Echo chamber, 2

I just checked, and my last post on this topic was two weeks ago. Obviously I dropped a week in my memory. (Marie and I talk every Wednesday morning, you see.) I think we've reached a terminus on the discussion, but I wish I were happier about it.

I should probably just go to bed. I'm drowsy and droopy; and while the amount I drank with dinner isn't enough to put me away, it's enough to make me flabby and imprecise. On the other hand, I was thinking earlier this afternoon (admittedly, while completely sober) that it was about time to post a follow up to the earlier note. So here goes.

As noted, we talk live once a week. I forget what exactly we discussed on March 13, but it was more of the same. And Marie focused in particular on two points: 

First: While Old Sawney Webb had refused to join the Ku Klux Klan after the War, it was because he thought it dishonorable to go around masked. But at one moment in around 1868 or 1869, he did express sympathy with their desire to "restore order," given the total violent anarchy in the South in the immediate postwar period. (To be clear, the whole rest of his life—as clearly shown in the book we were arguing over—was one long campaign against mob violence, in and among many other things like school-teaching.) Marie pulled out the moral checklist that she keeps handy at all times and filled in the box accordingly: "Sympathy for the Klan? Clearly a Bad Person."

Second: One of Sawney's students later (as a grown man) entered politics. His name was Ed Carmack; and at one point (lasting at most a few months in a long career) Carmack had supported driving out of town a Black woman journalist named Ida B. Wells. Since Wikipedia didn't say any more about Carmack's career than that, Marie concluded that his entire career could be summarized in the single word "lynching"; and since Webb was apparently fond of his one-time pupil even into adulthood, she concluded that Webb, too, must have been in favor of lynching.

God in Heaven.

I wrote her a long email (a few days later) arguing, as dispassionately as I could, how foolish and simplistic and schematic these conclusions were. She didn't really get around to replying much by email, but we talked again on March 20 (a couple of days ago). At that point, her position was, "That's all very well, but there are certain lines you can't ever cross. And if you are willing to cross them ever, for any reason, then you are a Bad Person."

In the moment, I kept it simple. I told her, "Anyone who tries to evaluate a person's character based on one remark he made once, even when the whole rest of his life tends in the other direction, is an idiot. That approach is idiotic. Period." Then to soften it I said, "The other way to look at this is that you and I live pampered lives in peacetime, while Old Sawney had just lived through a terrible war. And everybody knows that war changes your perspective on everything. That's a truism that has been known for centuries, but it is still true." And then I changed the subject.

But I'm still angry.

I'm angry at her intellectually: 

• for her simple-minded belief that people in 1869 should have had as much information available to them as we do today (for example, information about what exactly the Klan was doing to whom), and that they should have processed that information in the same way we do today to come up with the exact same results; 
• also for believing that absence of evidence (for example, regarding the career of Ed Carmack) is the same thing as evidence of absence (so that if Wikipedia doesn't report anything else about him besides his conflict with Ida B. Wells, then he must never have done anything else in his entire adult life besides persecute Black women). 

And I'm angry at her morally: 

• for the fatuous self-righteous self-satisfaction and outright nerve that lets her judge other people according to a simple-minded grade-school-level checklist rather than by understanding their full stories and taking those stories into account; 
• and also for her serene inability to see the possibility that the very criteria she deploys to criticize others could some day indict her too. 
• She's against slavery? Great. So are we all. But she owns a cell phone, and a laptop, and a car. All of those are packed full of complicated electronics manufactured in China by slave labor, which means that she benefits from slavery all the same. (She has just outsourced it to another country, so she doesn't have to look at it.) Of course, I own a cell phone and a laptop and a car. It's not like I'm any better, in this calculus. The difference is that I don't castigate people who are long-dead for social arrangements they were powerless to change, and she does.
• She's against mob violence? Again, so are we all. That's a very easy position to hold when you have plenty of food and live in a comfortable neighborhood in peacetime. But what happens when you find yourself in a neighborhood riven by violence between rival gangs? (God forbid!) What happens when you have a choice: pick one gang and they will defend you, or remain virtuously nonaligned and become a legitimate target for them both? At that point it's still possible to say that you are against mob violence, but it's also suicidal. I don't know how Marie would react to such a situation (and again, God forbid it should ever happen!), but as I still love her I hope she would not choose the suicidal option.

I suppose I'll get over it sooner or later. Maybe I should go to bed.