Ideological inconsistency
“We hold these truths to be self-evident” wrote Thomas Jefferson, “that all men are created equal”—and yet this Founding Father believed that blacks were inferior. Jefferson tried to limit slavery in the new nation, and yet he owned about 200 slaves, of which he freed two in his lifetime and five upon his death.
How to explain this contradiction? Was he simply content with a policy of gradualism? Did the “Negro President” know he depended on the additional 60% weight given to the slaveholder vote under the three-fifths compromise? Or was he simply unable or unable to give up the slaves that buttressed his extravagant, indebted lifestyle?
Troubling questions, these, and still debated by scholars more versed in his life than I. Today’s tour of Monticello gave us a fascinating glimpse into the life and mind of a great statesman, philosopher, and citizen farmer—and an all-too-human portrait of ideological inconsistency.
It’s sobering to ponder that we too are rationalizing our stand on an issue that is also very much ethically urgent and on which future generations may judge us harshly. We pay lip service to preserving nature for our grandchildren and to living sustainably, but in reality few of us actually practice what we preach. My biking notwithstanding, I certainly am not, not with the cross-country road trip or the jet-set life, the non-regional food and the foreign-made clothes. Just like we puzzle over Jefferson’s ambivalence on an issue that is now so clear, so too may observers two centuries hence puzzle over the divide between our rhetoric and our deeds.
December 19th, 2006 at 7:29 am
In 200 years, people will think you’re a mass murderer for eating meat. They’ll think you’re a slaver for imprisoning your computer. They’ll think you’re a fastidious prude for god-knows-what reason.