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An Adolescent Conceit
The new national pastime of decrying the sins of our predecessors brought these remarks by Dr. Robert George of Princeton to mind:
Undergraduates say the darnedest things. When discussing the history of racial injustice, I frequently ask them what their position on slavery would have been had they been white and living in the South before abolition. Guess what? They all would have been abolitionists! They all would have bravely spoken out against slavery, and worked tirelessly in the cause of freeing those enslaved. Isn’t that special? Bless their hearts.
Of course, it is complete nonsense. Only the tiniest fraction of them, or of any of us, would have spoken up against slavery or lifted a finger to free the slaves. Most of them—and us—would simply have gone along. Many would have supported the slave system and, if it was in their interest, participated in it as buyers and owners or sellers of slaves.
So I respond to the students’ assurances that they would have been vocal opponents of slavery by saying that I will credit their claims if they can show me evidence of the following: that in leading their lives today they have embraced causes that are unpopular among their peers and stood up for the rights of victims of injustice whose very humanity is denied, and where they have done so knowing (1) that it would make THEM unpopular with their peers, (2) that they would be loathed and ridiculed by wealthy, powerful, and influential individuals and institutions in our society; (3) that it would cost them friendships and cause them to be abandoned and even denounced by many of their friends, (4) that they would be called nasty names, and (5) that they would possibly even be denied valuable educational and professional opportunities as a result of their moral witness.
In short, my challenge to them is to show me where they have at significant risk to themselves and their futures stood up for a cause that is unpopular in elite sectors of our culture today.
Theodore Dalrymple has observed that there are few feelings more congenial than a sense of moral superiority. It’s both easy and pleasing to feel superior to people from the past. It’s especially easy, in part, because the dead can’t defend themselves. The old admonition not to speak ill of the dead came about for a reason.
All of this came to mind recently on the heels of David French’s johnny-come-lately embrace of hereditary racial moral culpability. In short: he has decided that the majority of Americans are complicit in the racial sins of the past primarily on the basis of sharing the same skin color as some of the perpetrators from days gone by. If that rationale comes across to you as flimsy and outrageously unjust, well, you would not be David French.
Others on Ricochet have posted very useful responses to French, most notably @arizonapatriot here and @bryangstephens here.
I’m not writing here to rehash the actual arguments of French and his ilk. I’m primarily writing to observe that I have yet to witness French or anyone else in the hairshirt brigade take any concrete action that might suggest that they themselves are guilty of the inherited racism they accuse the rest of us of. They may say “we must atone” but apparently, any actual atoning will start somewhere else. For all of the mau-mauing about inherited racial guilt being done by white writers and white leaders of corporations, I have not observed a rush for the exits by any of them. It seems that the louder the assertion of collective guilt, the more unlikely the accuser is to actually lead by example in personal sacrifice. David French may say that we are systemically guilty, but his fingers are pointing outward, and he himself remains comfortably ensconced in his privileged sinecure.
The result of all of this is that French and others come across to me as primarily engaging in an adolescent conceit. French is like the 16-year-old boy who looks down on his father for working too much but who nevertheless expects to maintain his own comfortable living arrangements, and to borrow the car keys on Saturday night. French eagerly accuses his country and his neighbors, but without any expectation that his own comfortable circumstance should change.
I suspect that in reality, when the David Frenches of the world allege that America is systemically racist and marred by the unremovable stain of a racist past, they intend to direct the accusation at the rest of us but not really at themselves. It is a pose, or maybe as poker players would say — “a tell.” It primarily reveals that they view themselves as set apart — as the moral betters of the hairy unwashed around them. They apparently don’t intend to make any actual sacrifices themselves. They only intend to accuse. They expect the consequences for the collective guilt they imagine to fall entirely on someone else.
Perhaps rather than letting his feverish moral condescension get the better of him, French would do well to remember there are moral failures more heinous than the figments he imagines. If he can bring himself to take a break from his moral preening and grandstanding, he might recall that on the larger list of things God hates are two practices that French’s own writing unhappily brings to mind:
Published in GeneralThere are six things that the Lord hates,
Seven that are an abomination to Him:…
A false witness who declares lies,
And one who spreads strife among brothers.— Proverbs 6:16-19
@marcin – I don’t know if you’ve read Marvin Olasky’s book The Tragedy of American Compassion, but it highlights the implausibility of effective help being given to the poor at anything like a large scale centrally managed. Poverty, especially in free societies, is not susceptible to amelioration by bureaucrats. I suspect that’s because, for someone living in a free society, there are generally extraordinary contributors to the fact that they find themselves in poverty. This is almost always true for, say, the homeless (e.g. drug use, mental illness.)
I think you highlight a very important example, here, of the effectiveness of focusing on something in a local community at a modest scale. Continent-sized economic redistribution doesn’t help the poor because the nature of such a blunt instrument mitigates against any actual discernment on the part of the “helpers”. It becomes impossible to personalize the help being provided in such a way that it verifiably does more good than harm.
My own faith teaches me that a big part of the mandate to help the poor is not merely economic but to cultivate love in the heart of the helper. In fact, Jesus made the observation that poverty would never actually be eliminated. The goal of cultivating love in human affairs is, IMO, unlikely to happen when “help” for the poor is reduced to the government periodically recharging the cash balance electronically on a welfare Visa card.
Your examples are, I think, particularly good in two ways. First, they are at a scale where personalization and discernment is feasible. Second, they require an active demonstration of initiative by the recipient.
I could not believe that French had actually swallowed the CRT line whole, and on reading his article that was linked in the OP I found that he had not. He does not endorse most of the CRT nonsense such as the guilt of all whites or individual whites or the idea that whites are all evil or that America is an inherently and unredeemably racist country. He does not support equity over equality. He does not blame capitalism. What he endorses is something more obvious and basic, something we all know, which is that poor people and many minorities begin with a disadvantage in America that affects their chances in life. At least part of this is obviously due to the racist (and classist and sexist) policies of the past. It is reasonable and right to do what can be done to correct this.
I’m aware that CRT radicals are engaged in a Motte and Bailey game such that when their radical core is challenged they will fall back and insist that they mean only that reasonable efforts to acknowledge and correct disadvantage should be taken. But I don’t think this is what French is doing. He really does mean the latter more reasonable proposition.
Having said this, I’m disappointed that French adopted some of the rhetoric of the CRT movement, such as blathering about the “legacy of discriminatory structures our forefathers created.” As an isolated idea it’s valid, I guess, but with all the other nonsense that the CRT radicals have entrained to it I’d avoid parroting them.
French prefers conservative approaches to this problem of disadvantage over progressive ones. For example, the political pressure from teachers’ unions to keep poor kids in bad public schools rather than giving their parents other options is one thing that perpetuates the disadvantage that these folks have. School choice ought to be a conservative goal because it promotes justice and equality. Another example would be to remove the barriers to development of low cost housing set in place by environmental and zoning laws. Another would be to remove barriers to starting small businesses, such as onerous licensing requirements, taxes, and regulations.
As for French failing to step aside for a member of a minority to take his job, that does not apply because racial quotas in employment are not things he endorses, either. Rather, for example, access to a better education would make minorities better able to compete for jobs.
My purpose was not to unpack all of what French had to say on this. I’m assuming you’re referring to this post of his here. I wonder if you also read Michael Anton’s response to French here? Anton, IMO, correctly perceives the rather sinister and far-reaching implications of French’s use of scripture to make the case for inter-generational moral complicity.
French parrots a growing chorus of evangelical big-shot pastors in arguing that people who are not racists are nevertheless morally complicit in racism merely on the basis of sharing a similar pigmentation with people from the past. There is a lot that could be said about French’s embrace of hereditary bloodguilt as an animating principle for justice, but your analysis of what French “endorses” or has “swallowed”, while kind, doesn’t engage the actual words he wrote in his post. It was not his detractors, but French himself, who introduced hereditary bloodguilt as a basis for modern justice. Vicarious moral culpability (i.e. bloodguilt) has a long pedigree among those more feverish pro-life activists of the 1980’s who leaned, shall we say, toward more kinetic responses to abortion. French’s ideas have a provenance whether he himself is aware of it or not.
There is also a very large dollop in his post of the tedious leftist trope that disparity=discrimination. His narrative arc, running from long-ago red-lining to contemporary household wealth disparity, is a typical example of the kind of causal presuppositions that are always assumed but never quite proved by the disparity=discrimination crowd. There is “many a slip twixt the cup and the lip”, as the old saying goes. Understanding the complex origins of disparities in household wealth in America requires rather more rigor than the facile analysis French offers – not least because there are other races in America besides black and white. When viewed more holistically, the narrative of household wealth as an artifact of injustice becomes, shall we say, more murky than helpful for the likes of David French. And the entire drumbeat to “do something” about disparity avoids looking squarely at just how much has been done already – for the last 60 years at least. It’s as if the entire wealth transfer represented by the “war on poverty”, or the entire reverse-discrimination regimen imposed by affirmative action, suddenly went poof.
French has gone completely off the rails. It saddens me, because I’ve been a fan of his in the past.
Very well put.
Indeed.
He just is showing who he really is.
French is a Pharisee.