September 2025 - Patricia Roberts-Miller

BSAB: “Both sides” and the slavery debate

cover of book on the slavery debate — https://www.uapress.ua.edu/9780817381257/fanatical-schemes/

As I’ve said many times, as soon as a public, media, or person frames our complicated world of policy options as either a binary or continuum of two sides, then it’s all about in- and out-groups, and our shared world of policy disagreements isn’t the kind of disagreement that can help communities come to pragmatic solutions. It’s some degree of demagoguery. Maybe it’s a horse race, maybe it’s a full-throated call for political or physical extermination. But it’s never useful for effective deliberation, about anything. Because there are never just two sides about any policy. And while one can describe our political situation as a binary or continuum, one can also rate all political figures on the basis of whether they agree with your narrow policy agenda. One can also arrange all candidates on the basis of how much they use the letter ‘E’ in their messaging. One can find a lot of ways of categorizing political figures and group commitments—that doesn’t mean those categories are useful ways to think about what policies are best for our shared world.

What framing our complicated world of policy options as a binary or continuum does is to fame is it as us v. them. And so we engage in motivism, the genus-species fallacy, and various forms of ad hominem.

Once political disagreements are framed as conflicts among various identities (either a binary or continuum), then we don’t deliberate together, and that is what is supposed to happen in a democracy. Democracy thrives for everyone when people try to work together to solve problems. They can argue, vehemently, petulantly, emotionally, but with each other.

And, really, this is something we all know to be true. The moment that a conflict in your church, family, workplace, garden club, D&D game, neighborhood mailing list, or whatever is framed as a conflict of two sides is the moment that people stop deliberating and start taking sides. They might still debate, but they aren’t deliberating. And the train is wobbling on the tracks.

Here’s an example of a time that binary/continuum was (and is) both false and poisonous: antebellum debates about slavery, and postbellum narratives about what happened. [If you want me to cite sources for everything I’m saying, go here. ]

There weren’t two sides to the debate about slavery, yet that’s how the issue is described, in everything from textbooks to popular understandings.

There were at least eleven.

1) Slavery should be expanded to all states, so that there should be no such thing as a non-slave state. In other words, they didn’t believe in states’ rights.

2) If you enslaved someone in a pro-slavery state, you should be able to take them into any state, and ignore whatever laws that state had about slavery. Again, a stance that made clear that it wasn’t about states’ rights.

[So, let’s stop pretending that slavers were pro- states’ rights. They didn’t recognize the right of a state to ban slavery. If you think I’m wrong, cite sources that show that pro-slavery rhetors thought states had the right to ban slavery. Good luck with that. Also Dred Scott. Also you’re saying that the people who called for secession were liars, since they said it was about slavery.]

3) Slavery should be allowed in current slaver states, and every additional state should be balanced in terms of slaver or not, so that anti-slavery states couldn’t have more than 50% of the Senate. (The 3/5th clause pretty much guaranteed them the House.) The electoral college also did (again, 3/5th clause), so this was not a compromise, but a pro-slavery policy, and a violation of states’ rights.

4) We should restrict slavery to current slaver states, and not let it expand.

5) Slavery will die out for economic reasons, and so there’s no reason to try to resist slavers’ actions.

6) Slavery will die out, and result in large numbers of ex-slaves, so we should “re-colonize” freed slaves (this persisted until the 20th century, since it’s essentially Theodore Bilbo’s argument).

7) We should institute a slow ban on slavery, giving slavers the opportunity to sell their enslaved people to areas where slavery was still legal. (This was done in many states).

8) We should ban slavery, and recompense slavers.

9) We should institute a slow ban slavery, recompense slavers, and return all freed slaves to Africa (not a party they were from; sometimes this proposal included second or third generation Americans).

10) We should ban slavery and not recompense slavers.

11) We should ban slavery, and fully integrate African Americans as we have other ethnicities.

Notice that five and six are not anti-slavery, but also not pro-slavery. I have trouble characterizing three or four as anti-slavery, since they were allowing slavery to continue. Pro-slavery rhetors treated those polices as anti-slavery because slavery as an economy was about buying and selling the enslaved people, so, i slavery didn’t expand, then there wouldn’t be a market, and then slavery wouldn’t be profitable. (If you want the chapter and verse on that argument, it’s here.)

Even the positions that could be characterized as anti-slavery (8-11) or pro-slavery (1-3) were substantially different from one another in important ways.

This isn’t a case where, sure, there were subtle distinctions within each of the “two sides,” but there were basically two positions. There weren’t. And, oddly enough, had the pro-slavery rhetors been willing to think and argue pragmatically about the long-term ethical and economic consequences of slavery, they wouldn’t have started an unnecessary war. (Had slaver states taken the most expensive option—free and colonize the enslaved people and be recompensed—it would have cost them less than the war they started.)

And, if at this point, you decide I’m wrong and won’t check my sources because you’ve decided I’m out-group, then you’re making the same mistake that pro-slavery rhetors did.

Because pro-slavery rhetors decided that the complicated world of possible policy options about slavery was actually a binary, they murdered people who criticized slavery, instituted a gag rule in Congress, criminalized criticism of slavery, and started a war they lost.

Pro-slavery rhetors should have taken seriously the criticisms of their position. They should have been open to pragmatic discussions about policies, instead of turning a complicated situation into a binary of identities.

What does all this have to do with the BSAB (Both Sides Are Bad) position? I’ll get to that in the next post.

Arguing like an asshole: obvious problems, and obvious solutions

Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in front of a map of VN — Photo from here: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/07/us/07mcnamara.html

I’ve spent a lot of time arguing with assholes. Because I’ve spent a lot of time arguing with all sorts of people.

I was at Berkeley for many years, and argued with all sorts of people–anarchists, Democrats, environmentalists, evangelicals, feminists, Libertarians, Maoists, Moonies (they were terrible-car–crash-can’t-look-away bad at arguing), Republicans, Stalinists, Trotskyites, vegetarians. If you’re paying attention, then you’ve noticed I argued with everyone, including people with whom I agreed, but I disagreed with them on some point that seemed important to me. And some of them, even people with whom I agreed, argued in a way that I’ve come to call “arguing like an asshole.” By the way, so did I from time to time (and not everyone with whom I disagreed argued like an asshole).

Then I got on Usenet, and got to argue with (or watch arguments among) all sorts of people about all sorts of issues, from fairly trivial things (arguments about cooking methods, or dog training) to scammy (get laid fast, make money fast) to the biggest (genocide deniers or defenders). And then I drifted into other social media sites, and I took to arguing with all sorts of people with various alts. And I learned a lot about argument by doing that (also about how algorithms work, and many scams).

One of the things I learned is that, while there are some arguments that are never argued reasonably (e.g., make money fast, or get laid fast), there are assholes everywhere, albeit not evenly distributed. And that is the important point. Arguing like an asshole isn’t about what position you hold, but how you argue.

During all this time, for complicated reasons having to do with a Great Blue Heron, I was becoming a scholar of bad arguments, or, as I like to say, a scholar of train wrecks in public deliberation. And by train wrecks, I don’t mean that people made decisions that turned out disastrously because they didn’t have the information they needed (e.g., they didn’t know how cholera works), but when they had enough information to make a good decision, and they rejected it. What made (and makes) them assholes is how they rejected that information they could and should have considered.

It wasn’t necessarily because they were stupid, or corrupt, or villainous. Often they were very smart and good people who were sincerely trying to do what they believed to be the right thing.

And it was interesting to me that the train wrecks involved the same ways of disagreeing that assholes at Berkeley or in social media argued.

If, at this point, you want me to tell you the simple solution to the problem of how people (often very good people, and people whom we should admire) made disastrously bad decisions, and you want me to put it into 25 words or less, you can skip to the end. If you skip to the end and decide I’m wrong because you don’t agree with my conclusions, then you win the first gold star of assholery. Let’s call it the McNamara medal.

There are two parts to this error. First is believing that all complicated problems can be cogently and clearly summarized, and then persuasively communicated to any person, without having to go through the data; and that good and smart people can instantly recognize whether an argument is true without having to work through the reasoning. (In other words, that no situation is so complex that it can’t be easily and quickly communicated to smart people.)

Second, and related, is that the cogent and accurate summary of a problem necessarily leads to an equally cogent and easily communicable solution. The correct solution to any problem—no matter how apparently complicated—is obvious to smart and good people.

This is one of the most popular ways that countries, political leaders, business leaders, and others wreck a train: assume that every problem has a straightforward solution that is obvious to reasonable people (i.e., them). The problem is exactly as it looks to them, and the solution is the one that seems obvious to them. And if you can’t articulate the problem and solution in such a way that it’s obvious to any and everyone, then you have no clue what you’re doing. If the McNamaras of the world get pushback, oppositions, or counterarguments, they conclude that their opponents/critics are too stupid to understand an obviously true argument or too corrupt to accept it. Or both.

Assholes, regardless of the political, religious, or whatever affiliation, decide that an argument is right or wrong on the basis of whether it confirms what they already believe. Their beliefs are non-falsifiable, not in the sense that they’re so true that no one can prove them false, but in the sense that their attachment to those beliefs is not up for reconsideration. (What’s funny is that they do actually change their minds, as well as have a lot of contradictory beliefs, as well as beliefs they believe they have, but that have no influence on their behavior—we all have some of those–but I’ll get to that much later.)

There’s still debate as to whether the US could have won in Vietnam without paying an unacceptable moral, political, and economic cost, but there isn’t debate about whether McNamara’s strategy of limited war with limited means for a limited time could have worked. It didn’t. It couldn’t. Even he later admitted that. But, when he did, he failed to mention that he was told so at the time, and given all the evidence necessary to come to that conclusion as early as January of 1963.

McNamara wasn’t particularly vehement in his arguing, and he always had lots of data, but he argued like an asshole.

A more useful way to think about authoritarianism

train wreck — image from https://middleburgeccentric.com/2016/10/editorial-the-train-wreck-red/

When I found myself as the Director of the First Year Composition program, I also found myself in the same odd conversation more than once. A student would come to me outraged that they were being held to the same standards as the other students. At first I thought I was misunderstanding, but they meant it. They sincerely believed that, for reasons, it was “unfair” (that was the term they used) for them held to the same standards as other students. They weren’t claiming any kind of disability, but just … well…privilege.

I came across a similar argument when reading arguments for slavery, on the part of people who claimed to be Christian. They openly rejected “Do unto others as you have done unto you”—a way of behaving that would have made slavery impossible–in favor of some really vexed readings of Scripture. They rejected a law Jesus very clearly said in favor of problematic translations and comparisons. (In other words, they were antinomian when it came to Jesus’ laws.) For them, hierarchy was important, and the ideal hierarchy was rigid, with one’s place on the hierarchy determined by various criteria that were often regional (race, gender, wealth, source of wealth, religion, family standing, occupation, place of origin, political affiliation, and so on).

That’s how authoritarianism works. It’s a way of thinking about politics, organizations, families, and/or communities that says the ideal system is a rigid hierarchy of power (people have the “right” to dominate the people or groups below them) and privilege (people on a hierarchy should submit to those above them,). That hierarchy of domination and submission means that people should not do unto others, and should not be held to the same standards. The paradox is that people who claim to be higher on the hierarchy because they are better people hold themselves and others like them to lower standards than people below them.

There are a few other interesting points about that hierarchy. People believed that the categories that justified the hierarchy were Real, created by some kind of higher power (Nature, Biology, God), and therefore Eternal.

That belief that the categories were Eternal meant that they took what were actually very recent practices and projected them back through history. For instance, pro-slavery rhetors could thereby ignore that the kind of slavery practiced in the US in the 19th century was relatively recent in almost every way, and not how slavery operated in Jesus’ time or before (the closest would be the Helots).

Another confusing paradox is that people who believe in a stable and Real hierarchy are saying, quite clearly, that they are born with certain privileges by virtue of family and so on—they will insist that they are entitled to getting better treatment and being held to lower standards—but they get very, very mad if you point out that they have privilege, so they are asserting and denying they have privilege.

At the end of this, I’ll explain my crank theory as to what’s going on with that asserting and denying of privilege, but I want to make a few other points about that hierarchy of submission and domination first. It’s very common, across various cultures, religions, organizations, businesses, but it isn’t universal. Many years ago, Arthur Lovejoy pointed out that what he called “The Great Chain of Being” has a long tradition in Western theology and philosophy. Although the term is medieval, the concept of all creation consisting of a hierarchy goes at least as far back as Plato’s Timaeus. Eighteenth century natural philosophy began the long and tragic tendency to insist on a “natural” hierarchy of ethnicities. Although Darwin was explicit that evolution was not necessarily progressive, and rejected the hierarchy of species, it was so ingrained after Linnaeus that he was largely ignored. “Darwinism” was weaponized to support a stable hierarchy of beings that was not at all what he meant.

The narrative that the hierarchy was ontologically grounded (that is Real) meant that any disruption in the hierarchy was “unnatural”—that is, a violation of nature. That claim has/had two odd consequences. It meant asserting that hierarchical systems are more stable, and less prone to conflict, which led to another backward projection: that there used to be a time of stable hierarchy, and it didn’t have social disruption.

The Catholic Church in the Middle Ages is sometimes cited as an example of such a stable hierarchy that was associated with a lack of rebellion—people will sometimes claim was stable and peaceable (Chesterton, for instance). In actuality, it was neither. While peasant revolts were fairly unusual until the 14th century, there was constant conflict in Europe, with various political and religious leaders disagreeing (quite violently) about just what the hierarchy was, all the time asserting that there was a Real and natural hierarchy, and claiming that they were enacting that Real one. And, keep in mind, these were Catholics killing other Catholics, or Christians killing other Christians. Sometimes they were major wars over religious issues (e.g., the 13th century Albigensian Crusade), sometimes executions and persecutions of heretical sects (e.g., various forms of Gnosticism), and sometimes they were political in nature. Christian troops sacked both Constantinople and Rome, after all.

Neither the political nor religious hierarchies were actually all that stable or peaceful. There were constantly heretical sects, internal conflicts—if the Catholic hierarchy created peace and order, why did the Pope have an army that was used against other Catholics?

The fantasy that there is no conflict in a rigid hierarchical structure is just that—a fantasy.

So, why do people simultaneously claim and deny that they have privilege? I think for similar reasons that people claim that there were long periods in history with no conflict. They need to believe (and claim) that hierarchy provides stability in order to feel better about their status and authoritarian politics. It’s about feelings.

The notion of a hierarchy of privilege makes people really comfortable (“I’m owed this”) and uncomfortable (because it isn’t something they did other than be born). They want to believe that they have privilege because they have earned it. But, oddly enough, they earned it by being born to their family. When they’re arguing for things to which they feel entitled because of privilege, then privilege is a useful concept, and they invoke it. But, when others point out that they might have privilege because of to whom they were born, they feel that they’re being accused of never having to work at all, and so they get mad.

But notice that I’m not saying that authoritarianism is far left, far right, or both. In fact, it’s the whole problem of authoritarianism that should make people stop trying to make politics a binary or continuum. At the very least, there are two axes—one about degree of governmental support for a social safety net (if we’re talking about domestic policy), and another one for commitment to authoritarianism. To what extent do we think people who disagree with us should be treated as we want to be treated. And it’s that second axis that is predictor of democracy ending.

Arminianism, Antinomianism, and American Politics

My first introduction to American religious debates was a course taught by a prof who came from Yale’s American Studies program (I ended up taking several courses from him), and, as is oddly appropriate for someone from Yale, he was deep into the theological disputes of the 17th century—Yale was founded because of those disputes.

I’ll mention it was a great class. It changed my life, actually. We read nothing but histories of the Plymouth Plantation, beginning with Bradford, and ending with Perry Miller. It was a rhetoric of history class—this was 1978 or so (maybe 1980?), so pretty early for historiography classes for undergrads.

He emphasized that the major theological/political/eschatological debates of the 17th and early 18th centuries were both very serious and oddly binary. They were serious in that there were serious punishments for being in the wrong group (up to hanging), and yet, the criteria for heresy were incoherent. Later, when I learned more about demagoguery, I realized that the New England authorities like Winthrop or Cotton Mather engaged in pretty bog standard demagogic practices. I wrote a fairly boring (aka, very scholarly) book about it, and it shows up again in the introduction to a more recent (and less boring) book, but the short version is that authorities were committed to a theory of Biblical interpretation: Scripture is not ambiguous; it has a clear meaning that any reasonable person can understand; if there is disagreement, then it means that someone is wrong (and possibly in league with the devil), so expel or hang them.

It’s common among a lot of Christians to say that Scripture is absolutely clear, and their interpretation is indisputable. But, if that’s the case, why are there so many major disagreements and different interpretations on major issues? Paul, pseudo-Paul, Augustine, various church fathers, Luther, Calvin, and so many other major figures in Christianity disagree about central questions—such as whether to read Genesis literally, what the most important rules are, the role of grace.

So, what people are saying by asserting that their interpretation of Scripture is undeniable and obvious to any good Christian is that they’re a better Christian than Paul, and so on. If I’m particularly grumpy, I ask how good their Hebrew or Aramaic is.

I only once got a response. The person said that those people didn’t have the benefits of science we now have. Since that person’s whole position was about rejecting current science, I still have no clue what they meant. My drifting around in weird parts of the internet has a lot of interactions like that.

A particularly complicated problem in Christianity has long been the faith v. works problem. Paul and pseudo-Paul worried about it a lot; Luther worried about it more, and Calvin even more. One response is that you can get to heaven by following the laws, and faith doesn’t matter. Over time, people took to calling that Arminianism, and sometimes Judaism (Nirenberg‘s book is really good on the latter tradition). Neither Jews nor Arminius ever advocated works alone, but lots of beliefs are characterized by the name of someone who didn’t actually advocate those beliefs, and often actually condemned.[1]

Both Luther and Calvin believed that if you only behaved well because you didn’t want to go to Hell, then you were going to Hell. [If you think about that, it raises some serious questions about a lot of current proselytizing rhetoric.] I’m not sure there really have been any sects in the Judeo-Christian traditino who preached that works alone would save you–the closest I can get is the view that various theologians have criticized (behave well or you’ll go to Hell), or maybe the “fake it till you make it” argument, but the latter is a stretch.

At the other extreme is what’s usually called antinomianism (nomos is Greek for “the law”). That heresy says that it doesn’t matter what you do, as long as you have faith. Your faith cleanses your actions of all sins. While it’s hard to find many people who openly advocate Arminianism, antinomianism is more common (e.g., Rasputin, various cult leaders, abusers).

The New England Puritans (who were not, by the way, the first settlers of what is now the US, nor the first Europeans to settle in the US, nor even the first British people to establish a permanent settlement in the US) struggled with the antinomian/Arminian problem. It is a complicated problem—if you do the right things only because you’re trying to get yourself to heaven, were those acts of faith? Or just ways of looking out for yourself? If you have perfect faith that you are saved, and therefore believe that you can do anything you want…that’s a problem.

Here’s the important point: the early New England colony authorities resolved that complicated problem by saying that faith was the same as behaving as church authorities thought one should behave, and having the opinions they thought one should have. I read a lot of Puritan sermons. They didn’t pay much attention to the gospels, focusing more on Jeremiah, Isaiah, Psalms, and some Paul.[2]

For complicated reasons, at one point in my life I found myself spending a fair amount of time listening to a “conservative” (they aren’t and weren’t conservative, but reactionary) “Christian” radio station. And it seemed to me a weird combination of antinomian and Arminian.

Their major message was that you needed to have complete faith that Jesus has saved you from your sins–that faith frees you from paying attention to various laws he laid down. So, that’s the antinomian part. But, getting to heaven requires that you rigidly follow various laws, most of which appear to have been selected without a clear exegetical method (unless the exegetical “method” was “what supports my policy agenda”). That’s the Arminian part.

It seemed to me both antinomian and Arminian.

Have faith in Jesus, but ignore what he clearly said. I’ll give one of the most glaring examples. Jesus said do unto others as you would have done unto you. That is very clearly a rejection of what’s called “in-group favoritism.” But, many Christians are open that there should be in-group favoritism, that people who vote like them, believe what they believe, have their background, and so on should not be treated like others; they should be held to lower standards of behavior than non in-group members. They advocate worse punishment for non in-group members for the same actions; they want basic rights to be restricted to in-group members (“freedom of religion for me but not thee”); they express outrage at non in-group behavior that they dismiss or rationalize in in-group members.

They’re antinomian when it comes to Jesus, but Arminian when it comes to their rules.

[1] The accusation that some person or belief is “Armininian” has as much to do with Jabocus Arminius as many accusations of “Marxist” have to do with Marx, or “Freudian” practices have to do with Freud. So, this isn’t about what Arminius actually said, but about the rhetoric of early American New England Puritans. This heresy was often attributed to Catholics, but, as Nirenberg shows, has most often been associated with Jews.

[2] As another aside, I have to mention that the proof texts for Puritan sermons seemed to me—when I was working on this, there wasn’t the option of just searching digital sources—rarely had anything from the Gospels as a proof text. (Tbh, I think it was never, but I avoid using that term.) Lots of Isiaih , Proverbs, Jeremiah, Deuteronomy. I think there might have been pseudo-Paul, but I’m not sure. I hope someone has since done that quantitative research—it’d be interesting to see if there’s a correlation between purist/authoritarian self-identified Christian churches and not citing Christ.

Seeds over a wall

A lot of people are saying that the murder of Kirk was a false flag. They are also saying that the Reichstag fire was a false flag.

That way of talking about Kirk’s murder helps pro-Trump fascism.

What matters is not whether Kirk’s murder or the Reichstag fire were false flags.

What matters is that pro-Trump figures are treating the murder of Kirk differently from how they treated the murder of Melissa Hortman. They are saying that only the murder of in-group political figures matter. They’re fine with murders of out-group political figures.

They are admitting that they do not believe that they should treat others as they would have done unto them.

Don’t focus on the question of false flag. Focus on the open authoritarianism and rejection of Jesus in their treatment of different kinds of political murder.

If you have Trump supporters in your SM world, point that out to them at every opportunity.