W.E.B. DuBois on Booker T. Washington

Mr. Washington represents in Negro thought the old attitude of adjustment and submission; but adjustment at such a peculiar time as to make his programme unique. This is an age of unusual economic development, and Mr. Washington’s programme naturally takes an economic cast, becoming a gospel of Work and Money to such an extent as apparently almost completely to overshadow the higher aims of life. Moreover, this is an age when the more advanced races are coming in closer contact with the less developed races, and the race-feeling is therefore intensified; and Mr. Washington’s programme practically accepts the alleged inferiority of the Negro races. Again, in our own land, the reaction from the sentiment of war time has given impetus to race-prejudice against Negroes, and Mr. Washington withdraws many of the high demands of Negroes as men and American citizens. In other periods of intensified prejudice all the Negro’s tendency to self-assertion has been called forth; at this period a policy of submission is advocated. In the history of nearly all other races and peoples the doctrine preached at such crises has been that manly self-respect is worth more than lands and houses, and that a people who voluntarily surrender such respect, or cease striving for it, are not worth civilizing.

In answer to this, it has been claimed that the Negro can survive only through submission. Mr. Washington distinctly asks that black people give up, at least for the present, three things,–

First, political power,

Second, insistence on civil rights,

Third, higher education of Negro youth,– and concentrate all their energies on industrial education, and accumulation of wealth, and the conciliation of the South. This policy has been courageously and insistently advocated for over fifteen years, and has been triumphant for perhaps ten years. As a result of this tender of the palm-branch, what has been the return? In these years there have occurred:

1. The disfranchisement of the Negro.

2. The legal creation of a distinct status of civil inferiority for the Negro.

3. The steady withdrawal of aid from institutions for the higher training of the Negro.

These movements are not, to be sure, direct results of Mr. Washington’s teachings; but his propaganda has, without a shadow of doubt, helped their speedier accomplishment. The question then comes: Is it possible, and probable, that nine millions of men can make effective progress in economic lines if they are deprived of political rights, made a servile caste, and allowed only the most meagre chance for developing their exceptional men? If history and reason give any distinct answer to these questions, it is an emphatic NO. And Mr. Washington thus faces the triple paradox of his career:

1. He is striving nobly to make Negro artisans business men and property-owners; but it is utterly impossible, under modern competitive methods, for workingmen and property- owners to defend their rights and exist without the right of suffrage.

2. He insists on thrift and self-respect, but at the same time counsels a silent submission to civic inferiority such as is bound to sap the manhood of any race in the long run.

3. He advocates common-school and industrial training, and depreciates institutions of higher learning; but neither the Negro common-schools, nor Tuskegee itself, could remain open a day were it not for teachers trained in Negro colleges, or trained by their graduates…

…It would be unjust to Mr. Washington not to acknowledge that in several instances he has opposed movements in the South which were unjust to the Negro; he sent memorials to the Louisiana and Alabama constitutional conventions, he has spoken against lynching, and in other ways has openly or silently set his influence against sinister schemes and unfortunate happenings. Notwithstanding this, it is equally true to assert that on the whole the distinct impression left by Mr. Washington’s propaganda is, first, that the South is justified in its present attitude toward the Negro because of the Negro’s degradation; secondly, that the prime cause of the Negro’s failure to rise more quickly is his wrong education in the past; and, thirdly, that his future rise depends primarily on his own efforts. Each of these propositions is a dangerous half-truth. The supplementary truths must never be lost sight of: first, slavery and race-prejudice are potent if not sufficient causes of the Negro’s position; second, industrial and common- school training were necessarily slow in planting because they had to await the black teachers trained by higher institutions,–it being extremely doubtful if any essentially different develop- ment was possible, and certainly a Tuskegee was unthinkable before 1880; and, third, while it is a great truth to say that the Negro must strive and strive mightily to help himself, it is equally true that unless his striving be not simply seconded, but rather aroused and encouraged, by the initiative of the richer and wiser environing group, he cannot hope for great success.

In his failure to realize and impress this last point, Mr. Washington is especially to be criticised. His doctrine has tended to make the whites, North and South, shift the burden of the Negro problem to the Negro’s shoulders and stand aside as critical and rather pessimistic spectators; when in fact the burden belongs to the nation, and the hands of none of us are clean if we bend not our energies to righting these great wrongs.

References:

1. Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others

Edward Gibbon on Christianity, monasticism, and the collapse of the Roman Empire

Gibbon was not interested in religious doctrine, though he amused himself with its speculative refinements. But religion and Churches, he would admit, are a social and psychological necessity, and the particular forms which they take are important, for they can influence the progress or decline of civilization. Therefor the historical question he asked was, did the ideas of Christianity and the organization of the Church, as adapted to the Roman Empire, generate or stifle public spirit, freedom, and the advancement of knowledge and a plural society.

His answer was that they stifled it. If Christianity had first been established in independent city-states like those of Greece, perhaps its would have assumed a different and more useful form – as it eventually did in the communes of Italy and, more successfully, in the Protestant cities of Switzerland. But the very fact of its establishment by imperial power, as an ideological support to that power, made it subservient to a centralized, monopolist system whose organization and absolutism, in its own formative period, it imitated and sustained.

Of course there were exceptions. Occasionally, the organized Church of Rome would find itself the champion of freedom, and its clergy would show, or elicit, signal examples of public spirit. Thus Gibbon would pay a notable tribute to Pope Gregory the Great, whose antique Roman patriotism recreated the virtue of ancient Rome and gave to his city, deserted by its Byzantine overlords, a new lease of life. ‘Like Thebes or Babylon or Carthage,’ he writes, ‘the name of Rome might have been erased from the earth, if the city had not been animated by a vital principle. which again restored her to honour and dominion’; and later he praises the popes of the eight century, thanks to whom he can say that, although the temporal power of the popes ‘is now confirmed by the reverence of a thousand years,’ ‘their noblest title is the free choice of a people whom they had redeemed from slavery.’ However, in general, Gibbon believed that the Church was opposed to progress. By its very structure – by its adaptation to the centralized hierarchical system of the Constantinian Empire – it undermined the social basis of public virtue.

In particular, as a cause and symptom of corruption, Gibbon singled out monasticism. Some of his most brilliant chapters, and his most sustained irony, are reserved for the spread of this Egyptian plague, as he called it, over the Roman empire: for ‘the swarms of monks who arose from the Nile’ and ‘overspread and darkened the face of the Christian world.’ Monasticism, he wrote roundly, had, in a later age, ‘counter-balanced all the temporal advantages of Christianity.’ For monasticism, he believed, was parasitic not only on society but also on the Church, whose ‘temporal advantages’ – i.e., whose constructive social function – he would admit. It withdrew the resources of society, both human and economic, from that free and useful circulation on which progress depended. It condemned men to idleness, immobilized wealth, kept land in mortmain. And it positively undermined the very idea of civic virtue.

References:

1. Gibbon, Edward, and Hugh Trevor-Roper. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993. Print. xci-xcii.

 

Edward Gibbon on public virtue and the collapse of the Roman Empire

Indeed, from the beginning, his praise of the Antoine age is qualified: for he sees, even in that age, in the very structure of the imperial system, the seeds of its decay. For the centralized Roman empire, by its very definition, excluded a certain vitalizing principle necessary to the health of society. That principle was public spirit, what Machiavelli had called virtu.

‘That public virtue,’ writes Gibbon, ‘which among the ancients was denominated patriotism, is derived from a strong sense of our own interest in the preservation and prosperity of the free government of which we are members. Such a sentiment, which had rendered the legions of the Republic almost invincible, could make but a very feeble impression on the mercenary servants of a despotic prince.’ This animating principle of ‘public virtue,’ expressed in active participation in public life, is to Gibbon the great contribution of classical Antiquity, and its extinction, in imperial times, its transfer (as Machiavelli would say) to the ‘barbarian’ successor-states in Western Europe, is a major theme of his work. Later, dealing with Byzantine history, he makes the same point more explicit. ‘In the last moments of her decay,’ he writes, ‘Constantinople was doubtless more opulent and populous than Athens at her most flourishing era’ when a far lesser wealth was divided among far fewer citizens. But each Athenian citizen was a freeman who dared to assert the liberty of his thoughts, words, and actions – whose person and property were guarded by equal law; and who exercised his independent vote in the government of the Republic. Against this, ‘the subjects of the Byzantine empire, who dishonor the names both of Greeks and Romans, present a dead uniformity of abject vices which are neither softened by the weakness of humanity nor animated by the vigour of memorable crimes.’ It was on this account this account that Gibbon quickened his pace when dealing with Byzantine history. In Byzantium he could find no evidence of theMachiavelli’s virtu, and so he transferred his interest to the barbarians who had in their societies those seeds of growth.

How is this virtue born, how nourished, how stifled and killed? Essentially, it depends upon the discovery, cultivation, and systematic teaching of the natural dignity and equal rights of man. But since man, as Montesquieu had argued, is conditioned by his environment, and the ‘spirit’ of his institutions, there is always a danger that such ideas, which are not native everywhere, and are often inconvenient to rules, will be suppressed and extinguished by orthodoxy and interested power. For even if power is exercised by liberal rules, there is always the danger of illiberal successors. A Marcus Aurelius may be followed by Commodus. For this reason, Gibbon, though he may praise the virtuous emperors, cannot praise the system; and he adds that, even under the ‘Antonine’ emperors, excellent rulers though they were, the inherent vices of the system were positively aggravated by ‘two peculiar circumstances’ which exposed the subjects of the Roman empire to a condition ‘more completely wretched than the victims of tyranny in any other age or country.’ These two circumstances were the memory of past freedom and the universality of imperial power. ‘The division of Europe into a number of independent states…is productive of the most beneficial consequences to the liberty of mankind.’ The heretic, the nonconformist, could always find a base, and so ideas and experiments unwelcome, could always find a base, and so ideas and experiments unwelcome to present power could not be completely stifled. But the monopoly of the Roman emperors was absolute. They ruled effectively over the entire civilized world. ‘Wherever you are,’ said Cicero to the exiled Marcellus, ‘remember that you are equally within the power of the conqueror.’

Virtue therefore depends for assured survival, not only on a continuing tradition of freedom, but also on a plural society, on the division of power between separate authorities Ideally, it requires independent, competing states, preferably with different political systems; independent authorities within particular states; economic and intellectual competition. In the Roman empire these conditions did not obtain. There the emperor exercised a complete monopoly of power, and this monopoly, by stifling freedom, inevitably stifled all forms of progress. At one moment, Gibbons tells us, in the decline of the Western Empire, the emperor Honorius sought to devolve power in Gaul to provincial assemblies. ‘If such an institution, which gave the people an interest in their own government, had been universally established by Trajan or the Antonines, the seeds of public wisdom and virtue might have been cherished and propagated in the empire of Rome,’ which ‘under the mild and generous influence of liberty’ … might then ‘have remained invincible and immortal.’ But the Antonine had granted no such devolution of powers, and now it was too late. The over-centralization of the Empire had already stifled the spirit of freedom which alone could have revived it, and ‘the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight.’

For virtue, to Gibbon, is not as the Stoics, merely a private possession, enabling a man to bear with equanimity all the blows of fortune. It is essentially on active principle. It depends on freedom, demands freedom, and creates freedom. It also, since it nourishes science, forwards material progress. Conversely, monopoly of any kind is its enemy: monopoly of power, monopoly of wealth, monopoly of knowledge or of alleged access to truth. The centralized power of the imperial bureaucracy was one such impediment to virtue: by its mere structure ‘the empire of the Caesars undoubtedly checked the activity and progress of the human mind.’ The vast hereditary estates of the Roman landlords were another. So was the immobility of labour -the hereditary obligation of the Roman middle class as much as the hereditary serfdom of the early medieval peasant. Gibbon hated all forms of immobilization: mortmain of land, thesaurization of wealth, tied labour. So he would rejoice when the Crusades incidentally broke up the baronial wealth and power and would record without pain the sacrilegious dispersal of clerical wealth, ‘most wickedly converted to the service of mankind.’…

…Public spirit, public service – this to Gibbon, was the human motive force of progress; and it was nourished, in his view, by the kind of society which, in turn, it created and preserved: a plural, mobile society. It had created the city-states of Greece, the republic of Rome; and from those city-states and that Republic – not from the Roman Empire – the ideas had been born which were the intellectual means of its preservation. The centralization, the immobility, the monopoly of the Roman Empire had gradually destroyed that pluralism, stifled those ideas, and so progress had been retarded, public virtue had declined, and in the end an inert, top-heavy political structure had fallen to external blows which a healthier organism could have survived. For it was not the barbarians – ‘those innocent barbarians’ – who had destroyed the Western Empire. ‘If all the barbarians conquerors had been annihilated in the same hour, their total destruction would not have restored the empire of the West.’ It had been rotted from within.

References:

1. Gibbon, Edward, and Hugh Trevor-Roper. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993. Print. lxxxvii-xci.

 

 

Our national character is still in the making

From the point of view of a detached cosmopolitan spectator, our country may seem to have little to be proud of. The United States of America finally freed its slaves, but it then in- , vented segregation laws which were as ingeniously cruel as Hitler’s Nuremberg laws. It started to create a welfare state, but quickly fell behind the rest of the industrial democracies in providing equal medical care, education, and opportunity to the children of the rich and of the poor. Its workers built a strong labor movement, but then allowed this movement to be crushed by restrictive legislation and by the gangsters whom they weakly allowed to take over many locals. Its government perverted a justified crusade against an evil empire into a conspiracy with right-wing oligarchs to suppress social democratic movements.

I have been arguing that the appropriate response to such observations is that we Americans should not take the point of view of a detached cosmopolitan spectator. We should face up to unpleasant truths about ourselves, but we should not take those truths to be the last word about our chances for happiness, or about our national character. Our national character is still in the making. Few in 1897 would have predicted the Progressive Movement, the forty-hour week, Women’s Suffrage, the New Deal, the Civil Rights Movement, the successes of second-wave feminism, or the Gay Rights Movement. Nobody in 1997 can know that America will not, in the course of the next century, witness even greater moral progress

References:

1. Rorty, Richard. Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-century America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1998. Print. 105-106.

Loyal to a dream country

The distinction between the old strategy and the new is important. The choice between them makes the difference between what Todd Gitlin calls “common dreams” and what Arthur Schlesinger calls “disuniting America.” To take pride in being black or gay is an entirely reasonable response to the sadistic humiliation to which one has been subjected. But insofar as this pride prevents someone from also taking pride in being an American citizen, from thinking of his or her country as capable of reform, or from being able to join with straights or whites in reformist initiatives, it is a political disaster.

The rhetorical question of the “platoon” movies-“What do our differences matter, compared with our commonality as fellow Americans?”—-did not commend pride in difference, but neither did it condemn it. The intent of posing that question was to help us become a country in which a person’s difference would be largely neglected by others, unless the person in question wished to call attention to it. If the cultural Left insists on its present strategy-on asking us to respect one another in our differences rather than asking us to cease noticing those differences-it will have to find a new way of creating a sense of commonality at the level of national politics. For only a rhetoric of commonality can forge a winning majority in national elections.

I doubt that any such new way will be found. Nobody has yet suggested a viable leftist alternative to the civic religion of which Whitman and Dewey were prophets. That civic religion centered around taking advantage of traditional pride in American citizenship by substituting social justice for individual freedom as our country’s principal goal. We were supposed to love our country because it showed promise of being kinder and more generous than other countries. As the blacks and the gays, among others, were well aware, this was a counsel of perfection rather than description of fact. But you cannot urge national political renewal on the basis of descriptions of fact. You have to describe the country in terms of what you passionately hope it will become, as well as in terms of what you know it to be now. You have to be loyal to a dream country rather than to the one to which you wake up every morning. Unless such loyalty exists, the ideal has no chance of becoming actual.

References:

1. Rorty, Richard. Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-century America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1998. Print. 100-101.

Richard Rorty predicts Donald Trump

Many writers on socioeconomic policy have warned that the old industrialized democracies are heading into a Weimar-like period, one in which populist movements are likely to overturn constitutional governments. Edward Luttwak, for example, has suggested that fascism may be the American future. The point of his book The Endangered American Dream is that members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers-themselves desperately afraid of being downsized-are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.

At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for-someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. A scenario like that of Sinclair Lewis’ novel It Can’t Happen Here may then be played out. For once such a strongman takes office, nobody can predict what will happen. In 1932, most of the predictions made about what would happen if Hindenburg named Hitler chancellor were wildly overoptimistic.

One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. The words “nigger” and “kike” will once again be heard in the workplace. All the sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.

But such a renewal of sadism will not alter the effects of selfishness. For after my imagined strongman takes charge,he will quickly make his peace with the international superrich, just as Hitler made his with the German industrialists. He will invoke the glorious memory of the Gulf War to provoke military adventures which will generate short-term prosperity. He will be a disaster for the country and the world. People will wonder why there was so little resistance to his inevitable rise. Where, they will ask, was the American Left?

References:

1. Rorty, Richard. Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-century America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1998. Print. 89-91.

Top-down and botton-up Leftism

The history of leftist politics in America is a story of how top-down initiatives and bottom-up initiatives have interlocked.

Top-down leftist initiatives come from people who have enough security, money, and power themselves, but nevertheless worry about the fate of people who have less. Examples of such initiatives are muckraking exposes by journalists, novelists, and scholars-for example, Ida Tarbell on Standard Oil, Upton Sinclair on immigrant workers in the Chicago slaughterhouses, Noam Chomsky on the State Department’s lies and the New York Times‘s omissions. Other examples are the Wagner and Norris-Laguardia Acts, novels of social protest like People of the Abyss and Studs Lonigan, the closing of university campuses after the American invasion of Cambodia, and the Supreme Court’s decisions in Brown v. Board of Education and Romer v. Evans.

Bottom-up leftist initiatives come from people who have little security, money, or power and who rebel against the unfair treatment which they, or others like them, are receiving. Examples are the Pullman Strike, Marcus Garvey‘s black nationalist movement, the General Motors sit-down strike of 1936, the Montgomery bus boycott, the creation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, the creation of Cesar Chavez‘s United Farm Workers, and the Stonewall .. riot” (the beginning of the gay rights movement) .

Although these two kinds of initiatives reinforced each other, the people at the bottom took the risks, suffered the beatings, made all the big sacrifices, and were sometimes murdered. But their heroism might have been fruitless if leisured, educated, relatively risk-free people had not joined the struggle. Those beaten to death by the goon squads and the lynch mobs might have died in vain if the safe and secure had not lent a hand.

These loans were unheroic but indispensable. The Luce journalists of 1937 who filled the pages of Life magazine with pictures of the National Guard beating up striking United Automobile Workers were not taking many risks. Nor were the TV reporters who kept the cameras focused on Bull Connor’s dogs and cattle prods in 1961. But if they had not been there, and if a lot of secure and well-off Americans had not reacted to those images as they did, the UAW strike against Ford and the Freedom Ride through Alabama would both have been ineffectual. Somebody has to convince the voters that what the authorities are calling senseless violence is actually heroic civil disobedience.

References:

1. Rorty, Richard. Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-century America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1998. Print. 53-54.

 

The myth of a morally pure America

America is not a morally pure country. No country ever has been or ever will be. Nor will any country ever have a morally pure, homogeneous Left. In democratic countries you get things done by compromising your principles in order to form alliances with groups about whom you have grave doubts. The Left in America has made a lot of progress by doing just that. The closest the Left ever came to taking over the government was in 1912 , when a Whitman enthusiast, Eugene Debs, ran for president and got almost a million votes. These votes were cast by, as Daniel Bell puts it, .. as unstable a compound as was ever mixed in the modem history of political chemistry.” This compound mingled rage at low wages and miserable working conditions with, as Bell says, .. the puritan conscience of millionaire socialists, the boyish romanticism of a Jack London, the pale Christian piety of a George Herron, … the reckless braggadocio of a ‘Wild Bill’ Haywood, . . . the tepid social-work impulse of do-gooders, … the flaming discontent of the dispossessed farmers, the inarticulate and amorphous desire to ‘belong’ of the immigrant workers, the iconoclastic idol-breaking of the literary radicals…and more.”

References:

1. Rorty, Richard. Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-century America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1998. Print. 52.

Richard Rorty on Hegel’s philosophy of history

Hegel was the first philosopher to take time and finitude as seriously as any Hobbesian materialist, while at the same time taking the religious impulse as seriously as any Hebrew prophet or Christian saint. Spinoza had attempted such a synthesis by identifying God with Nature, but Spinoza still thought it desirable to see things under the aspect of eternity. Hegel rejoined that any view of human history under that aspect would be too thin and abstract to be of any religious use. He suggested that the meaning of human life is a function of how human history turns out, rather than of the relation of that history to something ahistorical…

…Hegel’s philosophy of history legitimized and underwrote Whitman’s hope to substitute his own nation-state for the Kingdom of God. For Hegel told a story about history as the growth of freedom, the gradual dawning of the idea that human beings are on their own, because there is nothing more to God than his march through the world-nothing more to the divine than the history of the human adventure. In a famous passage, Hegel pointed across the Atlantic to a place where as yet unimagined wonders might be worked: “America is the country of the future … the land of desire for all those who are weary of the historical arsenal of old Europe.”

Whitman probably never encountered this passage, but he knew in his bones that Hegel should have written that sentence. It was obvious to him that Hegel had written a prelude to the American saga. Hegel’s works , Whitman said, might “not inappropriately be this day collected and bound up under the conspicuous title: Speculations for the use of North America, and Democracy there.” 18 This is because Hegel thinks God remains incomplete until he enters time-until, in Christian terminology, he becomes incarnate and suffers on the Cross. Hegel uses the doctrine of Incarnation to turn Greek metaphysics on its head, and to argue that without God the Son, God the Father would remain a mere potentiality, a mere Idea. Without time and suffering , God is, in Hegel’s terms, a .. mere abstraction. “

References:

1. Rorty, Richard. Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-century America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1998. Print. 19-21.

John Dewey and Walt Whitman on Democracy

“Democracy,” Dewey said, “is neither a form of government nor a social expediency, but a metaphysic of the relation of man and his experience in nature.” For both Whitman and Dewey, the terms “America” and .. democracy” are shorthand for a new conception of what it is to be human-a conception which has no room for obedience to a nonhuman authority, and in which nothing save freely achieved consensus among human beings has any authority at all. Steven Rockefeller is right to say that .. [Dewey’s] goal was to integrate fully the religious life with the American democratic life.” But the sort of integration Dewey hoped for is not a matter of blending the worship of an eternal Being with hope for the temporal realization, in America, of this Being’s will. It is a matter of forgetting about eternity. More generally, it is a matter of replacing shared knowledge of what is already real with social hope for what might become real. The word ” democracy,” Whitman said, “is a great word, whose history … remains unwritten, because that history has yet to be enacted.”

References:

1. Rorty, Richard. Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-century America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1998. Print. 18-19.