Outliving this Day and Coming Safe Home

The essence of communication is that both the speaker and listener understand what is meant. Sometimes words and emblems, formerly benign or meritorious, can be adopted and used by miscreants and thus become symbols of bad causes. They convey messages that may not be intended by the speaker, but are widely understood differently by listeners. Two of the most odious political causes in living memory were Communism and Naziism. But the hammer juxtaposed on a sickle was originally a symbol of industrial and farm workers’ aspirations; the swastika was an Indian religious icon. Both became feared symbols of totalitarianism, oppression, and evil. For too many of us, the Confederate battle flag—based on the cross of St. Andrew, as is the flag of Scotland, has acquired similar meaning.

Secession and the establishment of the Confederacy was a bad idea from the start. Starting war by the attack on Fort Sumter was an even worse one. The size and unity of the United States within a federalist system is what has made the nation so strong and prosperous. Capitalism and the free market would not have survived in the semi-feudal South had secession succeeded. In any event, it became a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight, like all wars.

Men who fought under the Confederate battle flag (which was NOT the “Stars and Bars”—that flag was replaced for the battlefield because it was confusingly similar to the Union flag) generally fought honorably, even if their leaders’ cause was flawed. For that, they deserve to be respected. The leaders may have started the war to preserve slavery, which they believed necessary to produce cotton, which was the source of their wealth, but the soldiers themselves fought for the reason soldiers always fight—self preservation, and then for their fellow troops. To many of their descendants that what the flag means. Unfortunately, it has been co-oped by racists in recent decades, and acquired the meaning of their cause.

The most revered Confederate hero Robert E. Lee, whose name also has been hijacked by racists at times, sought reconciliation after Appomattox. “Furl the flag, boys,” he said to his troops after his surrender. It was a well taken admonition then; it is now.

See also: http://www.bobreagan13.com/2011/04/blood-and-money.html

On July 5, 1687, 99 years less one day before the Declaration of Independence was adopted in Philadelphia, Isaac Newton published the first edition of his Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. The two writings are not unrelated. Newton was a central thinker of the Enlightenment, one tenet of which was that the natural world and the moral world are inseparable and understandable, and reason was God’s—or Nature’s, if one must—greatest gift to humankind.

Newton’s Principia, as it has been called because of its Latin title, was a watershed in the history of Western culture. It confirmed mathematically the heliocentric solar system and behavior of the planets postulated by Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo, the theory of gravity, and the laws of motion that form the basis of modern science.

The reasoning methods Newton used to arrive at his conclusions demonstrated that humans could understand the natural processes of nature and, by extension, the universe. This gave credence to John Locke’s ideas concerning natural law and individual rights. Within the next century, Thomas Jefferson, with help from John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, set forth those ideas in our Declaration.

Newtonian physics was radically modified, though not discredited, by Albert Einstein’s Theories of Relativity. For that, Newton would have been pleased. He had made a virtue out of necessity by insisting that science should not feign hypotheses, that it should be limited in its ultimate claims; that is, there is no such thing as settled science.

Newton’s work was so revolutionary that the English poet Alexander Pope was inspired to write “Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night. God said, ‘Let Newton be,’ and all was light.”

Isaac Newton died in 1727. He is buried in Westminster Abbey: The burial place of kings and queens.

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Thomas Paine was born in Thetford, England on February 9, 1737. Paine emigrated to the British American colonies in 1774 with the help of Benjamin Franklin, arriving just in time to participate in the American Revolution. He was a political activist, philosopher, political theorist, prolific writer, and revolutionary. Acknowledged as one of the Founders, he authored two influential pamphlets at the start of the American Revolution, Common Sense and The American Crisis. His ideas were quintessentially of the Enlightenment—the notions of individual rights and reason.

Paine’s writings were instrumental in persuading the delegates to the Second Continental Congress to declare independence from Great Britain. Common Sense was so influential that John Adams said, “Without the pen of the author of Common Sense, the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain.”

Common Sense begins with the following paragraphs.

Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness POSITIVELY by uniting our affections, the latter NEGATIVELY by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first a patron, the last a punisher. 

Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one…were the impulses of conscience clear, uniform, and irresistibly obeyed, man would need no other lawgiver; but that not being the case, he finds it necessary to surrender up a part of his property to furnish means for the protection of the rest; and this he is induced to do by the same prudence which in every other case advises him out of two evils to choose the least. WHEREFORE, security being the true design and end of government, it unanswerably follows, that whatever FORM thereof appears most likely to ensure it to us, with the least expense and greatest benefit, is preferable to all others. 

The last two sentences express the same sentiments Thomas Jefferson included in the Declaration of Independence.

Later in 1776, when the colonists, meagerly armed and equipped, were defying the world’s most powerful military, Paine wrote The American Crisis series to inspire the patriots. George Washington had it read to all of his troops.

These are the times that try men’s souls: The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like Hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as freedom should not be highly rated.

Several years after the American colonies won independence, Paine moved to back to Britain. During this time he wrote Rights of Man, in part a defense of the French Revolution against its critics. His attacks on British writer Edmund Burke led to a trial and Paine’s conviction in absentia in 1792 for the crime of seditious libel. Paine was never sentenced as he had moved to France, where he lived for most of the 1790s. He became involved in the French Revolution there. In 1792, even though he was not able to speak French, he was elected to the French revolutionary National Convention. While the more moderate revolutionaries regarded him as an ally, Robespierre and the radicals, regarded him as an enemy. Paine was arrested and condemned during the Reign of Terror, but narrowly escaped the guillotine after Robespierre and his radical faction fell. In 1794 and 1795 he wrote The Age of Reason, which he addressed “To My Fellow Citizens of the United States of America.”

I have always strenuously supported the Right of every Man to his own opinions, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies to another this right. Makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it. The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is Reason. I have never used any other, and I trust I never shall.

Paine returned to America in 1802. He died in Greenwich Village, New York City, in 1809.

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A recent flap at the University of Texas at Austin about whether the monuments to Confederate soldiers and officials should be removed from their place of honor on campus reminded me a question/comment made by a fellow student when I was an undergraduate in the 1960s. My colleague was not necessarily offended because the statues and plaques supposedly honored or commemorated slaveholders and their defenders, or that they arguably committed treason against the United States. His question was “Why have monuments to losers?”

Why, indeed? Whatever the merits of their cause—defense of slavery, or rights of states to be free of interference by the general government, whatever the honor and bravery with which they fought—the end result was: the Southerners were unsuccessful; they failed; they lost.

Today, the bicentennial of the Battle of Waterloo when the French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte met his final defeat caused me to contemplate the same question again. Why erect monuments to losers?

Napoleon led France as a dictator for nearly two decades. In 1804, he styled himself Emperor of the French. During that time he and his army fought and defeated coalition after coalition of other European states that had vowed to destroy him. By 1812, Napoleon ruled, directly or through surrogates, nearly all of western and central Europe. The only European powers remaining not subdued or cowed were Great Britain and Russia.

That year the emperor’s Grande Armee of around 420,000 men began the ill-fated invasion of Russia. Like Adolf Hitler 130 years later, Napoleon was to meet his match—General Winter. The vast land area and frigid climate of Russia defeated him and his troops. Nearly three-fourths of his army never made it back to France. The Russians, together with the other Europeans powers, allied with the British, defeated Napoleon and forced his abdication and exile in early 1814. Not to be so easily vanquished, Napoleon returned from exile the next year and regained his throne, only to be defeated once and for all by a seventh coalition of Britain, the Netherlands, Prussia, and several other German states (Germany was not a united nation then and would not be until much later in the century). He died in exile on the remote island St. Helena in 1821.

There is no question that Napoleon was a despotic and autocratic ruler, as well as a threat to European peace. He did institute reforms that continued some of the ideals of the French Revolution, such as the Code Napoleon, the civil code that still forms the basis of French law (and in this country, Louisiana’s civil code). His military adventures, however, cost the lives of perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives—French as well as inhabitants of countries he conquered. Worst of all, despite stunning victories early on, ultimately, he lost.

Yet Napoleon continued to capture the imagination of the French. So much so that his nephew, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, restored the empire in 1852, styling himself Napoleon III (Napoleon II was the former emperor’s son, who reigned nominally for a few weeks after Waterloo, and died at age 21 in 1932). Napoleon III, also an autocrat, was also deposed after an ignominious defeat at the hands of the Prussians in 1870. Thereafter, France remained a republic, albeit with varying degrees of liberté, égalité, fraternité according to the national mood at any particular time.

Nevertheless, even today Napoleon I has a fond place in the hearts of many French. He is magnificently entombed in L’Hôtel des Invalides, shrine of the French military in Paris. His image is even displayed on coffee mugs for sale at various museums and souvenir shops in France—perhaps the ultimate honor.

All this for a loser?

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On this day in the year 1215, King John of England signed the Magna Carta, or Great Charter. It is hailed as a monarch’s acknowledgment that his power and authority were not absolute, that he is subject to the law of the land, and as one of the first enumerations of human rights. It is, at least symbolically, all of those things.

Nevertheless, we must bear in mind these realities about the Great Charter. It was not signed freely; it was coerced by the English barons—mostly of Norman descent—whose privileges John had infringed in various ways. It only applied to the rights and privileges of the nobles, and to some extent, other free men, such as knights and soldiers. It in no way acknowledged the right of peasants or serfs — the bulk of the population— or women. John, together with the persuasive authority of the Pope, abrogated it soon afterward,  Civil war then ensued, ending only on the King’s death the next year. The Charter was later re-issued several times, somewhat modified. The most significant re-issue was that of Edward I in 1297.

Only two of the original articles remain as effective statutes in Great Britain. Those are the first article guaranteeing freedom for the English church, and, the twenty-ninth (from the 1297 version, which combined the 39^th and 40^th from the one signed by John) article. The latter, arguably the most significant for us today, is here quoted:

NO Freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or be disseised of his Freehold, or Liberties, or free Customs, or be outlawed, or exiled, or any other wise destroyed; nor will We not pass upon him, nor condemn him, but by lawful judgment of his Peers, or by the Law of the land. We will sell to no man, we will not deny or defer to any man either Justice or Right.

This is the substance of the due process clause in the Constitution of the United States, applicable to both the national government and the states, and the constitutions and laws of many other nations. Basically, it means that all persons are free from being divested of their life, liberty, or property without due process of law. Which means, they have the right to be notified of legal proceedings that might deprive them of those rights, the right to be heard in those proceedings, and the right to be judged by the law of the land, applied by their peers, not by whim or arbitrary standards.

This is the bedrock of the Anglo-American legal system, in civil as well as criminal cases. Whatever miscarriages of justice that might occur today, the horror visited upon Josef K in Franz Kafka’s The Trial must not occur. If it does, we call it a lynching.

The greater significance of the Magna Carta is that it was a step toward the abrogation of the Great Chain of Being: a philosophical concept that dominated Medieval thought, and, really, life. As applied to humans, that concept held that everyone was born into their place, and must stay there. Attempting to step out of one’s place was a sin and crime. A noble was born and remained a noble; a peasant was born and remained a peasant. A king was born to be God’s lieutenant on Earth, and had divine authority. Challenging it by deed, word, or even thought was heresy—a capital offense. It has been a long arduous and journey away from that Chain, and it is not entirely complete, even in this country. But Magna Carta was one of the first steps.

Note: A contemporaneous exemplified copy of the 1215 document resides in the chapter house of Salisbury Cathedral. It’s well preserved and is legible (if you can read Latin). Four other known such copies in Lincoln and the British Library are not in as good condition. At the Runnymede meadow where King John is reputed to have agreed to it, the American Bar Association erected a memorial in 1957, attesting to more significance Americans attach to Magna Carta than our British brothers and sisters.

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Been rather busy with work, so I haven’t posted much this year. Managed to take a week off to clear the brain. Just returned from a week in South and North Carolina. My first visit to the Holy City, which is what South Carolinians call Charleston. It is a historically interesting place, and the food is good—much like New Orleans. It’s also warm and humid. We stayed at the Inn at Middleton Place, located on a colonial era rice and indigo plantation located about 13 miles up the Ashley River from the city. An 18th Century Middleton was a signer of the Declaration of Independence, a 19th Century one signed the South Carolina Ordinance of Secession, and a 20th Century descendant played the role of Ming the Merciless in a Flash Gordon movie.

The Smoky Mountains of North Carolina were pleasant as always. We managed to do some semi-serious hiking up trails. Great waterfall scenes; mountain laurel and rhododendrons were blooming. Journey back to Dallas was a hassle because our original flight was canceled. It was partially made up for with a first class seat, but we still had to endure a rather tense landing at DFW with lightning and thunder all around. The Airbus A-300 made it to the ground in one piece on the second try.

Speaking of the weather, North Texas has had serious rain during the past month or so: Fifteen plus inches this May. The drought has ended, but some of our neighbors may not have gotten the word, as they insist on leaving their lawn sprinklers on automatic. Whatever.

I have heard opinions that this “extreme weather” is caused by global warming (or whatever the PC term for it is now). News flash to those who don’t bother with history: The world was not created when you were born. A serious drought in the 1950s ended with flood in 1957—tornadoes and levee to levee water in the Trinity River (those levees were built in the 1930s—any guess why?). There were also droughts in the late 1960s and late ‘70s (1980 was the hottest recorded summer here). Both were broken by torrential rains and floods. The late Harold Taft, a venerable local TV meteorologist observed that’s the only way to end a drought.

The 2016 Presidential race is already in progress. Hilary Clinton wants to succeed Obama, her 2008 nemesis. So far she has no serious Democrat opponent. The GOP field, on the other hand, looks like a flash mob. No space here to name everyone. Which side will win the Presidency is not predictable at this time, but internationally there seems to be a rightward swing. Israel, Britain, and local elections in France have seen the rightist candidates win. Perhaps a harbinger for the U.S.?

Politicians being charged with various wrongdoing generally is not note worthy for my bytes, pixels, and scarce time. Nevertheless, I am compelled to comment on former House of Representative Speaker Dennis Hastert’s indictment. He is charged with structuring cash withdrawals from a bank account so as to avoid reporting requirements, and lying to the FBI about it. The alleged reason for the withdrawals was to pay hush money to a blackmailer to keep quiet about some past, unnamed, misconduct by Hastert. There is speculation that the “misconduct” was of a sexual nature—perhaps molesting boys he was coaching. There was no indication that the money in Hastert’s account was dirty (except, of course, to those who believe that lobbying fees are ipso facto ill-gotten gains). It’s also odd that the blackmailer was not charged. Is this a vindictive prosecution by a Democrat Justice Department against a former Republican Speaker?

There is a federal law that any cash transaction with a bank over $10,000 must be reported to the government. It is a felony to structure such transactions; that is, make numerous ones under that amount to avoid triggering the reporting requirement. It is also a felony to lie to a federal law enforcement agent in connection with an investigation. The cash transaction reporting requirement is an attempt to root out terror financing and money laundering, especially that of illegal drug trafficking money. Laudable goals, one might believe. But is it really the government’s business what honest folks do with their money? In cash, or otherwise? This seems to be an overreach, especially in Hastert’s case. If he was paying off an extortionist, he was the victim, regardless of what he might have been paying for. The blackmailer has not been charged; wonder why? Hastert should have known better. After all, the law was passed by Congress, in which he had a significant role. Whether he was instrumental in passing this particular law, he is bound to have known of it, otherwise why structure the transactions? Let the bank report it and tell whoever might ask about it that it’s none of their business, including the FBI. Lying to the FBI or any government investigator is idiotic. Actually, consenting to be interviewed by a criminal investigator is unwise, unless you do so with you lawyer present. One has every right to tell them you’re not giving them the time of day and leave you alone. But you cannot lie. Hastert should have realized that. Maybe he was a child molester. If so, and the statute of limitations had run on the offense, this might be the way to get him. I suppose we will find out in the fullness of time.

On that note, this coming June 15th is the 800th anniversary of King John’s signing the Magna Carta. That document is touted as the foundation of the principle that the king—or the government, democratic or monarchical—is not above the law. While its immediate significance back then may often have been overstated, its downstream effects are profound. I may have more to say about that in a subsequent post. In the meantime, if you’re interested, take a look at this article.

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President Abraham Lincoln died early this morning, 150 years ago, nine hours after John Wilkes Booth shot him at Ford’s Theater. After the President drew his last breath, his Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, is reputed to have declared that “Now he belongs to the ages.” John Hay, Lincoln’s private secretary and later Secretary of State under Presidents McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, and who was present at the vigil, years later attributed that quote to Stanton. Some historians have disputed what was actually said— contending that Stanton actually said “angels” instead of “ages.” Among the sources of the latter version, one appears to be from John Tanner, a shorthand reporter who lived in the house next to the one Lincoln was taken to after being shot (there were no level-anything trauma centers in those day, not that it would have mattered— his head wound was similar to Bobby Kennedy’s, who died in spite of state of the art medical care in 1968). Tanner, according to some accounts, wrote what he thought he heard sometime shortly after the event, not as it was said. He, as well as Hay, doubtless heard Stanton utter the brief eulogy. Ears, however, play tricks on us. We are often disposed to remember what we want to or are conditioned to, not what was actually said. The two words can sound similar in certain settings.

Does it matter? Some have attached ideological significance to the versions. Is Lincoln’s immortality in heaven, or is it in human memory— his huge presence in history? It is unnecessary to make that unknowable determination. In many senses, Abraham Lincoln belongs to both— the angels and the ages. Most of all he belongs to all Americans, so long as the Star Spangled Banner yet waves.

For more reading, see Jay Wunik’s April, 1865, mentioned in a previous post. Also, George Packer’s article in the May 28, 2007 issue of The New Yorker discusses the conundrum in depth.

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The following was supposedly written by a Los Angeles County Deputy Sheriff. I have heard similar sentiments form a number of quarters lately. As a former police officer, it is troubling to me that such feelings can exist. My posting this is not in any way an endorsement of this attitude, but all of us should be aware it exists. It portends bad things to come. 

This is quoted verbatim.

“It is obvious, is it not, that all of the recent problems with the police have occurred because cops keep meddling with people. If the fuzz had left Rodney King alone, Los Angeles would not have burned. If the cop in Ferguson had not stopped Michael Brown after he robbed the store, the town would not have burned. If a New York cop had not tried to keep from selling illegal cigarettes, there would be no protests. If OJ Simpson had not been prosecuted for murdering his wife, racial tension would have been less. On and on.

“It is blindingly clear that nothing but trouble results when cops interact with criminals in places of high diversity. It makes no sense to meddle. It is racism. It is irresponsible. It leads to arson. It needs to stop. And it can.

“If you were a young white cop just out of the academy, and asked my advice, I would say, “When on the street, mind your own business.” For example, if you see a drug dealer on the corner peddling rock, what should you do? Nothing. Doing nothing protects you, protects the dealer, and keeps the locals from burning the neighborhood. As a police officer, it is your duty to protect.

“Do nothing. Here’s why: Let us suppose that the dealer is young, weighs 290 and, when you try to arrest him, says, “#### off, whitey.” You are 35, 180, and haven’t been to the gym for a while. What can you do?

“You could call for backup and five of you could swarm the guy, but that looks bad to the population. (“Dem white muhfuhs be gangin’ up on a brotha.”) Your other choices are try to wrestle him down, pepper-spray him, Tase him, club him, or shoot him. All of these are ugly to watch and upset the locals.

“All have a chance of ending unhappily. The perp has asthma and the pepper spray does him in, or has a weak heart and the Taser croaks him. Then here come Jesse and Al, Barack and Eric, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. You will be raped in the media, lose your job and your mortgage, goodbye retirement, and face six months of media circus, death threats against your family, civil suits by the family and civil-rights charges by the feds.

“Don’t risk it. You have nothing to gain and everything to lose. Leave drug peddlers alone. Don’t get involved.

“Nonintervention, note, will please everybody. If your department really is brutal, as all are said to be, you can’t be brutal if you leave people alone. Complaints about misbehavior will diminish, pleasing blacks and liberals, and this will make your chief happy. When you go on the street as a rookie, you will find that police incidents fall into three categories.

“First, things that you encounter by chance: crack whores, bar fights, drug dealers, muggings, burglaries, the fifteen-year-old runaway being worked by her pimp, the guy breaking car windows to steal the GPS. These are the small change of police life. Ignore them. You can later say that you didn’t see anything. It is much harder for the feds to come after you for something you didn’t do than for something you did. Again, you have nothing to gain by interfering with local enterprise.

“Second, hot calls: rape in progress, armed robbery in progress. You have to answer these because dispatchers record their radio traffic. They are, however, calls dangerous to you. For example, rapists often have violent tendencies. They usually do not want to go to jail. A rapist may attack you with a length of rebar, in which case your choices are to shoot him or have your skull crushed.

“How do you profit from either of these outcomes?

“The armed robbery offers equal hazards with no rewards. Armed robbers typically are armed. In a shootout you very possibly get killed, which is not to your advantage, or the perp does. It then turns out that he was sixteen, wanted to go to divinity school, the gun was plastic or a cell phone. Brutality, extremism, overreaction, profiling, black lives matter, and here come the Four Horsemen.

“But a wise cop can easily avoid these perils. Rapes don’t last long, nor do armed robberies. When you respond to the call, drive at the speed limit, stop for traffic lights, and hit the siren and bar lights well before you arrive at the scene. When you get there, the rapist will be long gone.

“This is a happy ending for everyone. You are happy because you will not be charged with racially motivated murder. The rapist is happy because he will not go to jail. Businesses are happy because they won’t be looted, the locals because a brothah was not mistreated.

“Be very careful of profiling beefs. Since this sin is not defined, you can never tell when you have committed it. Suppose you encounter a 2015 Beamer with the passenger-side window broken out, plates with rust stains around the bolt holes, and a nineteen-year-old driver in ghetto-bag attire who refuses to make eye contact. What do you do? Nothing. It would be profiling. (If you saw him run out of a bank with a gun in one hand and a bag of money it the, and arrested him, it would be profiling.) Don’t risk it. The locals will appreciate your sensitivity.

“Technical tip:

“Don’t run the tags out of curiosity. They will come back to a 2006 Camry, and you will be on electronic record as knowing the car was stolen and not doing anything about it. It isn’t your problem. The insurance company can handle it. If you are of liberal leanings, you can think in terms of cost and benefit. Is an $80 GPS worth a man’s life? Should a rapist die because of ten minutes of bad sex? Ferguson burn over a handful of stolen cigars? In black neighborhoods, you should do nothing at all in response to anything. This just shows a decent respect for the desires of the population, who do not like white cops, or any cops. (Chanting “What do we want? Dead cops”, would seem indicative.) Find a good bar or doughnut shop. Stay in it. In mixed regions, arrest only middle-class whites over forty-five to avoid profiling. As for the neighborhoods of rich white liberals, they do not need police because they live in gated communities, so you probably will never be assigned there.

“It is simple democracy. In regions that are almost entirely diverse, people do not want to be policed. It is unmistakable. Why force outside cops on them? It leads to chaos, arson, and armored shoe-stores. Should they not be allowed to police themselves as they choose, to the extent they choose, as towns once did? Live and let live. It is the American way.”

Unfortunately, there is a core of truth in much of what this writer says. The origins of the difficulties in police work are many and complex. Solving the problems, however, will not be accomplished by vilifying the police or the communities they serve. They also will not be solved by tolerating real criminal acts, such as unprovoked violence, stealing, sexual and other assaults, and other violations of personal and property integrity and rights. 

One hundred fifty years ago this day, was a Sunday – Palm Sunday. It was the day that Confederate General Robert E. Lee met Union General Ulysses S. Grant at a house in Appomattox Virginia to surrender his army. This act ended, for all practical purposes – the American Civil War.

I chose the descriptive word for the war carefully. There have been long running controversies as to what properly to call that conflict. Each has its own ideological or partisan shade of meaning that is unnecessary to expound here. “Civil war” is a term, however, that describes a military action between and among factions in a body politic that are otherwise politically, culturally, and economically closely associated, and that certainly describes the states and their citizens who took sides in the 1861 – 1865 American conflict.

Most civil wars, before and since, have not ended well. The bloodiest and most devastating in the modern era was the Thirty Years War in Germany during the years  1618 – 1648; it took fully two centuries for that land to recover, and, arguably, longer. The English Civil War paused for 11 years when the king was beheaded and a theocratic dictatorship established. When that played out, bloody retribution was visited upon the leaders during the Restoration. The Russian civil war in the wake of the Bolshevik revolution resulted in the death of hundreds of thousands, and 70 years of oppression with tens of millions more dead. Our Civil War was pretty much an exception. There was no mass retribution by the victors. There was talk of punishment for the Confederate leaders, but only one – Henry Wirtz, the commandant of the Andersonville prisoner of war camp – was convicted and executed. And that was for war crimes, not treason or secession. 

What has been called “waving the bloody shirt” – bringing up real or imagined past injustices in history to justify injustice being committed in the present — by politicians, occurred on and off. The aftermath could have been much worse. Since Appomattox, there has never been serious consideration of revanchism or secession, and many of the most ardent supporters of the Stars and Stripes and the ideals it stands for, are those whose ancestors fought under the other flag for four long years. The brunt of bitterness was born by the freed slaves, in all parts of the nation, not just the South. Racism was virulent, but it was not caused by the war. Racist attitudes intensified in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries as a nationwide, and worldwide, phenomenon, and were never confined to the American South.

Part of the reason for the reconciliation was the magnanimity Grant showed to Lee and the defeated Confederates. Unlike so many other wars of all kinds, the losers  were not required to stack arms and be marched to POW camps or worse, but allowed to immediately return home. The officers were treated with dignity and respect. Of course, Grant certainly had President Lincoln’s approval for such treatment. The President had already set the tone for binding up the nation’s wounds rather than seeking retribution, in his second inaugural speech. Lee’s surrender and bidding his soldiers to “furl the flag” and accept defeat and go home was no less an act to encourage reconciliation. The former Confederate soldiers could have headed for the hills and swamps to fight on as guerrillas indefinitely. In those days, that was a distinct possibility. Some called for just that. None, fortunately, were those who had the respect and confidence Lee inspired. The country owed a lot to Lincoln, Grant, and Lee for what they did – and did not do – at war’s end in April 1865.

For more, see April 1865: The Month that Saved America, by Jay Winik, HarperCollins Publishers, 2001.

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The ideas in these quotations from Ayn Rand made an instructive convergence this past week. I allude to the firestorm and media frenzy in the wake of the Oklahoma University’s Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity members drunkenly singing a racist song on a bus that resulted in expulsion of the fraternity from OU’s campus and two students from the school.

Few organizations in our society are as collectivist and conformist as college fraternities. The “brotherhood” is more tribal than familial affection. Their whole existence is based upon group identity. They dress alike, act in groups, publicly display their identity, and, most important, they exclude from their ranks those who they collectively perceive are not “like them.” As to the last point, “like them” refers not usually to ideas and goals, but social class.

In order to maintain solidarity, the tribe has a bogeyman; that is, an external enemy or threat. George Orwell illustrated that at the global level in his 1984— Oceania was always at war with either one of the two other world states. Racism fulfills that need on a local, personal level. It provides a convenient identifiable “other” that can be perceived as a threat, and thus enhance cohesiveness.

But there is another, perhaps more ominous, aspect to the event and its becoming a national imbroglio. “What were these guys thinking?” is an understandable reaction. These “guys” are in their late teens or early 20s; they are college students, possessed no doubt of somewhat above average intelligence. They grew up with the ubiquity of cell-phone cameras, video recorders, and YouTube. Did they fail to realize that capture and dissemination of their drunken and boorish behavior was inevitable, given the availability of the technology?

Truth is, probably not. They were used to insularity. They did not realize that their convenient communication instruments were eroding the privacy that comes with civilization.

During the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan wrote of the advent of a “global village” fostered by modern communications media. Villages are small, insular societies where everyone knows everyone and everybody else’s business. It is usually not necessary for a village to enforce social norms and attitudes by formal, legal punishments, though many have in the past. Many of those punishments involved shaming. The pillory, stocks, and whipping post were more about shaming than the physical pain involved. In an 18th Century colonial American village, a woman caught in the act of adultery and her paramour were sentenced to twenty stripes each at the whipping post; the woman accepted the whipping but petitioned the judge to set the time of her punishment early in the morning before most in the village arose, thus sparing her the humiliation. Most of the time, public disapproval is enough. Association with a pariah tends to impute some of the same character, so they are to be avoided or shunned.

Nowadays, the global village seems to be enforcing not its behavior standards, but its standards of thought, by viral Tweets, Facebook, and other blog posts. Over a year ago, Justine Sacco, the top communications executive for IAC/InterActiveCorp was shamed on the Internet and lost her job for a supposedly racist tweet. This occurred in spite of her and her South African family’s long time activism for racial equality in their home country.

Many believe that racism is ugly, and eliminating it, by publicly shaming anyone who harbors racist thoughts if necessary, is a good thing. Racism, however, as Rand pointed out, is merely a primitive form of collectivism. It is the judging of a person by their identity as a member of a group that is based on arbitrary criteria rather than by what they do as individuals. So long as a collectivist mind-set exists among humans being, there will be racism.

It is impossible to eradicate completely the idea that one’s skin color that is a result of biological ancestry matters. There are many reasons why that is so. One is that human beings rely on their sense of sight much more than any other. Another human’s appearance defines him as like or unlike the observer. Like is generally friend; unlike is often foe. That is partly the result of  evolution.

We can, however control the effects of racist behavior. For the past four decades or so, we have done a pretty good job of that in this country. Unfortunately, continued official racial classification by our government has fostered, rather than discouraged tribalism. Many remedial measures, such as affirmative action, amount to reverse discrimination, or at least its perception. That perception goes a long way to explaining some of the resentment that is often conflated with racism.

A greater danger lies in the punishing of any ideas, wrongheaded or not. Punishing ideas or beliefs, as opposed to acts, was the function of the Inquisition, and Orwell’s fictional Thought Police. Other speakers’ or writers’ condemnation of loathsome ideas or expression of those ideas may be appropriate; punishment for such ideas or thoughts is not.

The reason for this is that our environment (in its broadest sense) is constantly changing and human knowledge is constantly being acquired. Innovation and critical thinking is necessary for applying that knowledge and coping with the new environment. Critical thinking must examine the unpleasant, the offensive, and even the loathsome thoughts and ideas. Any political or social structures that inhibit thought retard and even prevent progress. There was a time in the not too distant past when such thought-crime was punished by death—in a most gruesome manner. It was called heresy, and heretics were burned at the stake. Galileo narrowly escaped that fate in the 17th Century, but at the price of recanting the theories based on his research and submitting to house arrest for the remainder of his life. As we know, his theories became the basis for modern astronomy and physics, though they were refined by further, less inhibited research and study.

Less drastic disapproval can also inhibit innovation. Even devoted contrarians have to live in society. Being shunned in a village can amount to civil death if one has to stay there. It is impossible to escape from a global village without becoming a hermit.

It may not be possible to eliminate a global village where busybodies and nags gossip about everybody. Thanks to our advance technology, Big Brother’s telesceens are everywhere. Unlike the world of 1984, it is not necessary for the government to set up the means to spy on the citizenry—the people are doing it to themselves. This is so because technology makes possible 24 hour surveillance of everyone. Those in power, like the president of OU, a government institution, can use the information gathered by private persons to expel students from school and shut down their living quarters because they expressed notions that are emphatically disfavored.

The good news is that unlike other nations, where the mere expression of certain ideas is a criminal offense, the United States has Constitutional protection of expressive speech. And it is nearly absolute. The exceptions are narrow. Libel, slander, and direct threats are essentially the only ones, and each bears a heavy burden of proof for the complaining party. That absolutism may well be the only defense against the tyranny of living in a global village.

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