Confederate Memorial Day - Page 5

Yes, down here we don't like the workers to get too uppity.

Yeah, sure thing buddy.

The notion of the North brough inclusion in the civlized world has some very serious and grave philosophical implications. I'll go ahead and say it: I don't think you truly want to make that claim.


I read an interesting article explaining why unions never took off in Dixie. In short it was because the working class had homes and other goods provided to them by the companies they worked for. It was very interesting.

Reason?

Sure.

You can say then that non-Western cultures weren't civilized and became civilized by way of imperialism.

Adding:

You're creating a world view where one culture and way of life is superior ("civilized") than another and that the other one is lacking something and "needs" to be civilized.

Well people have made the argument that Northern Culture was superior, Thomas Sowell comes to mind. I may be over simplifying what he was saying but it was implied on some level.

People have made the argument that a lot of cultures/races/etc are superior. The question here is not whether the argument has been made, it is whether that argument is legitimate.

Ed said that a philosophy that states anyone is inferior or in need of improvement by an outside actor is probably a negative thing. Your response was to state that someone actually holds this position, and you name an academic. Your response doesn't address the philosophical objection to the notion that acting as a "civilizing" force is a good thing, it simply states that an ostensibly intelligent person might agree with you.

History is littered with attempts at improvement of one group at the tip of the sword of another, and it almost always ends poorly.

I wasn't taking a side either way, I didn't agree or disagree with Ed. The South was apart of American civilization just a poorer less educated section. It is similar to saying people in the ghetto should exposed to the upper classes in order to help them improve their values, viewpoints etc.
The South needed an outside force to come in an disallow them from keeping humans as chattel, there is no argument there.

Apologies, I misread your intent. That said, I think there is a major distinction between exposure and civilization. I try to be exposed to as many cultures and ideologies, but that is a far cry from someone showing up on my doorstep with a gun and a civilization agenda. The difference, I think, is coercion. People in the ghetto should be given the opportunity for exposure to other classes, but it should not be forced upon them. If someone is willfully ignorant, the "superior" culture doesn't have the right to force them to change.


Slavery is wrong, I hope there is no one here who would argue for any other position. Perhaps there is an argument to be made about the method of abolishing the practice, but certainly it needed to go.

I am not disagreeing with this by any stretch of the imagination, but would you agree then that the U.S. has a moral obligation to invade those nations that continue to practice slavery to this day?

No, but it had an obligation to eradicate it in it's own nation.

oh, no, having thought it through carefully, I would like to make that claim

It could be argued that the fact that northern culture won the war, is evidence that it was superior.


southern culture was based on a slave economy - its very root and base was on an evil. on top of that, it had several other flaws - it was more of a "caste" based system, more of an "honor" based system, less democratic, less capitalistic.

now, we may find that there are better systems than an industrial capitalistic democracy, but for the past 150 years or so that has been the model that has provided the most good for the largest number of people, which could be taken as a good indicator of the superiority of a culture.

Winning is evidence that it was superior in a military sense, but it doesn't prove that it was somehow culturally superior.

The entire United States was based upon a slave economy. Even if we assume there weren't any slaves in the North (which is untrue), the industrial North was dependent upon the raw materials provided by the agricultural South. You can't ignore the interdependence of the U.S. economy. The South grew the cotton, and the North turned it to cloth. Pretending slavery was only perpetuated by the South is like pretending people in NY don't pay less for fruit because of the cheap labor provided my migrant workers in CA. Slavery was undeniably evil, but it would be willfully ignorant to pretend that the South was the only part of the U.S. that benefited from its existence.

Also, given less than 5% of southerners owned slaves, I think it's a stretch to state that southern culture was based upon a slave culture. It was based upon agriculture, but I think it's inaccurate to assume that 95% of southerners bought into a culture of which they weren't a part. The average southerner in 1860 was a poor farmer trying to survive, not a plantation owner getting rich on the backs of his slaves.

Fukuyama would be proud of your last statement. While I am a defender of market economics and, to a lesser extent, democracy, I don't pretend it's the only legitimate system in existence. To assume the Western model is the best model for all is ethnocentric to a degree I find to be unpalatable.

But much more than 5% held the belief that Black were only fit for slavery and that was Blacks caste because they were less than human. I don't think it is a stretch to say slavery was one of the main things the culture was based upon.