Why Do You Bring Up That Old Shit?

How the idea that slavery was wrong came about and how it became politically effective are hardly trivial.  The evil of forcing other people into misery so that the product of their labor can be stolen from them, without legal risk is one of the greater themes of evil in human history.  It always advantages those with more power to compel that theft and the establishments raised with the wealth accumulated and the social habits instilled have made those forms of theft customary and resistance to them a conventional wrong.   Considering the persistence of de facto slavery, which I see becoming more acceptable even here in the United States than it was even forty years ago, that's an important question.  It is related to how egalitarian democracy came about, hardly a trivial matter.  I think the casual acceptance trade agreements that lead to a wage slavery and the importation of things made by slave labor and the use of prison labor here make those things entirely relevant and important.   Slavery is here and now, it it wasn't in the remote past.

The key issue for me is how ideas that were such a disadvantage to those with power gained enough influence and force to force legal changes in the status of slavery are more important than the merely abstract, academic treatment of them and I think that it was clearly because people were convinced that it was a requirement of living according to the teachings of Jesus and the prophets in the Jewish tradition.  I doubt that without that level of of inhibition, being convinced that it is against the commandments of how we are supposed to live our lives, that doing the right thing will overcome the pervasive selfishness and other corruptions that are the motives for oppressing other people as it is possible for some people to do.

That's as true today as it was in the fourth century, the fifteenth, sixteenth or nineteenth centuries.   The forms of enslavement and oppression might change to skirt any laws that might exist, judges and governments will find ways to enable those legal fictions as easily as our present Supreme Court does, law schools and their fellow lawyers and scholars will give them the words to cover that up with as it did the courts in the time of the Dred Scott decision during slavery, the Plessy v. Ferguson court did, continuing de facto slavery after abolition and the present day court dismantling the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts passed in the mid 1960s.  Only a morally convinced population will resist that and it has to be an effective majority of that population.  I doubt that mere secularism will do that.  I don't believe a secular society will, actually, retain the strength of belief that will make that possible.

That it convinced Quakers, Presbyterians and others to free slaves they held even as such gods of secular enlightenment babblers about liberty as Jefferson, Madison  held people in slavery tells us a lot about the difference between mere words and actually living according to them.   

Another ornament of the secular enlightenment, Benjamin Franklin, held two people in slavery and ran ads for the slave trade in his newspaper.  Some of the things I've read attribute his conversion to abolitionism to his experience of British oppression.  Who can know?   I can point out that  when he, eventually, was convinced of the wrongness of slavery  and he freed them,  it was a group begun by and largely consisting of Quakers, the Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and the Relief of Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage, that he joined up with.  By that time the great and early abolitionist John Woolman had already convinced most if not all of the Quakers he had contact with to forbid owning slaves.  He had died on an anti-slavery mission to Britain thirteen years before Franklin's conversion.  He'd published his first major anti-slavery essay,  "Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes",  decades earlier.  I would be surprised if either that or his other anti-slavery writings and efforts were unknown to Franklin.  As I have been showing, the condemnation of slavery on the grounds that it was incompatible with The Bible goes back much farther and it seems to come up even among people who were unaware of those earlier documents as they read those scriptures and take commandments such as "The Golden Rule" seriously.   Those commandments go right back to the earliest books in the tradition.  I don't think anyone would take those seriously if they didn't really believe they were divine commands as to how we were to lead our lives.

That slave labor in the past century and today was found at its most official and in the largest numbers has been in states which also suppress religion has also forced me to think hard about the left and its relationship with those states.

If atheists had not lied about the origins of abolitionism and so many other things, lies that are obvious to anyone who reads the primary literature, if they had not attacked the status of human beings as the possessors of rights and moral obligations with the ability to think freely I'd probably not have taken these matters up.   As it is every single time I have looked into things which atheists have successfully inserted into the common received wisdom that we depend on as opposed to actually reading and studying such things, I've found out that they are largely false or distorted.  The history of abolitionism, the nature and history of Darwinism, the Galileo legend,  the motives that led to the establishment of egalitarian democracy, the nature and history of of the Marxist left (I will note that it was something Marx, himself seems to have rejected when he declared he wasn't a Marxist).   In each of those and others, I've found that the things I'd been taught from secondary and tertiary sources on those are mostly fabrications with a clear ideological motive behind them.  That, frankly, makes me angry, to have found out that we've been lied to.   The alternative is to be found in the actual liberal tradition which, in each and every case I've found, was either motivated by real, believing religious people or which had their effective force from religious people.   That is a genuine leftist tradition which will have to be uncovered and promoted, its genuine character borne out in its being able to convince people and actually do things.

I have seen the rise of a mostly secular "left," frankly motivated primarily by a hatred of religion,  in the United States over the past half century and with the shoving aside of the religious left and defections from it.   I've seen the left go from being able to pass those great Civil Rights laws to utter and total impotence in that time.  I think that lack of religious conviction mixed with idiotically buying the false myths of Marxists, anarchists, etc. was virtual suicide for the left.   Any left that could tolerate and retain the Stalinists even as the mass murders and show trials and oppression of workers and others were common knowledge entirely discredited itself.  Now, looking with a clearer eye at the Western left of that period, those people are as repulsive to me as the right who supported Hitler and Mussolini.  Those who supported Mao and Maoist terrorists in other countries are as bad, though, as far as we know, they weren't in the actual pay of Mao as some in the Communist Party were from the Soviet government.

I think finding out that the Rosenbergs depite what I'd been told since the 1950s, were, in fact, involved with nuclear espionage was also a watershed event in my evolution from a conventional, pseudo-leftist to a real leftist.   I am still dealing with the scandal of even some of my great heroes of the left making idiotic statements about attacks on the Pol Pot regime as being Western imperialism, painful as it is to consider what that really meant and means.  This has been a painful evolution but a necessary one.   I'm morally obligated to tell the truth about what I find, I believe that because I believe God wants people to tell the truth, I believe I'm required to.