Response Hum-08, response -Ph-04,response HUM-08

Response one-HUM-08

The exclusions of groups of people to the social contract were perhaps so woven into the fabric of society that many people took it for granted that this was a western and European contract.” As I have explored this concept, I have come to realize that it truly was ignorance that led the belief that a man of color could never claim intelligence, educability, and even the right to be called human. The plight of the black man, as a forever slave, was ingrained indelibly into the minds of nearly every white individual, at least in Europe and colonial America, as well as many other places around the world. As we have seen “these authors struggling … with the issues of indigenous populations and slavery” throughout our readings, we have also observed sympathy through the eyes of Adam Smith. I believe his sympathetic gestures offer us a glimpse of, what I am sure existed, many souls who were filled with regret and sorrow toward how Africans were mistreated. Humanitarianism toward black people existed within acts of extreme caution and fear. “The social contract … was deliberately set up for the privileged; it did not include non whites.” Humanity, however, eventually abolished slavery, but racism continues and may always exist because of our ugly past.

The following is an excerpt from my final paper.

Slavery provided the foundation of northern colonization during the beginning of the seventeenth century. As previously noted, the institution of slavery had already been established as a natural part of society. Spencer Pack gives credit to Adam Smith as having found a “deep connection between owning slaves and demanding independence from England” (261). Wendy Warren, in her interview with Terry Gross, provides astounding facts concerning early colonization. While the colonists sought freedom, in particular, religious independence from England, they, however, relied on slave labor to ensure their own sovereign authority. “Puritans … actually owned enslaved Africans. And it’s hard to reconcile this vision of religious freedom with the practice of slavery” (Warren). Slave history from the northern colonies offers much insight regarding the colonization of our country. Its exclusion from textbooks and other publications proves inexcusable. Only lately have historians produced accurate records detailing how slaves played a leading role in the founding of cities such as Boston and New York. Recent articles offer astounding additional information to our appalling history. Winthrop Jordan validates Wendy Warren’s premises and provides a glimpse of John Smith’s journals that reveal “that Negroes first came to the British continental colonies in 1619” (18).

Jordan cites Philip A. Brice as revealing that documents provide information that “enslavement … [began] … around 1660, when statutes bearing on slavery were passed for the first time” (18). Jordan’s research maintains that the earliest written records indicate colonists “assumed that prejudice against the Negro was natural and almost innate in the white man … [and rested in] … overseas imperialism …and full-throated Anglo-Saxonism” (19). Philip Morgan, while claiming that no one “in the ancient world ever seriously questioned the placement of slavery in society” (51), names several European countries who supported the enslavement of Africans to ensure productivity in establishing our colonies. The reality of prejudice that followed the colonists, as hungry as they professed themselves to be for freedom, remains astounding as well as absurd.

 

RESPONSE TWO HUM-08

The main problem that Charles Mills focuses on in his work The Racial Contract is the way in which social contract theory is taught, discussed, and developed in mainstream philosophical and political discourse. Mills’ Racial Contract is all about exposing what he sees as the diminished, overlooked, or worse, deliberately ignored, racial dimension that underlies the history of social-contract theorizing. As Mills explains, traditional social contract theorizing identifies the social contract as “the crucial human metamorphosis…from ‘natural’ man to ‘civil/political’ man, from the resident of the state of nature to the citizen of the created society”. Mills argues that this “raceless” and “ideal” presentation of social contract theory belies the actual racial and historical circumstances that inform contractarian thinking, all the way from its heyday in the 16th and 17th centuries to the present day. Mills’ “Racial Contract” is offered up as a corrective, one that identifies the real metamorphosis at the heart of social contract theory as “the preliminary conceptual partitioning and corresponding transformation of human populations into ‘white’ and ‘nonwhite’ men.” According to Mills, “the Racial contract ‘constructs’ race…’White’ people do not preexist but are brought into existence as ‘whites’ by the Racial Contract”. In other words, the categorization of people as ‘white’ and ‘non-white’ is partially a product of social contract theorizing. This is because the rise of social contract theory coincides with a very specific historical moment. As Mills explains, “the golden age of contract theory [1650 to 1800] overlapped with the growth of a European capitalism whose development was stimulated by the voyages of exploration that increasingly gave the contract a racial subtext”. This historical context also lends social contract theory an often overlooked economic dimension, one that is crucial for understanding the need to parse humans in to the categories of ‘white’ and ‘non-white’. As Mills explains, “the point of leaving the state of nature is in part to secure a stable environment for the industrious appropriation of the world”. Of course, the “industrious appropriation of the world” necessitated a demarcation of those who would do the appropriating and those whose resources would be appropriated. It would also require some sort of justification for this demarcation. For Mills, the philosophy and language at the heart of social contract theory, which is typically presented as racially neutral and applicable to all men, actually only applies to white men and this is demonstrated historically by the ways in which non-white men have been systematically excluded from the supposedly universal rights and protections guaranteed by the social contract. Mills explains that the typical strategy for justifying the exclusion of non-whites has been to portray non-whites as inherently “savage,” “irrational,” lacking in culture or industry, or not fully human, and thus not eligible for the rights and protections offered by the social contract which require the ability to exercise a sufficient degree of moral, political, and rational thought. All of this was done, in Mills’ view, with the intent of enriching the lives and territories of those who had the fortune of being considered ‘white’ (typically, European people and people of European descent). Therefore, according to Mills, the historical exclusion of non-whites from these rights and protections has not merely been a bug in social contract theory, but is actually a feature of it. It is the racial reality behind the idea of the social contract that leads Mills to dub it the "Racial Contract

RESPONSE THREE HUM-08

I have to agree with Marx. The social contract is lopsided. It always has been. There was a precipitous drop in health, longevity and agency in the transition from hunter-gatherer to agrarian societies. Only recently have those issues been adequately dealt with. But at what cost? Empires depend on a draw of resources and labor which are not in equilibrium. The US for example consumes an immense amount of energy. That dependence is why we have an interest in the Middle East. You can see how fixing one problem leads to another. I'd go further than Marx though. Max Stirner, a contemporary of Marx, would have called the social contract a spook--a ghost of the mind. It has no basis in reality. The contract, which I don't recall signing, has power only inasmuch as the individual provides, and to the extent that it's enforced via violence. Pacifists might say something like: if you require violence to enforce your ideas, maybe they're not such great ideas. If we conjecture that each nation possesses its own contract, then yes, I absolutely believe inequality is built-in to the benefit of those who devise it. Citizenship is by nature exclusive. What that means is that the citizens of those nations which subjugate others enjoy the fruits of surplus. Whether they're drawing resources from abroad, or bringing in slaves and wage workers, there's an inherent imbalance of power and consumption. Rejecting that position of privilege is not in any citizen's self-interest. That's why such conditions persist until the system runs its course, or a bigger fish comes along. The idea of relinquishing control doesn't appeal to ones desire for material prosperity. Security ultimately trumps social justice. Fear is a strong motivator--fear of going without, regardless of whether one has more than enough.

I'm reminded of a segment of social critique from The Torture Garden, by Octave Mirbeau:

You're obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you think absurd. You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn, and know lack all foundation. It is that permanent contradiction between your ideas and desires and all the dead formalities and vain pretenses of your civilization which makes you sad, troubled and unbalanced. In that intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and all feeling of personality, because at every moment they suppress and restrain and check the free play of your powers. That's the poisoned and mortal wound of the civilized world.

An excerpt from my draft, on an aspect of moral goods, regarding a shift from collective duty to individual culpability:

Tyranny of the majority is a well-known and discussed concept in the US. As the reins of representative democracy are loosened, there exists a growing commitment to compulsory education and continued education, to protect minority rights, while bolstering the democratic contribution of the individual. Ethically, today, we strike a balance between acting in accordance with the categorical imperative (something like the Golden Rule,) and doing what is reasonable. This is partly due to conflicting allegiances, but also a tug between moral behavior and self-interest. Citizens are educated at the most basic level to obey authority until it becomes unethical to do so; specifically, Principle IV of Principles of International Law Recognized in the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal and in the Judgment of the Tribunal, "The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him." This principle was not always widely accepted, and authorities could construe such disobedience as insubordination, or worse, treason. Informed and educated voters are a defense against tyranny of the majority. The shame of correcting a moral mistake is far worse than having crusaded against the majority’s insistence to do wrong. Dietrich Bonheoffer, a German theologian, remarked, upon leaving the safety of America for Germany at a time in which he was under the Reich’s eye, that he did not feel he could be present for the rebuilding of Germany unless he was present for its destruction. It is so easy, in the shortsighted pursuit of self-interest, to fall into an ethical lapse. A perfect example is the crumbling of the US financial sector in 2008, during which taxpayers came to grips with the cost of greed, as they found themselves responsible for footing the bill. This sort of shock is, perhaps, what the common citizen needs to address immorality at every step--every small step that leads to cataclysmic failure.