The guilty civilization that ended slavery and integrated baseball

This is depressing news, there’s no way to sweeten it. Today, March 31, 2007, major league baseball is going to inaugurate an annual “civil rights game” that will be played this year and every year just before the opening of the regular season, as part of a day-long event honoring the civil rights movement.

There’s the leftist mentality for you. Nothing can just be itself. The liberals have got to politicize everything. Not only do they create this ridiculous “civil rights game,” which is bad enough, but they schedule it each year so as to “frame” the baseball season in the civil rights idea. Baseball becomes about civil rights—which is also what Ken Burns did in his wretched documentary on baseball several years ago. Instead of being a sport to be played, watched, participated in, and enjoyed, it becomes an occasion to beat our breasts about how awful America once was, and still is. After all, look at how much inequality we still have. Look at how far behind blacks still are.

On a similar note, some pathetic left-wingers, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, demonstrated in London this week on the 200th anniversary of the ending of the slave trade, holding placards and wearing shirts that said, “Sorry … so sorry.”

Which eerily proves the point I made in the recent thread on William Wilberforce, copied at the bottom of this entry (though my point was not about Wilberforce, in light of this demonstration it now ironically turns out to have been so). I argued that each advance of rights, equality, and decent treatment of minorities, makes us feel even more down on our civilization than before. When Wilberforce after a twenty years struggle finally won the vote in Commons banning the slave trade, it was seen as a great moral triumph. Could Wilberforce have imagined that the anniversary of that accomplishment would, 200 years later, become the occasion for a self-righteous gaggle of neurasthenic wimps to slouch outside the British Parliament apologizing to the world for things that happened centuries before their birth?

Liberalism, as I’ve said before, represents the inversion of both ordinary and Christian morality. Now we see a new angle on this.

Under Christianity, you repent of your sins, confess your faults, are washed clean, and determine to live a new life in Christ. Confession and absolution clears out the sense of sin and gives a person a new beginning.

Under liberalism, society decides that something it is doing is wrong and determines to change, leaving its faults behind. So far, the process is like Christianity. But then something different happens. Instead of being rid of its past sins, meaning its past sins against liberal equality, instead of beginning a new life, the society feels more guilty than before, because by ceasing to commit the sin against equality it has admitted that it was committing that sin all along. Indeed, the further it gets in years away from that sin, such as racial discrimination, the more horrible and inconceivable the sin appears! And that history of sin can never be changed, erased, or forgotten. It is attached to the society at the hip forever, made part of its basic identity, invoked at every opportunity. The hypnotic thought that “we are a guilty country, we have done bad things,” becomes part of the consciousness and subconsciousness of every member of the society, crippling it, taking away its ability to affirm and preserve its own existence.

Christianity is about washing away our sins. Liberalism is about drowning in them. Or rather it’s about liberals using the society’s conviction of its sin to strangle it to death.

This difference between Christianity and liberalism arises from the fact that Christianity sees the truth as above man, and liberalism denies any such truth. Under Christianity, if man sees that he’s sinning, renounces his sin, and re-aligns himself with the truth that is above him, it is as though the sin were no more; it is superseded by a higher reality, life in God.

But liberalism denies that there is any higher truth. Just as liberalism says that there is nothing higher than the human self with its rights and desires, it says that there’s nothing higher than human sins. So for liberals there is no spiritual reality that can supersede and cancel out sin, no greater Truth in which sin disappears. If a society has sinned—or rather, if it has sinned against liberalism—it carries that sin with it forever. Under liberalism, there is no forgiveness for sins against liberalism.

Below I reproduce the exchange on the unappeasable quality of liberalism that took place in the “Warren on Wilberforce and the West” entry, which cannot be read at the moment because of technical difficulties.

Ben W. writes:

With respect to the Wilberforce film, and the dourness of John Newton, I’m sure the film-makers have bought into the liberal belief that it is anti-slavery that frees western man, not Christianity.

This comes from the same belief that the civil rights movement is the apex of American liberty.

Until that moment, the U.S. didn’t really experience freedom 100%. Nor was Great Britain truly free until the anti-slavery moment.

That’s why everything else about Wilberforce is minimized while the anti-slavery impulse is maximized.

LA replies:

Ben’s point is absolutely correct, but what makes him think that liberals think that America or Britain is 100 percent free now? Didn’t our president say in Africa that America still has the same racism that was responsible for slavery? Hasn’t his twin brain said a hundred times in a hundred capitals that America, while it has made some progress, still has a long way to go before it is truly equal and morally just?

Remember, each new step forward of liberal equality and freedom means that America prior to that moment was unfree and unequal. In January 2007 Nancy Pelosi became the first female Speaker of the House. Prior to that event, she and many others said, women had not experienced true equality and freedom, the glass ceiling was holding them down. Does this mean we have now reached true equality and freedom? No, because there is always some other “first” to be attained, such as the first female or black majority leader of the Senate, the first female or black vice president, the first female or black president, not to mention the equivalent “firsts” for every other “oppressed” group. With each one of those firsts, America’s entire history before that moment will be cast as a pit of darkness.

Thus liberal progress toward greater equality and freedom does not result in America becoming progressively better in its own eyes. It results in America becoming progressively worse in its own eyes. Under the terms of liberalism, America can never be good, can never have moral legitimacy as a society. How, for example, can we possibly feel good about living in a country that is so prejudiced and bigoted against homosexuals that it won’t allow people of the same sex to “marry” each other? For Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, the absence of homosexual marriage is such a crying injustice that it delegitimizes the existing institution of marriage between men and women. They say therefore that will not get married until same-sex couples can also get married.

This unappeasable quality of liberalism would be brought out if people would ask liberals or minorities who are complaining about this or that injustice: “Please tell us what an America that you would approve of, an America that you would not be angry at, would look like.” They won’t be able to answer, because they could only conceive of justice in terms of a condition of total equality that could never be realized on this earth, and therefore they could not describe, at least in non-risible terms, a morally legitimate America. Once it was realized that the liberal and minority agenda has no attainable standard by which America can become good and worthy of love and protection, but is only used to tear down whatever America is, the falseness and destructiveness of liberalism would be exposed.

All this requires is that conservatives, instead of accepting liberal premises in general and resisting them only at the margins, ask liberals pointed questions about their real beliefs, and not stop until they get an answer.

- end of initial entry -

An Indian living in the West writes:

“Under liberalism, society decides that something it is doing is wrong and determines to change, leaving its faults behind. So far, the process is like Christianity. But then something different happens. Instead of being rid of its past sins, meaning its past sins against liberal equality, instead of beginning a new life, the society feels more guilty than before, because by ceasing to commit the sin against equality it has admitted that it was committing that sin all along.”

It is not about society feeling guilty. It is about the Liberals demonstrating in the most vulgar and atrocious ways imaginable that they are morally superior to society. Liberalism is the Liberals’ love affair with themselves. The rest is a sideshow.

LA replies:

This discussion recurs constantly. The answer is that it’s both. On one hand, many members of the society do feel guilty. On the other hand, liberal elites stand above the society telling the society that it’s guilty and relishing their own superiority to it.

It doesn’t matter that in many cases liberals are not feeling guilty themselves but are just attacking the society, because what they’re attacking the society about is its guilt. Either way, it’s about guilt.

ILW replies:

The guilt is false because it costs them nothing. The people who feel guilty are no more likely to send their kids to study in gang infested inner city schools than we are. Guilt is a wonderful thing if it doesn’t cost anything. The middle class people who feel guilty will gush about their “guilt” about the past but let us ask them this: “Your ancestors* enslaved the blacks for nearly three centuries. While nothing can make up for that atrocity, you will work as a slave for blacks for a year and forsake all of your income to show your solidarity with the descendants of the people who suffered at the hands of your ancestors. Will you agree to do this?”. I would like to see how many agree. If anything, they would vote out the first politician who even raises their tax bill by 5 percent.

To most of those who feel guilt, it is all about splurging more of someone else’s money—especially the tax that comes from the rich. When charity comes from someone else’s pocket, it comes cheap. Let us not raise them to a level where they do not belong. It is modern hypocrisy.

*of course, only a small number of whites had slave owning ancestors but let’s take the liberal argument for a moment.

LA replies:

Who said the guilt was real?

Mark D. writes:

You wrote, in your piece about Baseball, Wilberforce, and liberal guilt:

“It doesn’t matter that in many cases liberals are not feeling guilty themselves but are just attacking the society, because what they’re attacking the society about is its guilt. Either way, it’s about guilt.”

I focused immediately on concept of guilt as used by liberals. There are several things to be said about it.

1. It’s manipulative. It seeks to play on the moral sensibilities of the audience in order to advance its own agenda. In this reading, morality is a weakness or misunderstanding on the part of the masses to be used for the liberal elites’ advantage. Those who use this tactic don’t themselves credit either morality or guilt; they are amoral.

2. It’s semi-legitimate, in that it transposes a category of the moral order to a spurious political order. It functions as an imitation. It’s simply the product of moral and spiritual confusion.

3. If liberalism validates human desire as the measure of the good, how could there be any guilt for anything, at least anything rising out of human desire? If some practice, such as slavery, is deemed politically or practically injurious, then eliminate it as simple administrative or managerial adjustment. Where does the guilt arise? Isn’t “therapy” (or “reeducation”) more appropriate?

4. “Guilt” is a spurious category within liberalism, given that human desire cannot be questioned. It’s pure sentiment, a posturing, to promote the atmospherics of “progress.” Because the narrative of progress can have no end in the liberal world, guilt is perpetual. It serves to denote that “progress is being made,” that there is a “better way to do things,” and guilt is used as a spur to further “advances” on the endless road of liberalism.

I tend to think that #4 is the closest to the truth—that guilt serves as both a talisman of Progress, and as a marker for Progress Made and Progress Yet To Be Achieved. It’s sort of a cosmic march through history, and it lends the entire narrative a mythological importance.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 31, 2007 12:59 PM | Send