No more compliments, thank you very much


US_map_regions

I’m not happy with this kind of speculation.



If South’d won Civil War? Slaves would’ve soon been freed anyway, South would now be banana republic, & North the greatest civilisation ever

And it was intended as a compliment?



No, such a thought never entered my head. My tweet was intended as a compliment to all that is best in America.

No, it isn’t. It’s an ahistorical mess.

Americans fought a bloody war over slavery. To argue that it was pointless and that the South would have just obligingly abandoned an institution that they regarded both as an economic necessity and a moral virtue is absurd, especially when we would see such ferocious resistance to civil rights in the 1960s. If the Confederacy had won, given that their manifestos at the start of the war had been all about the importance of slavery to their way of life, there’s no way they would have done anything but further entrenched inequality in their laws.

There is an unfortunate tendency to simply write off everyone in the South — I’ve sometimes been exasperated enough to indulge in it myself — but it’s not right. About a third of all Americans live in the South. They include all races and ethnicities, they include urban and rural people, Democrats and Republicans. That some of them are proud racists does not mean we should cheerfully greet the prospect of casting out 100 million people from our nation — every one of them deserves opportunity.

Dawkins should know this. Hitchens was quite vocal about the importance of touring the South, and talked about how many people there welcomed his message. They’re not all rednecks with Confederate flags on their pickup trucks…and even if they were, rather than shunning them, educate them.

And let’s be realistic: the North is not and has never been the shining ideal of a civilization. The armies of the United States slaughtered the Indian population; we spent the years after the Civil War reveling in Manifest Destiny and tearing into the Philippines, Central America, Cuba, and meddling in Mexico. During the Civil War we had riots in major northern cities against the draft, with accompanying resentment about defending negroes. We’ve had sundown towns, predatory loan systems, white flight, a criminal justice system that discriminates against the black population. Bill O’Reilly is not from Alabama — he’s from New Jersey. Those “family” institutes that rage against homosexuals? They’re in every state.

We do not progress by scapegoating entire regions and placing the blame for our problems on them. We have to honestly look at our flaws and address them. E pluribus unum was a pretty good motto — these different parts of American culture belong to all of us, and it does not make us better or stronger to divide us into good and bad.

Comments

  1. Seven of Mine: Shrieking Feminist Harpy says

    I said this in The Drum: we didn’t abandon slavery even after we made it illegal. We juggled the logistics a little bit and called it by other names but we still wasted no time finding new ways to force black people to spend their entire lives working for white people for no pay. The idea that it would have ended on its own if we’d just done nothing is ludicrous. And that’s leaving aside how repellent it is to imply that another few decades of buying and selling human beings as property would have been totes acceptable.

  2. Matt says

    Maybe it’s time to just consider a moratorium on Dawkins news. Fun as it is to gape at what a disaster he’s become, it’s probably best not to give him any attention. He’s always been terrible at understanding his ideological opponents, and Brits are generally terrible at understanding America. No surprises here.

  3. newenlightenment says

    Dawkins was being ahistorical, but it’s an interesting question. I did wonder if the economic damage of losing the war combined with the 1870’s global recession could have provided a massive impetus to the various radical movements in the late 19th century US, resulting in some form of socialist revolution, perhaps incorporating Georgeist economics. This would likely have been a great deal more liberal and positive that the Bolshevik revolution in real life. Of course, this would have been small comfort for the slaves of the Confederacy, but they would have eventually achieved emancipation, even if not as easily as Dawkins imagined.

    All this is pure speculation of course, but it makes for an intriguing thought experiment.

  4. says

    As Seven of Mine correctly points out, the south didn’t actually eliminate slavery after emancipation, they reinvented it as sharecropping, and otherwise kept African Americans in various forms of servitude and non-citizenship. I expect slavery as such would not have survived the 1930s, but trying to imagine the counterfactual of how and when it would have ended had Lincoln let the CSA go is feckless. Whatever the eventual course of history, it would have been extremely ugly. But reallly, this is all just pointless wanking. The Civil War did happen, so did Jim Crow, it is what it is. There really is no point in playing the what if game.

  5. UnknownEric the Apostate says

    “I know that if I were born Charlemagne, I would have been even better at Charlemagne-ing that Charlemagne was. If you disagree, go away and learn how to think like me.” – FauxDawk.

  6. says

    A more interesting (and equally improbable) what-if is to wonder what would have happened if the founding fathers had actually stood up for that principle of equality and outlawed slavery at the time of the revolution — if we had purged ourselves of that ‘original sin’ at the onset of the American experiment.

    But it’s kind of hard to imagine since so many of those signers of the declaration of independence had been slave-holders while signing off on a statement that all men were created equal…

  7. HappyNat says

    Matt @3

    I disagree, I think it’s important to point out when one of our “thinky leaders” is being an ignorant ass. If you look ath the original tweet many of the responses are people praising Dawkins for his thinkiness. Although, it’s obvious to many of us that he isn’t worth listening to, there are too many people lap up whatever he had to say as truth. We won’t break through the authoritarian wall of some of them, but pointing out when he is wrong is important.

  8. peterchapman says

    Everyone interested in this historical subject should read “The Road to Disunion” two volumes by William Freehling. The best antebellum history of ‘The South’ ( it wasn’t monolithic ) .
    The Northern financial system of brokers and factors and bankers was founded on cotton. It was the most valuable export product by a magnitude. If the South had won the Civil War these Northerners would have happily continued the system for the vast profits it would have continued to make!

  9. Jeff K says

    If the land owning gentry would have just waited, the Magna Carta would have just appeared out of nowhere.

  10. UnknownEric the Apostate says

    Yeah, but what if the Flash ran back in time and swapped Lincoln for Hitler?

    And what if Hitler were a Cyberman, and the Doctor had to team up with Iron Man to take him down?

  11. Annie Bruce says

    Dawkins needs to hire someone with the specific job of telling him when he’s about to make an ass of himself.

    It’s probably reasonable to expect the Northern economy to do better in such an event- Industrial Revolution in full swing, and the Northern economy was actually shifting with it, without having completely given up on agriculture. There would have been issues on both sides, but the economic situation would have favored the North in the aftermath of a Confederate victory.

    The rest of it, and the implication that things would have been better overall? A huge stretch(absent being forced, the South would have taken decades to evolve before abolishing slavery was on the radar), and even if that’s how it would have played out… kinda throwing a lot of people, many of them good, many more with the potential to be good if given the opportunity, completely under the bus there.

    Hell, even the North didn’t fully abolish slavery until a couple years after the war. Delware, Kentucky, Maryland and Missouri never seceded. Delaware and Kentucky didn’t get rid of their slaves until *after the war*, after the Confederate slaves were freed under military occupation. The North had slaves(well, legal and official slavery) longer than the South, and Dawkins thinks the South would have given them up soon after the war? It would have been decades, at least. They’d have needed an economic apocalypse and embargos from basically all trading partners for that to even be on the table had they won the war.

  12. HappyNat says

    Dawkins needs to hire someone with the specific job of telling him when he’s about to make an ass of himself.

    Sounds like a full time job with a lot of overtime.

  13. robro says

    Doh! Dick! Stop it!

    A friend of mine aired this historical speculation that Dawkins might sink his teeth into: What if Napoleon had managed to stave off British hostility toward republican France and did not sell the Louisiana territory to the United States, establishing French hegemony there? My god!! Would English dons be speaking in French now!?

  14. slithey tove (twas brillig (stevem)) says

    Backhanded compliment. Attempting to say that Americans are so good that *even*if* they won that war, they would have eventually abandoned the economic advantage of slavery (descending into banana republic status) to display their compassion and free those slaves. The North would have leveraged their industrial superiority to provide better goods to everyone, without being distracted at enforcing the slave owners to not renege.
    pffft
    It is of course ahistorical and assumes the best, even though there is historical evidence to the contrary. That was his point: ahistorical, to show us how bad we really are.
    To say it was a “compliment” is camouflage to insult us yet again for that huge mistake we undertook and had to fight the worst war in history* to attempt to eliminate. And even afterwards, were not entirely successful.
    ————————————————————-
    * as in, one of the battles thereof, is still recorded as having The Most Deaths of a single battle.

  15. =8)-DX says

    Um soon have been freed anyway? What? Is “soon” an euphemism for “maybe a few hundred years later”?

  16. freemage says

    I recently read a rather good short story in the ‘What if?’ vein–Lincoln loses the election, and so the Civil War never quite triggers–instead, it’s a long, drawn-out death for the slavery system. The story is told from the PoV of a photographer who is going around taking pictures of a specific set of historical sites.

    See, without a comparatively sudden emancipation, the economics just sort of make slavery less and less viable, economically. As this progresses, slaveholders just release their slaves when they no longer remain profitable.

    The southern states, envisioning a tsunami of unemployed, uneducated and resentful ex-slaves (who have no actual status as citizens) wandering around making trouble, therefore pass laws making it illegal to abandon your ‘property’, at least if said property might foment some sort of rebellion.

    So now, the slaveholders are forced to pay for the upkeep on their slaves, but not allowed to just cut them loose. Enter the camps.

    The camps are a business, and just what they sound like–barracks-like barns where slaves can be turned over along with a fee for ‘safekeeping’. The camps are supposed to care for the former slaves, without actually working them, until they die of old age. They are, of course, segregated by sex in order to prevent new generations.

    Of course, as usually happens, the camp operators underestimate the costs of warehousing these folks, even on the cheap, so as the money starts to run out… well, students of human history can see where the story goes from there, I think. The photographer is basically like a student of the Armenian Genocide or the Trail of Tears, trying to prevent America from being able to just forget about a bit of inconvenient history.

    As grim as the story is, I find it far more likely than Dawkins’ Shiny Happy North America.

  17. says

    I have long maintained that it should be a source of national shame that we had to go to war over an issue that most of the rest of the world came to realize was a bad idea in the first place.

    Considering economic realities, a much more interesting bit of historical reimagining would be to wonder what would have happened if the south had seceded but there was no more than economic sanctions to bring them in line. I’m guessing that it would have taken longer (upwards of 40 or more years), with abolished slavery as a precondition of re-entry and very possibly without all of the bitter feelings that still persist 150 years later.

  18. says

    Yeah, but what if the Flash ran back in time and swapped Lincoln for Hitler?

    And what if Hitler were a Cyberman, and the Doctor had to team up with Iron Man to take him down?

    Impossible. Everyone knows that The Flash is DC and Iron Man is Marvel. Two different universes, so you see that can’t have happened.

    Dawk Derp

    I’m so totally stealing that. :)

  19. sigurd jorsalfar says

    So if the South had won the civil war they would have soon given up on slavery any, but at the same time they would have gone on to become a banana republic? WTF? What is wrong with Richard Dawkins?

  20. jack lecou says

    I wonder if Dawkins is thinking of the speculation in economic-historical circles that, even in a strictly cold-blooded view, slavery at that point (the mid nineteenth century) was already a counterproductive, dis-economic system, and probably had been for decades (if not forever). Counterproductive in the sense that the availability of nominally cheap/free (but in actual fact still quite expensive) slave labor served to forestall industrialization and various efficiency improvements (basically, why invest in machinery or learning new techniques when you’ve got all this “free” labor around?).

    In other words, plantation style agriculture is and was basically a terrible way to efficiently grow either crops or economies. It was however, a great way for a small white minority to keep virtually the entire small pie for themselves, and to literally lord it over everyone in the process.

    Which was probably the real point. And it’s hard to imagine that that elite would have been MORE willing to to give up their privileges — or recognize the backwardness of the system — in the aftermath of an expensive and successful war to preserve them.

  21. eeyore says

    If Dawkins’ point is that the North would have been better off without the South, overall I think he’s probably right. Just imagine how much better off the North would be if the Congressional delegations from Texas and Alabama weren’t there. The South runs on federal money, even as its politicians decry the federal government. But all that said, I agree with PZ that it’s nonsense to think that slavery would have been abolished, or that blacks would have achieved anything even approaching legal equality in the south for at least a couple of centuries.

  22. robinjohnson says

    Annie Bruce, #13:

    Dawkins needs to hire someone with the specific job of telling him when he’s about to make an ass of himself.

    Homer’s nodding bird from that episode of The Simpsons springs to mind.

  23. karpad says

    So, Dawkins is clearly speaking out of his ass based on his misunderstandings of either history or human nature.

    It is true that growing industrialization was making outright chattel slavery economically suboptimal, approaching unfeasible. But it is also true that wage slavery and sharecropping were slavery by another name, and would still be perfectly viable. It is also true that racial slavery was not about economics, but about power and control. The Slave Owner class would be quite willing to pay an additional (mostly externalized) economic cost of reduced production and inflated costs simply to be the slave owning class. Genocide has never been economically rational.

    And that’s before we get into what a “banana republic” South would mean, in terms of geopolitics, regional economics and human rights. He seems kind of blase about 100 million people, what would now be the 12 largest country in the world, being a racially segregated puppet kleptocracy whose natural resources are being sold off to foreign corporations.

    “Man, wouldn’t it be great if South African Apartheid was a larger population with a stronger tradition of racial violence to resist internal pressure and economically robust enough to endure international pressure” doesn’t seem like a position Dawkins was really wanting to endorse, yet here we are.

  24. says

    Annie Bruce

    Dawkins needs to hire someone four people who work shifts with the specific job of telling him when he’s about to make an ass of himself.

    FIFY ;)

    I read something interesting on Twitter today:
    (Quoted from memory)
    How can you say bigotry cannot win? It wins every day. It destroys lives and those lives will not come back if at a future point bigotry ends.

  25. UnknownEric the Apostate says

    Now he’s claiming it was supposed to be an idea for a speculative fiction novel.

    My ass.

  26. qwints says

    Historical counterfactuals are a useful tool for understanding history, but as are unknowable as Stephen Jay Gould’s speculations about rewinding the universe. Ultimately, counterfactual claims are claims about the nature of the past. Discussing whether Gore would have gone to war in Iraq or whether a different treaty of Versailles would have prevented Hitler’s rise to power are discussion about why we went to war in Iraq or why Hitler rose to power.

    Dawkins tweets seem to be making the point that 1) there were other causes for the end of slavery in the US than military force; and 2) the Southern vote made the US worse off. Both points require lengthy scholarly discussion, but they are neither indefensible nor ahistorical. See e.g. The Scorpion’s Sting: Antislavery and the Coming of the Civil War or Pursuit of Unity: A Political History of the American South as examples of works that support such claims, at least in part.

  27. consciousness razor says

    cervantes:

    As Seven of Mine correctly points out, the south didn’t actually eliminate slavery after emancipation, they reinvented it as sharecropping, and otherwise kept African Americans in various forms of servitude and non-citizenship.

    That’s true of the US in general, not just the South. And we shouldn’t be using the past tense. Inequality, broadly speaking, is still a big problem now, no matter which geographical region we’re talking about.

    eeyore:

    If Dawkins’ point is that the North would have been better off without the South, overall I think he’s probably right. Just imagine how much better off the North would be if the Congressional delegations from Texas and Alabama weren’t there. The South runs on federal money, even as its politicians decry the federal government.

    The “North” and “South” now are not even remotely the same as they were 150 years ago, economically or politically. Nowhere is. Also, lots of the country didn’t even exist then, but those parts are implicitly getting lumped into one category or the other based on their current behaviors. Is Utah or Idaho part of “the South”?

    Besides, Dawkins clearly didn’t say it would be better off without them (just accepting their secession and some kind of a peace agreement, to make that explicit). The condition was if the South had won the war. It’s already impossible to make any reliable predictions about that kind of thing, but stretching it out some more, into an even more nebulous blob that would apply to all sorts of situations that look nothing alike (and don’t even make sense as I pointed out above), simply gives you an incoherent and useless mess. Dawkins evidently wouldn’t be above that kind of maneuver, but it wouldn’t help him either.

  28. says

    Is it just me or does this new example of Dawkins pontificating on socially sensitive things support a general implication that these social conflicts are not worth it? After all if the north won and slavery “ended”* in reality, and if the south won and slavery would have soon ended, then it stands to “reason” that there is no need for a social conflict. The status quo will fix things soon enough.

    *Assuming that Dawkins would not understand that qualitatively things did not change much for blacks after the civil war because society was still full of racist asshats.

  29. petesh says

    Hey, this kind of crap makes me want to stand up for the South! Personally, I’d put MLK into the bucket of “all that is best in America” and he was definitely southern. So was William Faulkner. And Elvis! YMMV.

  30. azpaul3 says

    Off topic. Mechanics. Curiosity.

    I see this here as well as other blogs. When quoting from Twitter there is, first, the quote then, second, an immediate repeat of the same quote.

    If South’d won Civil War? Slaves would’ve soon been freed anyway, South would now be banana republic, & North the greatest civilisation ever

    — Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) June 29, 2015

    If South’d won Civil War? Slaves would’ve soon been freed anyway, South would now be banana republic, & North the greatest civilisation ever

    I note that other quotes (non-twitter) are not repeated immediately after the original. Is there something about Twitter that requires the quote appear twice in succession in order for there to be meaning? Is there a concern that quotes from Twitter need to be repeated in case the first quote was somehow missed? Is this some deep dark conspiracy by Twitter users to use up what they see as excess electrons or to force additional storage requirements on the internet?

    I note that other quotes (non-twitter) are not repeated immediately after the original. Is there something about Twitter that requires the quote appear twice in succession in order for there to be meaning? Is there a concern that quotes from Twitter need to be repeated in case the first quote was somehow missed? Is this some deep dark conspiracy by Twitter users to use up what they see as excess electrons or to force additional storage requirements on the internet?

    Enquiring minds want to know.

    Enquiring minds want to know.

  31. slithey tove (twas brillig (stevem)) says

    A backhanded compliment. As in, his way of disguising an insult, phrased as a compliment.
    By saying “the Americans are good enough to eventually realize that slavery is wrong, so all the slave owners will come to their sense and free their slaves.” Resulting in the eventual cessation of slavery. Without the economic advantages of slavery: the South will economically descend into “banana republic” status [only being able to sell cotton, i guess]
    While the North, without being burdened by policing the South, would have produced so many goods, beneficial to the entire world!!!
    IF if if … But But BUT…
    Americans are actually *nasty*. Look at their history, see that set of bloody infighting skirmishes they had there???
    So Dawk can insult without saying the words, just implying it strongly.
    Like PZ, I too will say, No more compliments. Thank you very much. Good sirrrr [*wink*]

  32. brett says

    I think the South would have disintegrated as a country into component states before the end of the 19th century. They already had governance problems and internal conflicts even with war pressing on them, and the Union (among others) will be covertly backing as many black rebel groups and other insurgencies as they can.

    Slavery, though, would die hard. When cotton prices tank as Egyptian and Indian cotton comes on-line, their first tendency will be to start working the slaves even harder – perhaps working them to death because their value would have dropped and they’d feel implicitly threatened by too many slaves in the South. That in turn would spark revolts and nascent black nationalism in the South (backed by the Union and other countries), and so on and so forth.

  33. Seven of Mine: Shrieking Feminist Harpy says

    I note that other quotes (non-twitter) are not repeated immediately after the original. Is there something about Twitter that requires the quote appear twice in succession in order for there to be meaning? Is there a concern that quotes from Twitter need to be repeated in case the first quote was somehow missed? Is this some deep dark conspiracy by Twitter users to use up what they see as excess electrons or to force additional storage requirements on the internet?

    It’s because of possible accessibility issues with the embed of the actual tweet.

  34. deepak shetty says

    …and even if they were, rather than shunning them, educate them.
    This from a vocal advocate of deepen the rifts ? (to be clear , I totally agree with the above , i just wish you applied it to other matters too)

  35. UnknownEric the Apostate says

    Hey, this kind of crap makes me want to stand up for the South! Personally, I’d put MLK into the bucket of “all that is best in America” and he was definitely southern. So was William Faulkner. And Elvis! YMMV.

    Jazz! Gumbo! Sun Records! R.E.M.! A lot of greatness came from the South.

    Or, to name something old stuffed-shirt Dawkins might care about, Frederick Delius’ “Florida Suite!”

  36. Onamission5 says

    azpaul3 @31:

    To the best of my understanding, Twitter posts are images, and screen readers can’t parse the words contained within, so those words need be repeated in plain text in order for people using readers to know what the image contains.

  37. moarscienceplz says

    #21

    I wonder if Dawkins is thinking …

    No, he isn’t.
    For anyone who still thinks of Dawkins as a scientist, this tweet should finally put an end to that. He has bathed in the uncritical hosannas of his sycophants so long now that he actually believes that his opinions trump reality. He is no better than Ken Ham.

  38. jack lecou says

    Dawkins tweets seem to be making the point that 1) there were other causes for the end of slavery in the US than military force; and 2) the Southern vote made the US worse off. Both points require lengthy scholarly discussion, but they are neither indefensible nor ahistorical.

    I agree with that so far as it goes, but I think Dawkins earns some well-deserved criticism for the callous and simplistic presentation of these theses.

    For example, “Slaves would’ve soon been freed anyway,”: what’s “soon”? It’s hard to imagine that a Confederate victory would have led to emancipation immediately. It would have been decades, at least. That’s literally millions of additional person-decades of enslavement.

    And even if the white aristocracy had eventually seen the benefits to themselves of ramping down actual chattel slavery a bit, it seems rather likely the black population would have remained an underclass – not only economically, but in all likelihood, legally. There’d be no self-interested economic justification for elites to grant the franchise to “free” Southern blacks, for example, or any of a host of other basic human rights.

    Dawkins seems to agree, calling this counterfactual South a “banana republic.” In other words, an underdeveloped backwater where millions toil in low productivity work for the satisfaction of a tiny ruling class. And that’s probably about right – certain Latin American countries are probably the closest actual historical parallel to an independent South. In the counterfactual, we might not even have the word “banana republic”. We’d probably call such places “cotton republics” or “toboacco republics” or something.

    But it’s an awfully blithe way to dismiss the permanent subjugation and immiseration of millions.

  39. Pierce R. Butler says

    It’s an ahistorical mess.

    Up there close to, but not quite on a level with, the comparison of accommodational atheists with Neville Chamberlain in The God Delusion.

    At least in the present gaffe Dawkins has the excuse of a nearly 5-megameter puddle and almost a century (counting from his birth) between himself and the land/era under discussion, plus the flimsy defense of mere innocent speculation.

  40. petesh says

    “Slaves would’ve soon been freed anyway,”: what’s “soon”?

    Also, what’s “freed”? Oh, wait, we have historical evidence for that.

  41. laurentweppe says

    It is also true that racial slavery was not about economics, but about power and control

    I daresay that slavery was about economics, more precisely about building an economy dedicated to the preservation of parasitic dynasts’ lavish lifestyle.

  42. says

    It’s good to see Dawkins has found another subject to be totally ignorant about. And this time he’s not being quite as offensive as he was in his “Dear Muslima” phase. That’s an improvement!

  43. says

    It’s hard to imagine that a Confederate victory would have led to emancipation immediately.

    Yeah, especially since the Confederacy was created solely for the plainly-stated purpose of KEEPING slaves. Those people had spent more than fourscore and seven years pretending GOD HIMSELF ordained slavery as the “natural condition” of black people — it probably would have taken decades of violent slave revolts and civil unrest (likely aided and abetted by Northern abolitionists) to make them even THINK of abolishing their cherished class system.

  44. UnknownEric the Apostate says

    I don’t think he’s trolling or oblivious. I think he thinks we’re all stupid and all he has to do is wave his hand and we’ll forget any faux pas he makes and continue our worship as we plebs should do.

  45. consciousness razor says

    Jazz! Gumbo! Sun Records! R.E.M.! A lot of greatness came from the South.

    Or, to name something old stuffed-shirt Dawkins might care about, Frederick Delius’ “Florida Suite!”

    Dawkins has said more than enough to suggest he doesn’t have much respect (or anything coherent to say) for the arts and humanities, of whatever variety* — historical subjects being only the most recent and obvious example. STEM-related stuff and especially evolutionary biology are much more highly valued to him than pretty much everything else. The arts apparently rank above Islam (at the bottom, with other religions being a step up somehow), but they are still somewhere near the bottom of Dawkins’ great chain of being. I’m sure there are things he likes, but only when they approach him with humility and reverence.

    *I won’t address the implication that liking classical music has something to do with classism or racism, because that’s way too complicated and way too far off-topic, except to say that jazz, popular music, etc. don’t have very nice historical track records either. Maybe I should assume it has something to do with Britishness instead, but I doubt that’s what you meant.

  46. says

    Mr. Dawkins, is your next fantasy going to muse upon the British Empire being crushed militarily by all the people of color they colonized?

  47. MadHatter says

    Last year or the year before Ta Nehisi Coates did a series of articles on the lead up to the Civil War and Reconstruction. His articles led me into reading other stuff so I don’t recall where I came across this analysis. But it made the point that early in the 1800’s even southern slave-owners believed that slavery would be ended. At that time there was a lot less rationalization in the vein of the races being so different that it was just the right thing or god ordained it etc etc. But then the global demand for cotton (from Europe and the UK) skyrocketed and the Western US was being settled.

    Suddenly not only was slavery an economic necessity, it became a moral good in the South. A huge part of the lead up to the war was the balance of western territories joining as slave or free states. It is just as likely, in this alternate history, that had the South won we would have seen constant battles over the western territories. That more of the mid-western US that is today mostly farming would have been slave states. Then, presuming that slavery as such was ended (many decades later), we would certainly have seen a permanent social and legal underclass.

    It’s not as if the rest of the US had been so stellar in regards to civil rights post-war. Dawkins ought to know how to educate himself by now.

  48. qwints says

    Looking at Dawkins feed, the context appears to be a discussion about whether the US would be better off without the South inspired by bigoted reactions to the Obergefell decision.

    Initial tweet

  49. UnknownEric the Apostate says

    I won’t address the implication that liking classical music has something to do with classism or racism, because that’s way too complicated and way too far off-topic

    Agreed. Definitely was not my intent, though. I love classical as much as I love rock/jazz/hip hop/classic country and don’t consider it classist (some fans are, but some fans of ANYTHING are). It was just a weak jab on my part.

  50. qwints says

    MadHatter@49

    Then, presuming that slavery as such was ended (many decades later), we would certainly have seen a permanent social and legal underclass.

    As if that’s not exactly what we did see happen?

  51. maddog1129 says

    @Raging Bee #45

    It’s good to see Dawkins has found another subject to be totally ignorant about. And this time he’s not being quite as offensive as he was in his “Dear Muslima” phase. That’s an improvement!

    I’m not entirely sure. The callous disregard for the people left in slavery for however long, and the jolly descent of all the South, white and black, into the poverty and corruption of a banana republic, seems to me quite as offensive as “Dear Muslimah.”

  52. brett says

    The time to really “end” slavery in the US would have been if the folks at the Constitutional Convention had managed to get not just a ban on the Transatlantic Slave Trade by 1800, but an agreement that any children of slaves born after 1800 would be free. Slavery would have then died out, and it would have died out before King Cotton started turning it into a foundation of southern identity.

    Hard to say, though. The US was pretty racist even then, and anti-black laws had deeper roots at that point. They likely would have tried to push free blacks westward with the indigenous population if that came to pass.

  53. says

    deepak shetty @35:

    …and even if they were, rather than shunning them, educate them.
    This from a vocal advocate of deepen the rifts ? (to be clear , I totally agree with the above , i just wish you applied it to other matters too)

    Where have you been the last 5 years? The whole ‘educate them rather than shun them’ was tried years ago. It was tried over and over and over again til people were blue in the face. There’s only so many times people were willing to keep trying to educate the antifeminists, Thunderf00ters, and the MRAs before they threw their hands up and said “fine, get to the other side of the rift”.

  54. says

    laurentweppe @42:

    I daresay that slavery was about economics, more precisely about building an economy dedicated to the preservation of parasitic dynasts’ lavish lifestyle.

    Definitely. Economics played a huge role in slavery. At the same time, it was also more than that. It was integral to the Southern way of life:

    It is easy to understand why slave owners would be concerned about the threat, real or imagined, that Lincoln posed to slavery. But what about those Southerners who did not own slaves? Why would they risk their livelihoods by leaving the United States and pledging allegiance to a new nation grounded in the proposition that all men are not created equal, a nation established to preserve a type of property that they did not own?

    In order to find an answer to this question, please travel back with me to the South of 1860. Let’s put ourselves into the skin of Southerners who lived there then. That’s what being an historian is about: putting yourself into the minds of people who lived in another time to understand things from their perspective, from their point of view. Let’s set aside what people said and wrote later, after the dust had settled. Let’s wipe the historic slate clean and visit the South of 150 years ago through the documents that survive from that time. What were Southerners saying to other Southerners about why they had to secede?

    There is, of course, a historical backdrop that formed the foundation of experience for Southerners in 1860. More than 4 million enslaved human beings lived in the south, and they touched every aspect of the region’s social, political, and economic life. Slaves did not just work on plantations. In cities such as Charleston, they cleaned the streets, toiled as bricklayers, carpenters, blacksmiths, bakers, and laborers. They worked as dockhands and stevedores, grew and sold produce, purchased goods and carted them back to their masters’ homes where they cooked the meals, cleaned, raised the children, and tended to the daily chores. “Charleston looks more like a Negro country than a country settled by white people,” a visitor remarked.

  55. Rich Woods says

    @YOB #19:

    Impossible. Everyone knows that The Flash is DC and Iron Man is Marvel. Two different universes, so you see that can’t have happened.

    But the Tardis can travel between universes…

  56. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    deepak shetty #35

    …and even if they were, rather than shunning them, educate them.
    This from a vocal advocate of deepen the rifts ? (to be clear , I totally agree with the above , i just wish you applied it to other matters too)

    In order to educate people, they must be willing to learn. Too many folks come here with an agenda, trying to tell us what we must believe, and being totally deaf to learning anything on there part. The godbots, creobots, IDiots, liberturds, and MRAs come to mind in that regard.
    Maybe there’s a topic you were considering, but need to explain further why you said that.

  57. says

    On the contrary, the South had been on a trajectory of making it more & more difficult to free slaves. In part, because they were terrified that freed slaves would (rightly) be angry and might seek retribution for their ill treatment.

    Sheesh, Dawkins, learn some history before you spout off again!

  58. paulbc says

    Right. Since cheap (or coerced) human labor has had no economic value since the 1872 invention of the coal-powered Babbage-Jacquard universal manufacturing mill. Thus, the South would have shifted readily to an economy producing finished textile goods from fields tended by agricultural robots…

    Or… no wait… I have drifted off into steampunk fantasy land. Sorry. In fact, Dawkins is full of s***.

  59. anteprepro says

    Just Speculating, eh? The new Just Joking and Just Disagreeing. No, who needs to bother justify the bold claim that slavery would have ended on its own without a civil war! Just Speculate it and then use the corpses of sci fi authors as shields if someone dare to Just Speculate that your entire inner body is overstuffed with feces!

    Dawkins is just a fucking embarassment. More and more every day.

  60. Zmidponk says

    Being perhaps somewhat over-charitable to Dawkins, he could perhaps have meant that the ideals of freedom that America is supposed to stand for might have eventually seen that the slaves would be freed, despite the setback of the South winning. Personally, I think that view is a bit naively optimistic, given that, even without that setback, it’s the case that things like Jim Crow laws and the lynching of black people is still within living memory.

  61. consciousness razor says

    HG Wells wrote speculative fiction about a future in which humanity had split into 2 species, 1 preying on the other. How DARE he speculate?

    I’m pretty sure Wells didn’t tell Morlocks or Eloi to not take it seriously or personally, because they don’t actually exist, now or in the past or future, which is needed for having some kind of interest or knowledge about the subject. I mean…. did he do that? Because it would be really fucked up if he did.

    To make it more analogous with something that hasn’t happened (yet?), Dawkins should have tweet-speculated about the South rising again and winning the war. No way that could turn out badly. Of course, the North would be great or at least survive that somehow…. Not sure about any of the people suffering from the slavery or the war they’ll lose, but fuck ’em. As long as the North is great, I think that qualifies as a light romantic romp through a futuristic fantasyland instead of a tragedy.

  62. paulbc says

    If I speculate about about Dawkins’ relationship with his mother, could I claim precedent in the work of great directors like Alfred Hitchcock?

    Just askin’

  63. CJO, egregious by any standard says

    Yes, and Harry Turtledove, the modern master of Alternate History, has even written books set in an alternate Antebellum South. It’s not speculating per se that anyone is taking issue with, it’s the blithe dismissal of the harms of slavery and the discounting of an entire segment of the American population that are the problem.

    Let’s take a few items off the no doubt busy Dawk’s to-do list, shall we?

    Thinking Lessons
    Ranking Atrocities
    Alternate History Novel Treatments

  64. says

    PZ 7

    But it’s kind of hard to imagine since so many of those signers of the declaration of independence had been slave-holders while signing off on a statement that all men were created equal…

    Indeed, at least some of them acknowledged the moral issues involved, but not having slaves would have meant giving up their place as the aristocracy of the colonies, so..

    peterchapman 9
    I also recommend Bitterly Divided: The South’s Inner Civil War, by David Williams

    karpad 24

    The Slave Owner class would be quite willing to pay an additional (mostly externalized) economic cost of reduced production and inflated costs simply to be the slave owning class.

    They already were; slavery was an enormous economic drain on the South. Not only did they have to use a large amount of resources preventing/putting down revolts and escapes, poor whites were much poorer in the South than in the North, because they had to sell the products of their farm and craft and hard labor at prices competitive with giant plantations that didn’t pay for labor. Between the slaves not being paid and the poor whites not making any money, a huge portion of the population wasn’t spending any money (because they hadn’t got it), and that’s the biggest economic drag there is. Hell, during the Civil War, entire Nothern union locals shut down for the duration, because everyone had joined the volunteer brigades. They didn’t do this out of any particular love for black people (being mostly pretty fucking racist), but out of a deep knowledge that unions and slavery cannot coexist in the same economy, and they wanted wages, dammit.
    UnknownEric the Apostate

    Now he’s claiming it was supposed to be an idea for a speculative fiction novel.

    Harry Turtledove already did that one. Twice, in fact. In one, time-traveling South African terrorists (Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (Afrikaner Resistance Movement)) give the Confederacy AK-47s, and they win handily. Then President Robert E Lee gets his hands on a history book of theirs, realizes what the future has to say about them, and starts dismantling the slavery apparatus. In the other, no time travel occurs, and several books later WWII is raging on the American continent as the Confederacy implements a final solution to the issue of black people.

    Tony! 58

    But what about those Southerners who did not own slaves? Why would they risk their livelihoods by leaving the United States and pledging allegiance to a new nation grounded in the proposition that all men are not created equal, a nation established to preserve a type of property that they did not own?

    Another thing that people these days (both the Confederate flag assholes and their opposition) is that a whole lot of poor Southern whites wanted nothing to do with the war or the secession. The Confederate army relied as much or more on conscription as the Union army did, because they never had many volunteers. (The fact that anyone who owned more than 5 slaves was exempt from conscription was a significant greivance among conscripts) Over 100,000 Southerners went North to join the Union Army, many of them having deserted the Confederate Army to do so. There were also huge levels of desertion generally, and in some areas deserters and draft dodgers formed armed bands to resist press gangs.

  65. deepak shetty says

    @Tony! The queer shoop

    The whole ‘educate them rather than shun them’ was tried years ago. It was tried over and over and over again til people were blue in the face.

    Isnt that also true of racist rednecks who fly the confederate flag?Isn’t that also true of homophobic bigots ? why should there be special categories (atheist assholes) who we need not bother educating ?
    You are arguing that any approach(educational or otherwise) will be unsuccessful (and it may well be) – Whereas I guess the point would be why not go in with the attitude that people can be educated, that people can change , no matter how entrenched they may be, right now?

    @Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls

    Maybe there’s a topic you were considering, but need to explain further why you said that.

    Nope – I’m complaining about the general attitude of “deepen the rifts”.

  66. Seven of Mine: Shrieking Feminist Harpy says

    @ deepak shetty

    There’s a difference between advocating for educating people generally on a topic and refusing to sink any more time and effort into a specific person or group of people who have demonstrated their unwillingness to learn. I’d bet very large sums of money that you understand that PZ is not opposed to educating people generally about the harms of misogyny. In fact, I’ll go out on a limb and suggest that teaching people about the harms of misogyny has something to do with why he writes about it so much. The Deep Rifts are between decent people and people who refuse to learn; it’s saying “if you’re not willing to rid yourself of your various bigotries, at least stay the hell away from me”.

  67. Seven of Mine: Shrieking Feminist Harpy says

    It’s saying “That behavior is unacceptable and, if you refuse to stop it, you’re not welcome in any space I occupy”. It’s not even a refusal to educate at all.

  68. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    Whereas I guess the point would be why not go in with the attitude that people can be educated, that people can change , no matter how entrenched they may be, right now?,

    Be my guest at showing good evidence that the #gamergate bigots are educatable. We have tried. They don’t listen, just bully and preach. So, how does one get through to them. SHOW US HOW.

  69. brucegorton says

    My suspicion is this: If the North had lost…

    I think the entire of the US would have suffered some major issues.

    Basically the South would end up like the Afrikaner states of South Africa. Theocratic, racist, and doomed the second they found anything worth colonising them over. Slavery in name might have ended anyway – but Apartheid stuck around until 1994, meaning slavery in nature could have continued for a very, very long time.

    Because the South would devolve into being a series of basket case states, forming many different Souths all fighting with each other, the North would not achieve the wealth that it has now. A constant threat of the South’s wars spilling over the borders would mean instead of the civil war, there would be near constant tensions and skirmishes effectively causing more damage than the war itself did.

    Fast forward to WWII and there is no guarantee that all of the Southern countries would have been on board with operation take down Hitler, and a few may have joined the war on his side meaning America’s chief tactical advantage (its factories being out of bombing range) may well have been neutralised by having to fight on its own continent.

    This would mean that from Britain’s point of view, farming out the development of its new tech to America would not be as advantageous, which would further hamper the war effort. The atomic bomb may have ended the war, but if we are honest the winners were radar and penicillin.

    Would all of this have meant a victory for Hitler? I doubt it, but it would mean that World War II would have been much, much worse.

    Also, America’s main economic strength gained on the back of being where the world developed the tech that took down Hitler, would be lost. Which in turn would mean that the North would be pretty far from the utopia Dawkins imagines.

    At least, that is how I see it playing out.

  70. rq says

    This is a long but educational and informative read that argues that the South actually didn’t lose the war. Not where it mattered, anyway: Not a Tea Party, a Confederate Party.
    Most notably, this:

    Who really won the Civil War? The first hint at how deep the second mystery ran came from the biography Jefferson Davis: American by William J. Cooper. In 1865, not only was Davis not agonizing over how to end the destruction, he wanted to keep it going longer. He disapproved of Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, and when U. S. troops finally captured him, he was on his way to Texas, where an intact army might continue the war.

    That sounded crazy until I read about Reconstruction. In my high school history class, Reconstruction was a mysterious blank period between Lincoln’s assassination and Edison’s light bulb. Congress impeached Andrew Johnson for some reason, the transcontinental railroad got built, corruption scandals engulfed the Grant administration, and Custer lost at Little Big Horn. But none of it seemed to have much to do with present-day events.

    And oh, those blacks Lincoln emancipated? Except for Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver, they vanished like the Lost Tribes of Israel. They wouldn’t re-enter history until the 1950s, when for some reason they still weren’t free.

    Here’s what my teachers’ should have told me: “Reconstruction was the second phase of the Civil War. It lasted until 1877, when the Confederates won.” I think that would have gotten my attention.

    It wasn’t just that Confederates wanted to continue the war. They did continue it, and they ultimately prevailed. They weren’t crazy, they were just stubborn.

    […]

    The missed opportunity. Today, historians like Eric Foner and Douglas Egerton portray Reconstruction as a missed opportunity to avoid Jim Crow and start trying to heal the wounds of slavery a century sooner. Following W.E.B. DuBois’ iconoclastic-for-1935 Black Reconstruction, they see the freedmen as actors in their own history, rather than mere pawns or victims of whites. As a majority in Mississippi and South Carolina, and a substantial voting bloc across the South, blacks briefly used the democratic system to try to better their lot. If the federal government had protected the political process from white terrorism, black (and American) history could have taken an entirely different path.

    In particular, 1865 was a moment when reparations and land reform were actually feasible. Late in the war, some of Lincoln’s generals — notably Sherman — had mitigated their slave-refugee problem by letting emancipated slaves farm small plots on the plantations that had been abandoned by their Confederate owners. Sick or injured animals unable to advance with the Army were left behind for the slaves to nurse back to health and use. (Hence “forty acres and a mule”.) Sherman’s example might have become a land-reform model for the entire Confederacy, dispossessing the slave-owning aristocrats in favor of the people whose unpaid labor had created their wealth.

    Instead, President Johnson (himself a former slave-owner from Tennessee) was quick to pardon the aristocrats and restore their lands. [3] That created a dynamic that has been with us ever since: Early in Reconstruction, white and black working people sometimes made common cause against their common enemies in the aristocracy. But once it became clear that the upper classes were going to keep their ill-gotten holdings, freedmen and working-class whites were left to wrestle over the remaining slivers of the pie. Before long, whites who owned little land and had never owned slaves had become the shock troops of the planters’ bid to restore white supremacy.

    Along the way, the planters created rhetoric you still hear today: The blacks were lazy and would rather wait for gifts from the government than work (in conditions very similar to slavery). In this way, the idle planters were able to paint the freedmen as parasites who wanted to live off the hard work of others.

    There is a lot more at the link to read through. But the basic point is that the North’s victory may not have been as conclusive as people may think, so Dawkins’ speculation… is really the reality we are already living in.

  71. Amphiox says

    If the South had won the Civil War, the the native americans would have likely had to deal with TWO warmongering colonial powers invading their lands. They might have had the chance to diplomatically play one against the other and perhaps carve out more favorable deals for themselves, like they managed to for a time in Canada playing the French and English against each other. Or not.

    Things would likely come to head again circa 1914, with a high probability of the two sides refighting the Civil War, this time as the North American front of WWI. The North would be even more likely to win this one than the Civil War itself, since the economic disparity between the two would have only gotten greater in the intervening time, especially if the South clung to slavery for any length of time, and chances are the a reunification would have occurred at that time.

  72. says

    Given how major a point of departure the South winning the Civil War would have been to world history there all but certainly wouldn’t have been what we recognise as WW1 or WW2.

  73. Pen says

    Unfortunately for those of us who end up hearing what he’s said, Dawkins just doesn’t know the first thing about any of the social sciences or humanities. It’s like listening to a creationist spout off about evolution. Seriously, it’s hard enough to figure out why the past happened they way it did. Outside the realms of fiction, trying to figure out what would have happened IF… is an utter waste of time. But to take the simplest possible point, it seems naive to suppose that if the South had won the Civil War they would have been content with their initial goal of merely seceding. They would then ‘own’ the United States, and could have, if they wished, declared slavery legal throughout the federation.

  74. says

    deepak shetty @72:

    You are arguing that any approach(educational or otherwise) will be unsuccessful (and it may well be) – Whereas I guess the point would be why not go in with the attitude that people can be educated, that people can change , no matter how entrenched they may be, right now?

    Please point out the portion of my comment where I said that “…any approach (educational or otherwise) will be unsuccessful…”.
    I never said anything about anyone adopting such an approach. Nor do I subscribe to it.

    What I said was with regard to a very specific circumstance-the antifeminists, Pitters, and MRAs who argued against anti-harassment policies and the basics of Feminism 101-over and over and over again. It is not anyone’s responsibility to educate these people, and many, many of us tried and tried and tried. It is not our responsibility to keep trying. At some point, it is entirely reasonable to throw up your hands and be done with them (and that point is up to the individual attempting to persuade/educate). And that’s what has happened for many people. I’m sure there are still some on this side of the Rift trying to engage with those folks, and more power to them. But for many of us, we simply don’t want to continue doing so. That’s not the same thing as saying “don’t try it to begin with”.

    To bring this back on topic (having noted Beatrice’s comment), Dawkins is another example of someone that I feel is best written off. People have tried to educate him about feminism and rape culture for years. People have argued with him, civility and with hostility, for years. He’s proven incredibly dense and unwilling to budge an inch. I think it is wholly within reason for someone to throw their hands in the air and say “Fuck it. I’m done with Dawkins. He can enjoy his time on the other side of the Rift.”

  75. Pen says

    From the quote @78 in rq’s post

    Reconstruction was the second phase of the Civil War. It lasted until 1877, when the Confederates won.”

    This is essentially what I’d always heard, except that if we understand the North’s goal as preserving the Union, they won as well, It’s possible to suspect they weren’t terribly motivated about the rest. I picked up a book last time I was in the US called ‘Lies my Teacher Told Me’, by James Loewen. It says:

    Focusing on white racism is even more central to understanding the period Rayford Logan called “the nadir of American race relations”: the years between 1890 and 1940 when African Americans were put back into second-class citizenship.

    It has a lot to say about this ‘nadir’ and it argues that while Americans know a lot about slavery, they often know very little about this other stuff. It’s quite a light book and I never checked the references, but it’s argument seems plausible.

  76. shadow says

    @YOB #19:
    Impossible. Everyone knows that The Flash is DC and Iron Man is Marvel. Two different universes, so you see that can’t have happened.

    There ae many ‘cross-overs’ between DC and Marvel Universes. Most are single issue, but some are mini-series. I have some of them. Wikipedia (not a great source, but OK for comics series) lists them going back to the golden age.

  77. jack lecou says

    Given how major a point of departure the South winning the Civil War would have been to world history there all but certainly wouldn’t have been what we recognise as WW1 or WW2.

    I dunno. WW1 at least still still seems likely to me.

    I’d always understood that to world history, unified or not, the US wasn’t really much of a geopolitical player at all prior to the entry into WW1 (at minimum – you can argue convincingly that it wasn’t until somewhat later).

    Yes, North America was an emigration sink for poor Europeans. And yes, the US was a component in the global trade system that existed prior to WW1. And yes, the Civil War itself might have been something of a dress rehearsal for later “real” conflicts in the nineteenth century (although even a truncated “Civil War” could have performed that role, and I don’t think armaments development would have changed much either way.) But none of those seem to me modifiers to the deep socio-historical factors driving European power struggles.

    It’s hard to see how even major differences in basically regional North American politics could have really had much an impact on, e.g., the collision of European ‘great powers’ relationships that led to WW1.

    Doubly so if you assume that the “Confederate States”rapidly dissolve into global inconsequence, while the “Northern Union” proceeds along a recognizable trajectory of industrialization and genocidal western expansion. (I.e., the difference to world history between a Georgia that is a geopolitical irrelevancy because it is a minor political subdivision of the United States and has no diplomatic corps or military, and a Georgia that is a geopolitical irrelevancy because it is poor, backwards neighbor of the United States with a diplomatic corps and military that nobody pays attention to is pretty small.)

    So I would guess you get to at least the opening stages of something recognizably WW1 without too many divergences.

    The end game and leadup to WW2 is maybe iffier. The “Northern Union” might end up with different arms sales policies toward Europe, or enter the war much earlier/later/not at all/on a different side, or the Confederate States might be fertile ground for some kind of Zimmerman telegram, opening up a second front. If you suppose US participation in WW1 was pivotal, something certainly might change in the post WW1 period. (But, then, a lot of the same socio-historical factors are still going to be in play back in Europe, so it wouldn’t amaze me if you had something very WW2-ish all the same.)

  78. says

    WTF? He sounds like a Reconstructionist with this one:

    Slaves would’ve soon been freed anyway

    Any evidence for that Mr. Dawkins?

  79. mnb0 says

    Now imo Dawkins is a shallow thinker with the sensibility of an amoeba, as shown by “intended as a compliment”. Which such compliments the USA don’t need insults anymore. So it’s obviously rather stupid to defend him. And so I’ll do exactly that. Because this might be very well correct:

    “Slaves would’ve soon been freed anyway.”
    Brazil abolished slavery in 1878, China in 1906 and Korea in 1894. The South would have had to follow around the same time to avoid total isolation.
    At the other hand The North wouldn’t have been able to meddle with the Philippines etc. Possibly it wouldn’t have interfered with WW-1, the Central Powers might have won and that again would have saved us the Holocaust.
    The law of the unintentional consequences.

    @8 Happy Nat: “one of our “thinky leaders””
    Maybe you see RD as one, but not me. It seems to me that both words are incorrect when applied to him.

    @15 Robro: that’s the correct perspective.

  80. says

    We should all listen to this eminent scholar’s opinions about a topic he has no expertise in. After all, Richard Dawkins always affords this courtesy to others on the subject of biology, right?

    No? Then shut up already, Ricky D.

  81. pacal says

    The idea that American slavery would have disappeared with in a generation of two of the time of the Civil War originated with a group of revisionistic historians who argued as follows. They believed that slavery was old fashioned, inefficient and in decline and so would have vanished anyway within a short time. They further argued that slavery wasn’t much to get upset about. That the Civil War was an accident and that Abolitionists should have shut the fuck up. This is all to put it politely debatable.

    The argument that slavery was inefficient depends on what you mean by inefficient and efficient. In terms of efficiency, slavery was extremely efficient in generating large profits for slave owners. The 1850s were a boom time for Southern slave owners and their income, profits and wealth grew by leaps and bounds. And it wasn’t just cotton growers who grew much wealthier, (The Cotton boom of this time period.) but the growers in tobacco, wheat, rice and indigo to name a few. Reflecting this boom slave prices reached a peak in 1859 / 60. The slave system was not in economic decline but was in fact in a boom and also was very efficient in generating large profits for slave owners. In fact it did so to the extent that in 1860 the majority of the wealthiest people in America were the tiny number of elite slave owners owning more than 500 slaves.

    In fact it was the very strength of the slave system and the threat of its political, economic, social influence that helped to generate northern opposition to slaveries expansion and thus prepare the way for the Civil War. Economically the slave system was very successful in generating profits, wealth, social standing and political influence for the slaveholders. Especially the holders of large numbers of slaves- the so-called planter class.

    Now it is true that it is arguable that outside of the wealthier slave owners, slavery in the South impeded, social and economic development for non-slave owners and even for slave owners who owned only one or a few slaves. However for the elite slavery gave riches and power and never more so than during the boom of the 1850s. And since this elite dominated both politics and the economy the general backwardness of the South meant little to them in the context of growing wealth for them.

    In fact it can be argued that the reason why the election of Abraham Lincoln precipitated succession was because his election was thought to threatened to curtail this boom time.

  82. WhiteHatLurker says

    I have to agree with Dawkins. (Must be the first time ever.)

    If the South won, the North would have been easy pickings for British North America, and our influence would extend to the Mason-Dixon line (or where ever the final treaties placed the border), and you’d be a Canuck, PZed.

  83. says

    Slavery is so inefficient that we’re not currently using forced political prisoner labor to produce our clothes and plastic products and cheap electronics with the additional cost of then having to ship them to market halfway across the world.

    Oh wait…

  84. says

    PZ @#7: I wonder if you might have been more like Australia?

    One of the interesting things about the founding of Australia was that Governor Arthur Phillip outlawed slavery from the very beginning. Which makes Australia the first country anywhere ever to outlaw slavery, and also explicitly founded on enlightenment ideas (not christian values!). Phillip also had ideas about rehabilitating convicts and treating the local Aborigines well. Pity he only had the job for 4 years, and then it went rather pear-shaped with the Rum Cops and all.

  85. llewelly says

    consciousness razor:

    Also, lots of the country didn’t even exist then, but those parts are implicitly getting lumped into one category or the other based on their current behaviors. Is Utah or Idaho part of “the South”?

    You started off ok, but you went off the rails when you forgot the Mormons invaded the Salt Lake Valley in 1847 . And they had quite a few disputes with the US government, so much so that when it became clear the civil war was approaching, Mormon Prophet Brigham Young appealed to the states that would form the confederacy for alliance. They rejected the Mormons. So Brigham Young went back to the Union. The Mormons then recruited the “Mormon Battalion”, and sent soldiers off to fight for the Union. Union officers marched the Mormons around in a great big circle, and for the most part kept them far away from the action. Whether that is due to distrust or logistics is something of an open question.

    Idaho, of course, was largely populated by various Native American tribes, but it was claimed by the US in 1846, when the USA and Britain settled their dispute over “Oregon Country”, with the USA getting what is now Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, while the British got what is now British Columbia. Idaho territory itself was carved out of Oregon territory in 1863, during the civil war.

    Nevada also became a state during the Civil War, the land having been annexed from Mexico in 1848, along with what would become Utah, some of Colorado, most of Arizona, and some of New Mexico. Oh, yeah, and California. Whose statehood quest played a huge role in the disputes leading up to the Civil War.

    So much of what is now the modern US territory really had been claimed by the USA before the Civil war. Though Seward did not complete the Alaska purchase until 1867, it was discussed during the Civil War.

    It’s true that most of the “west” did not play a large role in the Civil War, but it did exist in some sense.

  86. jack lecou says

    Idaho, of course, was largely populated by various Native American tribes, but it was claimed by the US in 1846, when the USA and Britain settled their dispute over “Oregon Country”, with the USA getting what is now Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, while the British got what is now British Columbia. Idaho territory itself was carved out of Oregon territory in 1863, during the civil war.

    And the “Oregon” part of the Oregon territory became a state in 1859 – with a “bill of rights” that banned black people from living there.

    If anyone’s not familiar with the astounding history of official racism in Oregon, this was the first thing that came up on google when I looked for something to refresh myself on the details. It’s a thorough — and thoroughly disturbing, summary. Some choice bits:

    The question of whether Oregon should allow slavery dates back to at least the 1840s. The majority of Oregonians (which is to say the territory’s new white residents who were systematically and sometimes violently oppressing its Native peoples) opposed slavery. But they also didn’t want to live anywhere near anyone who wasn’t white.

    Even before it was a state, those in power in Oregon were trying to keep out non-white people. In the summer of 1844, for example, the Legislative Committee passed a provision that said any free black people who were in the state would be subject to flogging if they didn’t leave within two years. The floggings were supposed to continue every six months until they left the territory.

    It doesn’t get much better from there. Technically, Oregon didn’t fully sign onto the Fourteenth Amendment until 1973.

    And most relevantly here, quoting a historian:

    “What’s useful about Oregon as a case study is that Oregon was bold enough to write it down,” Imarisha told me. “But the same ideology, policies, and practices that shaped Oregon shaped every state in the Union, as well as this nation as a whole.”

    I think many people (Dawkins included, apparently) forget that while the North certainly had the moral high ground in the war, the actual views and motives of most Americans – even staunch abolitionists – were hardly what you would call progressive or inclusive by modern standards.

    It makes the “greatest civilization” thing a bit hollow. If the US had a chance at being the greatest civilization ever, it wasn’t a few Southern senate votes or the drain of a little federal aid to keep schools open in Mississippi that held it back. It was, among other things perhaps, a giant mass of gnawing, spiteful, self-sabotaging racism. And that racism was and is as alive and well in the North as in the South, in not even that radically an altered form.

  87. xno-archive says

    Very well said by P. Z., as usual.
    Dawkins overlooks important facts here, though. The South had aggressive plans to conquer South America and extend its slave empire beyond U.S. borders. This is well documented. if the South had been able to fight the Union to a stalemate, they would surely have turned to Mexico, Costa Rico, Guatamala and regions south to extend slavery. They were very explicit about it:

    Looking into the possibilities of the future, regarding the magnificent country of tropical America, which lies in the path of our destiny on this continent, we may see an empire as powerful and gorgeous as ever was pictured in our dreams of history. What is that empire? It is an empire founded on military ideas; representing the noble peculiarities of Southern civilization; including within its limits the isthmuses of America and the regenerated West Indies; having control of the two dominant staples of the world’s commerce—cotton and sugar; possessing the highways of the world’s commerce; surpassing all empires of the age in the strength of its geographical position; and, in short, combining elements of strength, prosperity, and glory, such as never before in the modern ages have been placed within the reach of a single government. What a splendid vision of empire!

    “How sublime in its associations! How noble and inspiriting the idea, that upon the strange theatre of tropical America, once, if we may believe the dimmer facts of history, crowned with magnificent empires and flashing cities and great temples, now covered with mute ruins, and trampled over by half-savages, the destiny of Southern civilization is to be consummated in a glory brighter even than that of old, the glory of an empire, controlling the commerce of the world, impregnable in its position, and representing in its internal structure the most harmonious of all the systems of modern civilization.” — Edward Pollard, Black Diamonds Gathered In The Darkey Homes Of The South.

  88. chigau (違う) says

    xno-archive #98
    from your quote
    “…the two dominant staples of the world’s commerce—cotton and sugar…”
    Wow.
    Things have changed.
    Now we have petroleum and coffee.

  89. brett says

    If the South wins, there’s no way they’re carrying out organized invasions of Latin America to expand slavery – although they’d likely support “filibusters” like the ones that white southerners carried out in the 1840s. It’s going to take all their manpower to secure the border against the Union and suppress constant insurgencies from the black and unionist white population, and that’s before they likely disintegrate into a bunch of feuding states.

  90. Holms says

    I actually reservedly agree with Dawkins on this one. While he could be construed as stereotyping southerners negatively and northerners positively – a consequence of trying to communicate via twitter – it is still broadly true that the south/southeastern are the most conservative states. If the south had won, splitting america into two nations (United States of America, Confederate States of America), then that hypothetical USA would very likely have experienced more rapid social progress due to being rid of the most conservative states putting the brakes on that progress.

    However, I disagree with him when he says “Slaves would’ve soon been freed anyway…” because that is just rubbish. He is speculating ‘what if the south had won the civil war’ but is forgetting that the war was explicitly about keeping slavery. While it would certainly have come to an end eventually due to international pressure at the very least, it remains obvious to me that winning that war would have extended the practice of slavery, potentially for decades.

    The main problem here in my view is that Dawkins has made the classic Dawkins error: trying to communicate a nuanced thought via twitter. As usual, all complexity went out the window, and what was left was a glib, empty blurt. The next stage in this oft-repeated drama is for the long form essay / blog post pointing out that of course he didn’t mean x, y, z and omg people need to lay off me and quit these witch hunts, my poor fee fees etc and again, he will not learn that COMPLEX THOUGHTS SIMPLY CANNOT BE DONE VIA TWITTER JESUS CHRIST DAWKINS WHEN WILL YOU LEARN THIS? All the communications skills in the world can’t manage that impossible task. At the very least if you want to express this sort of social commentary briefly via twitter, include a fucking link to a long form unpacking of your point on your blog.

  91. Nick Gotts says

    Yes, and Harry Turtledove, the modern master of Alternate History, has even written books set in an alternate Antebellum South. – CJO@71

    “The South won” has been one of the most popular “Alternate History” themes. I think alternate history can both be very entertaining, and if well-handled and seriously researched, can illuminate actual history: thinking about what could (and could not) have happened under various assumptions can help in disentangling the causal chains of real history. So the objection is not to Dawkins speculating, but to his historical ignorance, and the flip way in which he dismisses both the victims of slavery, and the significance of the war itself. As pacal@91 says, slavery in the southern states, and particularly the big slaveowners, were flourishing in 1860; and in a victorious Confederacy, the power of this elite would have been greatly enhanced – as rq@78 points out, they were able to regain much of their power even after military defeat. Since the question of whether slavery should be extended west as new states entered the Union was one of the prime issues leading to the war, we can be confident that the victors would have insisted on this, as far north as they could manage; and it is also likely that they would have at least tried to extend their rule to the south, as xno-archive@98 says (thanks for those fascinating references, rq and xno-archive).

    Brazil abolished slavery in 1878 – mnb0@89

    1888 in fact; and with a victorious slaveowner elite in the Confederacy, their counterparts in Brazil and elsewhere would have had a powerful potential ally. The idea that the end of (formal, legal) slavery was somehow inevitable because of its “inefficiency” is highly dubious. Millions are still in effect enslaved, and historically, slavery has been not only compatible with capitalism, but one of the main engines of its growth, and often the most profitable form of labour exploitation.

    To conclude on a highly speculative note, I agree with jack lecou@87 that a Confederate victory would probably not have had much effect on the dynamics of European power politics leading to WW1. But since the Central Powers very nearly won that war in 1918 and the entry of the USA was important in preventing this (through logistical and financial support, and effects on morale rather than in the fighting itself, where there were few American troops involved before the final German offensive had failed), the effects on Europe and European empires could at that point have become huge.

  92. Seven of Mine: Shrieking Feminist Harpy says

    Holms @ 101

    I think you’re giving him too much credit for having a nuanced position on the shit he tweets about. His excuse for this one is that he was just spit-balling ideas for a counterfactual/historical novel and proceeded to whine that nobody ever lynched HG Wells for writing speculative fiction. The man is just a fucking clown who can’t figure out why spewing forth his ignorant preconceptions no longer results in a uniform chorus of rapt appreciation.

  93. daba says

    @Jim Phynn
    I have long maintained that it should be a source of national shame that we had to go to war over an issue that most of the rest of the world came to realize was a bad idea in the first place.
    This is bit overstatement. I’m not an history expert, but from what I remember form history classes most progress in abolishing slavery and serfdom was achieved around same time. Quick wiki check confirms it that most of the reforms came in 19th century (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abolition_of_slavery_timeline#1800.E2.80.931849).

  94. Ice Swimmer (was Nakkustoppeli) says

    If the South would have succeeded in the secession, other states might have tried to secede as well, in both the North and in the South, following the precedent. Of course, the various Unions and Confederations could have tried to close the door with (say) a constitutional amendment to explicitly ban secession and adopting a more centralized system of government (banning state militias etc).

    Cotton harvesting machines became available in the 1940s, so slavery might have been profitable until then, although the value of slaves compared to land (which was very high as land was abundant but cotton growing depleted the land fertility quickly) would have gotten lower as artificial fertilizers became available and “virgin” land was becoming more scarce. I’ve seen claims that one of the reasons slavery was so entrenched in the South was that slaves were often the only property that the planters could use as collateral in loans they needed for their plantations (to buy seeds, to feed the slaves and pay the white employees, costs would run all through the year but only the harvest or selling slaves would bring money) from factors that financed them and bought their harvest.

    Horrible things have happened in the South. If CSA had been successful in the secession there might have been even more horrible things; black genocide as the value of slaves would have gone down, white military dictatorships if the Confederacy would have dissolved, maybe even a vengeful black republic a la Zimbabwe in Mississippi.

  95. Thumper: Who Presents Boxes Which Are Not Opened says

    My problem with Dawkins’ tweet is twofold. The first, PZ has covered quite nicely:

    And let’s be realistic: the North is not and has never been the shining ideal of a civilization. The armies of the United States slaughtered the Indian population; we spent the years after the Civil War reveling in Manifest Destiny and tearing into the Philippines, Central America, Cuba, and meddling in Mexico. During the Civil War we had riots in major northern cities against the draft, with accompanying resentment about defending negroes. We’ve had sundown towns, predatory loan systems, white flight, a criminal justice system that discriminates against the black population. Bill O’Reilly is not from Alabama — he’s from New Jersey. Those “family” institutes that rage against homosexuals? They’re in every state.

    The second is the phrase “Banana Republic”. I don’t know the etymology of the phrase, but it has always suggested a subtle racism to me; the idea that tyrannical Republics ruled by despotic “Presidents” are typically things experienced by people of a dusky complexion living in the tropics.

  96. Ice Swimmer (was Nakkustoppeli) says

    Thumper @106

    Banana republic was originally conceived to describe Honduras, which was basically ruled by U.S. fruit companies who with the help of U.S. military installed their hired goons as dictators of the said banana republic.

  97. slithey tove (twas brillig (stevem)) says

    re 107:
    I’ll share my preconceptions. I always thought “banana republic” was just offhand reference to “that country we by bananas from”, with little or no disparagement of politics nor ethnicity (with maybe a hint of classism). I acknowledge my preconception was too innocent to be factual. Just sharing my previous sense of the phrase.

  98. consciousness razor says

    llewelly:

    It’s true that most of the “west” did not play a large role in the Civil War, but it did exist in some sense.

    I understand all that, but it’s nonsensical to count those places as the “South” because today they exhibit many of the conservative anti-government sentiments associated with places in the actual South. It’s a definite geographical region with a specific history (the civil war and slavery being only a part of that history), and those places aren’t in it. And if they’re supposed to be left out of the analysis, because they’re not in it, then it doesn’t follow that we would lack obstructionists today if we were separate from the South. We have obstructionists in all sorts of places. Pick Illinois or New Jersey or basically any other state you like, instead of Utah or Idaho (or the actual South), and you’ll still find legislatures saturated with such people.

    And I have no problem whatsoever with poorer or disadvantaged states getting federal support. I don’t think of that as “leeching” or have any other reason to complain about it. If they complain about it and act like hypocritical assholes, then those politicians ought to be voted out, but otherwise I’m happy that at least to some extent the citizens there are still getting what they need, despite the bullshit their politicians spew on television.

    jack lecou:

    I think many people (Dawkins included, apparently) forget that while the North certainly had the moral high ground in the war, the actual views and motives of most Americans – even staunch abolitionists – were hardly what you would call progressive or inclusive by modern standards.

    Indeed, many abolitionists didn’t like slavery in the sense that they wanted an all white society that was insulated from bad influences they blamed on the presence of black people. Or they thought it was against their interests, doing whatever trade or farming or industry they did in a northern state, that slave-owners had such a huge/growing amount of economic and political power. Genuinely caring about equal rights for everyone was not all that common, from what I’ve read.

  99. Thumper: Who Presents Boxes Which Are Not Opened says

    @ Ice Swimmer #107

    Thanks; that’s really interesting. I may go do some reading around this.

  100. anteprepro says

    The thing is, if Dawkins actually did mean this be speculative fiction, it would be utterly banal. There are three elements:

    1. South would let slaves free.
    2. North would become a great civilization.
    3. South would become a banana republic (unstable country dependent on export of one single product with heavy divide between rich and poor and ruled by business interests)

    1 is the primary thing that people are objecting to and although I am sure the “speculative” justification for it would be interesting, it would be rather boring in terms of writing actual fiction! All it does is dismiss the significance of the Civil War! 2 and 3 are neither controversial nor particularly interesting. It is all a very boring speculative scenario. There is no particular novelty, creativity or insight. Unless there is some actual fucking support for the idea that the South would shortly have freed the slaves of their own accord, which comes right back to the very thing Dawkins is avoiding by waving his hands and shouting out “SPECULATION”: Justifying the claim.

    Dawkins is very, very horribly bad at dealing with criticism and justifying his own stances. And it just seems profoundly ironic, coming from the man who pretends to be the master of logic, the man who sneers at people for not being to cope with Dangerous Ideas. He is an illustration of why humanity will never completely solve their disputes and reach some sort of peaceful utopia. Because even the smart, reasonable, rational people can be myopic, egotistical, or privileged enough to advocate for completely asinine, irrational stances and stubbornly defend that position to the death by throwing out every mutually contradictory excuse they can to justify themselves. And it is also an illustration that simply alleging to be devoted to reason doesn’t mean you aren’t irrational.

  101. anteprepro says

    Oh and this latest is amusing:

    https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/616044061460271104

    Teh Dawk sez:

    As predicted, my #WhatIf tweets elicited a rash of “Are you drunk? Etc. Why do some people find gedanken experiments so threatening?

    Kai Samuelsen ‏@KaiDaigoji says:

    @RichardDawkins Because you didn’t frame it as a thought experiment. You just (inadvertently or not) repeated a racist meme.

    And then….Dawk Derp:

    @KaiDaigoji RACIST? What are you talking about? Remember I’m not American so I use words to mean what they mean, not some hidden US agenda.

    I am pretty much at a loss for words.

  102. slithey tove (twas brillig (stevem)) says

    Dawkins wrote (tl;dr):
    1) South Wins war
    2) ?
    3) Slaves set free, by ??
    4) North Profits!!!!!

    The thing is, if Dawkins actually did mean this be speculative fiction, it would be utterly banal.

    The way Dawk wrote the fiction part of the speculative fiction IS banal cuz he left so much of it tacit. It would be interesting speculative fiction, when an actual author applied their skills to filling in all the details into an alternate-history book. For which Dawk will take credit, as being the ‘primary source’ for such a work.

  103. consciousness razor says

    1 is the primary thing that people are objecting to and although I am sure the “speculative” justification for it would be interesting, it would be rather boring in terms of writing actual fiction! All it does is dismiss the significance of the Civil War! 2 and 3 are neither controversial nor particularly interesting. It is all a very boring speculative scenario.

    It seems much worse than that to me. I can’t imagine what scenario(s) he’s even speculating about. But maybe we’re interpreting it differently or focusing on different things…. Here are some claims:
    — The South wins the war, and the North will still win out in the long term somehow. How exactly is that supposed to work?
    — The South wins the war, and it ends slavery on its own. Again: WTF?
    — The South wins the war, and it ends slavery on its own, and it becomes a banana republic, (presumably) under the control of the “defeated” North. Uh…. what? How?
    — The North makes the South into its banana republic. What kind of economic leverage is supposed to exist here — the resources both agreed the South won’t have from slave labor?
    — The North makes the South into its banana republic, after losing the war and the South’s voluntary loss of slave labor, and the North is the greatest civilization ever? Shouldn’t you be blaming it just a little bit for (somehow) installing a banana republic in a shattered economy, that (RD claims) is going to be doing the right thing? And how is any of that going to happen if it wins the war, whatever that could possibly mean, and has some advantage over the North (if that’s still even a thing) to do what it actually wants after that, like not freeing all of its slaves or perhaps having lots more slave labor from the Northerners it just defeated?

  104. anteprepro says

    consciousness razor and slithey tove: You know, I hadn’t even bothered to think about the fact that part of his Speculation is that the North lost and what the implications of that would be. (I think imagined it not as the South winning, but as the war never occurring). And yes, I agree, that makes his predictions of the North’s success and South becoming a banana republic (and the South simultaneously getting rid of slavery….while becoming a banana republic for the one product that they used slavery to help produce….) are just utterly baffling in that context.

  105. consciousness razor says

    Just to make it more explicit, if you’re saying there’s a banana republic (Honduras, say), you’re saying the country (the US, and/or its commercial/industrial/military complex) responsible for creating it are responsible for despotism and slavery (or something close to it). Saying that is the greatest civilization ever either means you have no clue what the fuck you’re saying, or you’re deliberately celebrating that and blaming a powerless/abused society for being powerless/abused.

  106. Thumper: Who Presents Boxes Which Are Not Opened says

    RACIST? What are you talking about? Remember I’m not American so I use words to mean what they mean, not some hidden US agenda.

    Despite the fact that it’s not at all uncommon, I still struggle to understand how such an intelligent person can be such a blinkered moron.

  107. Seven of Mine: Shrieking Feminist Harpy says

    It’s awesome that his argument against his original tweet being racist is blatantly xenophobic. I’m actually just out of words with which to describe how ludicrous this man is.

  108. Seven of Mine: Shrieking Feminist Harpy says

    RACIST? What are you talking about? Remember I’m not American so I use words to mean what they mean, not some hidden US agenda.

    Also, this in the context of this whole farce is even more asinine. A minute ago, everyone was supposed to have psychically divined that he was spit-balling plot ideas for a novel. Now, all of a sudden THERE IS NO CONNOTATION, ONLY DENOTATION.

  109. deepak shetty says

    @Seven of Mine: Shrieking Feminist Harpy

    The Deep Rifts are between decent people and people who refuse to learn

    And racists in the south (or anywhere) are people willing to learn? The example in the post is not” Ignorant people who dont know any better should be educated”, right? (I don’t disagree with most of the things you wrote)

    @Tony! The Queer Shoop

    Please point out the portion of my comment where I said that“…any approach (educational or otherwise) will be unsuccessful…”

    I meant that in the context of the examples you are giving , not a general statement – i.e. the statement of the form of deepening the rifts are usually used to indicate that a person(s) is beyond any form of help and will not change , no matter what you do , right ? hence any approach will not succeed.

    It is not our responsibility to keep trying.

    No one said it was a responsibility.Is it responsibility that makes a white person argue against racism? I think there is a lot of difference between “I tried, I give up” and “You’ll never change – deepen the rifts!(plus a few profanities and abuses)”.The latter refuses to acknowledge how/why/how long it takes for people to change their views.

  110. drst says

    tim guegeun @ 80

    Given how major a point of departure the South winning the Civil War would have been to world history there all but certainly wouldn’t have been what we recognise as WW1 or WW2.

    OK I have to address this complete nonsense, because it’s almost as wrong as Dawkins original tweet.

    One of the primary causes of WWI was the military rise of Germany starting in the late 1800s and ramping up significantly as the 20th century began. Germany’s insistence on creating a powerful navy alarmed the British, who were for the first time in centuries pushed into an alliance with France (without which, IIRC, France would have had far more difficulty surviving the initial German advances – the combination of Britain and France’s military together about equaled the German forces on the Western front, leading to the stalemate that basically existed for the next four years). Combine this with the unstable Austro-Hungarian empire in eastern Europe being pulled apart by internal strife, economic swings and social movements in Europe including nationalist pushes and the rise of communist and socialist organizations, you get WWI.

    NONE of this had anything to do with the US. All of it unfolded without any relation to events in the US. There’s no reason to think that any outcome of the Civil War would have altered this (which is why we call it a “civil war” rather than just “war”). It’s ridiculous American jingoism to assume that what happens here is so vitally important it would impact the entire globe’s history by default.

  111. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    I think there is a lot of difference between “I tried, I give up” and “You’ll never change – deepen the rifts!(plus a few profanities and abuses)”.The latter refuses to acknowledge how/why/how long it takes for people to change their views.

    What is missing is that by marginalizing bigots you can reduce their influence. Showing their bullying does nothing but hurt them, they may be forced to rethink their presuppositions, and change their behavior. They did not logically assume their positions. Therefore, they cannot be brought logically out of them. They must understand the emotional reasons for their unreasoning. That isn’t our problem, but theirs.

  112. anteprepro says

    Oh, and if anyone wanted to see Dawkins running into more stupidity while defending the initial tweet:
    https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/615902443054895104

    @hoppy_bird US would be a better place without the 40% who think the world began 6000 years ago. Maybe they aren’t Southerners?

    So, leave aside for the moment the assumption that the United States would be significantly better off just by fixing the creationism problem. According to the logic in this tweet by Dawkins, the 40% of the United States who are creationist are almost AL in the South. Really. The mind boggles. That he thinks that this could even be possible is absurd: The South is only a third of the population of the country. https://www.census.gov/popclock/data_tables.php?component=growth

    For this to be true, 100% of the South would have to be creationist. And even then, 16% of the rest of the country would need to be creationist!

    Here are the actual facts. See map of the states in the Civil War here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War#Sectionalism_and_cotton_trade

    Here is a map of schools that teach creationism:
    http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2014/01/creationism_in_public_schools_mapped_where_tax_money_supports_alternatives.html

    Wisconsin, Ohio and Indiana all have private schools getting tax funded scholarships, teaching creationism. Same problem as Georgia, Oklahoma, and Florida. Only four Southern states go further than that, with either charter schools or public schools teaching creationism: Tennessee, Louisiana, Texas and Arkansas.

    Here is a map showing a rating of state standards for teaching evolution, made by Scientific American (the link is to a a creationist site whining about it): http://www.scienceagainstevolution.org/v6i8n.htm

    Most of the green (good) ones are Northern, but two are the Carolinas, out of only 9 states given that rating. The default is yellow, and the red (bad) ones are notably all over the place. There are 17, and they include Maine, New Hampshire, Illinois, Wisconsin, Wyoming, and North Dakota.

    And finally, a map of Biblical literalism and creationism belief on this page, under the “Where?” heading:
    http://ncse.com/rncse/24/5/creationists

    According to the study where the figures come from, regions that roughly correspond to the Confederacy have 41%, 45%, and 37% supporting creationism. For the north, 17%, 23% and 35%. For the pacific, 29%. And for the west regions, 33 and 34%. The actual percentages might vary based on how you define “creationism”, but I imagine the general trend holds.

    In other words, creationism isn’t exclusively a Southern problem, and if you got rid of the Confederate South it would maybe cut the problem in half (at best), not get rid of it.

    In other other words, Dawkins is clueless and full of shit yet again.

  113. zenlike says

    deepak shetty

    I think there is a lot of difference between “I tried, I give up” and “You’ll never change – deepen the rifts!(plus a few profanities and abuses)”.

    I’m so tired of this shit, I really am.

  114. jack lecou says

    consciousness razor, 115/117:

    Those are good points. I think my (probably very generous) interpretation seamlessly filled in the holes as:

    1. South wins, but only in the sense of winning their bid to secede from the USA (maybe the North never goes to war, or battles are fought but North throws in the towel at some point, whatever). A new nation called the CSA comes into existence, but the rest of the former United States remain the United States (and is maybe even slightly better off in some respects – fewer lives lost, less money spent on war, etc.). Massachusetts isn’t forced to join the CSA or anything.

    2. Freed from the pesky interference of Northern busybodies, the victorious South doubles down on their brand of low productivity slave-labor based feudalism, and stagnates.

    2b. At some point the South nominally frees slaves, for some reason. (I actually don’t think this is totally improbable…eventually. It certainly doesn’t happen in 1865 though. If the world community comes together and levies massive sanctions or something, maybe it happens in the 19th century. If the South is doing it on its own, maybe not until well into the 20th century. And then of course, it’s only going to be to trade it in for some alternate form of slavery-in-all-but-name – share cropping, company town-style wage slavery, all of the above….)

    3. The industrial North, freed of the racism, conservatism, dogmatism and greed that was all neatly and entirely geographically contained in the South (as everyone knows!), becomes a paragon of decency and progress. Workers prosper, science and democracy flourish, etc., etc.

    Fast forward to the 21st century, and the CSA (or its fragments) remains an impoverished, underdeveloped backwater (A “banana republic” in Dawkin’s words — I think he’s probably neglecting the “viciously manipulated client state” connotation of the term), while just to the north, the USA is a shining beacon of civilized glory or whatever.

    Which is at least a sorta/kinda coherent story if you squint at it right, though obviously still all kinds of implausible, historically ignorant, callous, racist, etc.

  115. anteprepro says

    Oh Christ, the thrills.

    Dawkins started #WhatIf 20 hours ago with this inane tweet

    What if … 3 sexes? Earth had always been in thick fog? You could marry a dog? We had 8 digits, not 10? Earth had no moon? More #WhatIf?

    And the fun begins:

    #whatif Richard Dawkins was real and not a burlap sack filled with caterpillars?
    ……..
    #whatif Richard Dawkins stayed in his lane and didn’t talk about things he doesn’t understand?
    ……..
    #WhatIf we considered part of the practice of “rationalism” to be understanding the limitations of your intellectual tools and your self
    ……………
    RT ? *richard dawkins fantasizing about marrying those dogs he saw 69ing* #whatif
    ………………………………….
    What if i never kissed a tory, but in kissing them set off a chain of events that led them to become a tory? #WhatIf
    ……………………………………
    #Whatif… god was one of us, just a slob like one of us, just a stranger on the bus trying to make his way home
    ………………………………..
    #WhatIf you could donate to a reason and science foundation, and they let you pick which mistress you wanted the money to go to?

    And a handful of other comments appear to be spam!

    This is why you don’t force a hashtag, folks.

    Also: One of the people quoted there is named Sean Retconnery and their avatar is Pearl from Steven Universe. I think I love that person.

  116. qwints says

    A lot of comments seems to be assuming the only way slavery would end in a victorious CSA is if the elite did so voluntarily. Let’s not forget that almost 200,000 African-Americans fought for the Union Army or the fact that the underground railroad was in full swing when the war started. Assuming Benito Juarez still defeats the French, Mexico is almost certain to be anti-slavery and anti-CSA. The US removals of the plains Native American tribes under the Medicine Lodge Treaty of 1867 seem unlikely, as does the US removal of the Apache and Navajo. So the question isn’t when slave owners would voluntarily end slavery as much as how long as they could maintain their power.

  117. unclefrogy says

    I have to disagree with something said above. it is that radar and penicillin won world war 2 and not the atomic bomb. I understand that is probably exaggerated but none the less I think it misses the most important underling condition that enabled those things to be developed and deployed successfully and that is the undisturbed industrial capacity the US that led to the inevitable collapse of the third Reich. Things could be invented and discovered and were on both sides during the war but they were successfully developed and deployed by the US in vast numbers in endless convoys and landing them in instant man made harbors on here to for beaches.
    I think that the besides the issue of slavery which was primary to the Civil War. I think there was also a major change going on. The power center was beginning to shift from an agricultural power house as represented by the plantation civilization of the south to one where the center of power and influence were primarily industrial power.
    Which is the importance of the blockade in the civil war. The south just did not have the industrial capacity the north did, which as in the World Wars was undisturbed with essentially unrestricted supplies of raw materials.
    uncle frogy

  118. gmacs says

    #Whatif Richard Dawkins can only argue against strawmen because he has replaced his own body parts with those of an enchanted scarecrow?

    Also, I love his defensive style of “My shitty tweet is on par with classic novels!”

  119. says

    anteprepro

    <So, leave aside for the moment the assumption that the United States would be significantly better off just by fixing the creationism problem. According to the logic in this tweet by Dawkins, the 40% of the United States who are creationist are almost AL in the South.

    Also, really?
    So you just kick the idiots out of the Union and suddenly there is no longer a problem with creationism? No True American?

    What if … 3 sexes?

    Well, we would lose a lot of human diversity, that’S for sure. Oh, wait, he still thinks there are only 2, right? #What if Richard Dawkins learned some biology?

  120. Al Dente says

    Giliell @131

    What if Richard Dawkins learned some biology anything that doesn’t involve navel-gazing?

    FIFY

  121. hyperboreea says

    @UnknownEric the Apostate

    Hey, this kind of crap makes me want to stand up for the South! Personally, I’d put MLK into the bucket of “all that is best in America” and he was definitely southern. So was William Faulkner. And Elvis! YMMV.

    Jazz! Gumbo! Sun Records! R.E.M.! A lot of greatness came from the South.

    Jazz! = Black;
    Gumbo! = African/Cocktaw/French-creole;
    Sun Records! = White guy makes money wt Black Music (labeled rhythm&blues) than turns around and white-washes rock&roll (Elvis, etc);
    R.E.M.! = *sigh* … 2 Californians, 1 Minnesotan and a guy born in Georgia. Yeah, all southern … the sound too.

    BTW, I’m not even american

  122. says

    drst@122 I’m a Canadian, so there’s no “ridiculous American jingoism” involved in my statement.

    You and some of the other posters(and probably Dawkins as well) seem to have an overly mechanistic view of history. WW1 was 50 years after the US Civil War, and a lot of things happened in those years that led up to the WW1 we know. Many of those things are going to be altered by the North losing instead of winning. For example Canada came together in 1867 out of fears of attacks by the Fenians from US territory, and a more nebulous fear of the victorious US having designs on the territories that became Canada. A defeated North might have reduced those fears and delayed Canadian confederation. Or how about the Alaskan Purchase? Do the Russians resume their efforts to sell it to the US if the North loses? Even if they do, a weakened North made not feel it has the money or energy to acquire what was already seen by some as a questionable purchase. Part of the Russian intent was to cause problems for their colonial rival Great Britain, so perhaps they try to interest another British rival in buying it.

    Those are just two examples of events post the Civil War, out of untold others, that may have changed with a Union defeat. The French involvement in Mexico, mentioned upthread, Is another that might have ended differently with a weakened US. And with every change you get spinoff effects.

    History is weird, convoluted, and messy, not a tidy list of “X happened, then Y, then Z.” If you told someone, from a world he was killed in WW1, that a working class Austrian born German Army corporal would go on to be the dictator of Germany in our world, and lead the country into a world war that killed millions, they would probably have a hard time believing you. A world where the South won the Civil War would have similar stories of people and things that we’d find kind of hard to believe, but did happen.

  123. Menyambal says

    Saying that the South won the Civil War is pretty imprecise. Do you mean that there was a brief skirmish, and secession pretty much happened unopposed? Or do you mean that at Appomattox Court House that night, Lee whipped out a pistol and got Grant to concede freedom to an exhausted South? Or did Gettysburg go well and the South keep on invading, making slaves out of the Yankees, and getting all the factories?

    I think most folks are thinking of a fairly quick war and an undamaged South, which might as well be no war at all. But the relationship between the two nations, the USA and the CSA, would be very important. Do they skirmish, do they trade, do they recombine?

    But yeah, saying that slavery would have ended is pretty ridiculous. Sure, it might have ended in name, maybe, but an exploitable underclass is not something that rich folks are going to let go of. Heck, there are still agriculture workers living in shacks and working without rights, damaged by their toil and ignored by the government.

  124. HappyNat says

    mnb0 waaaaaay back at #89

    @8 Happy Nat: “one of our “thinky leaders””
    Maybe you see RD as one, but not me. It seems to me that both words are incorrect when applied to him.

    But us plebes don’t have the brains to choose our thought leaders. We have the Global Secular Council, er I mean the Secular Policy Institute to speak for us. All you have to do is ask them
    https://secularpolicyinstitute.net/spi-volunteer-tiger-team/

    We are thought leaders. We are the world’s biggest secular think tank with Fellows and Advocates including Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Lawrence Krauss, and so many more.

    So we can just sit back and let the thinky thought leaders lead us. It may appear they are pompous out of touch dolts who love to stare at their own navels, but that’s only because we aren’t thinky leaders like them. They really are the top thinkers in the world, you can read it on almost every page of their Web site.

    This comment may contain traces of sarcasm.

  125. madscientist says

    Oh great – poo-poo all dem suddurnurs. It’s pretty damned rare that you even encounter a nut who’s pro-confederate; most people have accepted the Union long ago. I bet there are more of those gun-crazed people in communities that refuse to pay tax up in the colder states than there are pro-confederates. Robert E. Lee is long dead; let’s bury his vision of the USA and hear no more of it. Sure the south’s got it problems but I can’t imagine how they can possibly be holding back the rest of the states nor can I imagine the northern states wouldn’t still have the same problems without the south. Did I ever mention that I hate all this “what-if” stuff?

  126. Nick Gotts says

    It’s pretty damned rare that you even encounter a nut who’s pro-confederate; most people have accepted the Union long ago. – madscientist@137

    Ah. That would explain the confederate flags flying from state buildings then.

  127. Seven of Mine: Shrieking Feminist Harpy says

    madscientist @ 137

    Sure the south’s got it problems but I can’t imagine how they can possibly be holding back the rest of the states nor can I imagine the northern states wouldn’t still have the same problems without the south.

    “I don’t understand the problem, therefor you’re all wrong.” Well-played.

  128. Nick Gotts says

    Seven of Mine@120,

    Dawkins also appears to have forgotten that his initial tweet was supposed to be a compliment to Americans.

    drst@122,
    I partly agree with your basic point, but would identify different key factors: Christopher Clark, in The Sleepwalkers, points out that the powers needing a general war to achieve their foreign policy aims were all on the allied side: Serbia (break-up of Austria-Hungary), Russia (control of the Straits) and France (recovery of Alsace-Lorraine, lost in the Franco-Prussian War). On the German side, it was more a case of “If there has to be a general war, better now than in two years, when the military balance will be worse for us.” None of these factors would have been affected by a CSA victory, at least in any obvious way. But timgueguen also has a point: secondary, tertiary and further effects might make the difference, and Clark (along with many other scholars) also thinks WW1 was not inevitable. On balance I’d say WW1 might or might not have started much as it did after a CSA victory – but then it might or might not have started as it did with a Union victory! Once it did start, however, the existence of a unified and increasingly powerful USA became continually more important, and in the end, probably decisive for which side won.

  129. Thumper: Who Presents Boxes Which Are Not Opened says

    As qwints alludes in #128, I think it far more likely that, if the CSA had “won” the war and actually managed to set up a proper federation named the Confederate States of America, slavery would have ended as a result of a bloody revolution where black slaves and oppressed native peoples banded together with the help of some sympathetic white folks and kicked the shit out of the ruling elite. I’m not sure that’s any better than what actually happened.

    I did wonder whether class would enter into the equation, and poor, non-slave-owning whites would have ended up on the side of the slaves and native people, but frankly I think racism at the time would have been too strong for them to ally with non-whites, even in pursuit of their own self-interest.

    There’s other options, of course. If it got to the point where the CSA was the last slave-holding nation on Earth, they could bow to international pressure and make it illegal. Or, the zeitgeist having moved so far ahead in the rest of the world, there would be the possibility of righteous invasions born of a sense of moral outrage that such a thing was still happening. But I don’t think they could have maintained stability long enough for that to happen.

  130. Thumper: Who Presents Boxes Which Are Not Opened says

    @timgueguen #134

    I’ve got to be honest; I really can’t see how any of the possible effects you list could have had any significant effect on central and western European politics.

  131. Nick Gotts says

    Thumper@141,

    I think it far more likely that, if the CSA had “won” the war and actually managed to set up a proper federation named the Confederate States of America, slavery would have ended as a result of a bloody revolution where black slaves and oppressed native peoples banded together with the help of some sympathetic white folks and kicked the shit out of the ruling elite.

    There’s only one successful slave revolt in history that I know of – Haiti 1791-1804; and even that was vitiated by the successful French demand for a huge “indemnity” for loss of property. It also occurred in very unusual circumstances, with the imperial power, France, cut off from Haiti (where slaves were the majority) by the war with Britain. There’s no particular reason to think that slave-owning societies as such are unstable.

    If it got to the point where the CSA was the last slave-holding nation on Earth, they could bow to international pressure and make it illegal. Or, the zeitgeist having moved so far ahead in the rest of the world, there would be the possibility of righteous invasions

    I don’t think either of these can be assumed to occur, in the wake of a military victory by the CSA. As I’ve noted above, slavery-in-practice still exists, and capitalism and slavery are quite compatible. The CSA might still be a slave state today.

  132. Thumper: Who Presents Boxes Which Are Not Opened says

    @ Nick Gotts

    I agree that slavery and capitalism are perfectly compatible and that de facto slavery does in fact still exist. But when it comes to human morality labels and perception are important. De facto slavery still exists today because it does not exist in a form which the majority of people recognize to be slavery. It’s called something else, and has subtle differences to the archetypal “I literally own this person” sort of slavery, and thus people do not object to it.

    I agree that a slave revolution would perhaps be overly optimistic, but I think the possibility of outside help and support would be infinitely higher in a situation where slave-owning countries were in the minority, which they would have been as time went on. I do think that the CSA eventually bowing to outside pressure would have been very likely, lest they became isolated and the economy suffered. There’s very little point producing cheap cotton if the rest of the world refuses to buy it off you. Slavery would undoubtedly have gone on a lot longer, but I think we can be fairly confident that, assuming the same rate of moral progress in the rest of the world, it would eventually have ended in the CSA as well.

  133. Nick Gotts says

    I think we can be fairly confident that, assuming the same rate of moral progress in the rest of the world, it would eventually have ended in the CSA as well. – thumper@144

    But why should we make that assumption? You only need to glance at some of the atrocities of the later 19th and 20th centuries to see that moral progress is neither inevitable nor monotonic. A victory for the CSA would have been seen as a victory for and legitimation of slavery itself.

  134. EigenSprocketUK says

    The Dawkins quote was cut short. He meant to say:

    If South’d won Civil War? Slaves would’ve soon been freed anyway, South would now be banana republic, & North the greatest civilisation ever.
    But seriously…

    I’m all for ignoring Dawkins and his Dawk Derps whenever they plop out. But when anyone quotes his brain-plops and gives him approval as a global thinky-leader, it’s only fair to point out, clearly and forcefully, that he’s the sort of leader who holds everyone back.

  135. consciousness razor says

    Thumper:

    De facto slavery still exists today because it does not exist in a form which the majority of people recognize to be slavery. It’s called something else, and has subtle differences to the archetypal “I literally own this person” sort of slavery, and thus people do not object to it.

    Huh? I’m a person who objects to it. The reason slavery of whatever sort exists is because making something illegal is not a guarantee that it will go away, as in the case of murder or theft or anything else.

    I agree with Nick Gotts that nothing is inevitable about moral progress. (Or much of anything in history that you care to name…. I’m a determinist but not about most of these blurry categories we like to come with, since that’s the wrong level of description to be looking for such things.) And I’m a realist about this, meaning I do think there are facts about what’s good or bad for us, which people may or may not eventually learn. We could figure those things out under all sorts of different conditions (as long as you’re not supposing any extreme changes to what human beings themselves are like), but it’s not as if there’s a sort of telos that pushes us in the direction of knowing anything in particular.

  136. Thumper: Who Presents Boxes Which Are Not Opened says

    @ Nick Gotts

    I say fairly confident precisely because we can’t be sure. But I see no reason that a slight extension in the existence of the last bastion of slavery should have a significant effect on the moral progress of the rest of the world in regards to this single injustice.

    @ Conscioussness Razor

    Me too. I meant that the majority of people don’t. Or rather, that they don’t consider it to be slavery; I assume that they would find it at least mildly objectionable. But then I’m often overly optimistic.

  137. consciousness razor says

    Thumper:

    I say fairly confident precisely because we can’t be sure. But I see no reason that a slight extension in the existence of the last bastion of slavery should have a significant effect on the moral progress of the rest of the world in regards to this single injustice.

    Nick was basically claiming that there is no “moral progress of the rest of the world” which is inevitable or monotonic. Whether something would or wouldn’t have an effect on it isn’t relevant, if there isn’t a thing to have an effect on in the first place.

    Exactly what kind of progress do you think “we” have made anyway (in the real world, not a counterfactual history)? We do in fact buy items made in sweat shops, or otherwise exploit our economic/political/military advantages to get “cheap” labor/resources elsewhere, as if that resembles some kind of free trade between equals who respect and cooperate with one another. And if other countries don’t do enough to fix their problems with awful working conditions or sex trafficking or whatever it may be, we don’t see their systems collapsing because everybody decides to shun them for being such bad bad people. Instead, we take advantage of it as much as possible, because it’s not our citizens who are suffering from it, and because our politicians aren’t generally held to a standard where they care about the interests of citizens in some other country. The first thing to come out of a person’s mouth is that their job is to represent us, not them, or that our goal is to make our country the biggest and fastest growing and most prosperous one on the planet. And we count the “American lives” who die in our wars, down to the last man or woman, but give minimal effort and attention to whatever else happens on the other side of our borders.

    Me too. I meant that the majority of people don’t. Or rather, that they don’t consider it to be slavery; I assume that they would find it at least mildly objectionable. But then I’m often overly optimistic.

    That’s not nearly enough. They should have more than mild objections to the thing itself no matter what label they attach to it.

  138. Thumper: Who Presents Boxes Which Are Not Opened says

    It’s not inevitable, but it’s clear that at the time that’s the way the zeitgeist was already heading. What I’m saying is that the continued existence of a single slave-owning state is not something which I think could significantly slow or alter the course of the moral progress that was already happening at the time. I don’t think it’s some inevitable process that always would have happened regardless of history.

    I think we have made progress and continue to make progress, albeit very slowly. I think people are steadily coming to think in terms of humanity as a whole rather than a series of discrete nation-states that should all be looking after their own self-interest, though I completely agree that the latter view is still frustratingly common and that the increase of the former is frustratingly slow. Everything you list is a real and horrible problem, but I’m not sure how the existence of problems show that we’ve never made any progress. It’s fairly obvious that the western world is in a better moral position today than it was in, say, the Jim Crow era. “Better” =/= “Perfect”, and I never claimed it did.

    That’s not nearly enough. They should have more than mild objections to the thing itself no matter what label they attach to it.

    Agreed.

  139. consciousness razor says

    Everything you list is a real and horrible problem, but I’m not sure how the existence of problems show that we’ve never made any progress.

    Of course we’ve made progress. The issue there (for me, can’t speak for Nick) is how you’re saying that works and how you’ve come to such (perhaps tentative or uncertain) knowledge about it. I have no idea what this “zeitgeist” is/was or how anyone is supposed to determine that — it’s too easy for you to just say things like that and have nothing specific in mind. How is someone supposed know what it is at a given time, how can we know which way it’s going, and how can we tell when that’s a good direction or a bad direction? Just to be clear, I’m not implying such things can’t be known, but that not all conceivable methods for “knowing” it are actually effective at giving you that (and some are more effective or reliable than others). I don’t think vague intuitions or feel optimistic, if that’s all you have to support it, are a good replacement for some kind of facts (which we really do know) about the way the world/people/societies actually are.

    The other point I tried to make is that there are lots of other morally problematic things which people think/do, besides slavery, such that there isn’t much (or any) internal or external pressure to make slavery illegal. You need more than an idea that slavery (in some form) is bad to get a result like that. So, even if there were widespread acceptance all over the world that slavery should be abolished, that doesn’t imply there would be widespread acceptance that we should intervene in certain specific ways when other countries/societies/etc. engage in it. For that, it seems to me that people need much more general ideas about how concepts like equality or fairness or cooperativeness ought to be filled out in detail and applied to realistic situations. In reality that hasn’t happened yet (I claim and you seem to accept), so it’s not clear at all that if the South had won the war, they would’ve been pressured out of it somehow by today (“today” in this alternate universe/timeline). If so, then that’s also definitely going to have a significant impact on many other aspects of world history over the last 150 years. But I have no problem admitting that I have no clue whatsoever, when it comes to predicting (from that past counterfactual) what those effects would be.

  140. Thumper: Who Presents Boxes Which Are Not Opened says

    I’m talking specifically about the issue of slavery, so my “evidence” (loosely used) that the general public were generally progressing to the point where they found slavery to be morally distasteful is the spate of countries which began abolishing the slave trade and making slavery illegal. It’s been ongoing to a serious extent ever since the 1500’s, but it really kicked off in the late 1700s and through the 1800s. I think the acceleration in the number of countries banning it indicates a definite shift in the Overton window. It indicates that people in general were coming around to the idea that slavery is morally wrong, and as mentioned I can’t see how one slave-owning country existing for a bit longer could have significantly slowed or altered that process.

    I also think that if you look at the world today it’s fairly clear that certain developed nations who shall remain unnamed are more than willing to use armies to enforce their idea of how other countries should be run. Slavery being such a sensitive issue, and there’s no reason to assume it wouldn’t still be a sensitive issue in our alternate timeline, I don’t think it’s at all beyond the realms of possibility that other countries would use force to shut down the slave trade.

  141. jack lecou says

    I think it’s pretty clear that “world” opinion (read: the opinion of Western European colonial powers) had fairly conclusively turned against chattel slavery, which I assume is what Thumper is referring to.

    Wikipedia has a nice abolition of slavery timeline, which I think shows this pretty well.

    By the time of the US Civil War, the slave trade, slavery, and serfdom are abolished or soon to be in much of the world. It’s clearly a thing – a zeitgeist if you will – beginning as far back as the early 1700s. By the mid 1800s, it has quite a lot of momentum. And it’s something that world powers are fairly committed to (e.g., the British Navy maintains task forces for decades specifically to enforce bans on the Atlantic slave trade).

    The US Civil War over the end of slavery in the southern United States was part of this global movement. And much more driven by that global shift, than the cause of it.

    (I do think I’d hesitate to label all of that movement as “moral” progress per se. As noted before, the motives underlying some of these changes were more complicated, but it was unquestionably progress, and quite deliberately so.)

    So if the Confederacy had pulled out a long shot victory somehow, would that then have halted progress toward the end of slavery in Brazil or Russia or French Cambodia? I doubt it. Part of what makes postulating a Confederate victory (with the perpetuation of slavery in part of North America for decades longer) so weird is that it would have been so counter to the general tide of history. An anomaly.

  142. Pteryxx says

    For further reading, articles at the US Slave archival blog:

    River of Dark Dreams: The Mississippi Valley Cotton Kingdom

    From the Wall Street Journal Bookshelf, “When the South Was Flat: The brutal “slave-ocracy” along the Mississippi was far more integrated with the global economy than is often suggested,” by Mark M. Smith, on 22 February 2013

    […]

    In Mr. Johnson’s telling, the antebellum Mississippi Valley is an unexpectedly modern place, more technologically advanced than the mills of Massachusetts or Manchester and certainly just as connected to and driven by the dictates of the world economy. The technology powering steamboats, for example, was new, designed to overcome the river’s mighty flow, pushing goods and people upstream at an impressive if not always safe speed. The textile mills of the North and Britain, by contrast, still relied on an ancient, riparian technology, one hostage to the force of gravity. As Mr. Johnson notes: “A mere handful of the steamboats docked along the levee in New Orleans on any given day could have run the entire factory at Lowell.”

    A great deal of the capital underwriting this technology came directly from the North and Britain. New Orleans bankers managed the circulation of Northern and British capital in the region. With that capital, planters bought slaves, the human capital to cultivate cotton. The slave traders—there were as many as 20 establishments in New Orleans in the antebellum period whose sole business was the buying and selling of bondpeople—thus completed the dismal if highly profitable circuit in capital and labor.

    […]

    Mr. Johnson’s appreciation of the global and imperial aspirations of Mississippi Valley slaveholders helps us to make sense of the events leading up to the Civil War. These “full-throttle capitalists” were filled with expansionist zeal. Valley planters and politicians made dedicated efforts to overthrow Cuba’s Spanish colonial government in the 1850s. They feared what might happen if the anti-slavery British gained control of Cuba. Emancipation there might inspire slave insurrections and even race wars in their own part of the world. More optimistically, they thought Cuba could be the key to further economic success, valley-style. “It is sufficient to look over the extensive valley of the Mississippi,” wrote one supporter of annexation, “to understand that the natural direction of its growth, the point of connection of its prodigious European commerce and of its rational defense, is Cuba.” So, too, with Nicaragua. If Cuba functioned as the imperial slaveholders’ transatlantic connection, Nicaragua, at least in the conviction of William Walker (who invaded the country in 1855, proclaimed himself president and promptly reinstituted slavery), represented the slaveholders’ ambitions to link to the Pacific. (Walker was overthrown by local troops and shot in Honduras in 1860 after another attempt to establish a colony.)

    The US Civil War Coverage of 1865 from Great Britian

    From the archives of The Economist (UK), “The fall of Richmond and its effect upon English commerce,” Our [The UK Economist] coverage of the end of America’s civil war, on 22 April 1865 — United States — THE fall of Richmond is one of the most striking events of modern history. On the one side the great hopes of the Confederates, their equally great efforts, the sympathy they have gained in Europe: on the other side, the undaunted courage of the Federals, their refusal to admit, even to their imagination, the possibility of real failure,—their accumulating power, which for many weeks past has seemed to concentrate like a gathering cloud about the capital of their enemies, give to the real event the intense but melancholy interest that belongs to the catastrophe of a tragedy. It is impossible not to feel a sympathy with the Confederates. There is an attraction in vanquished gallantry which appeals to the good side of human nature. But every Englishman at least will feel a kind of personal sympathy with the victory of the Federals.

    […]

    Even under the most favourable circumstances a guerilla warfare by a nation of slaveowners must have unusual difficulties. The slaves cannot be relied on as a native peasantry can be relied on. It is said that Sherman on his march through Georgia always had good information regularly brought by negroes. We do not vouch for this as a fact, but it illustrates our meaning as an example. It is impossible that the existence of a slave class, which is not a part of the nation, which requires to be kept down by the nation, should not always be an impediment to the rising of the nation; and especially so in this case, when the invading army proclaims liberty to those slaves. We cannot expect a protracted guerilla resistance from a nation which has neither an inaccessible territory, nor a regular army, nor an attached peasant population.

    But if the Confederacy cannot long defend itself, if the civil war must soon come to an end, what will be its effect on us? The war itself disturbed as much in its origin and much by its continuance, will it also disturb us much by its cessation?

  143. numerobis says

    Vox engages in a different “what if the other side had won” — what if the American Revolution had failed? The Brits were giving slaves their freedom if they joined the army (much as the Union forces would later do), and the South were apparently pro-revolution in part for fear of the abolition of slavery. Slavery might have ended almost a century earlier.

    http://www.vox.com/2015/7/2/8884885/american-revolution-mistake

    Includes, contra Dawkins,

    Decades less slavery is a massive humanitarian gain that almost certainly dominates whatever gains came to the colonists from independence

  144. says

    The big winners of ‘the south winning’ are Latin America in general. Instead of a unified USA fucking with them, they have two large rivals to play against each other, who hate each other far too much to work together. It wouldn’t be hunky dory (Except possibly for Mexico, but it’d also help entrench the landowners there, I think) It’s also likely t he immigration waves would have targeted South America even more, since the wrecked economy of North America would be less attractive (And have fewer myths attendant to it as well).

    …But really, it’s not possible. The South could not win a victory if the North decided to really fight – the early days of the Civil War went about as well for the South as they could have reasonably hoped, and it still didn’t do what it needed to to shatter the resolve of the Union. Without British intervention (and it would have to be British – Nobody else was willing to give the South the time of day), the South simply could not win that war. And given that most Brits fucking hated the South, there was only so much Britain was willing to do.

  145. consciousness razor says

    I think it’s pretty clear that “world” opinion (read: the opinion of Western European colonial powers) had fairly conclusively turned against chattel slavery, which I assume is what Thumper is referring to.

    Wikipedia has a nice abolition of slavery timeline, which I think shows this pretty well.

    I want to point out that the “modern” part of that timeline, where there is undoubtedly more activity (and mostly progress), goes from 1537 all the way to 2007…. with obvious and important caveats about the distinction between de jure and de facto slavery.

    What I was basically saying is that I don’t see why we should expect it to take less (or significantly less) than 150 years for a “victorious” South, especially given a long timeline like that (which is, by the way, about actual history and not some alternate reality that’s going to be different in many ways). Somebody in 1700 could’ve said that it won’t be long before basically everybody abolishes slavery, after looking at their history and more recent developments and trying to extrapolate from that. But 150 years later, they would’ve been very tragically wrong. And 150 years after that, they still shouldn’t be impressed.

  146. jack lecou says

    What I was basically saying is that I don’t see why we should expect it to take less (or significantly less) than 150 years for a “victorious” South, especially given a long timeline like that (which is, by the way, about actual history and not some alternate reality that’s going to be different in many ways).

    I didn’t think we were talking about what happens in the South itself at all. Obviously if the South wins, and the regime there holds on to power and so forth, slavery could at least potentially continue in the South for quite a long time. And given that about 2/3rds of all those then enslaved in the Americas lived in the South, it would be a big setback.

    But given that timeline*, it’s not really obvious to me how that defeat would have particularly affected or delayed the waves of other emancipation processes spreading across the globe. The broader movement had its own history and momentum, and did not begin or end with Northern abolitionists.
    —-
    * Yes, it starts at 1537. And there’s some early good news there for the groups affected – like some indigenous South Americans, who could have used some about then – but, as you can see, prior to at least 1700, there’s nothing whatsoever to limit the African slave trade. That trade doesn’t really even pick up in earnest until a couple of decades before 1700, and there’d be no basis, at least in events that I can see, for standing up that year and predicting the end of black slavery. Hope, maybe, but you couldn’t point to any actual progress.

    However, by 1800, an acute observer might have been able to make an argument that things were turning around. And by 1840 or so, I think it’s clear the wind was definitely changing.

  147. Thumper: Who Presents Boxes Which Are Not Opened says

    @ Jack Lecou #153

    That’s pretty much exactly what I’m talking about, and far more succinctly put, so thank you.

  148. Thumper: Who Presents Boxes Which Are Not Opened says

    @ Jack Lecou #158

    We were sort of talking about whether or not this change of opinion would have had an effect on the south. What I’m saying is that the continued existence of slavery in the south would not have had a significant effect on the changes in the rest of the world, which you seem to agree with. But I also think that the South would have had to eventually abolish slavery of their own volition, assuming that they were not forced to do so beforehand by military action. Any country that wants to be an active participant in global politics and have all the economic and military (in terms of treaties) advantages which come with that are forced to bow to pressure from other countries on certain issues. As I see it they would have eventually been forced to abolish slavery or risk becoming isolated. How long that would have taken I can’t say.

  149. consciousness razor says

    But given that timeline*, it’s not really obvious to me how that defeat would have particularly affected or delayed the waves of other emancipation processes spreading across the globe.

    Sure. I wasn’t trying to focus on the effects elsewhere, just whether the South itself would’ve abolished slavery (“by now,” “quickly,” “in X number of years,” “before event X happens,” etc., instead of some indeterminate qualifier like “eventually” which could mean anything). And I really don’t understand how anybody thinks they’re making any predictions like those, so saying it’s not obvious is fine with me.

  150. jack lecou says

    160, 161:

    Yeah, I don’t know how much we could predict about the duration of slavery as such in the South itself in those circumstances. I do agree with Thumper, I think, that inasmuch as slavery continued to (officially at least) come to an end throughout the “civilized” world, the South would rapidly find itself to be something of a pariah.

    But whether that would result in enough actual economic or military pressure to make it change is impossible to say. Provided the South could still find markets for its slave-grown cotton, etc., they might be just fine being a bit of a pariah. And people in Britain and elsewhere might be just fine buying the cheap cotton without thinking too hard about where it came from (much as people do now). They probably wouldn’t be able to maintain it too far into the 20th century, if there’s the same official League of Nations condemnation, etc., but there’s really no way to say for sure. At some point, people (outside the South) might just sort of get used to it, as one of those “this isn’t right, but how’s it ever going to change” international political problems nobody knows how to solve, so nobody tries very hard. In those circumstances, maybe it lasts until 1990, or 2025. Who knows.

    And there could be some other perverse effects in the mean time as well. For example, I wouldn’t find it too hard to imagine a Northern government quietly channeling arms and support to the Southern government to prevent slave revolt. The contemporary North was not exactly above racism, and they could well find themselves more afraid of the possibility of a Haiti-like black republic on the southern border than they were averse to negotiating or supporting the white CSA regime.

  151. unclefrogy says

    one of the things I dislike about “alternative histories” is what is changed and what remains much the same. It is very far from how things really happen that I find it irritating.
    If “The South” had prevailed in the Civil War would the The North then be able to abolish slavery in the north much easier? If we have a problem with “illegal immigration” from Latin America what would the emigration from the CSA look like with no fugitive slave laws in effect? How would the presence of a slave holding agricultural based country so close to a growing industrial country effect the development of Anarchist, socialist, communist philosophies – movements.
    What would be the effects of the continuing boom and bust economic cycles have on all of this. So much left out.
    uncle frogy

  152. says

    If “The South” had successfully succeeded in seceding (see what I did there?), I doubt that would have been the end of war.
    The Confederate States would have later invaded the rump state of the north, reduced its cities and industries to rubble, and fought to establish slavery there too.
    The CSA was a belligerent, reactionary entity, and “leaving people alone” was never one of its values.

  153. loopyj says

    Dawkins needs to admit to himself that Twitter is a terrible medium for him, what with him being neither pithy nor clever.

  154. Al Dente says

    loopyj @165

    Unfortunately, Dawkins thinks he is both pithy and clever. All of us illogical, overly emotional simpletons who disagree are being illogical and overly emotional. He is universally recognized by himself as a great thinky thought leader, bringing knowledge and enlightenment to the lumpen proletariat with his great thinky thoughts.