Slavery and Natural Selection

I have been reading the book about runaway slaves by John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger. It is an overwhelming book because it contains literally hundreds of stories of runaway slaves in nineteenth century America, with names and whatever scant details may be available from the historical record. The authors attempt some generalizations, but it is very clear that each slave’s story was individual and unique. And the documented brutalities are unspeakably painful.  I considered myself knowledgeable about American history, but this book took my breath away. No wonder the late John Hope Franklin is so famous among scholars and non-scholarly readers alike. This is the painting by Thomas Moran, who lived during this time, which is in the Philbrook Museum in Tulsa, where I live, and that was on the cover of the book.

 

And here is a photo of John Hope Franklin.

As a biologist specializing in writing and educating about evolution, I noticed a generalization that even the late great John Hope Franklin did not, and it has directly to do with evolution by means of natural selection.

Slaveowners and hunters believed passionately that slaves, and black people in general, were inferior in intelligence. Despite this, the racist whites of the South did their best to subject their slaves—and even free blacks, whom they sometimes kidnapped—to deprivations that were clearly intended to keep them physically and mentally inferior. In particular, they seldom allowed their slaves to learn to read and write (a literate slave could write out documentation that said they were free, for example), or to learn simple arithmetic, or to learn to read a map (which could help them to escape, if they should happen to get hold of a map).

Despite this, the runaway slaves proved themselves to be extremely intelligent and clever. As a matter of fact, the deprivations forced upon them by the whites selected for the most intelligent and clever slaves. The only way a slave could be successful was by outplaying their white overlords at their own game. One example that sticks in my mind is the slave who, on his escape route, asked a white train operator which train went to Raleigh. The slave knew that word would soon get around about his escape, and with his description. Asking the train operator how to get to Raleigh was a trick. The slave had no intention of going to Raleigh, but his question would mislead his pursuers into looking for him in that direction. Clever!

That is, the very ways in which whites oppressed slaves were in fact an evolutionary pressure leading to greater intelligence, over the generations, in the slave populations. Not only were black people equally intelligent to start with, but the evil efforts of the whites pushed black populations into even greater intelligence.

It doesn’t take any intelligence to be cruel or to be an oppressor. It takes intelligence to escape oppression. To this day, we are left with the image of stupid racists trying to belittle intelligent minorities.

January 6 and the Legacies of Slavery

Can you believe it, I have only now read Uncle Tom’s Cabin? This was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, which began serialization in 1851, about the many ways that black slaves suffered in a country that was still the United States. It is a novel that is today not taken seriously enough, and most of the issues that the book raised remain unresolved. Among the modern consequences of slavery was the domestic terrorism of January 6, 2021.

It is common now for readers to look down upon Uncle Tom’s Cabin. And it is true that this novel could not be published today in its current form. But it played an important role in American history at that time. Stowe pointed out many things that even most northerners did not know about slavery, for example, that slaveowners could abuse their slaves, with no limits, because slaves were property, not people. Few slaveowners killed their slaves, but for those that did, there was no legal consequence. For example, in 1847, a slave owner’s wife murdered two female slaves by bashing their heads in. She was brought to trial. The prosecution, representing the state of South Carolina, called it murder. The defense called it “ordinary domestic discipline.” The judge found in favor of the defense. This was one brief shining moment where slaves might have been considered human beings, and the moment passed.

Slaveowners could break up slave families and sell husbands, wives, and children separately. In fact, there was no such thing as marriage for slaves; slaveowners could dissolve slave marriages and force new ones, just like breeding livestock. Matter of fact, most Americans probably do not know these things even today. Stowe’s mission was to shock America into caring about the slaves and stopping the institution itself. All of the novel’s almost insufferable sentimentality had a direct purpose.

In addition, the title character, Uncle Tom, was completely subservient to his white masters and prayed constantly for their redemption from sin. This is not the image of slavery that we want to believe. We want to believe that slaves were proudly angry at their masters. And most of them probably were, as documented in the writings of historian John Hope Franklin. Slaves like Uncle Tom were rare. Personally, I prefer the slaves who fought back, like Nat Turner. But remember that there were other slaves in this novel who were not so subservient. The way Cassy manipulated Simon Legree was brilliant and heroic. You may pity Uncle Tom, but the way Eliza crossed the frozen Ohio River was worthy of a superhero.

Perhaps most of all, the issues raised by Uncle Tom’s Cabin were not resolved by the end of the Civil War, nor have they yet been. Oppression did not go away, and still has not.

Through most of the history of the United States, the racist South has gotten everything their way, by threat of force against the North. Here is my list:

• When Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, he included a paragraph against slavery. When someone pointed out Jefferson’s hypocrisy as a slaveowner, Jefferson said that he intended to free his slaves. The southern colonies forced the removal of this paragraph, thus giving birth to a United States in which it was legal to own slaves.
• Slaves were not given rights as citizens or even as people, but the Southern states insisted that slaves be counted in the census as three-fifths of a person, thus giving the Southern states a bigger representation in Congress than they would have otherwise had, when the Constitution was ratified.
• For the Southern economy, thus for the American economy, slavery was essential. The economy simply could not have functioned without the use of slave labor, in two ways. First, the slaves worked for free on the plantations themselves. Second, their owners hired them out to work in factories and shops, then kept the wages that the factory and shop owners paid to the slaves.
• This amounted to a big pot of money, without which the South would have gone bankrupt. And it was not just slavery that was essential; it was slaves as an expendable resource that was necessary. The slaves on the southern plantations, “down the river,” lived only a few years before they were worked or beaten to death. Had the downriver slaves lived full lives, however miserable, the slave market would have dried up.
• The northerners did not own slaves, but they were required (by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850) to turn in any fugitive slaves that they knew about, and certainly not to harbor any fugitive slaves. This is the reason that the Underground Railroad took slaves to Canada, not just to the North. The southern love of slavery forced the north to support slavery.
• When the South lost the Civil War, their economy was devastated. But they did not lose all of their money. The fortunes previously made, and which escaped battlefield destruction, were kept. This was the foundation of Southern corporations and banks. Today, many corporations and banks descended from those of the postwar South remain wealthy and have a major role in the modern American economy, because of the money they got from slave labor.
• Largely because of the direct influence of Southern states, justice has not yet been done regarding the lynchings of black people (in both the North and South) or the Tulsa Race Massacre. Even as late as the centennial of the Massacre, in 2021, most Americans (even me, a Tulsa resident) had not even heard about the Tulsa Race Massacre. Southerners have supported a conspiracy of silence about our recent past affliction of black people.
• The flag of the Old Confederacy still flies in America, mostly in the South, and was the direct inspiration for attacks on modern democracy, such as the January 6 attack on the Capitol exactly two years ago today.

America remains tarnished by the legacy of slavery.

"The Bible says..." about Slavery

Fundamentalist Christians universally claim, “The Bible says it, I believe it, and that settles it.” But this statement is, even from a literalistic view of the Bible, incorrect. What they really mean is, “The Bible says it, I interpret it, and that settles it.” The fundamentalist, therefore, puts Himself or Herself blasphemously into the line of authority. They expect us to believe their interpretation as if it were the very words of God. Literalist Bible believers should not do this. Many of them do, which is why I turn away whenever I hear them preaching.

Examples abound and I have written about many of them, both here  and in my science blog. But the example I am thinking of now is slavery; in particular, black slavery before the Civil War in the United States. I have just finished reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, the novel that, according to Lincoln, was one of the major causes of the Civil War. In addition, Harriet Beecher Stowe was the brother of Henry Ward Beecher, a famous preacher who stirred up great audiences in the north, and in England, against slavery. Some historians have said that Henry Ward Beecher’s message was an important reason that England supported the north instead of the south, which was a profitable source of cotton, sugar, etc. The southern states had ample reason to hate both of the Beechers.

This novel was written in the hortatory, preachy style found in so many novels of that period. Some of my liberal friends will roll their eyes at it. But it was the novel that captured the attention of most Americans to show that slavery was a complex system of evil that pervaded the economy. This was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s challenge: So, you don’t own slaves? Fine. But you may have invested in businesses that get their money from slavery. And your national laws require you to betray runaway slaves to federal authorities. Slavery was an evil deeply intertwined with the American economy. Many northerners, who could not own their own slaves, supported policies that maintained slavery in the south. These people, Stowe made it clear, were as cruel in their thinking as the slave owners themselves, even the slave catchers.

Many people think that the federal government could not have stopped slavery. The constitution did not delegate that authority to the federal government. It was a state’s right to have, or not have, slavery. This is stupid and evil. Of course the federal government could have done it, via the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution. That is, unless slave owners and sellers could prove that slaves did not cross state lines. As soon as a slave was transported from, say, Alabama into Georgia, the feds could have said, federal anti-slavery laws now apply.

And now consider how slavery relates to fundamentalism. The Golden Rule, as stated in the New Testament, is do unto others as you would have them do unto you. You wouldn’t want someone to whip you, or to steal your wages, or to take your child or wife or husband from you; so don’t do that to anyone else. Seems pretty clear.

But antebellum fundamentalists had some contorted arguments that they considered to be absolutely Biblical. Stowe mentions three, and I have added a fourth:

• One is that Paul told the escaped slave Onesimus to return to his owner, Philemon. This is explained in the Book of Philemon. Never heard of it? Prepare to be surprised.
• Another is, in Genesis, God said, “Cursed be Canaan,” and said his descendants, whom the fundamentalist preacher in the novel said were African, would be slaves.
• Paul also told Christians to be content in whatever state they find themselves. The Southern preachers used this to tell slaves that God wants them to be contented with being slaves.
• Finally, some Biblical scholars came up with a theory that the black race was not really human and found some way or other to justify it with the Bible. This one was not in the novel. But I have known people, within recent decades, who believed this. Of course, this would mean that the black race had to be housed with the animals on the Ark. Fundamentalists don’t have an answer to this. As an evolutionary biologist, I am particularly bothered by this argument, which contradicts all we know about human biology.

To fundamentalist preachers in the antebellum South, these fragile arguments were enough to negate the Golden Rule.

Yes, twisting scripture to make it say what you wish, in utter contradiction to what the God of Love would want, has a long history within fundamentalism. It continues today. I will have more to say about this very soon.

John Muir's Campbellite Father

John Muir’s father, on his farm in Wisconsin, was a Campbellite. And so, about 150 years later, was I. What does this mean?

Following the teachings of Thomas and Alexander Campbell, participants in the “Restoration Movement” wanted to “restore” Christianity to its pure Biblical basis. There were to be no doctrines or creeds that were not specifically in the Bible; the Bible alone was to be their basis of faith. You will find modern churches that identify with this tradition, usually called Churches of Christ. The Disciples of Christ denomination began from this tradition but has branched out to no longer be fundamentalists. And among the Churches of Christ, you have to look carefully for the true, utterly pure Campbellites. I was a member of a Church of Christ sect that insisted that you should use a single cup for communion, and the churches that used multiple cups (a separate cup for each communicant) were “erring brethren.” You couldn’t tell from the church signs which church was which; the signs did not say “We use only one cup/multiple cups in communion.” While this seems like a trivial controversy, it was deeply important to us, and we spent a lot of time, sermon after sermon, denouncing the erring brethren. How many hours of my life I wasted on this!

Of course, Campbellites reject the label. They, as I did, claim that they are followers of Jesus, not the Campbells.

But us Campbellites clung to many doctrines that were NOT in the Bible at all. One example: we claimed that no instrumental music could be used during church services. Such a command is not found anywhere in the Bible. The Bible does not even say, “You cannot do anything during a church service that is not specifically authorized by Scripture.” We just made that crap up.

Another, and I believe more important, example of non-Scriptural assertions of Campbellites is, or was, what John Muir’s father tried to indoctrinate his son John to believe. He believed that the entire world, including the natural world, the forests and its trees and birds and soils, was fallen and evil, and we should not celebrate it. He actively tried to get his son John to NOT love the natural world. Fortunately, he failed, and we had John Muir to lead us into an era of conservation awareness. Search the Bible all you want, but you will never find any reference to the natural world to be the realm of Satan, or that loving the natural world is a sin. Just read Psalm 104 and try to tell me that the love of nature is a sin. Just try it. Since I do not expect any Campbellites to read this essay, I expect no response to this challenge. Campbellites live in a little isolated world in which they, and they alone, are faithful to God, and perhaps more recently to worship Donald Trump instead of God.

I have a particularly vivid and painful memory in regard to this specific belief. The Bible tells about how the old heavens and the old earth will be destroyed, and a new heaven and a new earth will be created. As a lover of nature, I was overjoyed to hear this. The forests and flowered hillsides I loved so much would not be destroyed forever but be recreated without the taint of human sin that currently fouls them. When I was asked to give a sermon, our “evangelist” was sitting in the front row paging through his Bible. I did not know at the time that he was planning to lambast me about this horrible belief—the idea that anything in the world, even the forests and wildflowers, could possibly be good.

The next week he delivered a sermon that was directed specifically at me. He said that “certain teachers” (translation: me) actually said that God would create a new earth. Then he went through a really contorted and wicked line of reasoning. He said, the old earth was the Old Testament, since before Jesus our earth (or dwelling) was the Old Covenant. The new earth, therefore, had to be Jesus’ new covenant. Anyone who believed that it would be a literal new earth, with trees and stuff, was utterly wrong and bound for hell. Gee, thanks, Bob Sanders.

You can imagine the effect that this had on me, as a high school student. To be utterly shamed as not only an infidel but a heretic in front of the congregation which I loved very much! I was utterly depressed by it. Some people would interpret what he did as verbal child abuse. I believe this form of verbal child abuse continues today in fundamentalist churches. Of course, it turns out he was wrong about this, and about almost everything else.

Thank God, if there is one, that I am no longer a Campbellite, and that I revere the work and memory of John Muir.

Get Out the Monkey Wrenches?

I spent three years teaching at a Christian college near New York City. I wish I could get that time back, but it is gone forever. (Then I went off and taught another three years at a different Christian college. I finally learned my lesson and went secular for the rest of my career.) The college in New York claimed to be Christian but it was at least at that time just a front for the Republican Party. While I was there, it was quietly Republican. Years after I left, it projected an image of extreme right-wing doctrine.

While on the biology faculty at the small college near New York, I taught environmentalism. I did this partly because it was the only honest thing to do, especially among people who supposedly believed that God created the Earth and everything that is in it. Also, I was not the only faculty member doing so. Of us four biologists, none of us taught that God wanted humans to grab whatever they desire from the natural world and leave it bleeding, battered, and gasping as it awaited the Second Coming.

But most of the students at that college were not at all receptive to environmentalism. I think it was because they had never been allowed to think about it as they grew up. Imagine my surprise when, one day, I was in the computer lab writing something (few faculty had office computers), when the student assistant was telling the Learning Resources director all about this wonderful group he had just found out about, and which he admired greatly: Greenpeace. He admired their strong defense of the Earth and their willingness to take decisive, some might say extreme, actions. If Greenpeace is right about human abuse of God’s Earth, then mildness is not an appropriate response. Despite the repressive fundamentalism of that college, the students occasionally thought for themselves.

Another group besides Greenpeace that takes actions that some consider extreme is Earth First!

What I used to think about extremist environmental actions was that they were doomed to failure. The civil authorities would just sweep the protestors away and everything would go back to business as usual. Indeed, it was possible that their antics would turn people otherwise receptive to environmental views against the entire movement.

And this is exactly what Dave Foreman, one of the founders of Earth First!, used to believe, as he describes in his book Confessions of an Eco-Warrior. He worked with and for conservation organizations that took what they considered a more practical approach to environmental issues. Groups such as the Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council, and many others would meet with leaders of government and industry and try to convince them that sound environmental policy was profitable for everyone. This seems reasonable, doesn’t it?

Only it didn’t work out that way very often. Foreman describes his experiences with the extreme right wing Sagebrush Rebellion ranchers who wanted to take federal grazing land away from the taxpayers and keep it for themselves. The Sagebrush people created violent confrontations, and they considered mainstream environmental organizations to be their enemies.

The conciliatory approach wasn’t working very well. If you are part of a conciliatory environmentalist group, the right-wing extremists hate you as much as if you were a radical. So, for all the difference it makes, you might as well be part of a radical environmentalist group. They will hate you, but they would hate you no matter what. And this is still the case today.

This is why Foreman and others started Earth First! Back when he worked with mainstream organizations, he “was told to be rational, not emotional…I would lose credibility if I let my emotions show…But, damn it, I am an animal. A living being of flesh and blood, storm and fury. The oceans of the Earth course through my veins, the winds of the sky fill my lungs…I am alive! I am not…a cog in the industrial world…When a chainsaw slices into the heartwood of a two-thousand-year-old Coast Redwood, it’s slicing into my guts…” He and a few others decided, let the rage flow.

It seemed hopeless that anyone would pay attention to them. But when they staged a protest on Glen Canyon Dam, not destructive but very, very visible, they got in trouble but also got worldwide attention. Today, Earth First! associate organizations are found in many countries: Australia, Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic (which did not even exist when Earth First! was founded), France, Germany, India, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, Nigeria, New Zealand, the Philippines, Poland, Slovakia (which also did not yet exist), Spain, the UK, as well as the US.

One of the inspirations of the group was Edward Abbey’s novel The Monkey Wrench Gang. This was a fictional organization that carried out pranks against corporations and governments. The name comes from “throwing a monkey wrench into the works,” a wrench useful in manual labor but which, when thrown into the workings of a machine, can cause the whole mechanism to lock up. Nobody gets killed, but a lot of damage results. Foreman writes on page 23, “A monkey wrench thrown into the gears of the machine may not stop it. But it might delay it, make it cost more. And if feels good to put it there.”

Yes, I have to keep my emotions in their proper place when I do scientific research. But I am not just a scientist. I am also a passionate lover of the Earth. My role is not to stage protests, but to write, mostly books, but also blog essays like this one. I have retired from the academic world and feel too tired to participate in monkey wrench protests. But I am glad Earth First! is still at work, a counterbalance to the greenwashing [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwashing] of corporations that just pretend to be environmentally sound.

I suppose it is appropriate that I post this essay on midterm election day. In this election, environmental issues are mostly ignored.

Professor God

The way God is depicted by conservative Christians, he would have been the worst professor ever.

Suppose I, before I retired from professoring, had taught a class the way God supposedly teaches. According to conservative Christians, nearly everyone who has ever lived has been or is damned on account of disagreeing with one of numerous essential doctrines. This, of course, includes the people who never had a chance to even hear about these doctrines. Suppose I taught a course in which I locked the door and kept most of the students from attending the class. Then, I would give exams so hard that most of the class that got in the door failed the exams. What would my supervisor have said if 99% or more of the grades in my class were F? This would have been justification for corrective, and probably disciplinary, action on the part of the administration. Professor God could say, I taught the truth to pre-selected (predestined) students and if I didn’t like their answers, I flunked them, and that’s that.

It gets worse. I recently watched The Ten Commandments, the Cecil B. DeMille movie starring Charleton Heston and some inspiring sidekicks like Edward G. Robinson, Vincent Price, and, of course, Yul Brynner. I know it is fashionable today to spurn the “sand and sandals” epics of the mid-twentieth century. Those movies, of which The Ten Commandments was the most prominent, are easy to ridicule, especially when Heston (as Moses) seemed to be, after he became holy, nearly a log with a mask, speaking in Biblical phrases, and the narration, in faux King James English, were nearly intolerable. In this movie as in movies such as The Robe, the good characters seemed like robots. At least in The Robe, Jay Robinson played a really wickedly funny Emperor.

 

But I admit a secret admiration for sand and sandals movies. If only the line between good and evil were as clear as it appears in The Ten Commandments, and if only God’s presence were as easy to see as the red light on top of Mount Sinai!

In The Ten Commandments, God taught through proclamation. It would seem that Professor God was like the old-fashioned professor, one whom everyone would now hate, wearing his academic gown and proclaiming truths for students to write down. Almost no professor does this anymore.

Today, the ideal of education is to reveal the facts of the world and let the students explore them, figuring it out for themselves. In reality, they need some framework, some guidance for their explorations, but not rote memorization. It is amazing how long it took for academics to figure this out. One of the few academics before Thomas Henry Huxley (inventor of the modern biology teaching laboratory) who made the students explore the world for themselves was Aristotle. He invented the field trip. He had his students (in Asia Minor, not Athens) go to the seashore and the mountains, find things, and try to figure them out. They collected beetles (as Darwin did two millennia later) and birds’ nests. They dissected snakes. There was not yet any textbook to tell the students what they were supposed to find.

But Professor God would not have allowed this. If we see something in the world that puzzles us, we are not supposed to wonder about it, but simply accept what the ecclesiastical authorities, posing as God’s representatives, tell us. If you draw your own conclusions, you flunk. If you even ask inconvenient questions (how could a God of Love create an eternal Hell?) you flunk. Which means you burn in Hell forever.

Many of us believe that God, if there is one, invites us to look at all the facts of the world, explore them, draw our own conclusions from them, in discussion with one another. But this is not Professor God in the conservative Christian universe.

CheapGrace, a New Phone App

I have just posted a new video about a new phone app, which allows you to sin all you want to and yet get forgiven a thousand times a second. Available only to Republicans.

There is no such thing as human nature, I think. We have instincts, some we consider good (such as love) and some we consider evil (such as hatred). As we live, we create our own human nature, by (one would hope) practicing the good ones and minimizing the bad ones. This is true for all humans individually, if mentally normal; all ethnicities; and at all times in history. It is the legacy of evolution, of altruism. The reality is much more complex than this, but there is no time to explore this topic now.

That is the evolutionary view. The fundamentalist Christian view, however, is that everyone is a sinner unless God specifically forgives them. But as soon as you commit another sin, you have to ask forgiveness over again. The good news is that there is no Biblical limit to number of times God will forgive you. Even fundamentalist Christians would say that you cannot ask forgiveness a hundred thousand times and expect God to keep forgiving you, but, strictly speaking, there is no Biblical basis for this assertion, however reasonable it seems.

Theoretically, then, you could just keep doing whatever you want, and every time you sin, say “Woopsie, forgive me,” and God will forgive you.

But you could sin a hundred times a day. What happens if you die right after unforgiven sin number 57? What you need to do is to keep muttering “Woopsie, forgive me” all the time. This would be mind-numbing, but it would work.

What follows next is fiction.

You would go crazy by praying “Woopsie, forgive me” a hundred times an hour. But you don’t have to! This is the age of the phone app. You can download a phone app, “CheapGrace,” that is named after a concept created, disparagingly, by the World War II era Christian martyr Dietrich Boenhoeffer. It will send text messages to God demanding forgiveness. The free version (available from Gotohell.com) texts God 10 times per second. The version that you pay for will do it a thousand times a second. You think that God cannot handle a thousand pleas for forgiveness from billions of people each second? Remember, this is an infinite God we are talking about. This app will run in the background, so you can just forget all about it, and your sins are taken care of.

There are a couple of caveats, however.

First, it is available only to Republicans. You must click on the box indicating “I am a Republican,” and another box saying, “I am not a robot.”

Second, it is not available while your phone is updating itself, but that is usually at night when you are asleep, and you cannot sin. Of course, if you have insomnia, or if it turns out you can sin while asleep, then you are taking a little bit of a risk.

Technology can be fundamentalism’s best friend, in some cases.