Annals of Perversion 1

Abolitionists. Hisotrians, and the Messianic Proghressives

The current situation in Venezuela, what may well be the coming collapse of Iran, both coming on the heels of the fall of the Assad regime and the abysmal failure in Afghanistan, has understandably resulted in a reasonable question: how do we know the situation won’t end up being worse? And those of us inclined to an even longer view can easily come up with more examples.

Depending on how we define “worse,” it may well end up that way, but I believe that’s missing the basic point. Or perhaps it’s because of series of interrelated developments in our country’s history that go far back in time. Far back: into the 1830s. Ideas that were simply one part of the intellectual perversions that flourished in that century, and still dog us today.

Daudet called them stupidities, but that’s defaming ordinary people. Only intellectuals can come up this level of nonsense. No ordinary person would believe ideas like Proudhon’s “Property s theft, capitalism is murder. Unless he was forced to learn them. Which is where historians come in.

The First Perversion: The Abolitionist Heresy

Now recently I was listening to the remarks of an imam, and he identified the error perfectly. My religion, he observed, is a guide to how I should live my life. It should have nothing to do with the state.

Yeah, that may come as a surprise, given the number of those who profess his religion but behave otherwise, but so what? Human beings have the ability to pervert anything and everything, Christians as easily as believers in Islam. And since we were founded as a Christian nation, that’s the religious deviation I have in mind.

But the religious nature of the individuals who agitated against slavery here is poor misunderstood. Even though it’s not like they tried to hide it. Yes, they were called Abolitionists, but when you look at their writings, their religious zealotry is easy to see.

See, for example, among the many, Maria Weston Chapman’s How Can I Help to Abolish Slavery? or, Counsels to the Newly Converted, and Lydia Maria Child’s Anti-slavery Catechism, published in 1839. In both cases the primary meanings of the key words (converted and catechism) are religious.

Mrs. Child, who was a prolific author on the subject, begins her text with an explanation of why she feels it is her “duty to to preach and publish abolition doctrines.” And when in the next sentence she speaks of her “duty as a Christian; for the system of slavery, as a whole, and in each one of its details, is in direct opposition to the precepts of the gospel,” she places herself firmly within the ranks of those Protestant sects in which each congregant was free to interpret the Scriptures as he or she chose.

That’s all very well, but here’s the problem. Although Lydia Child could insist she was a devout Christian until the cows came home, she wasn’t. Because she was a Unitarian: theologically speaking, Unitarians either aren’t Christians, or they’re heretics.

So let me be clear on this: the Abolitionists were heretical or heterodox Christians who wanted the state to conform to their moral principles, which they erroneously linked to being Christians, and if you actually plow through their publications, they did so stridently and aggressively.

So although in centuries past, Mrs. Child would have declared a heretic and burnt, by the time she was born (1802), she was just another member of a sectarian fringe group, of which the United States had a good many. I should point out that even if it is assumed that Unitarians are Christians, which clearly most established churches don’t, their membership is extremely small. Even today it’s less than two hundred thousand out of about two hundred million.

Given the religious zeal of the Abolitionists, their insistence that they alone were true Christians, and their radical and heterodox views, it’s not surprising that a good many people, while deploring the institution, disagreed with them.

For example, right before the start of the war, F. G. De Fontaine published a series of essays in the New York Herald analyzing the methods of the Abolitionists, and his essays were promptly published in book form as the History of American Abolitionism by Appleton in 1861.

Fontaine begins his history by observing that

There are two classes of persons opposed to the continued existence of slavery in the United States. The first are those who are actuated by sentiments of philanthropy and humanity, but are at the same time no less opposed to any disturbance of the peace or tranquility of the Union, or to any infringement of the powers of the States composing the confederacy.

Fontaine thus identifies two separate issues that, logically speaking, concerned the majority. The first was the practical problem of figuring out how slavery could be abolished without disturbing the “peace and tranquility of the Union.”

Mr. Fontaine put it perfectly, when he describes the movement as follows.

The real ultra abolitionists—the “reformers” who, in the language of Henry Clay, are “resolved to persevere at all hazards, and without regard to any consequences, however calamitous they may be. With them the rights of property are nothing; the deficiency of the powers of the general government is nothing; the acknowledged and incontestible [sic] powers of the State are nothing; civil war, a dissolution of the Union, and the overthrow of a government in which are concentrated the fondest hopes of the civilized world, are nothing. . . .”

Fontaine then characterizes these people as

Utterly destitute of Constitutional or other rightful power; living in totally distinct communities, as alien to the communities in which the subject on which they would operate resides, as far as concerns political power over that subject, as if they lived in Asia or Africa . . . .

I’ve selected these quotes because they should sound familiar. All the characteristics of the Abolitionists are still present, even though in most cases its adherents hardly consider themselves as being Christians.

But here’s the important point: asserting that your view is the only correct one, and everyone else is wrong, is not a tactic calculated to gain influence. On the contrary, it looks suspiciously like the obsessions of fanatics.

However, to observe that their fanaticism then plunged us into a bloody war as a result, is simply a misreading of history. A statement that demands an explanation. One that I suspect will be in some measure surprising.

The Basic Causes of the War of 1861-1865

Now I don’t subscribe to the currently fashionable (and basically compulsory) belief that the primary and exclusive cause of the war of 1861-65 was slavery, any more than I subscribe to the notion that it was ether a “rebellion” or a “civil war.”

In case you’d curious: it was a war of Secession, an entirely different idea, because in both categories by definition involve a struggle to determine who will rule the state. But in secession, one faction wants to leave the state, the other one to compel them to remain.

Wars are like most disasters, have more than one cause. In that, they’re like individual acts, are over determined: many causes, one effect.

Contemporaneous observers in Great Britain saw the main cause as economic, and unlike most of the Abolitionists and all future historians, they were there. For example, see the dispatches of the British journalist William Howard Russell, who was on the ground in the months before the war (his accounts are all available as downloadable e-texts). His detailed arguments were amplified by British analysts writing in the leading British newspapers at the time.

Now while I believe their analysis is correct, as far as it goes, I would argue that the most significant cause was actually philosophical. A profound philosophical disagreement occasioned by the fact that our founding documents didn’t actually specify a way to withdraw from the union.

So we had one group of educated and intelligent men arguing that since there was nothing forbidding it, it was allowed, and another, equally accomplished group arguing, that it was impossible to have a functioning union if one or more of its members could pull out if they didn’t like what the majority was doing.

So, for example, when, in the fall 1861, General Frémont eman­cipated the slaves in the Department of the West by decree, President Lincoln promptly counter­manded his order. Because the president was determined to preserve the union, even at cost of allowing slavery. Not an inference: he said that. He was like General Grant, hoping the secession crisis would be resolved. Grant expressed that hope perfectly.

Up to the battle of Shiloh [April 1862!] I, as well as thousands of other citizens, believed that the rebellion against the Government would collapse suddenly and soon, if a decisive victory could be gained over any of its armies.

This view was supported by a good many other distinguished individuals, from the editors of Harper’s Weekly to Nathaniel Hawthorne.

The Second Great Perversion: Historians

The belief that historians oftentimes construct their accounts to fit their ideas, their allegiances, or their politics, is hardly new. Even in the distant past, it was noted that that this was a difficult task, as the following quote from the Graeco-Roman historian Polybius makes clear (I’m using the translation by Michael Grant in The Ancient Historians:

When a man takes on the character of a historian, he will often have to praise and glorify his enemies in the highest terms, when their actions demand it, and often criticize and blame his dearest friends in the harshest language, when the errors in their conduct indicate it.

In the ensuing centuries, some of our most important historians amplified on this idea. Here’s an example from Voltaire.

History is nothing but a tableau of crimes and misfortunes.

Voltaire was no mean historian, and here is his sarcastic comment about the problem. It is found in his biography of Peter the Great.

Such repeated imputations, unsupported by any proofs, are rather the clamors of an impotent cabal, than the testimonies of history; but faction, when driven to acknowledge facts, will ever be endeavoring to alter circumstances and motives; and, unhappily, it is thus that all the histories of our times will be handed down to posterity so altered, that they will be unable to distinguish truth from falsehoods.

Writing roughly a century later, the celebrated English historian Thomas Babington Macaulay, not content with noting the problem, gave us an explanation of the reason why. It was not simply a matter of what was said by a faction.

Where history is regarded as a repository of title deeds, on which the rights of governments and nations depend, the motive to falsification becomes almost irresistible.

But I believe the most succinct explanation of the problem was given by W. A. Hirst around 1900:

Current ideas about history are very often wrong; they are often the repetition at third or fourth hand of an extremely indifferent authority.

And as far as the issue o slavery and the war goes, one of the earliest attempts to write an actual history of the war (1910), George Cary Eggleston, debunked the idea right off, when he observed that

It is easy to say that the war of 1861-65 grew out of slavery; that slavery existed and was defended at the South while it was antagonized at the North, and that the conflict arose out of that.

Eggleston then points out the obvious fallacies in the idea, observing that “no reader of intelligence is satisfied with such a reference as a substitute for explanation.”

But like a great many intelligent men and women, he failed to grasp the power of the stupidities that Daudet described.

The Third Perversion: Progressives and Wilsonians

I quite agree with Richard Gamble, who in 1983 wrote a fascinating book: The War for Righteousness: Progressive Christianity, the Great War, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation. The (mostly Protestant) “progressive” Christians of 19^th century America believed it was their duty, their destiny, to reform the morally corrupt nations of Europe, so they behaved in accordance with their principles.

But their zeal was both misguided and theologically incorrect, because the guides Christians are supposed to believe as coming from God are entirely concerned with living a morally good life. Although Professor Gamble doesn’t really get into this, the roots of what he correctly identifies in his title really go back to the Abolitionists, and explicitly so. It’s not like they kept their religious principles hidden.

Woodrow Wilson epitomized this zealotry. His mantra of “Making the World Safe for Democracy,” was a product of this messianic complex, and if you read his Fourteen Points, you’ll notice his repeated use of religious language like “covenants.”

In fact, although Professor Gamble doesn’t discuss this, it’s not much of an exaggeration to see the Fourteen Points, with its wild generalizations, muddled reasoning, Messianic language, as the guide for all the subsequent nation builders, the so-called “Neocons,” and so forth, which is why I’ve linked all of the above together.

And as hopefully most people are aware, Wilson not only didn’t make the world safe for democracy, not only made it a far worse place, but in the League of Nations, he created a machine for great mischief, as currently embodied by the United Nations aka the League Failed States.

And subsequent Wilsonians, regardless of their religious views (mostly the lack thereof) were basically doing the same thing, with their attempts to establish democratic governments in the world. It’s the foundation of a whole series of debacles: not only is it our duty to rid the world of people like the Shah of Iran, the dictator of Libya, and Saddam Hussein, but when we do we’ll be “making the world safe for democracy.”

In the 1930s, after the collapse of the monarchy, Spanish intellectuals were considering the idea of adopting our constitution, which to a degree had been done in some nations in Central and South America. A distinguished Spanish thinker commented that if they wanted an American type of government, they should import Americans.

He was correct, although I should add that the main reason our system works is more because of our great wealth than any inherent virtue we might possess. But I’ll develop that point in a subsequent post, as it’s not really grasped. Instead, I’ll conclude with a comparison.

The New Fanaticism

The socialist thinkers of the nineteenth century possessed the same fanatical certainties as the Anglo-American Abolitionists, and in fact were curiously parallel in that they were both determined to force their erroneous notions on everyone else.

Two different sorts of error, since one was religious, the other economic. But the ideas now generally and not incorrectly associated with Karl Marx were just as mistaken as Mrs. Child’s and her ilk. And as time passed, both triumphed.

I don’t believe either one argued that in order for their view to prevail, it was necessary to engage in violence. Arguing that Marx should be held responsible for the mass murders of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao is just as wrong as saying the Abolitionists are responsible for 1861-1865 war.

But errors are still errors. The Abolitionists didn’t just reject fundamental Christian theology. They perverted the fundamental purpose of of religious belief in favor of a political cause. The Marxists did the same thing with science. But that’s the subject of a subsequent post. And as is often the case, Goethe expressed the problem perfectly, back in 1828.

The truth must be repeated over and over again; because error is repeatedly preached among us, and not only by individuals, but by the masses. In periodicals and cyclopedias, in schools and universities—everywhere, in fact, error prevails, and is quite easy in the feeling that it has a decided majority on its side. Often, too, people teach truth and error together, and stick to the latter. . . . These people do not care a jot about thoughts and observations. They are satisfied only if they have words which can pass as current. . . .