This is a followup to my post of 7/16/2019, which dealt with the New Jersey Star-Ledger article Cory Booker demands study on reparations for slavery, decries ‘hideous legacy’ during historic House hearing. The article reports:
“Slavery is the original sin,” [Rep. Sheila] Jackson Lee said Wednesday. “Slavery has never received an apology."
The idea of slavery being America’s Original Sin is absurd on its face. But it is persistent, and must be countered, for it strikes at the very heart of Americanism. America is the Declaration of Independence. How is slavery consistent with
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. . .
Margaret Thatcher once famously said: “Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.” Did the slaves consent to being enslaved? No. Properly understood, America is a set of ideals. In fact America inherited slavery, humanity’s age-old scourge. America, in fact, abolished slavery.
The American Revolution was radically unique in history. Typically, revolutions involved the overthrow of one government and replacement by another, typically replacing one form of statism with another. America was different. Margaret Thatcher correctly observed: “America was created by philosophy." America was born amidst a titanic clash of ideas, the ancient ideas of statism and collectivism versus the new Enlightenment ideals of liberty and individualism.
The American Revolution was a victory for liberty and individualism on the battlefield of arms. But it was a battle, not the war. The wider war was on the battlefield of ideas--the philosophical battlefield. You can change a government overnight. But you can’t win a war of ideas overnight. Ideas are about changing minds. The mind is an individual attribute. So you win the war of ideas one mind at a time. Therefore, ideas take time to penetrate a culture. The American Revolution, being a philosophical revolution, was a huge step forward. But it was a battle, not the final victory of the overarching war. The Philosophical war predated America, and continued after. From the start of America, the forces of statism/collectivism have been pushing back. The current attempt to recast America as a slave state is part of that statist/collectivist reaction against freedom/individualism.
This longrunning war of ideas is the context by which the current debate about slavery’s place in American history must be understood. The abolition of slavery and the defeat of racist Jim Crow law is what defines America, because they represent the victory of American ideals of individual rights and political equality. Of course, those ideals don’t always win. Sometimes, the reactionaries regroup. More progress needs to be achieved. But American ideals are key to finishing the job.
Slavery is not America’s Original Sin. Yes, slavery is a sin. But it is not America’s Original Sin. Original Sin, Christianity’s vicious “gift” to humanity, tars every human as irredeemably guilty, for which penance must be perpetually paid, with no chance of ever paying off the debt of guilt for a sin committed long ago, and reaching moral redemption. Applied to America, Original Sin condemns this great nation as irredeemably corrupt and evil, perpetually made to atone for that guilt by paying endlessly with its freedom and wealth through whatever socialist schemes the peddlers of Original sin deem needed for atonement. Thank you Christianity.
None of this is true. Yes, America’s promise of universal individual rights, equality, and justice was an unfinished promise. Nevertheless, America is a nation of original virtue. It’s principles are the death warrant for slavery and tyranny of man over man. The revolutionary ideology that grew in the American British colonies in the years that led up to America’s 1776 Declaration of Independence triggered the first ever systematic moral opposition to slavery, as the anti-slavery implications of their revolutionary ideals of equality and liberty became increasingly evident throughout the colonies and beyond (p. 232-246). Martin Luther King put it brilliantly. In his commemoration of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation on its 100th birthday, King said:
If our nation had done nothing more in its whole history than to create just two documents, its contribution to civilization would be imperishable. The first of these documents is the Declaration of Independence and the other is that which we are here to honor tonight, the Emancipation Proclamation. All tyrants, past, present and future, are powerless to bury the truths in these declarations, no matter how extensive their legions, how vast their power and how malignant their evil.
King was not describing a nation of Original Sin. A nation Founded on these truths, no matter its flaws in practice, is a nation of irreplaceable, Original Virtue.
Related Reading:
On New Jersey’s Proposed Bill to Study Racial Reparations
‘Reparations’; Another Leftist Path to Socialism
Obama's Collectivist Manifesto-Part 1...the "Original Sin" gambit
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, by Bernard Bailyn: Fiftieth Anniversary Edition
America's Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It by C. Bradley Thompson
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