In response to some recent articles that I wrote in defense of honoring the memory of the Confederacy and such distinguished Confederate and American heroes as Robert E. Lee, I received some telling comments from readers who are, presumably, \u201cconservative.\u201d<\/p>\n
These readers, some of whom explicitly claimed to agree with most of what I usually write, took unequivocal exception to my position on Confederate monuments. Their argument ultimately boiled down to this:<\/p>\n
(1)The Confederates fought in defense of slavery.<\/p>\n
(2)Slavery is immoral.<\/p>\n
(3)Therefore, via (1) and (2), the Confederates were immoral.<\/p>\n
(4) The immoral should never be publicly honored.<\/p>\n
(5) Thus, by way of (3) and (4), Confederates should not be publically honored.<\/p>\n
As I have observed, while the War Between the States did indeed have something<\/em> to do with slavery, (1) is simply incorrect.\u00a0 Most Confederate soldiers, as well as several prominent generals\u2014including, most notably, Robert E. Lee\u2014did not own slaves by the time that the war was raging.\u00a0 To claim that the mass of soldiers without whom the South never could have so much as thought of fighting sacrificed their lives and those of their family members for the sake of defending the right of a minority of wealthy aristocrats to own slaves is preposterous on its face. It is no less preposterous than the proposition that young lower and middle-class American men today would be willing to risk limb and life so that the \u201cone-percent\u201d can continue to get tax write offs or contracts with foreign businesses.<\/p>\n Besides this, there is no topic in perhaps the history of the entire world that has had more ink spilt over it than that of this war.\u00a0 That is, in more serious times, people, both the laity and scholars, realized that the complexity of this tragedy defied all attempts to reduce it to such simple-minded, one-dimensional caricatures of the sort advanced by those who would attribute to Confederates a single, nefarious motive: the love for slavery.<\/p>\n But I have already addressed this last point, and, at any rate, the first premise is false.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n The second premise that asserts the immorality of slavery is true. Yet it is also irrelevant, for without (1), it is not possible to get to (3), and since the immorality of the Confederates cannot be established through (1) and (2), (3) cannot be combined with (4) to arrive at (5).<\/p>\n This argument fails.<\/p>\n However, an even larger problem with the anti-Confederate position is its profound inconsistency.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s just assume (counterfactually) for the time being that the anti-Confederates are correct and that every single Southern man and woman that took up the cause of secession was committed to perpetuating the institution of slavery.\u00a0 Let us suppose that, as their most outspoken enemies assure us, Confederate symbols are monuments to \u201cWhite Supremacy.\u201d\u00a0 If Confederate symbols deserve to go the way of the dinosaur on the assumption that these claims are true, then so too do virtually all of the signs and symbols of Western civilization generally and America specifically deserve to be purged from public.<\/p>\n The roots of what today is recognized as Western civilization are to be found in ancient Greece.\u00a0 Though they weren\u2019t the first of the West\u2019s philosophers, Plato and Aristotle enjoy the distinction of being among their greatest.\u00a0 Indeed, Western philosophy and even Christian theology would be inconceivable without these two men.\u00a0 Yet even Plato\u2019s ideal Republic included slaves and Aristotle articulated a defense<\/em> of \u201cnatural slavery\u201d\u2014the enslavement of those who by nature<\/em> were suited to be slaves.<\/p>\n Since slavery is immoral, then the reasoning of the anti-Confederates demands that Plato and Aristotle be given the same treatment as General Lee, Thomas \u201cStonewall\u201d Jackson, and every other Confederate.\u00a0 They should no longer be honored with pride of place in philosophy texts and courses.\u00a0 Neither should The School of Athens<\/a><\/em>, the famous fresco painting of the Italian Renaissance artist Raphael, any longer be extolled as great art. The original should be removed from the Apostolic Palace, in the Vatican, where it has hung for centuries, and the numerous copies that decorate art galleries around the world should be expunged as well. \u00a0After all, it is a tribute to Greek philosophy and features, at its center, Plato and Aristotle.<\/p>\n Since slavery is immoral, the Bible should be jettisoned.\u00a0 It most certainly can\u2019t be revered or respected.\u00a0 Neither in the Old nor the New Testaments is slavery per se condemned by any Jewish or Christian heroes\u2014including Jesus.\u00a0 The latter invokes the imagery of slavery in various parables.\u00a0 Not only does He not condemn it.\u00a0 Jesus even implies that masters are justified in beating disobedient slaves, in turn implying that slaves have an obligation to obey their masters. Saint Paul expressly admonishes slaves to obey their masters, thus establishing that, from his perspective, the relationship between the two is legitimate.<\/p>\n