By GEORGE A. KENDALL
A few thoughts on slave reparations, a topic again raising its ugly head:
People have been doing wrong to one another since Cain killed Abel. When the wrong is perpetrated by one group against another, the wronged group is likely to seek revenge against the wronging group, leaving the latter to in turn seek revenge on the former, setting up a cycle that can go on for generations or even centuries, long after the original wrongdoers and their victims are dead.
That is how blood feuds get started. This makes no sense as a way to restore order, which is what we should always be trying to do after a wrong has disturbed it.
What is behind the push for slave reparations is the notion that because some of the ancestors of some white people owned black slaves, the descendants of those black slaves have the right to have a perpetual hook in all white people. There are several flaws in that idea.
First of all, it is a recipe for perpetual racial warfare, when the common good requires that we seek peace. Eventually, whites will want to get revenge on blacks for inflicting reparations on them, and the vicious cycle will just go on.
And, of course, there is no easy way to know which white people are descended from slave owners. My ancestors on my father’s side for a number of generations were New Englanders, so I doubt that any of them owned slaves. (Furthermore, my great-grandfather served in the Union Army and died at Andersonville, and so could be said to have given his life to free blacks from slavery. That being the case, if reparations are passed, I and all Kendalls descended from him should be exempt.) My maternal ancestors were Germans who didn’t even get here until the 1870s.
Even if you assume that it is right for people to be punished for the sins of their ancestors, probably the ancestors of most whites today are innocent of the sin of slave ownership, since slave owners were always a minority.
And the idea of hereditary guilt is quite questionable. Our whole legal tradition sees guilt as inhering in the individual. That being the case, no one living today is responsible for the enslavement of black people.
And if anyone should still insist on punishing people for ancestral sins, it should be pointed out that slavery was a major institution in black Africa since time immemorial, and is alive and well today in many parts of that continent. In that case, black people living today could be required to pay reparations for the crimes of their slave-owning ancestors. But who would they pay them to? This is where the absurdity of the whole thing becomes obvious.
The truth about all this silliness is this: Black people were badly treated in America, first under slavery, then segregation. Eventually, the American people, through their representatives, made major efforts to do something about this. We put an end to state-mandated segregation and passed laws against discrimination in employment and other areas, while restoring voting rights.
This opened up great opportunities for black people. Many of them took advantage of these opportunities, and are doing very well as a result. But some chose not to, preferring to cling to a black underclass culture which is very destructive, spawning violent crime, gangs, illegitimacy, family breakdown, and so on. Until these people make up their minds to abandon that destructive culture and take advantage of the real opportunities our society offers them today, neither reparations nor any other gimmick is going to help them. The reforms made during the civil rights era of the 1950s and 1960s were the true slave reparations. That bill has been paid.
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Thoughts on equality:
There is a kind of equality that we have with one another because we are all human — we all have the form humanity, which defines us, and is also known as the image of God. This form is qualitative, not quantitative. You can’t be more human or less human, any more than you can be semi-pregnant or semi-dead.
There are no degrees of humanity, though certainly some of us do a better or a worse job of living in accordance with the image of God. Pope John Paul II certainly lived out his humanity more fully than did Hitler, for instance. But humanity is not in itself something that we can have more or less of.
So there are things that everyone deserves simply by virtue of his humanity, like the right to life and the respect for human dignity, even in a criminal. You may not murder someone who carries the image of God. And there we have equality.
But then there are things that philosophers call accidents, not tied to the person’s essence as human. These things are quantitative, measurable. Height is an example. One man may be taller than the other, but we cannot say that the tall guy is more human than the short guy. One may be more intelligent than the other, but this has no bearing on the humanity of either. Similarly, with wealth, good looks, and so on. It is these things that egalitarian ideologues try to make equal. But when they try to equalize these attributes, they actually attack the humanity in which we are truly equal.
There is an old Greek fable about this, involving a gentleman named Procrustes, who kept an inn with only one bed. If a guest was shorter than the bed, he would stretch him on the rack to make him fit. If the guest was longer, he would chop off as much of him as was necessary to make him fit. His zeal to make his guests equal led to violence against his humanity, including murder.
The same applies to other areas where modern politicians want to equalize us. If you want to make everyone equally wealthy, then you have to steal from those with more to give to those with less. If you try to make everyone equally intelligent, then you will have to inflict damage on the brains of the brighter people to bring them down to the level of the duller ones. Even to make people equally educated, you would have to deliberately under-educate or mis-educate the bright children to keep them from knowing more than the dim ones (actually, we’re doing that now).
The obsession with equality leads to acts of violence against our humanity. In places like Russia and China, many millions were murdered in this effort.
Of course, as a matter of social justice, it is necessary that society try to arrange things so that everyone has a sufficiency of the basic necessities. A substantial class of destitute people is an injustice to the individuals involved, and undermines the common good. And this too is an attack on our humanity.
But the quest to make everyone equal is toxic, and needs to be eliminated from our political thinking.
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An addendum to both the above items: More and more of our egalitarian ideologues show clear signs of being clinically insane.
Ideology always rejects reality in favor of an alternative “reality,” and tries to replace reality with that alternative reality, which Eric Voegelin called “second reality.”
When ideologues try to do this, it is, of course, extremely destructive to society as a whole, but it is also destructive to the ideologues themselves. Contemporary research on the brain is beginning to show that the brain can rewire itself in response to a person’s habits, ways of thinking, and choices. Ideology starts out as a disease of the soul but can end up being a disease of the brain as well.
Some of these people we see on the national news every night, including some presidential candidates (guess which party), arguably need to be confined to a nice home where they can be prevented from harming themselves or others. Of course, some of them may need the services of an exorcist as well.
(© 2019 George A. Kendall)
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