"Asking questions" that deny people's humanity over and over isn't exactly a positive intellectual exercise.
We pretty conclusively decided that race based chattel slavery was wrong a while ago. But why? Can we keep expressing ideas and demanding proof of these claims? Can we do it forever? Can we do it while holding positions of power at institutions that are attended by black students?
Because the abolition of slavery is one of the greatest achievements of our civilization.
New generations of humans are constantly being born, and until we teach them, they don't know why this is. They don't know why slavery was such a black mark on our history. They don't understand what it does not just to the people involved, but to a society. They don't know why it proliferated so easily (and this is still very relevant today; when our society turns a blind eye to illegal immigrant labor, it's an echo of the same economics that made slavery easy for past generations to accept).
You should be able to sit down with a 9th grader and explain to them, this is what slavery was, this is how common it was for most of history. This is why it was so tempting and these are the benefits people reaped from it. But this is how we realized that the costs outweighed the benefits, and how we created a better world at a great cost to many people.
Crucially, it's important to explain to someone how slavery would be bad for them and their community, even if they themselves were not a slave.
It's important to teach all of this to the new humans we raise. "It was bad, end of story" is not enough. The best way for them to learn is to reason through the arguments on both sides, explore the history, see how we got to where we are, and draw their own conclusions. Because you can't force a belief on someone. They need to get there themselves.
If you ban the discussion they are going to reach their beliefs without guidance. And the isolated, the lonely, the angry will end up with some very dark beliefs. It's happening now as a direct response to censorship culture.
I completely understand that slavery is a difficult and very personal topic for a lot of people. These are hard conversations to have. But for the sake of future generations we need to have them. Beliefs are stronger when they're justified. They are strongest when they are challenged, defended, and the challenges are defeated. We should never stop doing that.
Explaining why slavery is wrong and why its proponents were monstrous is not the same as "lets have a continual public debate about my right to own you until the end of time".
Not only does this distract from productive intellectual discussion, it carries an implied threat that if a historically oppressed population ever slips up and fails to defend themselves that they'll be forced back into oppression.
Any explanation of why slavery is wrong falls flat unless you examine why it has been a part of so many human societies for most of history. You have to look at why so many people supported it, not just write them off as monsters.
Inevitably, that requires you to play devil's advocate. I agree, it's callous, insensitive, and unproductive if someone runs around telling other people that he has the right to own them. I don't think we should encourage that. But how can you understand a point of view if you're not allowed to state it?
That's exactly the ability we've lost as a society. The single most powerful thing you can do to bury the practice of slavery and everything like it is to sit someone down and tell them to write an essay explaining an argument in favor of slavery, then to defend it.
Slavery has been justified with many arguments. Some race based, some economic, some paternalistic. But what they all have in common is that when you explore them in depth and you see where they lead, you end up in a dark place. A place you realize you personally don't want to live in, that feels fundamentally wrong and detrimental to all the best things a human being can be.
That experience is personal, it's transformative and it's how a person develops a fundamental sense of justice which they then carry with them for the rest of their lives.
I think there is a lot of really bad discourse out there about controversial and sensitive issues (for instance, very little good comes out of having this type of discussion on Twitter, where everything is a reaction and people rarely think before they tweet). No that stuff is not productive, but there is a way to have these discussions which makes us better people. They used to be the subject matter of high school Civics until they were deemed too insensitive. We have moved backwards as a society by moving them to Twitter.
> We pretty conclusively decided that race based chattel slavery was wrong a while ago.
Unfortunate that you should use this example since slavery was finally abolished precisely because people kept "asking questions" contrary to the prevailing zeitgeist about why slaves did not enjoy the same rights as other humans.
Never has then been a clearer demonstration of why the "stop asking questions" stance advocated by progressives is intellectually bankrupt.
> We pretty conclusively decided that race based chattel slavery was wrong a while ago. But why? Can we keep expressing ideas and demanding proof of these claims?
Obviously yes? How else would we know that we are right?
We pretty conclusively decided that race based chattel slavery was wrong a while ago. But why? Can we keep expressing ideas and demanding proof of these claims? Can we do it forever? Can we do it while holding positions of power at institutions that are attended by black students?