It wasn’t World War 3, but the reprise of an earlier conflict

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: on one side is a cynical industrialized society with great inequality. On the other side is a rival society where a ruling caste uses idealism to justify treating humans like property. The unequal society fights to contain the unfree society.

Am I talking about the American Civil War or the Cold War? Yes.

Parallel institutions

The North of the USA was an archetypal example of industrialization. The poor lived in Dickensian squalor while the rich amassed fortunes. The poor kept flooding into the cities from the countryside, though. Even the slums were an improvement over the hardships of rural life. They wanted to earn more money in hopes of a better life. The result was an explosion of economic growth.

This still describes free societies, though the edges have been smoothed. People from poorer rural areas (or poorer countries) flow into cities where they can make more money. They live under bad conditions but are free to sell their services to the highest bidder. They’re also free to suffer, if they don’t or can’t work. This model was so successful that the rest of the world had to adopt it if they wanted to catch up. The chaos, inequality, striving and competition were the heart of the model.

The rural South of the US was different. Its economy was based around a “peculiar institution” where some people were property and others owned them. Slavery proponents praised this institution. Their society was nature’s (or God’s) plan, everyone was in their proper place, and the ruling caste was looking out for the interests of their slaves, like father figures. The horrific human rights abuses were dismissed or hidden. Slaves couldn’t choose where to live, how much to work, what to do with the proceeds of their work, or even criticize the system.

The communist countries of the 20^th century adopted this system, in spirit if not in name. Their society was history’s plan, everyone was in their proper place, and the ruling party was looking out for the interests of the proletariat, like father figures. The horrific human rights abuses were dismissed or hidden. Proles couldn’t choose where to live, how much to work, what to do with the proceeds of their work, or even criticize the system.

It’s not easy to compare the harm done by the Southern and the communist systems. The numbers are uncertain, and the circumstances are different. They’re arguably in the same ballpark, though. An estimated 2 million people died in the North American slave trade, while an estimated 100 million died under communism. One hundred is a much bigger number than two, of course, but communism was spread over a much larger population. The total numbers might not reflect worse conditions for individual people living in communism compared to American chattel slavery.

Containment

The free societies, flawed though they were, couldn’t stomach the expansion of their rivals. In the case of the US, this meant that every new state admitted to the Union would be allowed to choose whether it would allow slavery or not. The North knew that people would oppose it, so every new state would be a new abolitionist state. Slavery would be contained to the South.

The South knew this too, and so, reasonably enough, felt threatened. It knew its influence would shrink as the number of free states grew. This led to the Civil War.

In the conflict between NATO and communism, the free societies adopted a similar approach. The US diplomat George Kennan described a policy of containment towards the communist powers. This aimed to prevent communism from spreading, without going so far as attacking communist states directly. It was more successful than the North’s strategy: it never led to a full-scale war a la the Civil War. Instead, communism (mostly) peacefully collapsed, as its moral and economic failure became undeniable.

Historical revanchism

After the end of the Civil War, a generation of academics tried to justify the South’s actions and way of life. Some were Southerners who experienced hardship during the war and wanted to condemn the North. Some were racists who wanted to restore white ownership of blacks. Some were just confused.

They painted the Civil War as a noble “Lost Cause” by the South trying to preserve its idyllic way of life against an imperialistic North. They pointed to all the terrible side effects of industrialization and capitalism to defend the South’s slave society. They may have had a point about the ugliness of the North’s way of life, but they were wrong to use it to justify an even more grotesque system.

Academics and artists have similarly tried to defend Marxism and communist states. A handful still do, to this day. Some defenders are stuck with their past defenses of communism and condemnations of capitalism. Other defenders fantasize about being part of a ruling caste that controls how resources are allocated. Still others see the Cold War solely in domestic American terms: it was a conflict between mainstream culture and business on one side, and free thinkers, artists, and academics on the other. They care less about the fate of free thinkers in communist societies (hint: it was not good) and more about the Red Scare and the Hollywood black list.

Some defenders make the same mistake as the Lost Cause historians. They see all the ugliness of free markets and assume the alternative has to be better. They don’t know or care about the true nature of the alternative.

What can we learn from this?

Apologetics for enslavement probably can’t hold up over time. There are still people whose egos are tied to defending the USSR and other communist states. These diehards only get more stubborn as we learn more about the atrocities of communism from declassified information and the stories of survivors. They won’t live forever, though, and once they’re gone we’ll see the Cold War as clearly as we see the Civil War. It will be the death of the utopian dream of controlling other people’s lives and taking everything they earn… at least, for a time.

We all want to be remembered as good people. If you’re like me and don’t believe in an afterlife, then it feels even more important to have future generations love us. If the only thing that’s going to last forever is our reputation then we better make sure it’s good!

So when we fight other people, in war or in politics, we tell each other that history is on our side. We’re going to be remembered as heroes and our opponents will be remembered as villains or simply forgotten. We’re made by confident by the knowledge that our values will persevere and the rest will be consigned to the ash heap of history. There’s a problem with that, though.

History never makes up its mind.

Sure, at some points in time the majority of historians have settled on one view. Contrary to popular opinion, this isn’t always because “history is written by the victors.” We don’t usually think of the fall of Rome as being the triumph of the noble Germanic tribes against the oppressive Roman Empire, nor do we study the glorious victory of the North Vietnamese against colonialist capitalists. We think of these defeats in more diffident ways.

But even when historians reach a consensus view, it’s not written in stone.

The Bright Ages

Most of us think of the years following the decline of the Roman Empire (around the 5th century) to the start of the Renaissance (the 14th century) as the Dark Ages, a time of ignorance, superstition, and barbarism. This isn’t completely wrong: the collapse of the Western Roman Empire did do a lot of damage to societies around Europe. It’s not completely accurate, either, and we’re mostly influenced by a historical consensus that developed in the Renaissance and became more extreme during the Enlightenment. It’s only relatively recently that historians have started to challenge this view.

The fall of the empire fractured governance into many smaller states. The central power uniting them became the Church. This was damning to Renaissance thinkers, who embraced humanism and rejected the view that mortal life was fleeting and temptations of the flesh should be resisted. The blossoming of art, philosophy and science that happened under the Church was minimized as it was inconvenient to their view of history.

Protestantism and the Enlightenment put more nails into the coffin of the Dark Ages’ reputation. Protestants wanted more reasons to condemn the Catholic Church, so they interpreted the Dark Ages as a time of the Church oppressing people and causing societal stagnation. Enlightenment thinkers needed to see themselves as triumphing over persecution, so they interpreted the Dark Ages as a time of ignorance and superstition that was encouraged by an anti-science Church. This was despite the fact that virtually all science was conducted under the Church, and that scientific works were preserved by the Church.

Even today many people believe these distortions, though most historians reject them. Does that mean history is on the side of the Renaissance and Enlightenment thinkers who dismissed the Dark Ages, or on the side of the people of the Dark Ages?

The Found Cause

Today nearly all historians agree that the American Civil War was over slavery. But this was not always so. Explanations of the war have shifted over time and, though it seems unlikely, they might keep shifting.

When the South first declared secession, their declarations and the speeches by their leaders made it clear why they were seceding. They said, over and over, that they wanted to preserve the institution of slavery. They seceded in response to the election of Abraham Lincoln, a member of the staunchly anti-slavery Republican Party. Though Lincoln himself was a moderate on the issue he still represented a party dedicated to ending slavery so was unacceptable to Southern leaders.

Then the South attacked Fort Sumter and the war began. Lincoln, and most Union soldiers, initially saw the war as an attempt to put down a rebellion threatening the United States. As the war continued their attitudes would change and they would see it as a war to end slavery. Southern leaders continued to defend slavery until they lost the war, at which point many would change their tune and say the war was about defending their way of life. The attitude of the Confederate soldiers fighting the war is less clear: only 20% specifically mentioned defending slavery, but the others did talk of opposing the North’s attempt to change their society, which, in the end, meant they were defending slavery. Maybe they didn’t personally love slavery, but they saw themselves as defending a society with slavery as a key part.

So, during the war, it was generally seen as a war over slavery. After the war ended, that changed. People (mostly Southerners) framed the war as a noble “Lost Cause” against a greedy industrialist North trying to destroy a chivalrous, pastoral South. Slavery was downplayed. A pro-Confederate person alive at that time could have said “look! History was on our side the whole time!”

As time passed, the Lost Cause explanation has fallen out of favor. Historians overwhelmingly see the war as being caused by the South’s secession which was caused by the Republican Party’s opposition to slavery. The war, therefore, was a war over slavery. Now, a pro-Union person could say “look! History was on our side!”

Both people are right. History was on the Confederate’s side until it was on the Unionist’s side. It’s possible that history will change its mind again and again. It’s unlikely, as there’s such a strong argument that the war was about slavery, but history is always viewed through the lens of historians. If a future society wants to tell a story about a war about honorable farmers fighting hordes of industrialists, then they might repurpose the Civil War again.

Don’t Count on History’s Hindsight

It’s tempting to think that future generations will look back on us and applaud our side as being on the vanguard of progress. Tempting, but unwise. It’s most likely that we’ll be forgotten by future generations, exempting niche historians. If we are part of a rare movement that makes the history books, then history will have a fluid view of us, as history is always a story told by historians, and the perspective of historians never becomes a timeless constant.

That’s a dispiriting message for those of us whose only afterlife is in the memories of our descendants. We aren’t going to be shuffled into a reputational Heaven or Hell for eternity. All we can do is believe in our actions today and hope that we’re not judged too harshly for them tomorrow.

Category: History

The Cold War was the Civil War’s Sequel