Couple of things
- When in doubt, turn to a Democratic Congress to get things done. In all seriousness, this is good. Though I still ask ... what in the world happened to all of that surplus money the governor repeatedly touted on the campaign trail?
- This is probably much ado about nothing. It would be nice to have someone from either Athens-Clarke County or Augusta-Richmond County on the Board of Regents, but it isn't as if the rest of the folks who are on it are going to suddenly forget about the state's flagship university or its only, full-service medical school.
- I've always supported official apologies for slavery, Jim Crow and segregation, so I've never really gotten why folks are so opposed to it. This isn't legislation being passed that affects our day-to-day living. Rather it's the elected representatives from across the political spectrum gathering together to say that, at one time, this governing body and/or state acted wrongly toward a segment of its population. I would think it would be our duty as citizens to officially say those actions were wrong and worthy of forgiveness. J.T. and the boys agree.
- Ah Newt ... how we truly have missed your double-talking, hypocritical ways. Now, if you could also change your mind to suit the political wishes of base, you'd be just like the rest of the Republican candidates for president.
- This is probably much ado about nothing. It would be nice to have someone from either Athens-Clarke County or Augusta-Richmond County on the Board of Regents, but it isn't as if the rest of the folks who are on it are going to suddenly forget about the state's flagship university or its only, full-service medical school.
- I've always supported official apologies for slavery, Jim Crow and segregation, so I've never really gotten why folks are so opposed to it. This isn't legislation being passed that affects our day-to-day living. Rather it's the elected representatives from across the political spectrum gathering together to say that, at one time, this governing body and/or state acted wrongly toward a segment of its population. I would think it would be our duty as citizens to officially say those actions were wrong and worthy of forgiveness. J.T. and the boys agree.
- Ah Newt ... how we truly have missed your double-talking, hypocritical ways. Now, if you could also change your mind to suit the political wishes of base, you'd be just like the rest of the Republican candidates for president.
posted by Jmac at 7:23 AM
22 Comments:
I think you nailed the apology thing: people who did nothing wrong apologizing to people who suffered no grievance, and doing so with absolutely zero accountability and no consequences whatsoever.
I can see why the Lefties at the ABH are in love with this idea.
Well, I think I nailed it too ... but not so much for the reasons you laid out.
We are not giving anyone reparations here and it is not a statement saying "I, (Insert State Legislator here), apologize to you, (Insert member of African-American race here) for slavery". This is the elected body of the state of Georgia apologizing on behalf of the STATE for the horrible transgressions of its past.
It's funny that the same people who screamed bloody murder about how Roy Barnes was "Stealing our Heritage" and "Trampling on History" when the flag was changed to now say, "it's over, why should we dwell in the past" is hypocritical and vile.
Penn and Teller cover reparations in an episode of their show "Bullsh*t." It's a good episode and the section on Native American casinos was particularly interesting.
Apologies are individual matters. "I hurt you, I'm sorry." There's no such thing as a collective apology.
But, hey, if a symbolic and pointless gesture will assuage whatever guilt you're feeling, go for it.
I love anonymous commenters! They always contribute so much to the discussion. Don't you just love 'em, Jmac?
If you think this isn't about reparations, you are either fooling yourselves or you are part of the game and stand to get some of the $$. Tyrone Brooks doesn't (and shouldn't) care about Casey Cagle's apology. Casey (nor 3 generations of Cagles) and Tyrone (nor 3 generations of Brooks) have never been involved in slavery.
Every lawsuit, save a few, have been tossed out of court. But the last string of hope is that the NAACP and collective Legislative Black Caucuses will blackmail several states' governments into apologizing. But, more than than, read the NAACP GA Chapter President's comments. "By asking Georgia to apologize for its role, we're asking it to assume responsibility".
That's not an apology, folks.
Well, all due respect, I don't think it's about reparations at all. I don't support the concept of reparations primarily because, well, legally it's impossible to implement.
One of the two law students who frequently post here can assist me with some clarifications here, but I just don't see how - even with an official apology from a governing body - reparations would be able to slide past a discerning court based on our existing legal structure, precedents, etc.
It would make the case for reparations just a bit easier than it is now: "You've just admitted responsibility by apologizing, now pay up."
It'd still be an uphill climb, but there would at least be a foundation.
Personally, I'm in favor of reparations. I would favor a government policy of providing a $1 million check for every black person alive in America today, whether or not they could prove descendancy from slavery. $1 million for all of them.
With this caveat: with the $1 million would come the end of every welfare entitlement program and every "affirmative action" quota program now in place, now and forever more.
Liberalism is usually definable somewhere along the lines of being a commitment to autonomy as one, if not the only, of its core values. Whether a "libertarian" liberal or a "progressive" liberal or a "neo-conservative" liberal, they all want people to be able to decide for themselves how to live their lives, to be held responsible only for things that are within their control (because if we can hold people responsible for things that are outside their control, then a person does not really have complete autonomy over her own life), etc.
Any notion of collective responsibility, it seems, is utterly contradictory of such autonomy. I myself don't have such a problem with collective responsibility (carefully defined, of course), but I'm also not a liberal and I don't claim autonomy as one of my core political values.
Thoughts?
The General Assembly represents me also and I have nothing to apologize for. Slavery was before my time, my parent’s time and my grandparent’s time. As for discrimination, I've never discriminated against anyone. This apology talk is a waste of time ...what exactly will this apology do? Will it feed or house the hungry and homeless? Will it educate today's children? Will it take care of our elderly and the injured solders come home from war? How ridiculously self-serving of some of our politicians to keep hatreds alive and themselves from getting real jobs! By the way, my family line is Irish, German and American Indian and I’m not asking for an apology for the way my American Indian ancestors were treated. Move on already; stop wallowing in the past!
Liberalism also has a core commitment to participatory government, in that any citizen who lives within the area of control of a state should have some duty towards that state, made manifest by one's voting, petitioning, serving, seeking redress, supporting, being elected, and so on. How one chooses to be a citizen is, of course, one's decision.
If the state participates in the institutionalization of unethical or immoral activity, it is the duty of its citizens to rehabilitate and redeem the state its failures. Given that both contemporary liberalism and conservatism flow from the same Enlightenment core, they both still share this idea. In other words, this kind of sense of rehabilitating or redeeming the state is present when people wish to deny the state supports of, for example, "gay marriage" or "abortion rights" or "theocratic rule" or "patriarchal dominance." What people do is attempt to outvote the others, petition through general referendum the state to change its practices, persuade the justices and judges to reconsider state decisions, legislate approved policies and rules. Again, how people wish to change the stance of the state is their decision, whether to march, to legislate, to vote, to protest, to speak, to write.
Collective responsibility is not contradictory with personal autonomy anymore than federal headship is contradictory with personal responsibility. At least, they are possibly inconsistent. People certainly are responsible for what happens in their life, but the state is not something separate from themselves in liberalism. It is the mass of the people taken together. In this respect, liberalism has never held to a complete autonomy of the individual. Liberalism is not anarchy, but a commitment to a just rule by participating citizens, most usually a democracy.
And since it is the mass of the people, whatever actions are taken by the state, whose life transcends any particular persons, are actions which collectively all participate in. It seems to me that people can accept that the proper function of a sports team is achieved when the teammates, no matter how much time they put in on the court/field, work together. And so, even if it's the left fielder who hits the game-winning home run, the reserve pitcher who didn't stand on the mound also wins by virtue of being on the team. Likewise if that pitcher gives up the game-losing home run, the left fielder also loses by virtue of being on the team. Participation in the state is similar, in the sense that personal excellence may not be enough to change the direction of the state, but whichever direction it does go or has gone is still my responsibility to give account for. I can be the best shortstop, but that doesn't mean it is not my responsibility to help the first baseman be the best first baseman, nor my responsibility when the team loses the series. I lose because we all lost.
To say that we have no share in what happened in the past because we weren't alive is to say that we don't really believe we have any share in what happens now, because the state is an entirely separate entity from us, and also to say that history is no account of our roots, but of removed persons and removed events of a removed time. Morality and decency are not timeless, but momentary and sporadic, without lasting consequence and substance, and so they have no long term, transcendental effects on the people who live long after the deeds—so says the person who denies that history reflects itself in our own failures and successes.
Like you, Xon, I don't consider myself to be liberal, but I do consider ourselves to be caught up in the same narratives once spoken during slavery that are still being told today. It seems odd, to me, that people will believe in an eternal hell for sinners who mess up just once, and yet find it laughable and absurd to think that anyone alive today should apologize for slavery. As though, just because it happened so long ago, it is not still having consequences. Anonymous might not believe in the eternal lake of fire for all the unrepentant sinners, but then I wonder how anonymous feels about morality: is it transcendental, or is it situational?
And, frankly, I've seen and heard plenty of people say, "On behalf of {set of people}, we're sorry." If a single accountant at Georgia Power screws up my electricity bill and I call them out on it, I get a letter from Georgia Power apologizing for it. This doesn't seem so absurd or fantastical, so to say there is "no such thing" as a collective apology is silly. And, if one is to say that Georgia Power is a singular "legal entity," I rest the case.
It seems odd, to me, that people will believe in an eternal hell for sinners who mess up just once, and yet find it laughable and absurd to think that anyone alive today should apologize for slavery. As though, just because it happened so long ago, it is not still having consequences
Mmm-hmmm.
And, frankly, you know, I don't see what the big damn deal about apologizing is. Slavery was wrong. End of story. Why is it such a big issue to apologize for something that was wrong? (I know the answer of course.. instituionalized racism and so on.. but we won't go into THAT here. Or at least I won't)
Why don't we just apologize every day then? It costs nothing, right? And ten thousand apologies are surely better than one.
Nice way of avoiding the question, Matt. How does it hurt YOU to acknowledge a clear wrongdoing? How is it any skin off your back?
I'd say it hurts because it's just more self loathing of the white man. Everyone's problems are the fault of the white man, everyone come get in a punch. It's all so stupid. I mean, I could point out that my ancestors weren't even here during slavery, but even if they were I would still oppose any apologies. And besides, so far the entire argument in favor of apologizing is that it doesn't cost anything or hurt anyone. Nevermind that it doesn't mean anything either.
Amber, will you apologize to me for the guy who cut me off in traffic? If not, why not? It's no skin off your back, as you say?
OF COURSE (sorry for yelling) the two situations are not comparable as far as moral evil is concerned. But the principle is the same. (If you want to apologize for something closer, but still not quite at the same level, then apologize to me for the fact that my anabaptist ancestors were persecuted by both Catholics and "mainstream" Protestants.)
Charles' argument is more complex and deserves a better response, and maybe I can get to that later. But for now I'll just say that most of what you say misses my point, bud. I think you've read a bit into my argument that isn't really there.
I know, it's so hard to be a white man! Oh, I'm playing my tiny violin for white men everywhere, right now...
Well, you could at least apologize for the sarcasm. Or for your general failure to recognize any valid point someone ever makes in an argument. Or for your apparent inability to even understand what your opponent is saying. These wrongs all have the nice feature of actually being committed by you yourself, so the debate about corporate responsibility can be placed to the side in these cases.
I'm not playing the pity card for myself. I'm pointing out that the world is full of injustices done by people other than Amber Rhea, and that it seems absurd to require Amber Rhea to apologize for any of them. Now, if it is your position that I don't even have the right to point this out, because I am white, then go jump in a lake. I don't think I speak out of turn when I say that this is not JMac's policy here on his blog.
If you give an argument in favor of apologizing for things that the apologizer didn't actually do, then I can give an argument in response to your argument. It is not my duty to simply demur to your voice on behalf of the oppressed. And if my argument happens to include an example from my own life, just to keep things simple, you are arguing fallaciously when you try to turn this into some sort of "white priveledge" rhetorical move on my part.
Do you believe that people should apologize for injustices that they didn't commit because "it's no skin off their back," or don't you? If you think that sometimes we should and sometimes we shouldn't, then this is reasonable but you should say more about how we know when we need to apologize and when we don't. This was the point of my question "If not, why not?" You have to provide a rationale for your position. If I point out that you haven't done so, then that's not me being ignorant of my "white priveledge." It's not about me, see, nor is it about what I might be ignorant of. It's about your argument, or the lack thereof.
Charles, definitions are important, and there might be some wiggle room here. But as I understand the notion of an "apology", moral responsibility is presupposed. You cannot apologize for something for which you do not accept moral responsibility. Do you disagree?
So the question is, is it reasonable to ask people to take moral responsibility for things they did not do and could not have prevented from happening? (Like things that occurred before they were born, for instance). Can people be held corporately responsible for things done by a group with whome they are identified?
I say "Yes, they can," under certain circumstances. But my (totally unoriginal) concern is with how people committed to political liberalism can say "Yes." Liberalism has to say "No," because it does undermine autonomy to hold someone responsible for anything over which they had no control, even if it was comitted by or in the name of a group with whom they identify.
For a few reasons, your contention that this is not a problem for liberalism is unpersuasive to me. You talk, rightly, about the fact that a lot of these injustices are still having effects today. This is a good point, but to whatever extent you are right you have just given the liberal an "out". Liberals don't claim in these situations that it is corporate responsibility that applies to the current beneficiaries of the past injustice, but rather that the current beneficiaries are individually responsible to own up to the benefits that they have received.
If a company dumped sludge in a river thirty years ago, say, and today kids downstream are still getting cancer from it, then the CEO of the company today (a different person than the CEO that decided to dump the sludge) DOES have a responsibility to make things (more) right. But this is not because he is being held "corporately" responsible for the decision to dump the sludge in the river (except perhaps in a rather strained way of speaking), so much as that he is being held individually responsible for things that currently affect him directly. He has no right to continue to profit off of the past injustice, for instance, and liberals expect a responsible individual to do the right thing and stop profiting from it. But as I understand things a liberal won't call this "corporate" responsibility; but rather a form of individual responsibility. (Same goes, I think, for the responsibility of citizens do redeem the failures of their government. This is true, in the present when those failures have a discernable effect on the citizens' lives. But it doesn't seem that it can be true, if we really want to treat people as autonomous moral agents, in cases where those effects are no longer felt by the citizens.)
What puts liberals on the hook is when they want to put responsibility on people for things that they did not do, could not have prevented, and from which they do not profit in any clearly discernable way. This clearly violates the "freedom" criterion of Grade-A Kantian autonomy. Ought implies can, as the dictum goes, and so nobody can be said to have an obligation to do differently when the thing that was done was not under their control in the first place. You can't say "shame on you" for the thing that happened, you can't hold them responsible for its having happened, and so you can't require them to apologize (or make amends in other ways).
You make a good point about how things from the past still have consequences in the future, that morality and decency are "timeless" and transcendent. I agree; but I am not a liberal. Liberal political philosopohy is what has the problem. Even if a liberal agrees that morality is timeless and transcendent and that actions in the past continue to have effects throughout the rest of the narrative of history (and many liberals do agree with this, no doubt), there is a problem with holding contemporary people responsible for those past injustices. It's not a problem of saying that the past injustices continue to have effects; it's a problem with saying that a person today who exercised no control over those past injustices can be held responsible for them. Under liberalism, we should all be able to say, "Our ancestors screwed up, and this has caused us to inherit numerous problems that need to be untangled. But no one of us alive today is responsible for what our ancestors did, though we do have to live with the consequences." That is a liberal ideal, at least on paper.
I now realize that Amber's most recent comment about "the poor white man" was possibly meant only for Matt, and not for me. Though this is hard to discern, because Matt and I are taking the same position more or less, and so I thought maybe I was being held corporately responsible along with Matt and was thus subject to the same response Amber gave him.
In any case, assuming I got this wrong and Amber was only talking to Matt, then I apologize for that bit of my recent comment in which I responded to her "white man" comments. Sorry, Amber!
I disagree that a person cannot apologize for something they are not morally responsible for. If my infant daughter shits on your floor, I apologize to you on her behalf. If my cat rends your house's drapes, I apologize to you on her behalf. If my mother comments to your wife that she needs to be a healthy, thin woman in order to have the biggest, cutest babies, I apologize to your wife on my mother's behalf. These do not seem, to me, to be inappropriate or absurd apologies to make. In fact, it seems to me that much of social life is about such irrational apologies on behalf of others. One does not need to be a philosopher to realize that.
I think it is not unreasonable to hear a (conservative, socially and theologically) pastor asking for his congregation to pray to God for forgiveness for the sin of abortion that is afflicting the United States, regardless of whether the people in his congregation have had abortions themselves or not. I have been present for such impositions, before. Perhaps, even, you yourself have made that prayer for his forgiveness for what our nation's culture finds permissible, when it is physically impossible for you to have an abortion. Such prayers seem to find their way to him often, and yet it does not take a pastor-in-training to notice how often people beseech the Lord his grace and forgiveness on behalf of others. For Christ himself to stand in and ask forgiveness for my own sins seems, to me, something quite reasonable for a liberal to also hold to as sacred and foundational, enough for such a person to seek out how to apply that lesson of moral and spiritual growth to her own life.
If my nation goes to war against a sovereign nation, and one of its citizens approaches me crying and pleads with me to stop our assault, again, it does not seem irrational or inappropriate or absurd to apologize to that person for what my nation is doing, and particularly so when I never approved of that decision to attack another sovereign nation. If my nation signs a treaty with another sovereign nation, then I as a citizen of this nation am duty bound and constitutionally commanded to uphold that treaty until this nation or the other nation abrogates the treaty or the nations cease to be. There are, then, obligations and duties that I hold as a citizen which became mine before I was ever born, when those treaties were signed and ratified by my nation. Thus, if my nation were to betray these treaties, or the Constitution itself, it becomes my own betrayal in the same sense in which I am, myself, a participant in this composition of the state, and it is thus my duty as a citizen to see to it that my nation is restored to the proper obedience to the law.
For whatever you want to talk about corporations and sludge (perhaps you read recently on the Bhopal disaster, who knows), the difference, as I see a liberal may explain it, is that whereas a company comprises shareholders, workers, executives, laborers, janitors, and temporary workers, the nation-state is more than just those who get paid from its doings. Again, I stress the participatory aspect that, to me, seems much a part of the liberal philosophy as you want "autonomy" to be. I didn't really see you address that aspect of my response, but then I don't really think you see that as important.
Liberalism is, perhaps, much easier to identify its inconsistencies if it is women seeking abortions or minorities wanting free cash, two sides of the same coin conservatives mint of liberalism. "Life without consequences for the living, privilege having consequences for the privileged"—there is no end to the ways in which the conservative paints liberalism this way. Whether women, Latin Americans, environmentalists, peaceniks, ghetto folks, or just anyone who thinks of our human struggle different from the (so-called) American dream, the paint brush is dipped in a message for finding the right guilt, finding the right scale for judgment, no more, no less. No unnecessary guilt, no unnecessary compassion; therefore, no unnecessary compensation. Afterall, life is about hard choices, when there are too many hungry stomachs and not enough fish and bread to pass around.
At any rate, given that I do not think moral responsibility a necessity for a reasonable apology, I find much of your argument useless.
But I do not speak on behalf of all liberals, so I am sure there are some who would agree with your initial assumption and then compose a beautiful, well-reasoned responsed, to which you could compose a beautiful, well-reasoned rebuttal, and the whole world could delight in your multiplications of the beautiful.
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