Walter Block is under fire from a bunch of very silly people, for reasons that he recounts in this week’s Wall Street Journal.
Unfortunately, if you’re not a Journal subscriber that link probably won’t work for you. Fortunately, it doesn’t matter, because these people are as unoriginal as they are silly, and the issues are pretty much the same as they were when a bunch of equally silly people ganged up on Walter six years ago. So you’ll be pretty much caught up if you just re-read the accounts from back then.
You could, for example, re-read my 2014 blog posts titled Block Heads and Chips Off the Block. I’ll even make this easier for you by reposting the first one right here:
The righteously irrepressible Walter Block has made it his mission to defend the undefendable, but there are limits. Chattel slavery, for example, will get no defense from Walter, and he recently explained why: The central problem with slavery is that you can’t walk away from it. If it were voluntary, it wouldn’t be so bad. In Walter’s words:
The slaves could not quit. They were forced to ‘associate’ with their masters when they would have vastly preferred not to do so. Otherwise, slavery wasn’t so bad. You could pick cotton, sing songs, be fed nice gruel, etc. The only real problem was that this relationship was compulsory.
A group of Walter’s colleagues at Loyola university (who, for brevity, I will henceforth refer to as “the gang of angry yahoos”) appears to concur:
Traders in human flesh kidnapped men, women and children from the interior of the African continent and marched them in stocks to the coast. Snatched from their families, these individuals awaited an unknown but decidedly terrible future. Often for as long as three months enslaved people sailed west, shackled and mired in the feces, urine, blood and vomit of the other wretched souls on the boat….The violation of human dignity, the radical exploitation of people’s labor, the brutal violence that slaveholders utilized to maintain power, the disenfranchisement of American citizens, the destruction of familial bonds, the pervasive sexual assault and the systematic attempts to dehumanize an entire race all mark slavery as an intellectually, economically, politically and socially condemnable institution no matter how, where, or when it is practiced.
So everybody’s on the same side, here, right? Surely nobody believes the slaves were voluntarily snatched from their families, shackled and mired in waste, sexually assaulted and all the rest. All the bad stuff was involuntary and — this being the whole point — was possible only because it was involuntary. That’s a concept with broad applicability. One could, for example, say the same about Auschwitz. Nobody would have much minded the torture and the gas chambers if there had been an opt-out provision. And this is a useful observation, if one is attempting to argue that involuntary associations are the root of much evil.
Nevertheless — that is, even though they agree with him — the yahoos go on to denounce Walter’s words as “untrue and offensive” — and to call for his condemnation and censure — because — well, as far as I can tell, because a certain kind of person just loves getting high on the euphoria of outrage, though God knows there are enough real outrages in the world that it’s hard to see why people feel like they’ve got to manufacture them.
Enter Father Kevin Wildes, the president of Loyola University —- you know, the guy who’s supposed to have his faculty’s back — to publish this astonishing response:
Dr. Block made two claims, one empirical and one conceptual, that are simply wrong. First, he made the claim that chattel slavery “was not so bad.” “Bad” is a comparative measure that, like every comparison, is understood in a contrast set. My initial question was where is the evidence? Dr. Block makes an assertion but gives no evidence for his assertion.
His second claim is an example of a fundamental logical mistake. In peaking of discriminatory lunch counters, Dr. Block makes the mistake of assuming that because of the Civil Rights legislation people would be compelled to associate with others against their will. The Civil Rights legislation did no such thing.
What the Civil Rights legislation did was prevent places like Woolworth’s from excluding people because of their race. No one was forced to sit at the lunch counter. The law simply made clear that people could not be excluded from the lunch counter because of their race.
If these remarks were made in a paper for my class, I would return the paper with a failing grade. This is hardly critical thinking. Rather it is a position filled with assertions, without argument or evidence, to gain attention.
My lord. Where to begin? Let’s skip right by the irony of a Catholic priest admonishing us to reject claims made with inadequate evidence, and get right to the meat of this:
1) Father Wildes opposes “slavery enforced against someone’s free will”. Professor Block says: “The real problem with slavery was that it was compulsory”. If Father Wildes really wanted to reinforce his own point, I wonder why he failed to quote Professor Block with approval.
2) Professor Block says that, except for its compulsory nature, chattel slavery was “not so bad”. Father Wildes calls this “an empirical claim”. Well, that’s one reading. Another reading is that it’s a principled claim, namely an instance of the principle that nothing is so bad as long as you can walk away from it. In fact, given the context, this would seem to be the obvious reading. Why did Father Wildes choose the reading that is both less likely and less charitable?
3) For the sake of argument, though, let’s suppose that Professor Block’s claim was meant to be empirical — i.e. a claim that the material conditions of chattel slavery were, by the standards of the time, not so bad. That is indeed an empirical claim. Father Wildes says this claim is “simply wrong”. That’s also an empirical claim. Father Wildes considers it reprehensible that Professor Block would make an empirical claim without citing evidence. In the course of doing so, Father Wildes makes an equally strong empirical claim, without citing evidence. You don’t need years of Jesuit training to see the problem here.
(Side note: Surely there were in fact slaves who were treated well — except of course for the involuntary part — and slaves who were treated abominably. If you’re interested in what sorts of treatment were most common in various times and locations, the place to start is Time on the Cross and the critical literature that it spawned. It has occurred to me to wonder whether Father Wildes, for all his professed certainty about this empirical question, has bothered to peruse that literature.)
4) I am dismayed by Father Wildes’s blindness to the clear analogy between being forced to work someone else’s land and being forced to serve someone else’s lunch. (Are these exactly the same thing? Of course not. That’s why the word “analogy” was invented.) But of course we all have our blind spots. On the other hand, a lot of us went into academia precisely because we like having our eyes opened. We are in fact particularly delighted when our eyes are opened by our students. Blindness is easy to forgive. Proud and defiant blindness — blindness coupled with an announcement that one has no interest in seeing things in any other way — is quite another thing. And malicious blindness — the sort of blindness that would punish a student with a failing grade for daring to point to an obvious truth that Father Wildes happens to have overlooked — is a most distressing thing indeed. One wonders why a man with such deep-seated hostility to careful thought, and particularly to careful thought on the part of his students, chose an academic career in the first place.
The problem possibly only arose because the NYT quoted Block saying “slavery was not so bad” without the context, giving the wrong impression he was pro-slavery. He sued, they got a dismissal under SLAPP. He appealed and won. NYT settled. Justice done – except it seems to have reared its head again.
The appeals court ruling to reverse the dismissal here:
http://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/16/16-30966-CV0.pdf
Most of the furore was reaction to the mis-quoted statement, not what he actually said. I don’t think we know what many of these commentators were reacting to.
The Block quote (should I put that in block quotes?) was obviously intended to provoke – which of course it did. It is exaggeration to make a point. The use of the phrase “nice gruel” which is sort of an oxymoron should give it away. [SL pointed out in the original that “pick cotton” is also a give away, as nobody does this as a pleasant activity.]
“I am dismayed by Father Wildes’s blindness to the clear analogy between being forced to work someone else’s land and being forced to serve someone else’s lunch.”
Analogies are not precise. They are intended to make a complex thing more understandable by reference to more easily understood, simple thing. Where the differences are greater than the similarity they fail. The differences between the lunch counter and slavery are so large that the analogy fails to my mind.
You could say that no slave was forced to work for white people – they could always kill themselves or allow themselves to be brutally slain. Just as the lunch counter does not force anyone to associate, they could always get another job or close the counter. It is only the strength of the penalty one must pay if one chooses not to comply. You always have a choice.
Whilst this does have some philosophical validity, as the existentialists may tell us, the difference in penalty and costs of complying are so vast that the analogy fails as anything useful.
However, Block does consider it useful because he holds the “law of free association” (which I do not think is a law in any sense) to be paramount, and uses this analogy to illustrate it. It succeeds on his terms.
Block says, “The Civil Rights Act of 1964, then, to a much smaller degree of course, made partial slaves of the owners of establishments like Woolworths.”
He is espousing the strict libertarian view that any transgression of the law of free association is bad and using slavery and lunch counters to make the point. I still reject that the point as missing out on a lot of nuance. The term “partial slave” is not very meaningful in my book.
I don’t know why this has happened now. The petition against Block reads like it was written by a 10 year old. It is quite amusing.
https://www.change.org/p/loyola-university-new-orleans-administration-fire-walter-block?recruiter=355294700&utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=facebook&utm_campaign=share_petition&recruited_by_id=a4743b40-3a9f-11e5-acb1-191591d2395c&use_react=false
I have now had a look back at the previous posts. Much of what I say is similar to those posts. In the second, you expressed the arguments as a syllogism, with premise 3 being there are no bad aspects to slavery except involuntary association.
You thought this was was true, but could not rule out other factors. Block considered this to be true a priori. Several people commented that there were things about US slavery that were intrinsic to that slavery and bad also – that it requires a slave-holding society, that it only happened to black people so requires racist views, that it brutalised white children etc. Block also believes that one can legitimately sell oneself into slavery. The test then seems to be, if the slaves had volunteered, would those other factors still apply? It was only offered to black people, so that still applies. The society to enforce the voluntary slavery still applies. The children growing up in a brutal society still applies. I think premise 3 fails, but am open to discussion on this.
On a semantic note, “defend the unefendable” is a somewhat strange construction. The usual term is “defend the indefensible.” A google search the former only comes up with Block’s book up to page 5. Is this a deliberate choice to convey something, or is it just Block’s idiosyncratic preference?
Harold: Thanks for your exceptionally thoughtful thoughts. I don’t thank you nearly often enough for your posts of this type. (I also, of course, don’t always agree with everything you say, but in this case — and not infrequently in other cases — I think everything you’ve said is thoughtful and well worth attending to.)
Harold,
Analogies are not precise. They are intended to make a complex thing more understandable by reference to more easily understood, simple thing. Where the differences are greater than the similarity they fail. The differences between the lunch counter and slavery are so large that the analogy fails to my mind.
That isn’t the only use of an analogy. Sometimes analogies that are different in form but the same in essence are made to test the consistency of a position. An example would be Steve’s argument that he made against the “Buy American” mantra that if racism is wrong because it’s discrimination against someone over something that they have no control over, skin color in this case, then it’s equally wrong to discriminate against someone who had no control over where they were born since they didn’t have any control over that either.
You could say that no slave was forced to work for white people – they could always kill themselves or allow themselves to be brutally slain. Just as the lunch counter does not force anyone to associate, they could always get another job or close the counter. It is only the strength of the penalty one must pay if one chooses not to comply. You always have a choice.
Whilst this does have some philosophical validity, as the existentialists may tell us, the difference in penalty and costs of complying are so vast that the analogy fails as anything useful.
How does a difference in “penalty costs” nullify an analogy that’s meant to show that if slavery is bad because it’s forced association for people you don’t want to work for, then servicing people you don’t want to serve is equally bad for the same reason?
This is just the tip of the iceberg. People are being canceled for a lot less. There is no end in sight to this trend. I would not be too surprised to see this blog being kicked off the internet in a few months.
These logical arguments do not mean anything to the cancel culture.
I’m not sure that I agree with your point (2). It seems reasonable to me to interpret the third and fourth sentences in Block’s quote as making an empirical rather than a principled claim. It’s not clear to me how the fourth sentence reinforces the principled claim, or what it contributes to the argument beyond what’s already in the fifth sentence. While this is largely a subjective call, it seems to me that a more natural reading of the structure of the paragraph is that it’s dividing the experience of slavery into an “empirical” aspect (the actual experience of slavery, independent of how that experience began or whether it could end) and a “principled” aspect (the fact that it was involuntary), and claiming that (a) one of those aspects was bad and (b) the other one wan’t, with both of those claims being individually non-vacuous.
In any event, take it as one additional data point that someone who is largely sympathetic to your general argument has a different read than yours on exactly what Block appears to be arguing in this short paragraph (not necessarily on what he actually believes).
Also, a note on point (3): I’m a little surprised that you mention “Time on the Cross” as the natural place to start for the empirical historical conditions of American slaves. It was nowhere near the first work of history to consider that question, and my (non-expert) understanding is that it is generally discredited among the community of historians: see the review of several critiques at https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1975/10/02/the-true-tragical-history-of-time-on-the-cross/. I know that your mention of “the critical literature that it spawned” includes critiques like the ones reviewed there, but I’m not sure if “Time on the Cross” is in fact the best place to start studying the issue.
For what it’s worth, I found Prof Block’s essay published at https://apkmetro.com/some-students-want-me-fired-for-a-thought-experiment/
His defense is that he is so much against slavery that he favors paying reparations for it!
Next he will be telling us that he donated to Black Lives Matter.
I don’t think this is a free speech question anymore. This is a question of how much he will be required to grovel to keep his job.
Roger Schlafly (#8): If you believe that Walter Block is “groveling”, as opposed to restating a position he has held deeply and defended for a long time, then you clearly have got no sense whatever of what Walter Block is all about.
If you want to refute his *arguments* (after having digested them), I welcome your followup. If you only want to disparage his *conclusion*, while completely ignoring his arguments, then you’re way off topic.
You’re right, I don’t know Block and I was not addressing his arguments.
I just note that in an attempt to keep his job, he found it necessary to say, “I repudiate slavery on each grounds. I even favor reparations, … Slavery ought to have been declared against the law, ex publish facto.”.
I was disparaging him, but the forces that got him where he is.
I meant I was NOT disparaging Block. Also, university presidents have a history of pandering to whoever happens to be pressuring them at the moment. A lot of university presidents would say similarly silly things, I am afraid. There is news every day of someone being unfairly canceled for something.
#4 Z. yes, my thoughts were evolving. I think it fails to be persuasive (to me anyway), because the difference is so large. It does not fail as an analogy, and does indeed illustrate what Block wanted it to.
#3 Thank you for your kind words.
From the bit I can read of the WSJ article, he says the students are upset because he says slavery is wrong “because it goes against Libertarianism, not because it is morally wrong.” Not sure I get the distinction?
As impressed as I am with people who have the intellectual courage to attempt to engage in this kind of open critical dialogue — the least honest statement going around these days is that we want an honest conversation about race — I’m tempted to say on pragmatic grounds that sometimes picking examples that are too extreme is counterproductive. However apparently this has always been Block’s MO, and comments like this may explain why:
(from Wiki) Economist Murray Rothbard thought that by emphasizing marginal scenarios, Defending the Undefendable “does far more to demonstrate the workability and morality of the free market than a dozen sober tomes on more respectable industries and activities. By testing and proving the extreme cases, he all the more illustrates and vindicates the theory.”
In a tempered fairness, Time on the Cross, which states a few ideas based on applying econometrics to the historical topic of the antebellum south, asserted:
1)The material (not psychological) conditions of the lives of slaves compared favorably with those of free industrial workers. This is not to say that they were good by modern standards. It merely emphasizes the hard lot of all workers, free or slave, during the first half of the nineteenth century.
2)Slaves were exploited in the sense that part of the income which they produced was expropriated by their owners. However, the rate of expropriation was much lower than has generally been presumed. Over the course of his lifetime, the typical slave field hand received about 90 percent of the income he produced.
3)The typical slave field hand was not lazy, inept, and unproductive. On average he was harder-working and more efficient than his white counterpart.
4)Slave agriculture was not inefficient compared with free agriculture. Economies of large-scale operation, effective management, and intensive utilization of labor and capital made southern slave agriculture 35 percent more efficient than the northern system of family farming.
5)The belief that slave-breeding, sexual exploitation, and promiscuity destroyed the black family is a myth. The family was the basic unit of social organization under slavery. It was to the economic interest of planters to encourage the stability of slave families and most of them did so. Most slave sales were either of whole families or of individuals who were at an age when it would have been normal for them to have left the family.
All-in-all, it states when you treat people as if they were a form of capital, those who own the person will treat them as a form of capital to be maintained. Though it is important to mention the attempted monopolistic capture of cotton in the south, via the king cotton argument, was inevitably destroyed at the end of the Civil War.
These bullet-points are in stark contrast to the qualitative historical discussions of slaves during the time – most notably coming from significant figureheads like Fredrick Douglass. Where Douglass talks about the vast mistreatment of slaves, which we all know about today.
In the spirit of the economic historian McCloskey (she wrote about Robert Fogel’s impact as well in her pamphlet on the sins of modern economics), to resolve this historical issue, I’d argue we should look at the lived experiences of the slaves and compare them to the overall economic social structure they had to live within. Then find out where they agree. You can’t just look at the econometrics, and you can’t just look at the historical depictions of the era either. You need both, and the personal experiences (the microeconomics) of the slaves must inform and take precedence over the economic social realities granted to us via econometric analysis (the macroeconomics). There’s really nothing more too it than a re-interpretation of the Lucas Critique. Though with McCloskey, she probably would have a problem with the “hyper-rationalism” arguments associated to the contemporary world of Chicago.
So I would say that the central problem to the corruption of the antebellum south was Block’s position – slavery was involuntary. As a comparison, this kind of corruption is commonly seen in many Paternalistic societies where the father of the household is the final say in the decision-making of the familial unit. On a “macro” level, it seems like the “firm” is working, but when you get into the “micro”, there is something deeply wrong going on. That which is deeply wrong is the involuntary nature to social organization.