Can we fix social problems without launching social revolutions?

Jason McDougal continues:

Another issue that comes to mind with regard to America as a battleground: when does a corrective event in American society and history become an ongoing agenda? For example, Lincoln viewed ending slavery as a political corrective for a social aberration. It was a one time thing because Lincoln did explicitly and overtly state many times that he did not believe that ending slavery was the grounds for further social tinkering.

The liberal however turns a one-shot event into an ongoing (perpetual) social agenda. Thus ending slavery becomes an interminable civil rights program that moves from being a political corrective to a social engineering phenomenon.

What I am asking is it possible to contain “correctives” in time such that they don’t expand into becoming perpetually ongoing agendas? At some point the conservative has to define when a corrective has yielded the required results and appropriate consequences—thereby putting an end to “perpetual correction” (which becomes social engineering).

LA to JM:

That’s a great question. Yes, I think it is possible to cure a particular problem without the cure becoming part of an ongoing agenda of social revolution, if, and only if, the restraints on the cure are made absolutely explicit right at the start. Further conversation could fill in what I might mean by this.

Unfortunately, the example you gave, of the freeing of the slaves, is the hardest case of all. Lincoln in his 1858 debates with Douglas attempted to delineate the kind of limits you speak of, i.e., he thought the blacks should be free to enjoy the fruits of their own labor, while adding the caveat that he didn’t favor their being socially and politically equal with whites. But the problem was, once the Negroes were free, once, as Jefferson feared, “the two people [were] equally free, living under the same government,” then how in the world did Lincoln believe that social and political equality could be withheld from them? Lincoln never confronted that question. He freed the slaves in the Emancipation Proclamation, and ended slavery as an institution in the 13th Amendment (which he pushed through Congress a couple of months before his death), but he didn’t lay out any notion by which a society in which two such different peoples were equally free could maintain its institutions and its culture. He just didn’t think about it. Yes, in early 1862 he floated the re-colonization scheme, and presented it to free black leaders . They indignantly dismissed it, saying that they were just as much a part of America as the white man. Lincoln dropped the recolonization scheme, and proceeded a few months later to issue the Emancipation Proclamation.

My point here is not to take a position for or against any particular measure that was done for the sake of protecting black rights. My point is that Lincoln signally failed to erect any bulwarks against the sort of egalitarian revolution that he himself had previously opposed. While he may have had a preference that America not consist of two such different peoples equally free, living under the same government, the drift of historical tides overtook his own preferences, and he basically surrendered to it. I blame him for this, for precisely the reason you suggest. He didn’t summon the country to think about the question, how can we right this particular wrong, without its becoming the occasion for ongoing social revolution? And for this, while I consider him a very great man, I find fault with him.

JM to LA:

Thanks Lawrence. Your characterization of the ambiguity in Lincoln’s approach and the questions he left either unanswered or unapproached is the best evaluation of him that I have read. Thanks again!

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 25, 2005 01:19 AM | Send