempt to enforce the law, the emissaries were afraid to give the announcement and the law did not catch on again. The sultan only legislated under British pressure.
Slavery was the norm in the world and the British Empire offended various cultural traditions with its ethical imperative. To get an idea of the novelty of abolitionism, Sowell says that the first organized religious group to adopt it were the Quakers. Before that, the Catholic Church, although it disliked slavery, left the settling of accounts for the next life. She tried to improve the condition of black slaves and prevent the enslavement of Indians. And one thing that Sowell doesn’t mention, but that is very important to mark the differences between Brazil and the United States, is that the Church forbade human polygyny. All were equal and children of Adam and Eve. Protestants allowed polygyny, so it allowed to speak of racial hierarchy.
Fear in the United States
Sowell doesn’t say it with all the letters, but his wish is implicit that the end of slavery in the United States would have been like in Brazil: gradual and peaceful. According to him, there was a tendency among slaveholders in his country, similar to that of Brazilians, of freeing slaves, who were getting used to a free life without major bumps. However, two things impeded this process: the fact that the United States is a democracy and that the North has become aggressive towards the South.
Democracy fears the entry of a new mass of voters; therefore, the fear of the political elite would be reasonable in the US and unreasonable in Brazil. In this Sowell is wrong, because Brazil was a parliamentary monarchy that voted for congressmen and councilors. Soon, Brazilian politicians would also have reason to fear the entry of a new mass of voters. The difference is that we had no reason to think that blacks are of a different quality from other humans, since the Church did not form us that way.
Anyway, the fear of the political elite led her to forbid lords from manumission without going through bureaucracy. Even so, southern society was bigger than that and there were villages of blacks who were free in fact , even though they were slaves under the law, because of bureaucracy.
Let’s move on to the other reason, which is a corruption of the debate in the United States. Although he does not quote Weber, Thomas Sowell is very fond of the subject he discusses in distinguishing ethics from responsibility and ethics from conviction. Max Weber, in “Science and Politics”, condemns anyone who adopts an ethical principle as an inflexible guide to conduct, regardless of the consequences: “When the consequences of an act performed by pure conviction turn out to be unpleasant, the supporter of such ethics will not attribute responsibility to the agent, but to the world, to the foolishness of men or to the will of God, who thus created men. The supporter of the ethics of responsibility, on the contrary, will rely on the common weaknesses of man. and he will understand that he cannot throw the foreseeable consequences of his own actions on the shoulders of others”. Thomas Sowell defends the ethics of responsibility using the conservative vocabulary of Edmund Burke and John Randolph of Roanoke. Both speak pejoratively of those who reason on the basis of “abstract principles”.
In addition to the lack of pragmatism and lack of commitment to the consequences, the highly inflamed rhetoric of the partisans of virtue ethics led to a tightening of positions that could only end in war. If, on the one hand, abolitionists wanted a sudden revolution, regardless of feasibility, on the other hand, a virulent reaction arose in the South that sought to justify slavery both through racism and legal positivism. It was the polarized climate of opinion that led to the war, not material conditions or anything else.
I close by quoting Sowell: “Only those at the opposite ends of the spectrum of opinion thought the question of slavery too easy: people like Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, who wanted to keep blacks in slavery indefinitely, and William Lloyd Garrison of Massachusetts, who advocated the immediate emancipation of blacks with full citizenship rights. Ironically, both reasoned from abstract principles – legalistic principles, in the case of Calhoun, and moralistic, in the case of Garrison.”
Our peaceful, conservative rather than revolutionary abolition , should be celebrated again. The love of civil wars is for butcher Marxists.
