Why the South doth prevail (and why to some extent it didn't)

A 1957 essay by William F. Buckley, Why the South Must Prevail, was making the rounds on Twitter last night (thanks to Erik Kleefeld). In it, Buckley pretends to some regard for the ultimate welfare of Southern "negroes" but asserts that Southern whites have the right to preserve their cultural superiority by denying their black neighbors the right to vote --because  "the claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage."

That is, southern whites don't want to integrate and so pollute their...culture, so they have the right to keep "negroes" from voting to force them to do.  How can a minority claim to speak for "civilization"? "[T]he White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race."

People well-versed in Buckley's oeuvre and career, and in the legislative civil rights battles of the of the late 50s, will doubtless weigh in with appropriate context and analysis. Lacking more than passing familiarity with the latter and interest in the former, I still think it's worthwhile to note a couple of points that struck me, coming to this cold.

Detroit's destruction began in its heyday

Thomas J. Sugrue's The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (1997) is a great book -- and in some ways a simple one.  It provides extensive, fine-grained documentation of two or three (depending on how you count) relentless forces that destroyed Detroit.

The first was the hemorrhaging of manufacturing jobs that was in full flow by the early fifties, and could only have been stemmed by national industrial policies unthinkable in the United States: a rollback of Taft-Hartley's enablement of state right-to-work laws; a German-style role for labor in corporate management; legal restrictions on companies' right to lay off workers or move manufacturing operations as they saw fit.

The second was the vicious, rooted, legally codified and government-sanctioned racism that kept African Americans at the bottom of the labor totem pole, consigning them to the hardiest, dirtiest, poorest-paying and least secure factory jobs and excluding them skilled crafts, retail service and a host of other occupations.

Brooks' assault on reason

Funny that David Brooks dismisses moral philosophy because studying it doesn't seem to increase "proactive moral behavior."

The values that one would think a non-Christianist American conservative would hold most dear are a product of moral philosophy:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed....

Brooks sagely reports that moral judgements are "rapid intuitive decisions" rather than the product of deliberation. Day-to-day, perhaps they are. But millions of Americans were persuaded by watching southern policemen club nonviolent demonstrators that segregation was wrong. Sit-in participants and freedom marchers were demonstrating a very clearly articulated moral philosophy (see Letter from a Birmingham Jail) that changed this country.

Perhaps Brooks finds it comforting to think that morality can be entirely explained by evolutionary biology. Conservatives often find it hard to acknowledge that human ethics advance over time - and to accord judges the authority to incorporate those advances into law.

Over time, however, Americans have been persuaded that slavery is wrong. That women deserve property rights, the vote, equal pay for equal work. That 60-hour work weeks for children are wrong. Now, we're in the process of concluding that marriage for gay people is right.

Those advances in morality were not (are not) "rapid intuitive decisions." They worked through public spectacle, and public discourse, ultimately informed by moral philosophy.

If evolution shapes our values, it shapes them through our reason as much as through emotion. Just as perception and evaluation can't easily be separated, neither can thought and feeling.