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Mr. Fleming has written an account of the United States’ Civil War and uses a novel approach – “novel” as far as I understand American history and the role of emotionalism in explaining history — to show his reader the essential motives of both the North and the South.
The book generally spans approximately 365 years, i.e., 1501 to 1865; the earliest Purchase of Africans (from Africans) for work in “The New World,” mostly before the founding of the United States government. But its main focus is on the most important people in what evolved to be the United States of America and their motives. This is from about 1775 to 1865. That is, the beginning of the American Revolutionary War to the end of the American Civil War.
From my first reading of this book —in early 2018 —I see that progress for our culture and politics has been disappointingly poor but happily, the novelness of the book’s approach shows its reader’s why! My understanding of the “ups and downs” of western civilization is from my study of Ayn Rand’s and Dr. Leonard Peikoff’s philosophy of history that is the foundation of Peikoff’s “The Ominous Parallels.” In it he shows that “the pen is mightier than the sword, and it is really just a few pens! Fleming shows that it is really just about 25 people who set the stage for the carnage which was for Americans, “The Civil War.”
In The Ominous Parallels,” Peikoff illustrates the “unholy” alliance between coercion and irrationality. Fleming shows the South’s motivation was mostly fear. Fear that their slaves would violently and murderously revolt as they had done in other places. The North’s essential motivation was an emotionalist superiority and hatred — devoid of the proper political philosophy — of southerners. Essentially this was based in their monomaniacal “abolishionism” and the resulting merciless violence they were willing to inflict on southerners in retribution. What a horrible mess…
I am a casual student of history and this is the first civil war book I have read but it is easily in the “top 10” of my favorite nonfiction books. Thanks, Mr Fleming!
/sb
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Re: Robert Jones’ post 100573 of 2/26/18
The North’s essential motivation was an emotionalist superiority and hatred — devoid of the proper political philosophy — of southerners. Essentially this was based in their monomaniacal “abolishionism” and the resulting merciless violence they were willing to inflict on southerners in retribution.
Pragmatism speaking? Tadeusz Kosciuszko, Ernestine Rose, and Frederick Douglass had articulated the fact that while the countries of the old world were offspring of history, America was born of Philosophy (read our Declaration of Independence). The Abolitionists were as far as one can be from “emotionalist superiority.” Their rational, objective knowledge of the justice of their cause — and hence their factual, rational, objective conclusion of its superiority — came from objectively judging the evidence of the evil of enslaving one’s fellow Humans. If objective justice be “hatred” and “merciless violence,” then today the world is perishing from their absence.
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Re: Robert Jones’ post 100573 of 2/26/18
Mr. Fleming has written an account of the United States’ Civil War and uses a novel approach – “novel” as far as I understand American history and the role of emotionalism in explaining history — to show his reader the essential motives of both the North and the South. …
In The Ominous Parallels, Peikoff illustrates the “unholy” alliance between coercion and irrationality.
I read about one-fourth of this book, at the suggestion of a colleague. It’s a fascinating read and Fleming is a great storyteller. But his method, and therefore, conclusions, are so wildly wrong, that I couldn’t bear to read the entire book. The main problem lies in the “novel approach” that Mr. Jones highlights. Namely, emotions don’t explain the course of history.
The Ominous Parallels shows how ideas, rational and irrational, move history. Yet, it is the role of ideas that Fleming jettisons almost entirely from his analysis, in favor of emotions. This is hopeless, and he ends up coming to all sorts of bizarre conclusions because of his method. In some ways, his book reminds me of Murray Rothbard, both in method and conclusions.
As early as the preface, red flags go up as Fleming lumps together under the banner of “delusional frenzy and misguided passion” (my words), such things as witch hunting, prohibition, the “amoralism” of the roaring twenties (which he says, led to the 1929 Stock Market Crash), the Mafia, communism, “McCarthyism,” 9/11 terrorism, etc.
Never mind the ideas behind these historical events, their rationality or irrationality, what gave them power, etc. They’re simply categorized as emotionally-charged events that caused people to get “stirred up.”
His lead character, John Brown, the controversial abolitionist who was a bit of an irrational madman, serves as a model for the rest of the book. Brown’s passionate anti-slavery convictions combined with his irrational tactics allow Fleming to associate the idea of abolition with wild, monomaniacal emotionalism. He then focuses on the emotionalism and downplays the ideas. He follows this pattern throughout, showing cases of fear and loathing on the part of the South, for example, while largely ignoring the ideas behind these fears. As the story unfolds, we see a lot of hatred, passions, and frenzied behavior on both sides of the issue.
One is then led to the conclusion that the Civil War was just a bunch of misguided hotheads who got worked up in an irrational frenzy of fear and hatred. Had they kept their wits about them, the whole slavery thing would have blown over, and 600,000 lives could have been saved.
And, of course, this is the conclusion one would draw, once ideas are disregarded (or downplayed) in favor of an emotional explanation.
I’m not enough of a historian to know the merits of Fleming’s book from a factual perspective, but I certainly don’t agree with his conclusions and I can’t trust his analysis, given his erroneous premises and method.
/sb
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Re: Jim Allard’s post 122260 of 2/28/18
Jim:
In your opinion, do emotions play any part at all? Don’t ideas stir men’s passions? There are hundreds of ideas, good ones I might add, that don’t lead to action. Why do some take hold in the mind and lead to action while others just elicit a “that is interesting”?
*sb
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Re: Byron Price’s post 122263 of 3/1/18
If one does not have a coherent, objective idea of morality and justice, then one winds up either distrusting one’s own reason, or distrusting one’s emotions, or both. Those whom the incoherence of their personal philosophy leads to distrust the mind, do not act on their best ideas; those whose internalized incoherence leads them to repress their emotions, become passive regardless of the worth of their ideas. Why the common is not normative…
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Re: Byron Price’s post 122263 of 3/1/18
Why do some take hold in the mind and lead to action while others just elicit a “that is interesting”?
Basically, choice, regardless of non-basic causes or influences, e.g., emotion, concrete situations, culture. This is clear from “Objectivist Ethics” and “For The New Intellectual.” As 19th century Americans applied Enlightenment individualism, the basic contradiction to slavery became increasingly obvious and powerful.
*sb
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Re: Robert Jones’ post 100573 of 2/26/18
Robert Jones cites Thomas Fleming for the proposition that the South’s motivation for fighting the Civil War was fear. For obvious reasons, slave cultures always live in fear of slave uprisings. As one author (speaking of Sparta) put it, “Eternal vigilance may be the price of liberty, but it is also the price of tyranny.” (Quoted from memory)
I have not read Fleming’s book, but I have read enough history of this period to conclude that the South’s willingness to fight a war was based on fear of Lincoln’s opposition to the expansion of slavery into newly admitted states, not on fear of uprisings.
/sb
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Re: Steve Plafker’s post 122335 of 3/7/18
Thanks for the post! One of the other “novel” perspectives Fleming provided me was that of the willingness of the North to finally — after a lot of effort, across generations, to settle the slavery issue in a civil manner — to finally have to go to war. What surprised me was how Fleming was able to show the principled passion / love / respect many had for “the Union” and the legal-political principles it was founded on, and then, finally, the willingness to protect it with a war. If someone would have asked me before I read the book, I might have given the abolishionists too much credit, at the expense of “the Unionionists” (if that is the right turn of phrase).
Fleming spends a lot of time on the issue you raise in this regard: the seriousness of the issue of slavery spreading across the states, or NOT! These competing political and moral principles, Fleming shows as animating both the Unionists’ and the Secessionists’ motives and actions. Of course he also shows—as his foil—the motives and actions of those monomaniacal abolitionists who were, at times, willing to see the Union destroyed, if that (somehow) would end slavery.
Anyway, like I said before, this is the first book I have ever read on the Civil War but I am happy I did. Also, some critics more knowledgeable than I about this era might be suspicious of revisionist history, but Fleming says explicitly that he wrote the book because he and other scholars are finding the history does need updating / “revising”!
/sb
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Re: Robert Jones’ post 122366 of 3/9/18
… scholars are finding the history does need updating / “revising”!
Updating/revising our knowledge and interpretations is only good when it is based on new objective evidence, or on newly discovered objective solutions to problems of methodology. In history, updating and revising are good when based on evidence from newly opened, previously secret archives; on evidence dug up by archeologists; or on decoding previously undeciphered documents and inscriptions.
Updating and revising are not good when coming from mere change in cultural fashion – like the current change to pragmatism and emotionalism as supposedly valid explanations of history. And then there is “revisionism” as a dog-whistle for racism, as in Holocaust “revisionism” and pro-slavery “revisionism.” It is objectively evil, particularly when it uses the mask of “history” to deprecate objective justice as “emotional.”
And twice already, spelling “abolitionism” with “sh.” Where does that come from?
/sb
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Re: Robert Jones’ post 122366 of 3/9/18
I think I can understand and, perhaps, share the interest in such kind of books. However wrong or misguided the author’s conclusion might be, its factual content may be invaluable in fleshing out a period in history, whatever that might be. Although I agree with other commentators that there are much better sources for understanding the roots of the North-South conflict and the following war, it may be quite helpful to know other cultural differences of both sides. For that purpose, though, I’d recommend another book:
D.H. Fischer “Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America”
/sb
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