Have we? The culture and values that built this country are stained in blood, violence, and subjugation. I feel we are actually losing the enlightenment that came afterwards and regressing back.
As a kid in the UK one of the main ideas I had of the US was Cowboys vs Indians either as a show or a game, and the establishment of the US was largely that - white guys killing the native Americans and taking the land.
Well only a couple countries participated in the creation of the Atlantic slave trade, and very few in history have engaged in chattel slavery to the scale the USA did.
Seems like a very Americentric perspective. There's still plenty of chattel slavery out there right now[1]. In that respect, the idea that the US is uniquely bad is like the "evil twin" version of American exceptionalism[2].
It's hard to find other examples of it (or at least the inherent natural inferiority of one group of residents) being written into the country's foundational legal document. We are indeed exceptional in that regard.
It's time to get off your high horse. If you eat meat, future humans will regard you the same way as we regard the slave owners of yesteryear. Perhaps even worse.
Judge people by the ways in which they push their society's morals forward, not retroactively after hundreds of years of morals evolving.
No. Slavery is a unique evil and people knew it was a unique evil since the time of the ancient Greeks.
I refuse to accept "it was just the way things were at the time" when there were people opposed to slavery thousands of years ago. Aristotle wrote about them:
> others however maintain that for one man to be another man’s master is contrary to nature, because it is only convention that makes the one a slave and the other a freeman and there is no difference between them by nature, and that therefore it is unjust, for it is based on force.
There were abolitionists in the first days of the United States through to the civil war. People knew it was wrong or had ample opportunity to hear it argued that it was wrong, and furthermore, the inherent wrongness of it should be obvious to anyone that encounters it, and I don't give a moral pass to anyone that brushes it off because it was common any more than I do for American politicians that brush off school shootings because it's common.
The things you listed have always been with us, sure. What we’ve lost is the ability to see objective truth. And maybe people celebrated senseless killing in the past too and we just didn’t have access to their sick mentality before the internet.
Mobs of white people (including children) used to gather around the town square to hang black people. They would literally have picnics while doing it. I feel like the majority of our population is historically illiterate. On the scale of senseless killings, this doesn't even rank.
This is the kind of rhetoric which seriously undermines the history of American philosophical thought. The things you mentioned are found in the history of every nation. It's important to keep track of what should be improved, while also acknowledging what worked well and why.
> This is the kind of rhetoric which seriously undermines the history of American philosophical thought.
Hard disagree. Ignoring it is what allows systemic injustice to persist -- why do we care, today, what Eugenicists in the early 1900s had to say? Jim Crow implementers and supporters? Daughters of the Confederacy?
If the reality of history undermines your respect for American philosophical thought, then perhaps the American philosophical thought is not quite worthy of the pedestal it was placed on.
You’re right that it’s important to acknowledge the pain and suffering caused by bad policy and practices, and it’s important to examine what went wrong so we don’t repeat those mistakes.
That said I think it’s important to separate good ideas from their troubled past and use them where they still apply. People are not perfect, but a good idea is good no matter where it comes from. Those good ideas shape culture and shape the destiny of nations. That’s what happened in America, and there’s a lot to be learned from the past. Unless the point is to undermine the recipe that made America into what it is today, then it doesn’t make sense to measure people who didn’t live in our time by our sensibilities, morality or ethics.
We can learn their good stuff, and improve on what they didn’t do well.
Maybe it would help to pluck out the few good ideas from the bad slop. What do you consider specifically unique in the American experiment that transcends the toxic swamp of suppression of freedoms America often engages in?
> the toxic swamp of suppression of freedoms America often engage
Seems extremist to take that view, especially when all nations have just as bloody or dark histories.
But a lot of what shaped initial American thought were Enlightenment ideals, primarily the works of John Locke. So the foundation is solid enough, but is there more that can be done to produce effective implementations? Definitely.
It’s important to note that there are good ideas everywhere, and no one culture or nation has had hegemony or monopoly on producing the best works over time.
I personally also like the fact that the way the American revolutionaries thought shaped the progress of American science up to the 20th century. Here’s a recent lecture on this, but there’s no recording that I can find.
First off, not extremist. Let's give you the benefit of the doubt there, perhaps you simply didn't recognize you undercut your credibility in a discussion when you dismiss people having a different view of history by assigning them to an extremist bucket -- nowhere left to learn or discuss when you start there. Further, mild whataboutism doesn't support your case either.
Second, the Scottish enlightenment wad wonderful! Not unique to America, so recognizing that the darkest parts of our history are decidedly not representive of the Enlightenment, my classical liberal ideals, and I suspect yours too, does nothing to the case that America did a good job adopting some of the ideals of the Enlightenment in the constitution. We could have gone the French route with the horrors of Robspierre, but we didnt, whether due to lack of population density, aristocracy, or any number of factors.
We agree completely that cultural differences, known as diversity, have outsized benefits.
I'll review the science idea.
Thanks again for sharing your thoughts. We really aren't far apart. I simply see slavery, genocide, and other horrors of the American past as necessary to recognize in order to set context, and in no way does that diminish the astonishing success of our American experiment. Indeed, in spite of these stains on our history, we remain a nation that does the right thing, as Churchill puts it, after exhausting all other options. And that's a uniqur thing to history.
In my view, if we can't acknowledge our past deficits, in no way can we comprehend the present flaws sufficiently to motivate action and collaboration.