Morgan Godwyn was a man of God, an Anglican minister who, after graduating from Christ Church, Oxford, in 1665 traveled to Virginia and subsequently to Barbados. When he returned to England in 1680, he wrote and published several tracts critical of the prevailing attitudes of colonial plantation owners.
One of the beliefs Godwyn found abhorrent was what was known as the pre-Adamite heresy, a notion championed by Dutch ecclesiastic Isaac de la Peyrere that there were men on the earth before Adam and only the Jews were descended from him.
This was a convenient assumption for slaveholders, for it allowed the argument that black slaves did not descend from Adam and were not party to any covenant between God and his children. Therefore slaves were not fully human and ought not be given any religious instruction or baptized Christian.
"[A] disingenuous and unmanly position had been formed," Godwyn wrote in his most famous and enduring work, The Negro's and Indians Advocate, with slaveholders insisting that "... though in their figure [blacks] carry some resemblances of manhood, yet are indeed no men" but rather "creatures destitute of souls, to be ranked among brute beasts, and treated accordingly."
Godwyn, on the other hand, believed that blacks were undeniably human, in part because they mastered "man's peculiar faculties" of "risibility and discourse"--anyone spending time among slaves would note they had senses of humor and were capable of communicating complex ideas.
They were people, Godwyn argued, and the differences between Africans and Europeans were merely the result of environmental and cultural issues. Or, as 19th-century Catholic catechism held, "the slow influences of food and climate and other circumstances."
Yet as progressive as Godwyn might seem to us today, we should note that his interest lay in the conversion and baptism of slaves, not in their emancipation. He thought they should be treated humanely, not freed.
I think about people like Godwyn who seem to walk right up to the brink of enlightenment. They stop at some arbitrary intellectual moment and dare to go no further. Maybe their imaginations failed them.
But I suspect they knew in their hearts what they understood they could not say--that all men, even poor men, even black men, even women were complicated and compromised creatures capable of great generosity and terrible cruelty, that we were all more alike than different, and it was only the vagaries of history and dull dumb luck that determined who was master and who was slave.
Maybe it was even within their power to imagine a world without masters and slave--without tribes.
If they could (and they could), they kept their mouths shut about it, for the same reasons a lot of us keep our mouths shut about the way our world works today. Politics is about accomplishing what might be accomplished given the practical realities of our time. This means the obvious must sometimes go unsaid by candidates for high office. Sometimes the dumb and popular must be affirmed by people who know better. Sometimes we the people won't accept anything but flattering lies.
We (some of us, anyway) keep our mouths shut because we understand how little power we have to change things, and maybe we understand that the status quo benefits us. We shake our heads and turn off the distressing news and believe in the version peddled to help us sleep.
You're not stupid, though you might pretend to be; given how fashionable willful ignorance has become you might argue that it's become smart to act stupid, that it makes you more relatable and authentic and allows you license to do dumb and entertaining stuff.
Being an idiot might be a good career move, and if you can be a mean idiot--a thick bully with a gut full of unearned self-regard and telegenic unpredictability--you might have a future in the TV business, unlike all those boring Democrats.
Cruelty is delicious, especially when we can indulge it under the color of noble purpose or necessity. We have a taste for it. If I can shock you for your own good, to teach you a lesson--if the man in the white coat says I must--then I will do it.
You don't have to think about the Good Germans and what they didn't do during the Third Reich when they didn't know (they knew, just like Morgan Godwyn knew). Think about how less than 100 years ago, people like us lynched other people. People like us took grinning selfies with burnt corpses.
People like us follow orders. People like us are complicit with evil. You don't have to be special to be cruel. You don't have to be a monster.
All you have to be is scared. All you have to be is human and weak and selfish. All you have to do is reconcile yourself to the idea that economies are oiled with blood and tears. All you have to do is decide that some abstract political goal is worth more than the lives of others. All you have to do is to buy into the Randian conceit of the power of unfettered self-interest: Greed is good, meanness is inevitable, and tribalism is inevitable.
Maybe all you have to be is lazy and self-satisfied. Maybe all you have to do is retreat into your diversions, to Netflix and chill your way through the next few years, waiting for the inevitable swing back.
"The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice," a young preacher once said. I hope that is true though I fear the Randians and nihilists are right about morality being something mankind invented to insulate itself from a cold cosmos. It's obvious that a lot of folks in power are counting on it just being some pretty words.
Another preacher told us we should "love one another" and we killed him for that. Out of a lack of imagination. Or because that New Commandment just seemed like piling on.
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Editorial on 06/30/2019