LanDroid wrote:Mr. Tulip appears to take the side that yes, bloodshed and deceit are indeed required for human progress and goes further, claiming that just examining evil that takes place "impugns" the inevitable march of progress.

My statement was “By Zinn focusing on the emotional pain, destruction and evil of the moment of contact, the whole creative destruction that enabled modernity is impugned.” ‘Impugn’ means “dispute the truth, validity, or honesty of (a statement or motive); call into question.” It seems clear that a focus on evil events does call into question the motives of the agents of conquest and the overall legitimacy of systems built upon genocide, impugning the capitalist system as morally bereft.

Whether that critical deconstruction of empire is a good thing is not a simple question. Politically, the usual inference drawn from this impugning of systems of mass exploitation is that these systems should be replaced by methods that have higher respect for the rights and dignity of the poor. Unfortunately that is not so easy. Some people imagine that subsistence peasantry is a better lifestyle than factory work. And yet the poor of China and many other countries show clear preference for the cash income of industrial labour, despite the regimented and unsafe conditions. Political activists focus on stoking resentment about negative aspects of change, while often ignoring positive aspects of how economic growth provides opportunity. Finding a settled balanced viewpoint is not easy.

This debate is in sharp relief in Australia, with the 250th anniversary in 2020 of the 1770 discovery of New South Wales by Captain Cook, when he claimed sovereignty over Australia for the king of England. ‘Captain Cook’ is often used by aborigines as a metaphor for everything bad about white society and its celebration of invasion. Meanwhile Cook remains a hero for the white settler society, as an intrepid adventurer and scientist whose heroism and brilliance as a representative of modern enlightenment opened Australia to contact with the emerging global trading system.

If England had not invaded Australia and the USA, then France, Holland, Germany, Spain, Portugal, and even Japan and China were nearly ready. Like in the Americas, the stone age economy supporting a tiny population could not compete against the industrial systems of the modern world, and aboriginal people were viewed with disdain and incomprehension by colonists due to their primitive technology and simple social organisation without kings and armies.

That does not justify deceit, although there is the famous comment from the Sioux Chief Red Cloud that ‘the white man made many promises but only kept one, they promised to take our land and they took it.’ The economic driver for the westward expansion of the frontier was too great for moral sentiment of restraint to be effective.

LanDroid wrote:Presumably he agrees that repressing stories of genocide and abuse are required to maintain the sunny façade of progress.

Far from it. I hold to the core Christian principle that the last are first in the kingdom of God. Progress can only retain a mandate of legitimacy through a rigorous and transparent accountability, honouring the suffering of the oppressed. Façades serve to conceal and promote corruption. What I would like to repress is the attitude of resentment that uses stories of genocide as rent-seeking bargaining chips, so the descendants of the murdered learn to live on inter-generational social welfare instead of participating in the broader society on an equal basis. The Bible says that trauma is inter-generational. Overcoming trauma requires forgiveness and reconciliation, which in turn require repentance, with the guilty admitting and understanding their error and exhibiting genuine sorrow. Too often the political movements of reconciliation and recognition are captured by leftist ideology, using the poor and deprived as pawns by fomenting hostility in ways that destroy potential for equal participation in the modern economy.

LanDroid wrote: This is a false dichotomy. When the English arrived in North America, they didn't know what they were doing and were starving. They could have requested help, cooperated, and negotiated more peaceful terms. A devastating coast to coast invasion including the massive importation of slaves was not required to transfer technology in both directions. But being so arrogant they were unable to treat the Indians as anywhere near equal and were incapable of abiding by the terms of their own agreements.

There is something depraved about the settler ideology. That should not surprise, given the first point of the Calvinist Puritan Tulip acrostic http://www.reformationtheology.com/2013 ... ummary.php believed by the Mayflower pilgrims was Total Depravity, meaning a radical corruption encompassing all of human life as a result of the fall from grace. The Puritans themselves were gripped by this psychotic delusion of depravity, which produced a radical alienation from indigenous culture as beyond the pale of civilised property and propriety. That attitude of separation made the cooperative model you describe psychologically impossible. Zinn mentions the extreme opprobrium meted to settlers who fraternised with Indians as equals, or who recognised that Indians were happier than the conformist city with its imagined light on the hill. Again, it is reasonable to ask if the USA could have achieved the world leading manifest destiny that providence has bestowed if its founders had lacked this narrow manic discipline.

LanDroid wrote:And so continued the genocide for well over a hundred years... We must examine history fearlessly in order to learn.

Genocide of indigenous people continued physically until recent times, and continues as cultural genocide today. I know it seems a radical challenge to question the secular saints of the age of discovery such as Columbus and Cook, and yet we should also have the courage to enquire about the political implications of this revaluation. Communists were able to rely on this mass resentment of what Lenin called ‘Imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism’ to trick people into accepting dictatorship by a clique, with complete destruction of private property rights and freedom of speech and thought. Stalin and Mao were greater mass murderers than Hitler. So yes, be fearless, but include a rigorous critique of the major anti-capitalist movements of world history alongside a balanced analysis of the frontier wars waged by the west.

Robert Tulip wrote: If England had not invaded Australia and the USA, then France, Holland, Germany, Spain, Portugal, and even Japan and China were nearly ready. Like in the Americas, the stone age economy supporting a tiny population could not compete against the industrial systems of the modern world, and aboriginal people were viewed with disdain and incomprehension by colonists due to their primitive technology and simple social organisation without kings and armies.

And this reminds me of what an English friend said to me about colonial oppression under the British: You really would have had something to complain about if you'd been under the Spanish or the French! And truth be told, the British might have nurtured a republic into being.

You've wrestled with some tough complexities in your post and done it well. I become uncomfortable when I consider myself as the inheritor of a history that appalls me in some respects but has me as its beneficiary. Somewhere Yeats wrote about the violent men that came before him and did nasty work so that he could stand in a place of relative safety. It's always easy to take moral high ground when there's no cost to doing it.

To Robert Tulip:

I have done further research on the quote "History is written by the winners/victors/conquerors." It has indeed been attributed to Churchill. It has also been attributed to Hitler, Napoleon, George Orwell, and even Dan Brown. Probably the original statement is lost in the mists of history.

Cattleman wrote:To Robert Tulip:

I have done further research on the quote "History is written by the winners/victors/conquerors." It has indeed been attributed to Churchill. It has also been attributed to Hitler, Napoleon, George Orwell, and even Dan Brown. Probably the original statement is lost in the mists of history.

Hi Cattleman, thanks for following up on this point about history being written by victors, which illustrates the paradoxical nature of Zinn’s effort to write history from the viewpoint of the losers, and of the Christian doctrine that the last are first in the kingdom of God.

http://blogs.tribune.com.pk/story/447/n ... reed-upon/ provides a good and relevant discussion of Napoleon’s famous statement that history is just agreed myth. The view that failure to remember the past condemns us to repeat it, as said by Santayana and allegedly Churchill, conflicts with the purpose of school history to provide political indoctrination rather than accurate knowledge of the past.

These are difficult moral problems, since patriotism, national pride, loyalty, trust and belonging enable social identification, character and purpose. These moral values are promoted by positive messages about the national past, and undermined by negative history messages.

Rising empires are built on confidence about identity and direction. When an empire loses confidence in its identity and direction, it is on a path to collapse. Without what Napoleon called an agreed myth, or what the Psalmist called vision of divine law, or what Chinggis Khan called the eternal blue sky, or what Plato described as the noble lie of the golden age, or what Chinese history calls the mandate of heaven, a nation or people cannot freely hold together in a cultural and political sense.

The suspicion held by traditionalists toward negative history arises from a view that knowledge of facts is less important than national duty. When facts serve to cast duty into doubt, the traditional view is that the facts should be suppressed. Whether that view is good is a dilemma.

http://www.age-of-the-sage.org/history/ ... story.html has a lot of good quotes about history. Emerson said ‘’a man is a knot of roots whose flower and fruitage is the world.’ This sense of history as constructed by story, as the fruit of perceived connections, illustrates the mythological nature of meaning, with our horizon of care and concern exercising world-creating power.

Orwell’s comment in 1984 that those who control the present control the past and those who control the past control the future is another good paraphrase of the Churchill quote.

Today I visited a rather crazy creepy place called New Norcia, in the remote outback of Western Australia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Norci ... _Australia
It made me think of this discussion, on Zinn’s deconstruction of the motives and myths surrounding the American colonial enterprise.

One of the great source writers for deconstruction is Friedrich Nietzsche, who inspired a famous phrase ‘the hermeneutics of suspicion’. What that means is that interpretation of claims people make in philosophy and history should be treated as suspect, due to the common tendency to distort.

The New Norcia wiki page explains that the Catholics settled this remote place in 1846, aiming to Christianise the natives. The issue at New Norcia, apart from its recent notoriety as the worst paedophile centre in Australia, is what motivated the Roman Catholic Church to establish this incredibly remote mission.

To my reading, it was probably less about Christianising Aborigines than protecting them from genocide. The southwest corner of Western Australia is now a wheat belt, and with expansion over the last century has become one of the most productive cereal production farming regions in the world. In the early nineteenth century, the local Aborigines stood in the way of this economic enterprise by British settlers.

By and large, the response to this impediment to productivity was murder, applying the dictum later made famous by Joseph Stalin, ‘no man no problem’. The need for an Aboriginal orphanage at New Norcia raises the question of why the parents had died. Australia had between one million and three million inhabitants in 1788, the year of British settlement. By Federation in 1901, the aboriginal population had fallen to 90,000, a reduction of more than 90%, mainly due to the combination of bullets and disease, in an unknown proportion.

Christian missions to Aborigines had an explicit motto of ‘smoothing the dying pillow’, meaning that White Australia assumed that Aborigines were so primitive they were destined for extinction. The policy known as ‘dispersal’ involved killing every Aboriginal who could be found in an area of agricultural promise, which is why the Aborigines surviving today are mainly from parts of Australia that were less attractive to white farmers. Since this dispersal policy upset liberal Londoners, it was conducted in secret.

There are many aspects of monastic life that promote psychological distortion. I have long thought that the monastic attitudes to the human body derived from Christian theology have an element of perversity, as does the overall Christian confusion between the literal and the symbolic. Mariolatry serves to reinforce that perversity with its paradoxical veneration of the virgin mother.

Placing such a medieval mentality in New Norcia, with a concealed motivation of picking up the pieces from a secret genocide, makes it hardly surprising that after a few generations the original saintly reasoning would be forgotten, and the missionaries would give way to misfits.

Howard Zinn revisits how the Americans dealt with the native population in Chapter 7. It makes for fairly depressing reading. Almost anyone reading about this shameful era would wish that we Americans had been better, though to wish that is also to wish ourselves out of existence. I mean that any such major revision of history skewers entirely the record of births that led up to the production of the particular person I call "myself."

Zinn doesn't argue against the term "American Exceptionalism," but clearly he argues against the same idea. His purpose is to point out that, contrary to the textbooks written for schoolchildren and the typical 4th of July rhetoric, America has plenty of the standard-issue flaws that inflicted other imperial nations. (This might be the only point on which Zinn and Donald Trump might agree. Trump said in 2013 that he disagreed with American Exceptionalism). Perhaps the major imperial flaw is to treat the current occupants as scourges to be eliminated. Now had America integrated rather than exterminated native peoples, maybe that would be a good case for claiming exceptionalism.

DWill wrote:. Almost anyone reading about this shameful era would wish that we Americans had been better, though to wish that is also to wish ourselves out of existence. I mean that any such major revision of history skewers entirely the record of births that led up to the production of the particular person I call "myself."

I agree that one must wish for better behavior, but not that the alternative would have been no "me" or "we". The most striking thing about the first chapter (all I have read so far) is the wanton nature of Columbus' mistreatment and exploitation of the Arawaks, by comparison with their simple innocence. It was a person striving to get power and glory in a system geared toward military ferocity. (The Inquisition against "converso" Jews was mostly about desire to confiscate their property. The war against the Moors was a war of expulsion, in the context of a struggle over who would dominate the peasants.)

It would have been understood by the Europeans of the time that dominance was the only way to BE civilized - poverty was just a horror show. You had to dominate the peasants to extract taxes, and you had to extract taxes to own the horses and weapons with which to dominate the peasants. The Scholastics, such as Thomas Aquinas, attempted to justify the position of the noble ruling class by saying they defended the land against even worse treatment by outsiders wanting to take the land, and there was some truth to that, but in general the peasants didn't do a lot better or worse if Carthaginians were replaced by Romans or Romans by Goths or Goths by Moors. The peasants were seen as a resource, like land or forest, and any who were not defended by military force were a free resource. Might as well take some home and sell it, or if you didn't have much space in the ships, kill them for sport. Their land would be taken anyway.

Is it true that that was the only way to organize a civilized society? No, of course not. It was just the way that worked out, given the difficulty of organizing an alternative. A "forced move" in Dennett's sense, but not one that culture could never have found a way around.

DWill wrote: Perhaps the major imperial flaw is to treat the current occupants as scourges to be eliminated. Now had America integrated rather than exterminated native peoples, maybe that would be a good case for claiming exceptionalism.

That same question still persists, as has been observed. The Republicans of the 80s introduced "trade not aid" as an approach to the problem of less developed countries, and with Europe agreeing and Japan willing to go along, got a huge reduction in tariffs against developing country output, with enormous consequences for relieving poverty in the world.

That is how it looks for the poor to be "integrated rather than", in our case, shut out from a realistic chance of bidding for the scarcest resources. It still remains to be seen whether actual integration will take place, with both cultures learning from the other and each having a fair shot at defining its own future. Some are intent on still treating the whole business as a conflict between systems of, essentially, controlling the workers.

What is most striking to me is that we in the West believe there is an actual alternative to conflict. We have seen the possibilities unleashed by education and industry, and we no longer see history as essentially a nasty battle for domination. Among the many shocking developments is a leveling off of population, (likely to be clear and present in 30 years with the necessary decline in birth rates already in place)! Civilization has reached escape velocity from the poverty that made struggle for domination the only way to be civilized.

Our ability to look back on Columbus and Cortez and see their brutality is a sign of great hope.

Harry Marks wrote:I agree that one must wish for better behavior, but not that the alternative would have been no "me" or "we".

Strictly speaking that is a logical fallacy. To say I wish the past had been different is to say I wish I did not exist in my current form, since I am the causal product of past history. This issue of identity, causality and conscience raises the problem of moral assessment of depravity, and the causes and impact of the apparent total depravity of Columbus. I view it against the lens of Christian theology, that confession, sorrow, understanding, reconciliation and repentance can produce forgiveness, mercy, love and grace. But the problem is to say what is right and wrong. For example, Zinn implies that property is evil. Against that line, Locke held that property is the basis of sustained prosperity and growth. Until such basic moral questions are sorted, there is no prospect of reconciliation. A similar moral problem is about identity, with the balance between identity constituted as a free individual and as a member of society.

Harry Marks wrote: The most striking thing about the first chapter (all I have read so far) is the wanton nature of Columbus' mistreatment and exploitation of the Arawaks, by comparison with their simple innocence. It was a person striving to get power and glory in a system geared toward military ferocity. (The Inquisition against "converso" Jews was mostly about desire to confiscate their property. The war against the Moors was a war of expulsion, in the context of a struggle over who would dominate the peasants.)

That frames the problem well. I think of it in terms of the evolution of metallic arms races in Eurasia, per Jared Diamond, which produced a moral framework that you aptly call ferocity. The shift of the Genesis mentality of dominion from stewardship to domination was at the ground of this steady alienation of European civilisation from nature, and hence its ability to utterly dominate indigenous cultures where natural identity was prized. Unfortunately this alienated domination for profit has gained the whole world at the cost of loss of soul, a result that Jesus cautioned against.

Harry Marks wrote: It would have been understood by the Europeans of the time that dominance was the only way to BE civilized - poverty was just a horror show. You had to dominate the peasants to extract taxes, and you had to extract taxes to own the horses and weapons with which to dominate the peasants. The Scholastics, such as Thomas Aquinas, attempted to justify the position of the noble ruling class by saying they defended the land against even worse treatment by outsiders wanting to take the land, and there was some truth to that, but in general the peasants didn't do a lot better or worse if Carthaginians were replaced by Romans or Romans by Goths or Goths by Moors. The peasants were seen as a resource, like land or forest, and any who were not defended by military force were a free resource. Might as well take some home and sell it, or if you didn't have much space in the ships, kill them for sport. Their land would be taken anyway.

Yes, this pins the moral dilemma of western civilization, and reminds me of Gandhi’s observation in the context of the Raj that western civilization would be a very good idea. Domination is intrinsically barbaric, and yet the propaganda of classics has claimed the reverse, that barbarism is a quality of the savages outside the pale of the civilized. To civilise means to regiment into a productive secure hierarchy, conquering natural impulses in favour of constructed spiritual myths. Again, I think the fallen state of civilization is something well critiqued in the Gospels, and the twisting of Christendom to reinterpret this basic message of conscience into a blessing on domination is a key reason why Christianity is viewed with growing moral ambivalence and even repugnance in the secular world.

Harry Marks wrote: Is it true that that was the only way to organize a civilized society? No, of course not. It was just the way that worked out, given the difficulty of organizing an alternative. A "forced move" in Dennett's sense, but not one that culture could never have found a way around.

I question the nuance of your ‘of course not’. The essential problem in what has rightly been called conquest of the world by Europe’s warring states is that their mutual competitiveness drove cultural evolution of domination which meant if the Spaniards had accepted the common humanity of subaltern groups they would have failed in their endeavours of imperial victory, and other more ruthless powers would have prevailed over them. The difficulty of organising an alternative is another way of saying that more civil and respectful attitudes were conquered by military power, so had no prospect of achieving state control. That helps to explain Marx’s theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat, that the only way to shift to a more equal society was paradoxically through centralised control of the state.

Harry Marks wrote: What is most striking to me is that we in the West believe there is an actual alternative to conflict. We have seen the possibilities unleashed by education and industry, and we no longer see history as essentially a nasty battle for domination.

That is an essential point regarding the emergence of the material conditions required for the Christian principle that the last will be first. Such pie in the sky was simply impossible under the moral framework of domination by swords, and yet now with the rise of technological abundance the power of language is gradually becoming greater than the power of physical control. This is a slow meme, but global existence is steadily showing that dialogue and partnership are better sources of security than military power. That however is a millennial theme, and it is dangerous to imagine anyone can suddenly bring on the millennium by rejecting property and borders and armies and the other mechanisms of hierarchical control that ensure political stability.

Harry Marks wrote:Civilization has reached escape velocity from the poverty that made struggle for domination the only way to be civilized.

No, civilisation has not reached escape velocity, although maybe it will soon. We still face the possibility of a Challenger disaster, a crash and burn before we reach orbit. Climate change is the biggest problem, that unless we remove the excess carbon from the air immediately we will face the collapse of civilization. But fixing the climate will be the decisive step to what you very usefully call civilization reaching escape velocity. This is where I take the strategic view that emission reduction can only lead to war, as confrontation with the alienated culture of fossil fuels will lose. Carbon removal is the only path to climate stability and sustained global abundance.

Harry Marks wrote: Our ability to look back on Columbus and Cortez and see their brutality is a sign of great hope.

Some hope yes, great hope I don’t know. I still admire the pioneers and discoverers for their creative destruction, even if that is a morally complex position. The challenge in seeing brutality is not to take a simplistic moral position that condemns brutality as evil, given that the regrettable brutal history of conquest has sadly been a necessity in shifting the world into the conditions needed to establish a new unified global paradigm.

Robert Tulip wrote:Strictly speaking that is a logical fallacy. To say I wish the past had been different is to say I wish I did not exist in my current form, since I am the causal product of past history.

It's true, in wishing the past had found a way to be better, one is also wishing that the "me" which came from that past was also better. I don't find that problematic. Nor do I think it is the same as saying "there would not be a me."

Robert Tulip wrote:But the problem is to say what is right and wrong.

More often, the problem is to do the right thing, knowing pretty well which choice is which.

Robert Tulip wrote:For example, Zinn implies that property is evil. Against that line, Locke held that property is the basis of sustained prosperity and growth. Until such basic moral questions are sorted, there is no prospect of reconciliation.

The only point at which I remember Zinn implying such a thing is when he described the Iroquois society (in Ch. 2, I think). One view has it that such an idyllic (it probably wasn't) structure would be impossible with cities, division of labor, scarcity of farmland and commercial enterprise. I find that to be a post hoc fallacy, like saying that because the Chinese were more economically advanced (which they were until at least 1500) that civilization required a single dominant power, regular flooding which needed central coordination to control, and pictographic writing. What we have is not necessarily the best that could be.
Property is primarily a set of rules about certain uses of violence (theft) being unacceptable. The main benefits of restricting violence are certainly available in a common-property framework, as the monasteries of the Middle Ages demonstrated. One of the key innovations leading to the modern economy was the joint stock company, or limited liability, which was an ingenious modification of the apparent implications of absolute property. Other possible such institutions might have restrained abuses effectively while enabling more, not less, progress. I'll take Locke's analysis over Hobbes' any time.

Robert Tulip wrote:Domination is intrinsically barbaric, and yet the propaganda of classics has claimed the reverse, that barbarism is a quality of the savages outside the pale of the civilized.

Barbaric life involved raids for property and women. Domination by violence was part of life, including within the life of North American indigenous people. Maybe the Iroquois had learned to tame it without Leviathan extracting the surplus - I don't really know, though it seems possible to me. Hiawatha was known as a lawgiver, somewhat like Solon, but I think mainly for engineering the pact between the five peoples of the language group, a sort of constitution. Wikipedia has it that he was the persuasive force in bringing to reality the vision of a spiritual leader, "The Great Peacemaker". (Note: creative does not have to be destructive in the sense of wanton cruelty and violent exploitation.)

Robert Tulip wrote:To civilise means to regiment into a productive secure hierarchy, conquering natural impulses in favour of constructed spiritual myths. Again, I think the fallen state of civilization is something well critiqued in the Gospels, and the twisting of Christendom to reinterpret this basic message of conscience into a blessing on domination is a key reason why Christianity is viewed with growing moral ambivalence and even repugnance in the secular world.

And yet your definition, requiring involvement of hierarchy, buys into this morally repugnant blessing on domination by violence.

Robert Tulip wrote:The essential problem in what has rightly been called conquest of the world by Europe’s warring states is that their mutual competitiveness drove cultural evolution of domination which meant if the Spaniards had accepted the common humanity of subaltern groups they would have failed in their endeavours of imperial victory, and other more ruthless powers would have prevailed over them.

Well, I think Putin would agree with you, and perhaps Xi Jinping. I accept the inevitability, given the current state of civilization, of arming for an effective defense. I do not agree that the most ruthless power automatically triumphs over those who organize based on reason and mutual respect. Three cases which, while near things, demonstrate the possibilities for mutuality to excel over systems of domination are the revolt by the Netherlands against the Spanish (1600), the defeat of the allied aristocratic powers by the army of the French Revolution at Valmy, and the Salamis and Plataea defeat of the Persians by the allied Greeks.
An even more interesting case is the effort by Charlemagne to enlist the Christian church in civilizing his empire even while they legitimized it. That is, domination for its own sake has the same problem of emptiness as consumption for its own sake in today's hyper-commercial world. When the fear goes away because the battles have been won, you still face the problem of making sense of life.

Robert Tulip wrote:now with the rise of technological abundance the power of language is gradually becoming greater than the power of physical control. This is a slow meme, but global existence is steadily showing that dialogue and partnership are better sources of security than military power. That however is a millennial theme, and it is dangerous to imagine anyone can suddenly bring on the millennium by rejecting property and borders and armies and the other mechanisms of hierarchical control that ensure political stability.

Especially since nuclear arms mean that ruthlessness has little chance of achieving domination, but also that the fear never goes away. I don't expect any sudden rejection of hierarchical control, (nor, in most cases, would I likely prefer the alternative), but that doesn't stop us from using imagination to ask what an alternative might look like.

Robert Tulip wrote:

Harry Marks wrote:Civilization has reached escape velocity from the poverty that made struggle for domination the only way to be civilized.

No, civilisation has not reached escape velocity, although maybe it will soon. We still face the possibility of a Challenger disaster, a crash and burn before we reach orbit. Climate change is the biggest problem, that unless we remove the excess carbon from the air immediately we will face the collapse of civilization. But fixing the climate will be the decisive step to what you very usefully call civilization reaching escape velocity.

I have said similar things to my economics classes - if we solve the climate problem (and possibly other environmental catastrophes waiting beyond that one), since we will have a level population, we will have reached the point at which the forces of entropy and chaos will not drag us back into poverty and barbarism. It is not an easy transition, from a Malthusian poverty trap to a civilization of steady state population and gradual cultural improvement, but so far the odds are in the favor of culture. It is possible that only the big boost in farmland from the genocide in North America allowed this transition to occur, but I can give potent counterarguments.

Robert Tulip wrote:I still admire the pioneers and discoverers for their creative destruction, even if that is a morally complex position.

It is possible to see their accomplishments as signs of individual courage and skill without claiming a necessity of the brutal culture in which they operated. Obviously we can never really know what else might have been, and we have to, in some sense, forgive the past even while holding it accountable. Truth and reconciliation go together.

Harry Marks wrote:in wishing the past had found a way to be better, one is also wishing that the "me" which came from that past was also better. I don't find that problematic. Nor do I think it is the same as saying "there would not be a me."

The problem is the relevance of hypothetical situations to moral reasoning. Any scenario that begins ‘let us imagine the world was quite different from what we know it to be’, runs the risk of promoting fantasy and delusion.

The fact is, humans have massive embedded trauma due to what the world is like, and what our ancestors and their victims and oppressors did historically. Hypothetical imaginative history is a bit like thinking about multiverses and such like, interesting thought experiments of little practical value. Far better is discussing how people can be sorry and repentant for what actually happened.

Harry Marks wrote:More often, the problem is to do the right thing, knowing pretty well which choice is which.

Disagree. A classic case of that error is the false argument from Karl Marx that philosophers have interpreted the world but the point is to change it. A lack of careful interpretation leads to a superficial theory of change that has harmful or wasteful results. For example, there is major moral dispute on the balance between freedom and equality, and until such questions are in a better state it is risky to say we know what is good.

Harry Marks wrote:

Robert Tulip wrote:For example, Zinn implies that property is evil. Against that line, Locke held that property is the basis of sustained prosperity and growth. Until such basic moral questions are sorted, there is no prospect of reconciliation.

The only point at which I remember Zinn implying such a thing is when he described the Iroquois society (in Ch. 2, I think).

Luckily my kindle edition indexes the book, and it helpfully tells me that Zinn uses the word property 122 times. In the first use, at the end of Chapter One on Columbus and the Indians, Zinn states “behind the English invasion of North America… was that special drive born in civilizations based on private property. It was a morally ambiguous drive… the need for land was transformed into murder of whole peoples.”

The moral ambiguity of property is illustrated by the morality of money, which is both an enabler of activity and exchange and a source of grief, in the Biblical sense of filthy lucre as corrupting into selfish greed.

With even more vigorous emphatics, Zinn compares the arrival of British private property laws in the new world with Stalin’s Ukraine genocide and Churchill’s vindictive bombing of Dresden. In a later mockery of property as brutal and strange, Zinn quotes a Congolese leader asking if the Portuguese allow people to place their feet on the ground, indicating that the concept of property is simply an exercise in social control.

The ambiguity described by Zinn is shown in how the romance of communal ownership persists in the political left, in ways that resist logic and evidence, due to class mistrust of the power of money. Quantitative analysis, such as by the Institute for Liberty and Democracy in Peru, illustrates how the banking collateral unlocked by laws around private capital is a primary area of superiority of the rich nations of the world. It is a big challenge for some non-western people to retain cultural identity while also accepting the wealth creating ideas of property and money.

Harry Marks wrote:One view has it that such an idyllic (it probably wasn't) structure would be impossible with cities, division of labor, scarcity of farmland and commercial enterprise. I find that to be a post hoc fallacy, like saying that because the Chinese were more economically advanced (which they were until at least 1500) that civilization required a single dominant power, regular flooding which needed central coordination to control, and pictographic writing. What we have is not necessarily the best that could be.

I don’t see a post hoc fallacy here, which occurs when two events which happen sequentially are wrongly assumed to be causally related. It is not a fallacy to say the emergence of cities, labour division and enterprise caused modern wealth. The issue here is whether communal tribal culture is compatible with modern commercial enterprise. There is a strong argument that communal practice destroys incentive and productivity, and that nations need to shift to individual private ownership structures to sustain economic growth.

Harry Marks wrote: Property is primarily a set of rules about certain uses of violence (theft) being unacceptable. The main benefits of restricting violence are certainly available in a common-property framework, as the monasteries of the Middle Ages demonstrated.

Property is also a set of rules about borrowing money, providing the basis for the dramatic advances of modern capitalism and banking in the creation of wealth. Common-property frameworks are stagnant. The closure of the Catholic monasteries by King Henry the Eighth, ending their deadening effect on economic growth, was decisive for Great Britain’s shift to becoming a world empire.

Harry Marks wrote: One of the key innovations leading to the modern economy was the joint stock company, or limited liability, which was an ingenious modification of the apparent implications of absolute property. Other possible such institutions might have restrained abuses effectively while enabling more, not less, progress. I'll take Locke's analysis over Hobbes' any time.

What is the alternative you are suggesting to limited liability? I doubt that any communal systems could have enabled more progress than capitalist methods have. What is the main problem you see in Hobbes? I find his concept of the state as the basis of stability to be important.

Harry Marks wrote: involvement of hierarchy buys into morally repugnant blessing on domination by violence.

Yes, but the moral problems are complex. The history of civilization has been a process of bringing order and stability to chaos. Hierarchy has indeed involved what the Scottish chief said about Rome, that they made a desert and called it peace. However, we are deep in the lesser of two evils problem in looking at the morality of social structures.

We could all agree that equal societies are more morally just, but the problem is that equal societies are less robust and vigorous than unequal societies. There is a dialectic here between cooperation and competition. Inequality, including the hierarchical concept of rank, has been the great driver of economic production and military security. An unequal society with leaders whose words are obeyed functions as a social unit, and historically has defeated egalitarian groups who lack chain of command. Wistful nostalgia, like for the Asherah groves destroyed by the Mosaic hierarchy, as much as for the lost world of the Iroquois, often neglects the physical impossibility of a primitive stone and wood economy, with its social framework, competing against modern metal and paper.

Harry Marks wrote: I do not agree that the most ruthless power automatically triumphs over those who organize based on reason and mutual respect.

My sense is that respect is more durable in terms of cultural evolution than ruthlessness, although ruthless conquerors can win short victories. The examples of Hitler, Stalin and Genghis Khan illustrate systems of extreme tyrannical ruthlessness which crashed and burned after appearing omnipotent for a short time.

On the larger stage of the conquest of the New World, the British settlers have largely established seemingly sustainable societies, even though their origins lie in genocidal ruthless elimination of previous cultures. The trauma for victors and victims from that conquest endures today, as a pathological source of cultural blindness and bigotry on the side of the victors, as a broad source of anomic meaninglessness and loneliness in society, with individualism not providing a story of belonging and identity, and with the despair of the vanquished.

My sense is that the weakness of western culture, including the epidemic of mental illness, is in large part an untreated and undiagnosed traumatic effect of the ruthless culture of imperial conquest that established the USA as the leader of the free world, including the pervasive disdain for indigeneity as infra dig. That is why I see the core Christian ethic of the last as first as so crucial for psychic repair, forgiveness and reconciliation, as a way to build a culture of mutual care and respect.

Harry Marks wrote: Three cases which, while near things, demonstrate the possibilities for mutuality to excel over systems of domination are the revolt by the Netherlands against the Spanish (1600), the defeat of the allied aristocratic powers by the army of the French Revolution at Valmy, and the Salamis and Plataea defeat of the Persians by the allied Greeks.

Again looking at the Christian ideas, mutuality is central to the core teaching of love of neighbour. Jesus Christ in the Last Judgement says the criterion of salvation is performing works of mercy. To me this is a model of cultural mutuality as essential for human evolution, away from selfish domination towards mutual care.

But the challenge is to retain some of the robust ethics that have powered the stable fecund culture of domination, even while opening to more of the anarchistic liberty inherent in care as a guiding ethic.

Harry Marks wrote: An even more interesting case is the effort by Charlemagne to enlist the Christian church in civilizing his empire even while they legitimized it. That is, domination for its own sake has the same problem of emptiness as consumption for its own sake in today's hyper-commercial world. When the fear goes away because the battles have been won, you still face the problem of making sense of life.

Yes precisely, what profiteth a man that he gain the whole world and yet lose his soul? Redemption depends on legitimacy, which depends on a social mandate.

Even before Charlemagne, the Roman sense of their own moral vacuity was central to the victory of Christianity, providing the temporary Constantinian social licence for imperial security, but in a highly unstable way, which is why Rome fell. That vacuum was very like the emptiness of the consumer culture today, finding senseless meaning in shopping.

Harry Marks wrote: nuclear arms mean that ruthlessness has little chance of achieving domination

Now that has just a touch of post hoc, since there are other factors as well as atom bombs that constrain ruthless politics. The whole emergence of globalisation and communication makes concealment of oppression much harder, with the trade consequences able to isolate repressive regimes.

An irony here is that it is precisely and solely the nuclear option that enables North Korea to be so ruthless to its own people. More broadly, the shift to an interconnected world is shifting the locus of legitimacy from elites to the masses, with the need for governments to apply policies that will secure democratic consent.

Harry Marks wrote:I don't expect any sudden rejection of hierarchical control, (nor, in most cases, would I likely prefer the alternative), but that doesn't stop us from using imagination to ask what an alternative might look like.

The event that really shifted my thinking on this topic of hierarchy was the Tian An Men massacre in Beijing back in June 1989. Prior to that I was more of a utopian dreamer, but comparing the trajectories of Russia under Gorby and China under Deng gave me a view that stability must be recognised as a primary moral value. Deng prevented collapse of China into civil war.

Without political stability, grounded in hierarchical control, there is no capacity for economic growth, and without growth there is no human development or mutuality. So all the dreams of transcendental imagination of the kingdom of heaven have to be grounded in a harsh political realism to have any prospect of being achieved.

Harry Marks wrote: if we solve the climate problem (and possibly other environmental catastrophes waiting beyond that one), since we will have a level population, we will have reached the point at which the forces of entropy and chaos will not drag us back into poverty and barbarism. It is not an easy transition, from a Malthusian poverty trap to a civilization of steady state population and gradual cultural improvement, but so far the odds are in the favor of culture. It is possible that only the big boost in farmland from the genocide in North America allowed this transition to occur, but I can give potent counterarguments.

Linking climate politics today to the American genocide is complex but important. My sense is that the genocide produced deeply embedded trauma in the American culture and politics, of the type the Ten Commandments describe as intergenerational (Exodus 20:5).

So now, looking at Trump, we see a Republican culture that exhibits a high level of nervous anxiety, as it seeks to maintain its powerful position of social control, with cultural traditions that are fracturing, contested and unstable. These traditions, strongly alienated from any sense of natural meaning, had their formative origins in the American genocide, seen in incidents such as the trail of tears.

But now, the enduring air-headed motto of that culture is drill baby drill, an idea which specifically excludes the moral science around climate, preferring instead the depraved antichristian idea that destroying the earth will make you rich. How to extract from this depravity its core values of productive investment, while shifting it to a sustainable ethic, seems to be a challenge that is religious in scope, in view of the apocalyptic threats of climate change and the paralysed inertia of the world in the face of these looming security and stability problems.

Harry Marks wrote:

Robert Tulip wrote:I still admire the pioneers and discoverers for their creative destruction, even if that is a morally complex position.

It is possible to see their accomplishments as signs of individual courage and skill without claiming a necessity of the brutal culture in which they operated. Obviously we can never really know what else might have been, and we have to, in some sense, forgive the past even while holding it accountable. Truth and reconciliation go together.

We can know what might else have been, and the answer is nothing, since the past is the past. Speculation about alternative universes is nothing more than a game. That is not to say our decisions today are fated by deterministic physical causes, or that no mistakes were made, but rather that there is no real difference between observing that history occurred and saying things must have turned out as they did.

The brutal culture that conquered the New World was a product of the alienated European situation, lost in its wide and easy path of destruction. This recognition is important to see how to shift culture away from its brutal trauma towards more mutual love.

To hold the past accountable means to insist that people today understand history and are sorry for the mistakes that have produced ongoing suffering and trauma. Repentance is the primary condition for forgiveness, as John the Baptist told Jesus Christ. The truth will set you free.