White European Males

Someone in the comments of my previous article, “Roman Catholicism is the source of damage in our culture today”, suggested that I was “sounding like the Westboro kooks who think they're the only 20 people who are pure enough to be saved”.

I assure you that I am not intending to sound this way. I’m not going to be like Martin Luther, throwing ink wells at the devil in his room, and nor am I going to go into screeds about “know nothings”.

Instead I am taking seriously some of the things that the Roman Catholic Church officially says, the way they have positioned themselves “in the world”. I’m looking at their history, and political philosophy and I am trying to understand how this country, a mere 30 years after the fall of communism in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, can have so many agitators working to implement socialism today.

It’s “white European males” who find themselves at the bottom of all the “intersectionality” charts these days – It is “white European males” who are said by those on “the left” to be responsible for most of the evils in the world. I look at Roman Catholicism, which undoubtedly, for hundreds of years, was the primary intellectual environment for “white European males”, and I’m saying to myself, “I wonder if there’s a connection”.

With all of this in mind, I am an enthusiastic Trump voter who believes that the left/right divide has aligned itself on the person of Donald Trump, precisely because Trump is not an ideological person. He calls himself a “counter-puncher”, and it is purely an act of Providence, I am sure, that the United States finds itself today with a “political left” that is almost wholly united in its zeal against Trump.

So the “conservativism” that we see in Trump is almost purely a response by him to “counter-punch” against “the political left”, which at a political level includes virtually all Democrats, some “NeverTrump” Republicans, and some high-minded Christians who will never vote for someone who is less pure in his personal life than, say, John Piper. And which, at a cultural level, includes the news media, most colleges and universities, lots and lots of younger people who are just caught up in “the spirit of the age” (which is largely embodied by “wokism”).

In 2016, I had many conversations with fellow Triablogue writers, to the effect that Trump wasn’t conservative, that he would show his liberal side. And he has done so with his recent pronouncement that he is the most “gay-friendly” president in history – a thing that makes me cringe, but I try to understand it in context.

With that said, I still think voting for Trump is the best way to address the most immediate problems that we face today, particularly in the US. While it’s a big world, and there are many “enemies” (including Islam, Communist China, biological warfare, nefarious former KGB agents, and even mere apathy) I think “wokism” (which I am using as a catch-all phrase to include its intellectual parent, Marxism, and its like-minded relatives that we know as “Critical theory”, “Cultural Marxism”, Critical Race Theory”, “intersectionality”, “anti-Racism” “cancel culture”, and things like that), is the greatest threat to our country today.

And again I say this from the perspective of a Christian, “in the world but not of the world”, looking at what I can do, in the Romans 13 sense, “Every person is to be in subjection to the governing authorities”, in a land in which “we the people” are tasked with something like “self-government” through institutions that have been set up to function in a realm where concepts of “Republic” and “democracy” are in the forefront.

I’m not going to claim I have all the answers here. I have a lot of questions. I’ve haven’t written much lately, but I’ve been reading a lot, and I want to share what I’m learning.

We live in a culture where “white European males” are the ones who have come out at the bottom of the intersectionality charts. They and their paternalism are seen to be the greatest evils that the world is facing today.

There’s a saying, I don’t know if it’s true, that “a definition of insanity is doing the same things over and over again, and expecting different results”. If that’s the case, it doesn’t seem to me that we want to move back in the direction of Roman Catholicism, and in fact, while we want to look for Christian solutions, we certainly don’t want, moving forward, to repeat the mistakes of the past.

On the Origins of the African Slave Trade

I posted this article in August of 2019, but it seems more than helpful in today's context.

With all the talk of “intersectionality” “privilege” and “oppression” and “reparations” and “racism” coming from the left, I’ve felt inclined, again, to look to the beginnings of what people are talking about.

I’ve located three excellent historical sources on the African slave trade – I’m open to reviewing more, but these are three that I’ve found:

Inhuman Bondage—David Bryon Davis, 2006. New York, NY and Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800—John Thornton, Second Edition, 1998 (Twelfth printing, 2006). New York, NY and Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade: 1440–1870—Hugh Thomas, 1997. New York, NY: Touchstone (Simon & Schuster).

These are (generally) long books, but here are a few relevant points:

Slavery is not simply the problem of one race, it’s a human problem. The Israelites were enslaved by the Egyptians, “Romans established the status of a slave by law and distinguished him from a serf” (Thomas, p. 26).

A white slave trade existed in Europe before the west coast of Africa was ever explored by the Portuguese. “In the early 1400s this white slave trade from the Black Sea foreshadowed almost every aspect of the African slave trade, which was about to begin, including complex organization, permanent posts or forts for trade, and long-distance shipment by sea to multinational markets” (Davis, p. 82).

The term “Slavs” – from Slovak to Yugoslavia – is derived from the word “slaves”. I’ve already written to the effect that my own ancestors were likely slaves at some point.

“African Americans” should be at least as incensed with “African Africans” about the on-going capture and sale of fellow Africans, as they are with anyone else. “Virtually all of the enslavement of Africans was carried out by other Africans” (Davis, p. 13). On the other hand, Europeans did not conquer the Africans, nor could they. “Not only did African naval power make raiding difficult, it also allowed Africans to conduct trade with the Europeans on their own terms, collecting customs and other duties as they liked” (Thornton, p. 38).

A series of popes – all prior to the Reformation – authorized the entire African slave trade enterprise, prior to Columbus’s voyage to the Americas. Popes “Eugenius IV” (Illius Qui, 1442), “Nicholas V” (Dum Diversas, 1452 and Romanus Pontifex, 1454), and “Callixtus III” (Inter Caetera, 1456), (Thomas, pp. 64–66) ostensibly felt a “need to act forcefully against Islam, seen, after the fall of Constantinople, as now menacing Italy itself” (66). But it was the fall of Constantinople in 1453 which left the pope “the uncontested first prince of Christendom” (65). The slave trade was, in its beginnings, purely a Roman Catholic enterprise.

Fewer than “5-6%” of all Africans who came to the New World came to North America. “By 1820, nearly 10.1 million slaves had departed from Africa for the New World” (Davis, p. 80). “Yet the region that became the United States … received less than 4 percent of the slaves shipped to the New World” (Davis, p. 61). But conditions were such that these thrived to the degree that “by 1850 over 30 percent of the African New World diaspora” lived here.

This is not to say that there wasn’t “inhuman” treatment of some – even of many slaves. But inhuman treatment was rampant everywhere, at all times prior to the 20th century. Ancient Rome first captured its empire and then protected its borders by brutal, even savage means (though couched in “honor”, as it was at the time). This empire fell through invasions of external peoples who attacked, raped, pillaged, and enslaved those they conquered every bit as brutally.

That is just human-on-human treatment, and it’s not to take into consideration at all treatment by nature through “climate”, famine, disease, wild animals, and other ravages of nature. By those standards, no human being faces “oppression” today. You might say we are all (even the most “intersectional” among us) “living the dream”.

“White Privilege” and “Dum Diversas” – the Papal Bull that Authorized the African Slave Trade

I posted this article more than a year ago, but with race violence fairly prevalent right now, this seems like a useful bit of information that can help us get our bearings with respect to race issues in the western world.

The left-wing popular culture wants to attribute racism and slavery to “white European males”, and in fact there is now a whole derogatory category called “white privilege” that exists and that seeks to castigate every white person for the evils of racism and slavery by positing an ongoing “systemic racism” that still exists today, sort of like a headwind to “people of color” but a tail wind to those of white European descent.

But they ignore the fact that human slavery is as old as the human race itself, and that the Black African slave trade within that continent long pre-dated the arrival of “white European males”. It was, in fact, a concerted effort by more than a few “white European males” (for the most part, Protestant Christians) that ended the slave trade and eventually abolished slavery in the Western world (but not in the Muslim world). A little discernment will go a long way toward modifying and even dismantling the left’s narrative on this topic.

At this point, I don’t believe that too much qualification or explanation is needed to define “the political left” in the US. There is a stark and quite evident divide on the political spectrum. One qualification that is needed is to distinguish what I’ll call “classical liberalism” from “the political left”. “The political left” seems to have very little concern for “classical liberal” ideals such as “advocating private property, an unhampered market economy, the rule of law, constitutional guarantees of freedom of religion and of the press [and speech], and international peace based on free trade.” If anyone has any questions about this, I’ll be happy to comment further on it.

I myself am for the most part a second-generation American. My parents were born in the US, but three of my four grandparents were born in eastern Europe and migrated to the US prior to World War I. My maternal grandmother, who was born in the US, was the third child of grandparents who had their first child in Slovakia. More, this part of the world knew nothing of enslaving people, but it knew all about being enslaved, primarily by Muslim invaders of the Ottoman empire, who historically had made a number of incursions into that part of Europe.

My hope here is to try to provide some broader context for some of those fires that continue to rage on in our day.

A Brief History of the African Slave Trade