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Here was my response to it, which I also adapted into a letter to the paper, the Belleville News-Democrat:
Quote
In response to Dennis Nix’s “Obama and slavery” letter (5/17), I reply:
An individual’s behavior and interaction are very complex; those of humanity as a whole are magnitudes more complicated, to an extent a single human mind can’t grasp it all. So determining how history would have turned out if an event had or hadn’t happened is usually impossible to do with certainty. (This is an argument against big government, BTW; nobody can have the prescience to know precisely how government economic interference will impact millions of people. But that’s a side issue.) [I'm embarrassed to have left in this irrelevant aside, especially with its "BTW," but oh well.
]
Ergo, when Mr. Nix asks whether whites and blacks would have been better off without slavery and implies the answer is no, he speaks of what he cannot know. Perhaps whites and blacks would have been worse off, but maybe they could have been better off, too.
What if whites had explored the world and traded for land and wealth instead of killing for it? What if whites had treated other peoples as humans instead of animals? The result could possibly have been a prosperous world order with foundations of mutual respect and understanding, rather than an antagonistic international system that revolved around war and enslavement.
Also, by Mr. Nix’s reasoning, one could apologize for Nazi Germany because many of the technological advances of World War II have improved our lives. I suspect Mr. Nix doesn’t want to go that far.
In that case, he might consider not looking on the bright side of slavery, either.
An individual’s behavior and interaction are very complex; those of humanity as a whole are magnitudes more complicated, to an extent a single human mind can’t grasp it all. So determining how history would have turned out if an event had or hadn’t happened is usually impossible to do with certainty. (This is an argument against big government, BTW; nobody can have the prescience to know precisely how government economic interference will impact millions of people. But that’s a side issue.) [I'm embarrassed to have left in this irrelevant aside, especially with its "BTW," but oh well.
]Ergo, when Mr. Nix asks whether whites and blacks would have been better off without slavery and implies the answer is no, he speaks of what he cannot know. Perhaps whites and blacks would have been worse off, but maybe they could have been better off, too.
What if whites had explored the world and traded for land and wealth instead of killing for it? What if whites had treated other peoples as humans instead of animals? The result could possibly have been a prosperous world order with foundations of mutual respect and understanding, rather than an antagonistic international system that revolved around war and enslavement.
Also, by Mr. Nix’s reasoning, one could apologize for Nazi Germany because many of the technological advances of World War II have improved our lives. I suspect Mr. Nix doesn’t want to go that far.
In that case, he might consider not looking on the bright side of slavery, either.
