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Comment by chuckee | Hacker News Reader

Jefferson more than just didn't live up to his ideals by owning slaves. His ideals themselves would be anathema today:

Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people [negros] are to be free. Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them. It is still in our power to direct the process of emancipation, and deportation, peaceably, and in such slow degrees, as that the evil will wear off insensibly; and their places be, pari passu, filled up by free white laborers. If, on the contrary, it is left to force itself on, human nature must shudder at the prospect held up. -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson_and_slavery

Rather conflicts with the narrative that the US was founded as a melting pot nation.

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Projecting contemporary morals backwards is fraught for many reasons, not least of which is the fact that we know scientific facts people in Jefferson’s time didn’t.

If you were a European in 1780, and you believed that all people were morally equal, would it necessarily follow that all people were factually equal in every capacity? Would you really look at London and New York on one hand, and virtually anywhere else on the other, and conclude that the people who built those respective places were fungible?

How much does scientific knowledge shape moral thinking? In particular, how much does contemporary knowledge of the minimal genetic differences between groups of humans—something that wouldn’t be discovered until 150+ years later—color the conclusions we draw from the obvious differences in civilizations land technological achievement between people of different nations?

> Rather conflicts with the narrative that the US was founded as a melting pot nation.

The narrative is that America is a melting pot, not that it was founded as such. The founders were virtually all of British heritage and the country was founded as England 2.0. But starting with German American immigration in the early 19th century it very quickly became an immigrant nation.

He had six kids with one of his slaves. That slave was his wife's half-sister, because his father in law had six kids with his slave. The mother of the slave also had a white father and slave mother in turn.

Ignoring for a moment the question of whether someone you own as property can give consent to entering a child bearing arrangement in which the children will also be property, that's a whole lot of "melting" going on.

As uncomfortable as it is, this is all true. I'm not saying that means we need to 'cancel Jefferson' but maybe we should take notice of the ways in which standards of acceptability have changed throughout the ages. These changes in morals continue, one has to wonder what we do today that will be seen as barbaric in 100 years

> one has to wonder what we do today that will be seen as barbaric in 100 years

It's probably easy to come up with a list of dozens of common practices which cruelly mistreat the vulnerable, take away freedom, squander human potential, damage the environment (or the whole planet), and/or increase suffering while destroying things that are beautiful and beneficial.

Hopefully a more humane future will have long abandoned them as barbaric vestiges of the past.

It strikes me as pure arrogance that people think they are somehow morally superior because they have the benefit of looking back. Hindsight and all that. I hope they are judged with the same unreasonable severity that they judge others.

It’s also myopic to think that moral changes are only a function of “progress” in an abstract sense. Moral changes often accompany technological changes that significantly change circumstances.

For much of human history, human life was just a lot less valuable. The child mortality rate in 1800 was 46%. That means that one out of two children didn’t make it to their 5th birthday. A death of a child is a life altering experience for people today. Back then it happened to nearly everyone all the time. What did that do to people’s estimation of the value of life?

I think you can see this in other areas as well. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the legal and social equality between men and women has increased greatly alongside economic and technological developments that have diminished the advantages flowing from men’s greater strength and endurance. An economy built around heavy factory work and construction, like the early 20th century, is going to affect perception of social roles very differently than an economy built around office work.

Jefferson was a wealthy and powerful man who abandoned his own children to slavery. What kind of technological context might be relevant? The hindsight concern is valid in some cases but his was far from an "any one of us might be next" kind of failing.

The motivation for even attempting to excuse Jefferson is obviously to protect ideas about government and liberty from being contaminated. But they're at far more risk IMO when instead we say, well his own estate was medieval but xyz, or it's not pertinent, or won't we all be judged wanting, etc

The moral relationship between people and their children has changed a lot. People back then abandoned illegitimate children all the time. Studies show, for example, that childhood mortality rates for illegitimate children were often twice as high as for legitimate children. E.g. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Infant-mortality-among-l....

Nobody is excusing Jefferson, because that’s not the purpose of this exercise. The history is what it is. But it’s important to understand and appreciate Jefferson. Many people have ideas about “government and liberty.” But Jefferson’s ideas produced one of the most prosperous societies in the history of the world.

I'm confused by why you'd point out that historically parents were more ambivalent, if not to excuse Jefferson having enslaved his own offspring (which was not actually happening to everyone all the time).

You don’t need to excuse anything to try and understand something. For example even in 2021, we have Afghans who refuse to send their girls to school. We can’t even comprehend that mindset here in America. We don’t need to excuse it to acknowledge that there may be more to it than us simply being better than Afghans. Pastoral societies are often strongly male dominated even compared to similarly undeveloped agricultural societies.

The point is that morality isn’t simply about “we are better than the ignorant people of the past.” That’s part of it obviously, but scientific and technological change often changes the context of how we think about things.

We already do! I grew up in Virginia in the 1990s when it was a red state. Even back then if you toured Monticello (which everyone did) you’d learn that part of the history.

QI style quiz question:

Which American president had children with his slave?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/08/13/wa...

As that notes, some of the claims haven't been proven with DNA, but that was also the case with Jefferson, until it wasn't.

I don't think an insignificant portion of Americans want to deport non-white people with cries of "go back to where you came from"

And, groups like BLM will tell you that the white government is still opressing free black citizens.

The only difference between that and your quote is optimism vs pessimism on whether the problems can be resolved. A lot of the current social justice views are that the injustice will always be there, but we can consistently reduce it over time

It was a melting pot of the British, the Irish, the Dutch, the French etc. In the old world all nations lived relatively isolated, save them whose profession involved travel, that was expensive and painstaking.

The Irisih? You'd find many that would oppose the integration of their culture into American culture at the time. Let alone German culture.

Make no mistake, the USA at the outset was meant to be an Anglo nation, not a melting pot.

>> You'd find many that would oppose the integration of their culture into American culture at the time. Let alone German culture

Well the "many" failed in their opposition then. The default culture of the US is German, German is the largest self-reported ancestry group in the US.

They were actually very successful. German culture in the US was wiped out and the Anglo culture eventually dominated those of German ancestry.

Do Lincoln next.

Jefferson's idea that whites and Blacks of his time could not come together is totally reasonable. To argue otherwise is to argue that early America was not too racist. It is only after great historical strife and trauma that we find ourselves in an increasingly blended society.

>...US was founded as a melting pot nation.

I've never heard "melting pot" refer to periods before the late 1800s.

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