Speaking of the the Estrada impasse, Thomas Mann, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and ubiquitous talking head expert on all things Washingtonian, charged that “[w]hatever else he’s accomplished, President Bush has really polarized our politics.”
Mann is the sort of moralist who unhesitatingly discerns the cause of events he doesn’t like in the behavior of people he doesn’t like. He’s like the Southerners who maintained that the abolitionists’ fanatical response to slavery caused the Civil War … and the Northerners who maintained that slavery alone, not the response to it, caused the war. His is the sort of clear-eyed tunnel vision that can look at a zebra and see stripes of only one color.
“Northerners who maintained that slavery alone, not the response to it, caused the war.”
Who said that?
Essentially anyone who says flatly that “slavery caused the Civil War,” without more, says that. Although it’s true that without slavery there would have been no Civil War, it’s also true that without the moral response to it, without both the Southern and Northern refusal to compromise over its expansion, without …, etc., etc., there would have been no war. Or at least, there would not have been the precise war we had.
The best place to pursue this issue (at least the last time I looked, years ago) is in the writings of the philosopher William Dray, who emphasizes the degree to which “causation” — which sounds so scientific — is often a moral judgment. To say, for example, that the Russians started the Cold War is to say that they acted and we only reacted. But that judgment is not so much a matter of fact, of chronology, as a judgment of who was being reasonable and who wasn’t. The Russians saw themselves as reacting, for example, not taking the first step towards conflict. Similarly, to say slavery caused the Civil War is to make the judgment that it should not have existed, which is no problem as long as you recognize that you’re making a judgment, not a scientific explanation. Similarly, to say the moral response to slavery caused the war is to say that people shouldn’t have responded that way. I didn’t do this as well as Dray does.
I think your analogies need some help. Yes, saying “slavery caused the Civil War” makes a moral judgment about the relative morality of slavery vis-a-vis the moral worth of abolitionism– does that trouble you? Is that something that we shouldn’t do? That government couldn’t do? When can we? When (and how) can we evaluate — legally and morally– the ends of an action as well as its means?
Simon – I think my analogies are fine. It’s my writing that obviously needs some help, for I’m not at all troubled by the moral judgment that slavery was wrong. In fact, that was the point I was trying to make: to say that slavery caused the war is to make a moral judgment. I did not — or at least did not intend to — imply that judgment was wrong or that one shouldn’t make it. Before Dray’s writing it was not as clear that many attributions of causation are really judgments not about who did what, when, but who should have done what.
Okay, I think I see where you’re coming from. I think one can safely say that it was the issue of slavery that eventually led to the Civil War, and to the Mexican American War before that.