TIL: Today I Learned

[Birdjaguar]

Not a hunner per cent convinced that "owning black people as chattel" was merely insufficiently progressive. Think it mighta been, not to get melodramatic, objectively evil? And it seems like, when we're evaluating a person's historical legacy, "committed evil deeds, continuously and enthusiastically, for decades" is a reasonable consideration.

That gets back to how the scale balances. Owning slaves in 1800 will weigh differently for some people than others. As will Owning slaves in 1500 or 500 CE. Can genocide be ranked? Was it worse in 1944 Germany vs 1914 Turkey vs 1870 US west vs 1640 New England vs Mongol invasions etc.

At what point in history does the progressive or enlightened agenda become relevant? Were the Aztecs objectively evil? for that matter are the massacres of the Old Testament objectively evil?

 

[Dachs]

sign
I didn't complain about anything Phrossack said. I just asked a question. You seem to extrapolate a huge amount from my post. I never mentioned who I do admire or why. And I never mentioned any kind of list of who others should admire. Jefferson was an example because he has two recognized aspects that are often seen as good and bad (D of I and Sally Hemmings).

You seem to think it is significant that Jefferson cribbed John Locke and that reflects badly on Jefferson. Idea theft is pretty common in philosophical and political thinking and can have positive outcomes. Did Locke write the D of I and help launch the US? No, but Jefferson did. The influential people of history have created, begged, borrowed and stolen ideas from all over. They were not perfect people. Eisenhower cheated on his wife while winning the Western front. So what? That does not diminish his influence.

Are you saying that because Jefferson was not progressive enough 200 years ago his efforts as a US Founding Father should be diminished? People accomplish things, create change and have lasting influence, both positive and negative, while being difficult, nasty, mean, smart, creative and hypocritical. People tackle problems that interest them and ignore ones that don't. Growing up in the 60s I paid a lot of attention to the anti war movement, but not to the civil rights movement. Does that make me racist? We all choose the battles we want to fight and where to put our energy and attention.

Choosing "Great People" is a selective process and if we do so we do so for particular reasons. In choosing the infamous people of history we also do so because we have been selective about the things they did. We each make mental lists of the things they did (that we know about), and then weigh them in a balance to see which way the scales fall.

For the record I see he crowning achievement of President Jefferson as the Louisiana Purchase.

Birdjag, I'm sorry, but it's very difficult to discuss this with you when you seem to be talking about three different things as though they are interchangeable.

1. Acknowledging that somebody did something in the past
2. Believing that a thing done by somebody in the past was important
3. Admiring somebody who did something in the past

To my knowledge, literally no one you're talking to doubts that Thomas Jefferson was a man who was alive two hundred years ago and is reasonably famous for doing things. Many of the people you're talking to believe that he was a execrable human being because of some of the things that he did. Nobody thinks that he wasn't President, or that he wasn't Secretary of State, or that he didn't draft part of the American Declaration of Independence. Some of us may even think that those things make him important to world history. It is possible to hold that idea in one's head and also think that he was a monster.

The obvious point to bring up here is that you would presumably agree that Adolf Hitler was an awful person while simultaneously being responsible for a great deal of important history. Moral judgment on the people of the past is not the same thing as damnatio memoriae.

Now, I think that most of the things that Jefferson did of importance to American and world history were #actually bad. Hence my earlier comment about eating Napoleon Bonaparte's ass. But it's not like I think Jefferson didn't matter or something.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Many of the people you're talking to believe that he was a execrable human being because of some of the things that he did.

Actually, it has seemed to me like this is really the only point of discussion that BirdJag has been pursuing. Because that is the point that illustrates the fallacy of "objectively evil." In the context of his times pretty much everything Jefferson did that people today complain about was "objectively normal." Without context there is no such thing as "objectively" anything.

 

[Dachs]

Actually, it has seemed to me like this is really the only point of discussion that BirdJag has been pursuing. Because that is the point that illustrates the fallacy of "objectively evil." In the context of his times pretty much everything Jefferson did that people today complain about was "objectively normal." Without context there is no such thing as "objectively" anything.

I completely disagree with your reading of the discussion, and I would like to point you to the posts on the previous page discussing "the context of his times".

 

[Timsup2nothin]

I completely disagree with your reading of the discussion, and I would like to point you to the posts on the previous page discussing "the context of his times".

Those are the ones that specifically support my reading of the discussion, which is why I was hoping having a second person point them out would make the point.

 

[Birdjaguar]

I just got off a three hour conference call and will return to this thread in a bit.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Birdjag, I'm sorry, but it's very difficult to discuss this with you when you seem to be talking about three different things as though they are interchangeable.

1. Acknowledging that somebody did something in the past
2. Believing that a thing done by somebody in the past was important
3. Admiring somebody who did something in the past

To my knowledge, literally no one you're talking to doubts that Thomas Jefferson was a man who was alive two hundred years ago and is reasonably famous for doing things. Many of the people you're talking to believe that he was a execrable human being because of some of the things that he did. Nobody thinks that he wasn't President, or that he wasn't Secretary of State, or that he didn't draft part of the American Declaration of Independence. Some of us may even think that those things make him important to world history. It is possible to hold that idea in one's head and also think that he was a monster.

The obvious point to bring up here is that you would presumably agree that Adolf Hitler was an awful person while simultaneously being responsible for a great deal of important history. Moral judgment on the people of the past is not the same thing as damnatio memoriae.

Now, I think that most of the things that Jefferson did of importance to American and world history were #actually bad. Hence my earlier comment about eating Napoleon Bonaparte's ass. But it's not like I think Jefferson didn't matter or something.

To continue your line of thought...

I would add to your list of things under discussion

1. Acknowledging that somebody did something in the past
2. Believing that a thing done by somebody in the past was important
3. Admiring somebody who did something in the past
4. Maligning someone for doing things I think of as bad
5. Maligning someone for doing things their contemporaries thought were bad

I do not see those as independent things, but rather as pieces of a picture or weights on a balance. We give weight to each piece based on our own biases. D of I counts as +5, Sally Hemmings as -4, Louisiana Purchase as +6 etc. You are going to weight things differently and create a different picture and your scale will balance differently than mine. The whole idea of erasing someone from memory is a bit silly. I have no problem with you (or anyone) thinking of Jefferson as monster in spite of his more positive contributions to history. I just disagree. Much like I disagree with those who think Trump is saint. You are probably weighting the pieces of his life differently than I do.

You do seem to grasp my approach to "judging" those long dead, but how do you do it?

 

[Birdjaguar]

Actually, it has seemed to me like this is really the only point of discussion that BirdJag has been pursuing. Because that is the point that illustrates the fallacy of "objectively evil." In the context of his times pretty much everything Jefferson did that people today complain about was "objectively normal." Without context there is no such thing as "objectively" anything.

I completely disagree with your reading of the discussion, and I would like to point you to the posts on the previous page discussing "the context of his times".

I think the discussion brought me to the point that "objectively evil" was the actual topic of discussion. And once one moves to that, things tend to get philosophical. The transition from slavery being both normal and generally thought of as correct to slavery being abhorrent and generally thought of as evil has been a long and slow one. At any given time there were adherents all along a continuum of positions. Even today there are those who approve of slavery. No single person represented the all the views, but there were some collective mass of people who held the then generally accepted views. when you establish an independent objective standard for all times and places, it just diminishes the value of human thought and action. The rule is the rule and if you violate it, you are evil even if you didn't know the rule existed.

How do you set a standard for objectively evil? Were the Aztecs evil? What is the standard for calling Jefferson monstrous versus a bad politician, bad husband, bad president?

 

[Timsup2nothin]

I think the discussion brought me to the point that "objectively evil" was the actual topic of discussion. And once one moves to that, things tend to get philosophical. The transition from slavery being both normal and generally thought of as correct to slavery being abhorrent and generally thought of as evil has been a long and slow one. At any given time there were adherents all along a continuum of positions. Even today there are those who approve of slavery. No single person represented the all the views, but there were some collective mass of people who held the then generally accepted views. when you establish an independent objective standard for all times and places, it just diminishes the value of human thought and action. The rule is the rule and if you violate it, you are evil even if you didn't know the rule existed.

How do you set a standard for objectively evil? Were the Aztecs evil? What is the standard for calling Jefferson monstrous versus a bad politician, bad husband, bad president?

I disagree with the assertion "at any given time there were adherents all along a continuum of positions." Throughout the vast majority of history slavery carried no moral tone at all, it was just how the world worked. Drop back 2000 years and it is unlikely that you could find anywhere in the world where you could say "slavery is objectively evil" and not have slaves and slaveholders alike looking at you with "what else do you do with captives?" on their lips. It may have dragged on in the US for a couple generations past its wider world expiration date, but that hardly makes US slaveholders some sort of oddities in the grand scheme of things, and certainly doesn't qualify them across the board as "objectively evil."

 

[Birdjaguar]

I disagree with the assertion "at any given time there were adherents all along a continuum of positions." Throughout the vast majority of history slavery carried no moral tone at all, it was just how the world worked. Drop back 2000 years and it is unlikely that you could find anywhere in the world where you could say "slavery is objectively evil" and not have slaves and slaveholders alike looking at you with "what else do you do with captives?" on their lips. It may have dragged on in the US for a couple generations past its wider world expiration date, but that hardly makes US slaveholders some sort of oddities in the grand scheme of things, and certainly doesn't qualify them across the board as "objectively evil."

You are likely right about the objective part, but I was thinking that as part of the population, slaves might well hold the view that slavery was not such a great idea if you were the slave. They might well be opposed to it. Spartacus seemed to be...

Wait... Wiki to the rescue:

Slavery was a common practice in ancient Greece, as in other societies of the time. Some Ancient Greek writers (including, most notably, Aristotle) considered slavery natural and even necessary. This paradigm was notably questioned in Socratic dialogues; the Stoics produced the first recorded condemnation of slavery.[2]

 

[Berzerker]

About 81 percent of autism risk comes from inherited genetic factors

according to new research

 

[Dachs]

Those are the ones that specifically support my reading of the discussion, which is why I was hoping having a second person point them out would make the point.

They certainly are not. Your subsequent elucidation of your position, quoted below, is incorrect. I can't imagine how I can be clearer.

Throughout the vast majority of history slavery carried no moral tone at all, it was just how the world worked. Drop back 2000 years and it is unlikely that you could find anywhere in the world where you could say "slavery is objectively evil" and not have slaves and slaveholders alike looking at you with "what else do you do with captives?" on their lips. It may have dragged on in the US for a couple generations past its wider world expiration date, but that hardly makes US slaveholders some sort of oddities in the grand scheme of things, and certainly doesn't qualify them across the board as "objectively evil."

To continue your line of thought...

I would add to your list of things under discussion

1. Acknowledging that somebody did something in the past
2. Believing that a thing done by somebody in the past was important
3. Admiring somebody who did something in the past
4. Maligning someone for doing things I think of as bad
5. Maligning someone for doing things their contemporaries thought were bad

I do not see those as independent things, but rather as pieces of a picture or weights on a balance. We give weight to each piece based on our own biases. D of I counts as +5, Sally Hemmings as -4, Louisiana Purchase as +6 etc. You are going to weight things differently and create a different picture and your scale will balance differently than mine. The whole idea of erasing someone from memory is a bit silly. I have no problem with you (or anyone) thinking of Jefferson as monster in spite of his more positive contributions to history. I just disagree. Much like I disagree with those who think Trump is saint. You are probably weighting the pieces of his life differently than I do.

You do seem to grasp my approach to "judging" those long dead, but how do you do it?

I'm sorry, but I think that this is word salad and a very long way away from what the original topic was - or indeed anything else we've been talking about.

The topic under discussion started when two forumites pointed out that some dead men that they had originally liked and respected did disappointing things, too. You dragged that into the related-but-not-quite-the-same topic of "why judge people in the past by modern standards?" You built off it to describe your, um, give-everybody-from-the-past-a-number rating system, which is...well, it's very nice, and good for you, but it's a long way away from any point anybody else was trying to make. I get that you think that these things are all actually the same discussion, but they aren't, and your decision to shift the terms of the discussion over to what you want to talk about rather than what people have actually said is very frustrating to me.

Throughout, it's easy to notice a shift in the terms of the discussion with each of your responses. When TeeKay pointed out that using modern standards to talk about the dead is useful when dissuading modern people from being okay with the things that they did, you started talking about "influence" - nobody said anything about influence - and "value added" - also never discussed. In fact, nobody had even started to talk about their overall appreciation for any of the people under discussion yet. MagCult didn't say, "welp, now that I know that about Calvin Coolidge, a man I used to admire, I now hate him and think that everything he did was awful, and also he wasn't an important person in history or anything". Phrossack didn't say that about Teddy Roosevelt, either. You brought all of those assumptions in yourself. You're basically monologuing, and it doesn't matter if the post you're responding to is tangential at best to your point - you'll make it anyway.

What drew me into this discussion was the bit on standards. I'm mostly here because I feel very strongly that many of the times people claim that it's okay to write off horrible things that dead people did because it was supposedly morally acceptable at the time, those people are wrong. Those assertions are founded on a deeply flawed understanding of the past and an outright disrespectful attitude toward the dead. I am all for recognizing context and the sorts of choices that the people of the past would plausibly have made. It is often the thing that I choose to speak up about on the Internet in history discussions. Some of my favorite books and authors deal with approaching the choices that dead people made on their own terms, on subjects as disparate as late antique Rome and the Battle of Midway. And it's why I keep hammering away on this point.

I'm not here to talk about legacies or overall evaluations or your Gesamtnoten für berühmte Männer. My concern is that you are blithely waving your hands and saying "welp, it was just the way it was back then, no big deal, it's okay if I think this guy that did some awful things was still great". I don't really care what your overall opinion is of (insert whatever guy). What I care about is the "it was just the way it was back then". Not only does it turn an is into a should, it ignores the contemporaries who did not do that thing and, in fact, thought that it was horrible.

I think the discussion brought me to the point that "objectively evil" was the actual topic of discussion. And once one moves to that, things tend to get philosophical. The transition from slavery being both normal and generally thought of as correct to slavery being abhorrent and generally thought of as evil has been a long and slow one. At any given time there were adherents all along a continuum of positions. Even today there are those who approve of slavery. No single person represented the all the views, but there were some collective mass of people who held the then generally accepted views. when you establish an independent objective standard for all times and places, it just diminishes the value of human thought and action. The rule is the rule and if you violate it, you are evil even if you didn't know the rule existed.

How do you set a standard for objectively evil? Were the Aztecs evil? What is the standard for calling Jefferson monstrous versus a bad politician, bad husband, bad president?

I'm not the one who mentioned the term "objectively evil", so I'm not sure why you expect me to talk about it. It certainly was not the "actual" topic of discussion. I have not even addressed objective morality and have no desire to do so. It's unnecessary to the points I've made or am interested in making.

Since y'all are basically ignoring what I have to say on the subject, and pulling your discussion into new and...exciting...areas, I'm gonna dip. Have fun.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

They certainly are not. Your subsequent elucidation of your position, quoted below, is incorrect. I can't imagine how I can be clearer.

I can't imagine either, but perhaps not relying on "I am Dachs so I am correct and you are wrong, trust me" would provide an angle.

 

[Dachs]

I can't imagine either, but perhaps not relying on "I am Dachs so I am correct and you are wrong, trust me" would provide an angle.

I would love to know when you think I've ever assumed that kind of tone.

On a side note, most of the time the argument about "standards" in history gets made, it's just poorly informed. To use your example, Jefferson did not live in a time when no one ever thought the institution of chattel slavery was morally wrong. In fact, that view was pretty popular! Hell, Jefferson was a direct contemporary of the crusade to abolish slavery in Great Britain, and they even spoke the same language as he did. Two of his political sparring partners, John and John Quincy Adams, both thought slavery was bad and wrong, Quincy Adams fairly vociferously. Even the institution of slavery itself implicitly acknowledged that slavery was a moral wrong through the existence of things like manumission; the likes of John C. Calhoun were somewhat in the future compared to Jefferson. And one of the things that Jefferson's admirers always bring up is that he was supposedly a smart, well-read guy. The man was a prolific intellectual; if anyone had agency to determine his own morals in eighteenth century America, it was him. It's farcical to claim that there was no possible way he could have come into contact with the notion that what he was doing was morally wrong. Now, the man's upbringing and class certainly conditioned his response and made it relatively unlikely that he would make the choice to stop participating in the great American horror story, but it did not dictate that he would choose to keep humans in bondage.

The short version is that there was a lot of antislavery and abolitionist sentiment in the Atlantic world in Jefferson's time, that those activists actually managed to get a lot of stuff done in Britain, France, and America, and that Jefferson was absolutely aware of all of this and even participated in some of it.

In fact, his hypocrisy extended even further. Here is a delightfully lengthy quotation from his letters about slavery being morally wrong:

Query XVIII, "Manners", in "Notes on the State of Virginia"

There must doubtless be an unhappy influence on the manners of our people produced by the existence of slavery among us. The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal. This quality is the germ of all education in him. From his cradle to his grave he is learning to do what he sees others do. If a parent could find no motive either in his philanthropy or his self-love, for restraining the intemperance of passion towards his slave, it should always be a sufficient one that his child is present. But generally it is not sufficient. The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to his worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances. And with what execration should the statesman be loaded, who permitting one half the citizens thus to trample on the rights of the other, transforms those into despots, and these into enemies, destroys the morals of the one part, and the amor patriae of the other. For if a slave can have a country in this world, it must be any other in preference to that in which he is born to live and labour for another: in which he must lock up the faculties of his nature, contribute as far as depends on his individual endeavours to the evanishment of the human race, or entail his own miserable condition on the endless generations proceeding from him. With the morals of the people, their industry also is destroyed. For in a warm climate, no man will labour for himself who can make another labour for him. This is so true, that of the proprietors of slaves a very small proportion indeed are ever seen to labour. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever: that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events: that it may become probable by supernatural interference! The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest.

This man continued to keep humans in bondage after writing these words.

His actual approach to the problem was a series of half-measures. He followed the paragraph above with a halfhearted plea that eventually enough people would change their minds that every slaver would voluntarily emancipate their slaves, but did nothing to follow through for himself. He tried to improve conditions for the slaves at Monticello rather than actually emancipate them, with mixed results. He professed abhorrence at the harsh punishments meted out to slaves, but did nothing to mitigate what his overseers did while he held political office, and even imposed such punishments himself on occasion. He held 130-odd people in bondage at the end of his life and freed a grand total of five, one of whom was his own son. The rest were sold to cover his debts; their families were broken up and scattered across the United States.

Thomas Jefferson knew that he was "depraved" and a "despot" and he continued to do it anyway, and if that isn't cause for moral censure even on his own terms, then I'm not sure what else to say to you about that.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Finding fault with dead people who are a product of their time and place seems pretty pointless to me. It is fine to rewrite and unsanitize biographies to reveal more accurate pictures of people, but to criticize the value they added to their times and the future because they acted like their friends and relatives is imposing standards they did not have. All those long persons were just people doing the best they could to make their way in this world. Just like you. Just like me.

So we shouldn't find fault with Nazis, because they were a product of their time and place. What does this say about the neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers (public Holocaust denial is considered a hate crime in Canada)? These POSs are certainly not products of the time in which they were born, because they believe things that are now considered abhorrent by most modern North Americans.

I find the whole concept of "admiring" some long dead historical figure strange and unhealthy.

It depends on what they're famous for and how they went about it. There are a lot of historical figures I admire for specific things they did, but at the same time I acknowledge their faults.

I've noticed that conservatives tend to favor the idea of heroes and Great Men, and aren't particularly put off by any wrongdoings on the heroes' part, no matter how extreme, short of being to the left of them, while those on the left tend to believe that moral failures invalidate any good deeds a person has done and consign them to the dustbin of history.

There are places in Canada where people are actively pulling down statues of our first Prime Minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, because of his policies regarding the native population of the country. Yes, the residential schools were horrible places and the goal was basically cultural genocide. That said... I'm of the camp that says it's better to leave the statues up and teach people that Sir John A. had conflicting facets to him - he had a grand vision of creating the country of Canada that would stretch from the Pacific to the Atlantic, but he also believed in cultural genocide of the natives, AND he is responsible for the execution of Louis Riel (Riel can legitimately be considered to be one of the Fathers of Confederation, since without his efforts there would have been no province of Manitoba). That's the first (and hopefully the last) time that a Prime Minister has been responsible for the execution of someone who had been elected to Parliament.

While hero-worship tends to lead to moral blindness and a willingness to excuse further wrongs, I have to wonder whether anyone from our age will be considered admirable, or even respectable. Given the climate crisis, I wouldn't be surprised if in the future, all people who ate meat, drove cars, or flew in planes will be reviled, and I'm not sure what to think about that.

We're being reviled now. Not that I'm someone who does a lot of flying, but I do eat meat. And every time a vegan starts yapping about how immoral I am, it just makes me want to eat a cheeseburger at them.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

I would love to know when you think I've ever assumed that kind of tone.

In the immediate quote right there. "You're just wrong, I don't know how to make that any clearer" is hard to take as a representation of any other tone, really. But no worries. I always swat back but I have a very thick skin and am completely unharmed. I just enjoy such exchanges, perhaps too much.

The short version is that there was a lot of antislavery and abolitionist sentiment in the Atlantic world in Jefferson's time, that those activists actually managed to get a lot of stuff done in Britain, France, and America, and that Jefferson was absolutely aware of all of this and even participated in some of it.

In fact, his hypocrisy extended even further. Here is a delightfully lengthy quotation from his letters about slavery being morally wrong:

This man continued to keep humans in bondage after writing these words.

His actual approach to the problem was a series of half-measures. He followed the paragraph above with a halfhearted plea that eventually enough people would change their minds that every slaver would voluntarily emancipate their slaves, but did nothing to follow through for himself. He tried to improve conditions for the slaves at Monticello rather than actually emancipate them, with mixed results. He professed abhorrence at the harsh punishments meted out to slaves, but did nothing to mitigate what his overseers did while he held political office, and even imposed such punishments himself on occasion. He held 130-odd people in bondage at the end of his life and freed a grand total of five, one of whom was his own son. The rest were sold to cover his debts; their families were broken up and scattered across the United States.

Thomas Jefferson knew that he was "depraved" and a "despot" and he continued to do it anyway, and if that isn't cause for moral censure even on his own terms, then I'm not sure what else to say to you about that.

A hundred years from now you and I may be viewed through a prism of "they f'ing KNEW what their cars were doing to the planet, but they JUST KEPT DRIVING!!!!" Now, I dunno about you, but for most of my life living in Southern California 'drive or die' may not have been absolutely true, but it has sure seemed like it. Does it present me with a moral dilemma? Yes. Might a future context where cars have been recognized as the epitome of arrogant selfish outright objective evil make me look hypocritical and lead to my demonization? Sure. Is there abundant "anti car sentiment" happening right here in my own time? Sure. But the fact remains that contexts change and my context right now leaves me plenty of room to squirm.

Anyway, you'll note that the statement you called "just plain wrong" involved a two thousand year time frame, not two hundred. Two hundred years is a blip. A blip in which the immorality of slavery has grown from a topic of discussion with moderately wide agreement to an absolute truth. Those contexts are different, as is the context of two thousand years ago, when seriously EVERY human culture on the planet took and kept slaves, in varying degree, and no one gave a moment's thought to any idea that they shouldn't.

 

[Yeekim]

A hundred years from now you and I may be viewed through a prism of "they f'ing KNEW what their cars were doing to the planet, but they JUST KEPT DRIVING!!!!" Now, I dunno about you, but for most of my life living in Southern California 'drive or die' may not have been absolutely true, but it has sure seemed like it. Does it present me with a moral dilemma? Yes. Might a future context where cars have been recognized as the epitome of arrogant selfish outright objective evil make me look hypocritical and lead to my demonization? Sure. Is there abundant "anti car sentiment" happening right here in my own time? Sure. But the fact remains that contexts change and my context right now leaves me plenty of room to squirm.

This.
Also, I really should start selling myself being too lazy to get a driver's license as a sign of impeccable moral fiber instead.

 

[Dachs]

In the immediate quote right there. "You're just wrong, I don't know how to make that any clearer" is hard to take as a representation of any other tone, really.

I assumed that when you informed me that you had read the posts in question, you had actually read the posts in question, and that I didn't need to refer back to them.

I completely disagree with your reading of the discussion, and I would like to point you to the posts on the previous page discussing "the context of his times".

Those are the ones that specifically support my reading of the discussion, which is why I was hoping having a second person point them out would make the point.

Anyway, you'll note that the statement you called "just plain wrong" involved a two thousand year time frame, not two hundred. Two hundred years is a blip. A blip in which the immorality of slavery has grown from a topic of discussion with moderately wide agreement to an absolute truth. Those contexts are different, as is the context of two thousand years ago, when seriously EVERY human culture on the planet took and kept slaves, in varying degree, and no one gave a moment's thought to any idea that they shouldn't.

Ever since Birdjag brought up Thomas Jefferson, I've pretty much been sticking to Thomas Jefferson. When I described the post as an "elucidation of your position" - your position that I, in talking about Jefferson, was wrong - I was interested more in the claim about US slaveholders, not about the bit about millennia of human history, which is a thing you and Birdjag started talking about amongst yourselves. It would have been clearer if I had only quoted the part specifically discussing US slavery, I suppose, but I didn't like starting off the quotation with a pronoun that had an unclear antecedent. That was a problem I could've rectified with square brackets instead, but I incorrectly assumed that it was pretty clear that I was focused on Jefferson. I apologize for the poor drafting and lack of clarity.

For what it's worth, I do disagree about the "no one gave a moment's thought" bit as well. Christian critiques of slavery have existed for pretty much as long as the religion itself has, e.g. by Gregory of Nyssa, and churchmen staging emancipations was certainly a Thing in late antiquity. It's an oversimplification to describe slavery as a monolith that was everywhere until the Enlightenment; its use waxed and waned, and different ideological justifications sprang up around it at various times. Frankly, I'm not the right person to hold an extensive discussion on the topic, but I'm aware of the outlines of it.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

TIL:

Eisenhower cheated on his wife while winning the Western front.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

This.
Also, I really should start selling myself being too lazy to get a driver's license as a sign of impeccable moral fiber instead.

You awe inspiring climate warrior you!