Pro-Slavery Stance & Anti-Democracy Tactics

On both sides of the Atlantic, there is a notable overlap of politicians who defend symbols and monuments that endorse a pro-slavery stance, and those who relentlessly deploy anti-democracy tactics.

Take a look at the many statutes erected to commemorate people who profited from the slave trade or built their military career on defending the system of slavery.  There are politicians who, as soon as they hear of any attempt to remove such statutes, summon up the most righteous anger to condemn anyone who dares to disrespect the country’s history.  Note they are not saying that shameful chapters of the past should not be hidden away, but that there is nothing regrettable at all about these individuals who proudly stood on the side of slavery that should make any contemporary commemoration of them unwelcome.

 

These politicians are often found amongst those keenest to use anti-democracy tactics to stop the public from holding them to account.  These tactics include: altering electoral boundaries to reduce the number of winnable seats for their opponents (widely deployed by US Republicans in states they control); the introduction of Photo ID to make it more difficult for the poor and minority groups to vote (a favourite of US Republicans and being introduced by the Conservatives in the UK); taking power from an independent body to determine what is or is not an acceptable political campaign in elections (UK Conservatives); and undermining judicial autonomy in upholding the rule of law (by packing the US Supreme Court with Republican-backed justices, or curtailing the UK Supreme Court’s ability to carry out judicial reviews of government actions).

Anti-democracy politicians often try to hide their affinity with pro-slavery traditions by misrepresenting historical connections. For example, some claim that it was the Tory MP Wilberforce who brought about the abolition of slavery. The truth is that Wilberforce was frustrated for years when his support for the abolition of slavery was repeatedly resisted by the majority of Tory MPs.  It was the Whigs – precursors of the Liberals – who championed the ant-slavery cause. When Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807, it was under a Whig Prime Minister; and it was a Whig Government that put an end to slavery throughout the British Empire in 1833.

 

In the US, contemporary Republicans are ever ready to invoke Lincoln, the Republican President who stood against the pro-slavery states’ armed attempt to break away from the United States. But many Republicans today side with those seditious confederate states in seeking to retain the symbols of their defiance in the American Civil War.  Most pertinently, the Republican Party today shares the political DNA of, not Abraham Lincoln, but Ronald Reagan – the Reagan who opposed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act; who declared publicly that "if an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house, he has a right to do so”; and who as president granted tax exemption to schools that put racial segregation in place.

 

It is no coincidence that politicians who are keen to deploy anti-democracy tactics are often the ones who have no trouble backing people with a pro-slavery stance.  They don’t see the enslavement of others as an affront to society.  They believe that it is perfectly fine for them to gain wealth and status by depriving others of power.  They should not be allowed anywhere near public office.

 

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See: ‘Reagan’s Race Record’, by Matthew Yglesias, The Atlantic November 9, 2007: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2007/11/reagans-race-record/46875/

Cooperative Problem-Solving: its historical significance

There have been many attempts to deal with sceptics and relativists who dismiss objectivity as a basis for grounding beliefs. It has almost become common to assume that no such attempt can ever succeed because some version of the infinite regress argument can always be deployed.

In short, whatever is claimed to be true, it can be asked by what criteria that claim is assessed to be true and why those criteria should be accepted as the correct ones.  To claim that it is true that those criteria are the correct ones would trigger again the question that challenges the basis for making that claim, and so on.  Either this goes on ad infinitum without any ultimate justification, or it ends abruptly at some arbitrary point.  The sceptic would take the former as pointing to the futility of looking for objective validation.  The relativist would take the latter as a reflection of one’s personal or cultural perspective as the definitive point of reference, beyond which there is no scope for settling any difference in claim assessment.

However, if we stick to the real world and recall how agreement is reached after divergent views emerge, we will come to realise that the most relevant criterion for differentiating the credibility of rival proposed solutions is the effectiveness of each in dealing with the problem they are meant to tackle.  

Historically, cooperative problem-solving first emerged through the utilisation of shared intelligence amongst primitive groups who found that bringing people’s ideas and perspectives together led to better outcomes than having one individual trying to work everything out on one’s own. Its development was disrupted, unfortunately, by the rise of rigid hierarchies, the imposition of dogmas, and the spread of superstitions and prejudices.  

The impetus for a resurgence of cooperative problem-solving came in the 16^th/17^th centuries during a period when the tightly knit power dominance of the monarch, the church, and elite scholastics was challenged by thinkers and practitioners who drew attention to the consistently greater effectiveness in finding what would work well – in governing society, guiding ways of living, evaluating claims about the world – when critical deliberations were carried out by people in collaboration, rather than unquestionable pronouncements issued by a few individuals.

From the 18^th century on, cooperative problem-solving became increasingly more sophisticated and extensively applied. It came to characterise scientific research, underpin the organisation of democratic decision-making, shape societal reflections on and shifts in customs, permeate investigative procedures in civil and criminal cases, and steer diverse practices such as teaching, engineering, and reporting. In different spheres, it was discovered that the more people could cooperate in finding ways to deal with the problems they faced, the better chance they had in arriving at workable solutions.

Furthermore, as the approaches were being taken forward and refined, a number of conditions were found to be particularly important. If people were to participate to the best of their ability in cooperative problem-solving, they needed to be accorded respect as fellow participants; freed from deception, intimidation or bribes; and given meaningful opportunities to make informed contributions. These conditions would in time be recognised as essential for people to flourish together as a community.

For much of the 20^th century, cooperative problem-solving was applied to more situations where conflicting views and incompatible assumptions needed to be resolved.  At the same time, it was so taken for granted that hardly attention was given to raising public understanding of its central value. Consequently, people who aspired to the old authoritarian ways were able to mislead large numbers of people into believing that cooperative problem-solving processes such as democratic participation, scientific peer assessment, judicial examination, journalistic verification, were all dispensable when ‘decisive leadership’ was put forward to deal with demonised scapegoats and imaginary threats.

There is an urgent need to explain why cooperative problem-solving approaches and the conditions they have found to be vital for constructive co-existence are essential for the healthy functioning of society.  Without them, we would be pushed back towards an unaccountable few dictating to us what we must believe and how we should act, all to fit in with the whims and self-centred interests of authoritarians who despise consensus and cooperation.

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For more information on the historical background and contemporary applications of cooperative problem-solving, see:

The Evolution of Communitarian Ideas:  https://www.palgrave.com/gb/book/9783030265571

‘Cooperative problem-solving: the key to a reciprocal society’: https://henry-tam.blogspot.com/2012/10/cooperative-problem-solving-key-to.html

‘Paradigm Lost’: https://henry-tam.blogspot.com/2018/01/paradigm-lost.html

‘Question the Powerful’: quincentenary of the 1514 watershed’:

https://henry-tam.blogspot.com/2014/01/question-powerful-quincentenary-of-1514.html

‘Learning from the Civic Cooperators’: https://henry-tam.blogspot.com/2021/12/learning-from-civic-cooperators.html