Many shades of grey

During the couple of years before the faculty union blacklisted me, I used to engage in conversations with colleagues.  In one of those in-the-hallway chats, an adjunct faculty and I got to talking about imperfections in humans, especially the political leaders who transformed societies for the better.

We talked, in particular, about Gandhi and MLK.  And we both agreed that it does not help anybody by making them saint-like.  Instead, we ought to understand and appreciate them warts-and-all.  Such an unvarnished image then will help us understand that ordinary mortals like you and me were able to do so much, which will be way more encouraging to the youth than if they thought that one had to be super-human of sorts.

The adjunct's contract was not renewed, and I lost touch with him.  I tell ya, anybody who thinks like me doesn't last long.

During the road trip a few weeks ago, we were far, far away from anything and anybody familiar, when I heard a voice.

"Sriram?"

I turned around.  It was a former colleague, who was my lunch-mate during the couple of years he worked at my university.  I warned him in one of our early meetings that if he and I agreed so much, well, he might not last long on his job.  At our final lunch, I reminded him about my warning.  We both laughed.  And now after a decade a random encounter!

Anyway, back to Gandhi and MLK.  It is not that they had moral clarity from day one of their adult lives, and it is not as if they did not err in their daily lives.  Mistakes were in plenty.

Take Gandhi, for instance.  Most of us are familiar with his years in South Africa, which is when we began to understand white supremacy and, therefore, his own brown-skin standing in the bastard empire.  However, Gandhi in South Africa was not very much different from the white supremacists there, when it came to their views on the "native" Africans.  Gandhi thought less of black Africans, and his struggle was only to elevate the status of Indians like him who were there in the bastard empire, which he was not really fighting against.  As his biographer, grandson, wrote:

After all, Gandhi too was an imperfect human being. ... The imperfect Gandhi was more radical and progressive than most contemporary compatriots.

And by the time he became the Gandhi that we usually think about, he had become way less imperfect.

There is no need to create a false Gandhi here that ignores the real Gandhi since the real Gandhi is himself such a historical exception. And, of course, the fact that the real Gandhi was only remarkable – but not perfect, as per today’s moral standards – is also nothing to be ashamed of.

Gandhi was imperfect like the "deeply racist" Thomas Jefferson, about whom I have blogged here. Over the years, the more I understand the imperfect Gandhi, the more I have walked away from referring to him as a "mahatma."  But, while recognizing their imperfections, we ought to know better than to equate Gandhi with Churchill, or Jefferson with Hitler.  I am thankful that, Gandhi and Jefferson, despite their imperfections, worked towards constructing a positive, healthy vision for humanity.  

We hold these truths to be self-evident

In commenting at this post, before Anne returned to her senses, er, to this blog, Mike referred to Woodrow Wilson's racism.  In my rejoinder, I hoped that we are at least moving forward in the correct direction.  I had also noted about the founding fathers--"slave owners on the one hand, but talking the big talk about all men being created equal and about freedom."

Why not explore that some more?

Consider Thomas Jefferson.  He was the main author of the Declaration of Independence.  Jefferson was only 33 years old when he drafted that.  Only 33!  With soaring, majestic, rhetoric, Jefferson tells us:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness

The same Jefferson was a big time slave owner.   Writing at the Scientific American, John Horgan says that it was more than a small blemish; Jefferson was "an egregious hypocrite, who willfully betrayed the ideals he espoused."

"Willfully" is the key word here.  I.e., Jefferson knew better, and yet continued with his slave owning.

Jefferson was a “brutal hypocrite” even when judged by the standards of his time, according to historian Paul Finkelman. He notes that “while many of his contemporaries, including George Washington, freed their slaves during and after the revolution--inspired, perhaps, by the words of the Declaration--Jefferson did not.” Jefferson also “dodged opportunities to undermine slavery or promote racial equality,” Finkelman writes. As a Virginia state legislator Jefferson “blocked consideration of a law that might have eventually ended slavery in the state.” As President he purchased the Louisiana Territory but “did nothing to stop the spread of slavery into that vast ‘empire of liberty.’” Finkelman accuses Jefferson of being “deeply racist,” noting that he called blacks “inferior to the whites in the endowments of body and mind.”

Pause.  Think about this.  Jefferson writes that "all men are created equal."  Many of his notable contemporaries, including Washington, freed their slaves consistent with the spirit of the revolution and the very idea that "all men are created equal."  Yet, Jefferson not only did not free his slaves, he even resisted legislative attempts to free them!

The public "doesn't know enough about Jefferson's poor record on issues of race."

"I don't think you go around honoring people for behavior that was truly awful, and Jefferson's relationship with slavery and race was truly awful, even from his own times," Finkelman said. "This is not looking back from now," he stressed.
...
"George Washington ceased using white overseers to manage his plantations before he became president," and gave the positions to slaves "as a prelude to emancipating them in his will," Finkelman said. Jefferson never took such a step. "Washington famously said that he did not take men to the market like cattle, but Jefferson sold nearly 100 slaves in the 1790s," Finkelman said.

Which is why I appreciate Horgan's use of the word "willfully" when it comes to Jefferson's slave ownership.  Not only Jefferson knew better, his contemporaries were freeing slaves whereas he continued to treat them worse than cattle.

Horgan runs quite a list of Jefferson's hypocrisy.  He ends with this:

The United States has come a long way since Jefferson’s era. Our moral progress is exemplified by the fact that a black man is President. But this country still falls far short of its professed ideals of peace, equality, justice and liberty for all. Perhaps if Jefferson had set a better ethical example, we would have come further by now. 

If Jefferson had set a better example by freeing his slaves, and as a legislator and president if he had championed the rights of blacks, perhaps our history would have been different.  Maybe we would have moved much faster in the correct direction towards Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness, and I would not be worried about the possibility of a racist in the White House making a speech in 2019 marking the four hundredth anniversary of twenty captive Africans sold into slavery in the British colonies in North America!

Behind the academic curtains ...

I thought I had heard it all in academia .. but, apparently not!
Recently I overheard a tenured faculty explaining to a student, with all the sincerity and emotion that is characteristic of the person, that Thomas Jefferson was a slave-owing pedophile.
Awful. Simply awful.
I am willing to bet that it is only a matter of time when the academic world horrifies me, yet again :(

I was all set to write that it is not pleasant watching how sausages are made; but this NY Times report includes a remark that it "is offensive to sausage makers; their process is better controlled and more predictable." ht

The forgotten radical founder: Thomas Paine

How important was Thomas Paine and his Common Sense to the American Revolution and the founding of these United States of America?  Here is Brendan O'Neill, reporting from New York:

Prior to the publication of Paine’s Common Sense in America in January 1776, only around a third of the delegates to the Continental Congress, the political body of the American Revolution, supported separation from Britain. The rest wanted only for the ‘mother country’ to grant its American subjects more rights and to ease the tax burdens. As late as 1775, the year before Common Sense was published, George Washington was still toasting George III after dinners and Thomas Jefferson said: ‘There is not in the British Empire a man who more cordially loves a union with Great Britain than I do.’
Paine changed all that. This Englishman, not yet 40 and of no significant social standing, argued in Common Sense for the immediate and complete separation of America from Britain. ‘Even the distance at which the Almighty hath placed England and America is a strong and natural proof that the authority of one over the other was never the design of heaven.’ Ridiculing Britain’s hereditary principle and imperfect democracy, Paine urged Americans to ‘make a true revolution of their various struggles’ (3), and to create a single nation state with a government constituted for ‘respublica... or the public good’, in which there should be a Bill of Rights and ‘above all things, the free exercise of religion according to the dictates of conscience’ (4).
Americans read it in their thousands. A New Yorker wrote to his local newspaper: ‘This animated piece dispels, with irresistible energy, the prejudice of the mind against the doctrine of independence, and pours in upon it such an inundation of light and truth as will produce an instantaneous and marvellous change in the temper, in the views and feelings of an American.’ Within months, Jefferson made his Declaration of Independence, and Paine joined Washington’s armies against Britain as a kind of intellectual soldier, writing a 13-volume series called The American Crisis in the bloody era of 1776 and 1777. If Common Sense helped to give rise to the desire for independence, The American Crisis sustained it in the face-off with the ‘mother country’. ‘These are the times that try men’s souls’, wrote Paine (as quoted by Obama in his inauguration address in 2009).
Not content with having created an intellectual ‘land-flood that sweeps all before it’ in America, as one of his readers put it, Paine later went to France and stirred things up there too. His defence of the French Revolution, The Rights of Man, published in 1791 (part one) and 1792 (part two), was burnt by conservatives in Britain, and devoured by radicals in France. Paine later co-authored the French revolutionaries’ Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and was elected to the French National Convention (where he had to have his speeches read out by other people, on account of the fact that he didn’t speak French).

How easily we forget, eh ...

The Pastor Rick Warren exam at Saddleback

Kathleen Parker has a good argument in her WaPo column:

At the risk of heresy, let it be said that setting up the two presidential candidates for religious interrogation by an evangelical minister -- no matter how beloved -- is supremely wrong.
It is also un-American. ...

Her closing lines are great ...

For the moment, let's set aside our curiosity about what Jesus might do in a given circumstance and wonder what our Founding Fathers would have done at Saddleback Church. What would have happened to Thomas Jefferson if he had responded as he wrote in 1781:
"It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."
Would the crowd at Saddleback have applauded and nodded through that one? Doubtful.
By today's new standard of pulpits in the public square, Jefferson -- the great advocate for religious freedom in America -- would have lost.