Reparations
Slavery and the Tyranny of Imaginary Guilt
Nigel Biggar
Having read it
★★★★★
A clear, informative and important book that everyone should make an effort to read, so as to better frame and facilitate their understanding of historical events and the poor causal inferences made by the persons in the present that seemingly weave new tapestries from old, often misinformed and misunderstood legacies so as to seek attention and immediate change (often from their privileged vantage points).
Since all accumulation is achieved by sinners, there is no such thing as a pure inheritance. On the other hand [...] it does not necessarily follow that we must deploy our inheritance to unravel history and reverse the centuries-old wrongdoing that helped to produce it. We did not do the wrong. Those wronged are all dead. And between then and now, much else may have intervened to enable their descendants to transcend the effects.
Like the author’s book, Colonialism, it does not exempt but it does clearly explain things and it is a shorter read at 160 or so pages with fewer words on those smaller but still well typeset pages!
A good passage
Sometimes individuals and governments can be well motivated to achieve an important good, and they can choose their means of getting there conscientiously, and yet, through the bad fortune of relentlessly adverse circumstances, they can still fail. Not all failure to do good or avoid evil is immoral and culpable. Some of it is honest and tragic. Where that is so, the fitting response is not blame, but lament and compassion.
History contains an ocean of injustice, most of it unremedied and now lying beyond correction in this world. Even with respect to recent crimes, the attempt at human justice is haphazard and its achievement fragmentary. Those sober facts oblige realism about what is possible. Yet human beings seem to have a deep instinct for justice that will not let us settle for less, obliges us to hope against hope and drives us to our knees. The resultant posture, situated between cynicism and utopianism, is well captured by Reinhold Niebuhr’s famous prayer: ‘God give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other’.4
A second good passage
Enslavement was an alternative to slaughter. As David Eltis has written, ‘the substitution of slavery for death . . . legitimated slavery throughout history’13 Therefore, however counter-intuitive it may seem to us and however difficult to swallow it might be, enslavement sometimes represented a measure of moral progress. As the late nineteenth-century moral philosopher David Ritchie put it, slavery was
a necessary step in the progress of humanity . . . [since] [i]t mitigated the horrors of primitive warfare, and thus gave some scope for the growth, however feeble, of kindlier sentiments towards the alien and the weak . . . Thus slavery made possible the growth of the very ideas which in course of time came to make slavery appear wrong. Slavery seems to us horrible . . . It used not to seem horrible.14
A third good passage
The contemporary upshot of its colonial legacy is that, according to World Bank data on policy performance and institutional effectiveness, Barbados far outranks Jamaica and all the other states of Latin America and the Caribbean, and on two measures it even runs ahead of the major OECD countries (mainly Western Europe, North America, Japan and Australia).45 Moreover, it is now ‘a global model of parliamentary democracy.46