Kort Explores conundrums of the human condition

"We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it - and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again - and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore."
Mark Twain

"The essence of all slavery consists in taking the produce of another's labor by force. It is immaterial whether this force be founded on ownership of the slave or ownership of the money that he must get to live on."
Leo Tolstoy (1891)

"I consider [state's rights] as the chief source of stability to our present system; whereas the consolidation of the states into one vast republic, sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home, will be the certain precursor of that ruin which has overwhelmed all those that have preceded it.

"So, far from engaging in a war to perpetuate slavery, I am rejoiced that slavery is abolished."
General Robert E. Lee

Wisdom is in large measure the ability to accurately predict the future results of a given action based on knowledge of similar actions in the past. Wisdom is gained primarily through exploiting the advantages of historical perspective in order to find the true lessons of the past that at the time were hidden in a fog of incomplete information, faulty understanding, and emotion driven focus on factors that often turn out to be entirely superficial.

The wise cultivate the ability to work backward from the actual end products of complex processes to achieve a fuller understanding of the dynamics that created them. The more accurate the information and analysis, the greater the value of the wisdom that can be derived. But the lessons we attempt to draw from history are often as flawed as the accounts of historical events. Nothing is more dangerous to the future than false wisdom extracted from a flawed understanding of the past.

One of the greatest difficulties in understanding the thinking and motivations of those who lived in history is trying to comprehend their actions without the benefit of the knowledge that resulted from those actions. We forget that the knowledge we take so much for granted today was unknown to our ancestors. Much of our knowledge was learned the hard way by embracing emotionally attractive assumptions that were rudely corrected by reality - sometimes repeatedly.

Much of our recorded history concentrates on the triumphs and traumas of our many wars. Wars rarely accomplish the initial official intentions of those who wage them. Often the nature of human civilization is so transformed by major wars that the original intentions become irrelevant by the end of the fighting. Many wars have been intentionally started by deceptive leaders whose real objectives wouldn't have been an acceptable justification to wage war. Even more have been waged by fools who were unable or unwilling to consider the long term consequences of actions motivated by short term greed or convenience. The history of many wars has also been corrupted when their causes, component events, and ultimate results have been distorted by revisionists seeking to bend reality to fit their personal delusions.

The single most obvious pattern in all of human experience is the difficulty of predicting the ultimate results of our actions. Many warriors have fought for causes that ultimately had little to do with the actual results they helped create. Historical figures were often operating under illusions, assumptions and prejudices that in the fullness of time have turned out to have little to do with the ultimate significance of their actions.

While the personal motives of individual soldiers remain a useful historical detail, is the real significance of a war the motivations of those who fought it, or the actual results of it being fought? Is it more appropriate to consider the significance of a war from the often flawed perspective of those who started it, or from the perspective of the war's real effects on the direction of civilization and society? Is the true essence of a conflict the propaganda that fueled it, or the ways it changed the lives of the survivors and their progeny? Is history what actually happened, or what certain individuals wanted to believe would happen?

Consider the long term effects of the conflict variously referred to as the "Civil War", "War of Northern Aggression", "War of Southern Secession", "War Between The States", "War of Rebellion", etc. Nearly a century and a half after the conflict we still can't even agree on an accurate label, let alone agree on its causes and the long term ramifications of it being fought.

Much of this confusion is the intentional result of an ongoing propaganda effort by the victors to hide the true significance of their war effort behind emotion charged distractions. The propaganda effort to disguise and distort the true nature of the American War of the 1860's, is ongoing because the conflict over the fundamental issues that were the true essence of that war, continues today. The real "Civil War" never ended because we've never understood as a society the true significance of the conflict.

The claim that the "Civil War" was fought to end slavery is one of the most persistent distortions in American history. This is not to say that slavery wasn't a major issue at the time, and even the primary issue in the minds of some individuals. But only a tiny minority of Southerners owned slaves, and only a similarly tiny minority of Northerners were willing to go to war to end slavery.

There were powerful forces on both sides of the conflict who saw it in their best interests to portray slavery as the only issue in question. Not surprisingly, those still pursuing the Federalist agenda today continue to find value to portraying the "Civil War" as being about freeing the slaves. But in reality, the primary issue on both sides at the start of the war was the concentration of power in an intrusive Federal Government - an issue that remains as valid today as a century and a half ago.

In what must surely be one of the most tragic ironies in history, what superficially appears to have been an effort to eliminate slavery was in reality an effort to ultimately enslave all men, while what appears to have been an effort to preserve slavery was in essence a defense of the only political system capable of ultimately freeing all men. The key to understanding the seeming contradiction is that the issue of slavery was only a triggering condition, not the fundamental issue being contested.

Somehow we've lost the understanding that the fundamental issue that drove the Confederate States to seceded was "states rights" - whether political power would remain decentralized as the founding fathers intended, or would once again be allowed to concentrate in a centralized all powerful bureaucracy. In essence, the "Civil War" was fought over the same core issue as the Revolutionary War - whether the purpose of government is to serve the people or rule over them.

In the years preceding the war, the Federal Government had become increasingly dominated by the economically stronger industrialized Northern states. Having gained control over all three branches of the government, the Northern interests were unable to resist using that power for their own short term economic advantage. And the more they found government power useful, the more power they sought to transfer from individuals and states to the national government.

At the start of the war, the official Union cause was to preserve the union - to prevent the Confederate states from leaving a United States that was dominated by the Northern States. Freeing the slaves only became an official Union objective when, late in the war, Lincoln needed a political angle to use in blocking diplomatic recognition of the Confederacy by the British.

Slavery was already declining as an economic system in the face of the rapidly evolving industrial revolution. The operating overhead and reluctant productivity of slaves simply can't compete with the relentless reliability and consistent productivity of machines. The politics of slavery were also failing from within due to the changing attitudes of the citizenry - especially those who as jurors were refusing to convict under the slave laws.

In the South, the trend was clear even without the growing abolitionist movement, and those with a vested interest in the slave trade were looking for a way to counter the trend and protect their investments. There was already a growing resentment of abuses of Federal power by the Northern states in such economic issues as taxes, tariffs, and rates that caused greater hardship in the South than in the North. Many in the South feared that the manipulation of the way the census was counted - and thereby political representation apportioned - by the Northern dominated government would result in the South being demoted to the status of permanent junior partner forever denied the political power to resist the whims of the North.

The use of the slave issue to expand Federal power into yet another previous domain of States and individuals, brought slave owners and Southern abolitionists together in their common cause of defending the most fundamental principle at the core of our free society - that real political power should remain as close to the individual citizen as possible. The common ground that united the South was the same in essence as that which motivated the Patriots in the Revolutionary War - opposition to the concentration of power in an intrusive central government over which they had no meaningful political influence. In the name of denying the rights of slaves, the South was in the larger sense defending the fundamental principles of the only political system that has ever respected the rights of freemen.

The widespread resentment over Northern manipulation of the issue of slavery in order to expand the power and intrusiveness of the Federal Government, made it politically incorrect for Southerners to openly oppose slavery. As a result, the proslavery factions were able to insert specific protections for the institution of slavery in some of the founding documents of the Confederacy, and statements of support in some of the official documents. But the unifying cause of the Confederacy was always "State's Rights", not preserving the practice of slavery.

The Federals, on the other hand, were in essence supporting the same basic positions as the British in our Revolutionary War - the principle that the dominant socioeconomic group had the right to use its control over the coercive violence of a powerful central government to impose their social and economic agenda on those lacking the political power to resist them. In the name of freeing some men, the Federals were aggressively restructuring the balance of political power in ways that would eventually eliminate the freedom of all men.

America has never fully resolved the issues over which the Civil War was fought largely because we've tried to understand the conflict from the context of what the victors wanted us to believe it was about. Small wonder that attempting to implement the flawed wisdom, extracted from our flawed understanding of why all the blood that was spilled, has only brought us a century and a half of continued strife and steadily diminishing personal freedoms.

Thinking we fought the war to end slavery, we failed to address the racism that was at slavery's core. Not realizing that the war was about transforming our nation of free individuals into a nation of subjects ruled by a powerful Federal government, we have failed to be on guard against the subsequent incremental erosions of our individual rights by that Federal government. False wisdom drawn from a false understanding of history can be a more effective agent of evil than legions of armed soldiers. False ideas can easily pass through barriers that would stand against the strongest army, destroying from within that which is beyond the reach of external enemies. As Mark Twain told us long ago, we must be careful not to draw the wrong lessons from our experiences.