Judging People from the Past and Very Different Cultures (again)

I will go on with Aristotle when I have finished my reading. Just a short thought today.

 I have written about struggling with making moral judgments about people from the past: how to think about people socialized into the slavery or apartheid culture of the American South; how to think about the people who intensified the bombing (firebombing) of German and Japanese cities, especially when it was clear they were defeated; how to think about individuals such as Robert E. Lee or Winston Churchill, great people in a way but people with deeply flawed characters and moral belief systems.

    One problem: in a sense, I don’t believe in making moral judgments at all, if that means something like deciding whether a person deserves Hell or is radically evil. Human beings lack the wisdom and goodness to make such judgments. Take it as a metaphor if you want, but only God – and absolute Goodness, Justice, and Mercy – could make such judgments. I take Jesus literally: I cannot easily even think of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or Trump in Hell, though I can imagine an unimaginably painful Purgatory.  (Of course, I don’t equate Trump with the other three in terms of the blood he has on his hands. He does have blood on his hands though.) A scene from Ellis Peter’s Cadfael, a monk in the 10^th and 11^th centuries – the BBC television version, expresses my attitude toward moral condemnation. A woman had committed murder and Cadfael and his friend Sheriff Hugh Beringar:

 

Cadfael: Whatever was in her might have been best if it had not been maimed. She was much wronged.

 

Beringar: Old friend, I doubt if even you can get Susanne among the fold among the lambs. Now she chose her way and it had taken her far out of the reach of man’s mercy. Oh, and now I suppose you’ll tell me that God’s reach is longer than man’s…

 

Cadfael: It had better be. Otherwise, we are all lost.

 

[I don’t believe we are born guilty. Babies are innocent. The symbolism of babies in Hell (Limbo) in Dante is the perfect picture of the perverse essence of that thought. Knowing the Cadfael character, I think he would agree. “Suffer the children to come unto me.” Children are innocent. But which of us is entirely free of guilt after an adult life in the world? There is a solidarity in this – let he who is without guilt cast the first stone! This is what I take Cadfael to be expressing here, and not the dreadful doctrine of original sin.]

 

...

 

     Secondly, most of us feel uncomfortable blaming someone morally who grew up in a different world and acted under the pressure of terrible circumstances. When I strongly criticize the aerial bombing of German and Japanese cities, even at a stage of the war when its effectiveness in shortening the war was uncertain (it had no effect, as we know now), I don’t wish to blame Churchill, say, in the sense that I would have been righteous and done better in the same circumstances. I do wish to point out an ethical limitation of that culture, however, a kind of meaning blindness. It was morally imperative, imperative in every sense, that Hitler’s Germany be defeated – also for the sake of Germany. If it was rationally plausible that bombing cities (killing children, etc.) only way to do this, it would still be evil but perhaps justifiable. At the very latest, after the establishment of a 2^nd front (or 3^rd front, counting Italy), no reasonable person could believe bombing cities was necessary: Germany was beaten. But in that context it was almost taken for granted that killing enemy civilians and destroying infrastructure was a part of war; it could have, perhaps, shortened the war. The hundreds of thousands of dead children, women, old people – part of war. 

   (Still is for Putin and Netanyahu’s government. Even when you don't intentionally target civilians, you still end up killing them in masses - every individual killed unimaginable unless you are there - as the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan showed: an estimated 432,093 civilians died direct violent deaths according The Watson Institute for International Affairs, at Brown University. Add to this the maimings, the hunger, the dislocation, etc. How can you kill that many people as "collateral damage." I suppose you have to have some understanding for those Israeli's who accuse the US of having a double standard when it comes to their slaughter of civilians in Gaza. I have no words for any of this. There must be a better way to respond to terrorism.) 

     By criticizing that I am criticizing a cultural meaning blindness, a culturally transmitted ethical limitation more than judging the souls of the people in that culture. (Our culture is no doubt also meaning blind in many ways.) Not only the meaning of the civilian lives destroyed but the lives of the bomber crews sent on extremely dangerous missions to kill civilians: I have never been inclined to judge them. (I have talked to two bomber pilots. One a vet from WWII who said his main memory was fear and grief at the loss of so many fellows. One a young air force officer in the 80's - probably had never been in combat - who told me you have to think of the people you bomb as ants.)

 

    Thirdly and most importantly, to condemn past actions and practices does not imply self-righteously, moralistically blaming people from different times and places, from a safe outside point of view. It can also express a need to orient myself (to orient ourselves) to deeds, people, and forms of life we are somehow connected to. This includes defining my moral starting point, my context. It influences how I would respond today to what my government does, for example, or how I need to comport myself to African Americans.

 

   Not every moral criticism is a moralistic judgment. 

. . .

What cultures that disturb me most were / are generally blind to is the meaning of a human life, the meaning of destroying a human life. Blind to the evil involved. To the meaning of grieving loved ones. To the kind of searing remorse people would experience if they did understand the meaning of what they did. Here is some reporting about Robert E. Lee:

On June 24, 1859, the New York Tribune published an anonymous letter to the editor describing how Lee ordered the whipping of three enslaved people as punishment for running away. The New York Tribune was a well-known abolitionist paper in the years preceding the Civil War. They often published sensationalized stories about slavery to build public outcry against the inhumanity of slavery and gain support for the abolitionist movement. This article described how after George Washington Parke Custis had died, his son-in-law, Robert E. Lee, proved to be a strict slaveholder, which prompted the three enslaved people to run away. The letter then describes how the overseer took them “into a barn, stripped, and the men received thirty and nine lashes each, from the hands of the slave-whipper, when he refused to whip the girl, and Mr. Lee himself administered the thirty and nine lashes to her.” 

Another anonymous letter also published in the Tribune claimed “Col. Lee ordered them whipped. They were two men and one woman. The officer whipped the two men, and said he would not whip the woman, and Col. Lee stripped her and whipped her himself.” 

Lee never publicly responded or denied these claims but wrote to his son George Washington Custis Lee in July that “The N. Y. Tribune has attacked me for my treatment of your grandfather's slaves, but I shall not reply. He has left me an unpleasant legacy.” The Lees did not make any further comments about the event until after the Civil War.

I am pretty sure Robert E. Lee never lost any sleep over any of this. If he did, the scales might have been removed from his eyes that prevented him from seeing the true nature of what he did - which is easier for us to see that people of that time and culture.

To talk about the meaning of a person's life is a way of talking about their reality.