Curtis Yarvin's Weak Arguments Against the Declaration of Independence and For Slavery

 In my previous post on Curtis Yarvin, I have said that his arguments are remarkably weak.  His favorite form of argumentation is begging the question:  he finds a writer who agrees with him, he paraphrases or quotes from that writer, and then he concludes: ah, you see, I must be right because this writer agrees with me!  I have seen the same kind of sophistical rhetoric in the work of other critics of liberalism, such as Patrick Deneen and Rod Dreher.

In doing this, Yarvin violates his own standards for fairly debating controversial questions.  For example, in his writing about the debate over the American Revolution, he observes: "If you think of Patriot v. Loyalist as a lawsuit and yourself as a juror, not only had you never heard a single word from the defense, you hadn't even really heard a proper proposition."  His readers might assume, then, that Yarvin is going to vigorously present both sides of the case, and then show how weighing the opposing arguments against one another reveals the superiority of the Loyalist position.  But instead of doing that, he carefully selects only spokesmen for the Loyalists, and he is silent about what the Patriot might say in response.

From the beginning of his essay on the American Revolution, Yarvin is vehement in his Loyalist advocacy: 

"At present you believe that, in the American Revolution, good triumphed over evil.  This is the aforementioned aggregate.  We're going to just scoop that right out with the #6 brain spoon.  As we operate, we'll replace it with the actual story of the American Rebellion--in which evil triumphed over good."

"Yup.  We're really going to do this.  You're on the table.  It's the real thing.  In the terms of the time, at present you are a Patriot and (pejoratively) a Whig.  After this initial subprocedure you will be a Loyalist and (pejoratively) a Tory.  Obviously, a challenging surgical outcome.  But hey, it's the 21st century.  If not now, when?"

HUTCHINSON'S STRICTURES 

Yarvin then calls his "first witness"--Thomas Hutchinson, a leading Loyalist.  He allows Hutchinson to speak through his 1776 pamphlet Strictures upon the Declaration of the Congress at Philadelphia--a Loyalist attack on the Declaration of Independence.  He calls other witnesses, but they are all Loyalists.  He does this even though he says that "there is no such thing as a neutral primary source," which leads us to expect that he will introduce primary sources on both sides of the debate, but he never does.

Even in his exposition of Hutchinson's Strictures, Yarvin does not tell his readers that a dozen or more scholars studying the Declaration of Independence have critically responded to Hutchinson's pamphlet.  For example, Hans Eicholz has done this in his book Harmonizing Sentiments: The Declaration of Independence and the Jeffersonian Idea of Self-Government (New York: Peter Lang, 2001), which includes a reprint of Hutchinson's whole pamphlet.

Hutchinson concentrates mostly on the longest section of the Declaration--the list of 19 grievances against the King.  Yarvin quotes Hutchinson's comment on the first grievance:

"The first in order, He has refused his assent to laws the most wholesome and necessary for the public good; is of so general a nature, that it is not possible to conjecture to what laws or to what Colonies it refers.  I remember no laws which any Colony has been restrained from passing, so as to cause any complaint of grievance, except those for issuing a fraudulent paper currency, and make it a legal tender; but this is a restraint which for many years past has been laid on Assemblies by an act of Parliament, since which such laws cannot have been offered to the King for his allowance.  I therefore believe this to be a general charge, without any particulars to support it; fit enough to be placed at the head of a list of imaginary grievances."

Yarvin does not investigate the history of this first grievance.  But what Hutchinson says is enough for Yarvin to take it as an illustration of a general point: "these Congress people are so whack-a-doodle-doo, half the time your Lordship can't even tell what they're talking about."

 Eicholz indicates that Hutchinson was probably right in identifying the King's prohibition of laws for paper money as one case contributing to the first grievance.  Some of the Patriots--such a John Adams--might have agreed that paper money was not a good idea, but there was a more general point here: while the revolutionaries agreed that the King had the constitutional power to suspend acts of colonial assemblies, they complained that the King was not impartial in exercising that power--he would suspend colonial laws in favor of British interests, but he would not veto acts of Parliament to defend American interests.  In his Summary View of the Rights of British America, Thomas Jefferson remarked: "It is now therefore the great office of his majesty to resume the exercise of his negative power, and to prevent the passage of laws by any one legislature of the empire which might bear injuriously on the rights and interests of another."

There were also complaints about the King's prohibiting colonial laws to prohibit the importation of slaves, which favored British interests in the revenue to the Crown from the slave trade.  In Jefferson's original draft of the Declaration of Independence, he included this as a separate charge against the King.  This was stricken by Congress, presumably as a concession to those Americans who benefited from the slave trade.

Yarvin does not say anything about Hutchinson's remark on the 11th grievance:

"He has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies, without the consent of our legislatures."

"This is too nugatory to deserve any remark.  He has kept no armies among them without the consent of the Supreme Legislature.  It is begging the question, to suppose that this authority was not sufficient without the aid of their own Legislatures."

Well, yes, but isn't Hutchinson also begging the question here by assuming the point under dispute--that the British Parliament has supreme power to rule over the colonists without their consent?  Like the Tories of the Stuart monarchy, American Tories like Hutchinson assert that the people must submit to the absolute rule of the Sovereign, the only difference is that Parliament has taken the place of the King.

EQUALITY AND SLAVERY

 Another sign of Hutchinson's Tory ideology is that he passes over the Declaration's affirmation of human equality of rights as too ridiculous to deserve any comment, although he does make a snarky remark about the hypocrisy of Americans owning slaves.  

Yarvin agrees in scorning the idea of natural human equality of rights, and for that reason he cheers for the Confederacy as fighting for the good cause of natural slavery.  He agrees with Alexander Stephens in his "Cornerstone Speech" of March 21, 1861, which he delivered when he was Vice-President of the Confederacy.  He criticized Jefferson for his mistaken assumption of the equality of races.  And he declared: "Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery--subordination to the superior race--is his natural and normal condition.  This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.  This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science."  To assume that the negro is equal in every respect to the white man, and thus entitled to equal privileges and rights with the white man, Stephens insisted, is "attempting to make things equal which the Creator had made unequal."

Yarvin says that since he has seen the evidence that there are racial differences in average IQ scores, he cannot believe in "human neurological uniformity," and therefore he must agree with Stephens.  He also says that this shows that Aristotle was right in claiming that slavery was natural--that "slavery is a natural human relationship."

Yarvin also praises Thomas Carlyle--his favorite author--for his defense of slavery and his insistence that negroes will never work in place like Haiti and Jamaica if they are not compelled to work by the "beneficient whip" of their masters.

Like Carlyle, Yarvin admits that some masters mistreat their slaves in abusive ways.  But he claims that this rarely happens, because most slave masters are benevolent in their treatment of their slaves.  He dismisses the depiction of the brutality of slavery in Harriot Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin as "propaganda."

On all of these points, Yarvin displays his question-begging rhetoric in refusing to acknowledge or reply to any criticisms of his claims.

First, Yarvin assumes that the principle of equality of rights must depend on seeing human beings as equal or identical in all respects--particularly, "neurological uniformity."  But he is silent about the fact that all the liberal proponents of natural equal rights--from John Locke to Thomas Jefferson to Abraham Lincoln to Charles Murray--affirm natural human differences as being compatible with equality of rights.  As I have written in previous posts, the natural differences among human beings give no one the natural right to rule over others without their consent; and the natural equality of opportunity in pursuing one's happiness does not produce an equality of outcomes in life.  The natural differences between individuals, between the sexes, and between races give no one the right to despotic dominance over others.

Second, Yarvin praises Carlyle for his defense of slavery in his pamphlet Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question. (Please excuse the N-word.)  But Yarvin is silent about the fact that Carlyle's friend John Stuart Mill wrote a pamphlet replying to Carlyle--The Negro Question.  Mill challenged Carlyle on every point.  By what authority does the master rule over the slave?  The answer, Mill suggested, must be: the law of force.

A similar point could be made about Yarvin's references to Aristotle endorsing slavery as natural.  Yarvin does not tell his readers that Aristotle distinguishes natural slavery from conventional slavery.  Natural slaves are those very few people who as adults are unable to care for themselves--perhaps those with severe mental disabilities.  Conventional slaves are those held down by force against their will--as with those who become slaves by being captured in war.  Obviously, the institution of slavery as actually practiced can only be conventional, not natural.  Yarvin is silent about all of this.

He is also silent about the factual evidence for the brutality of slavery that Stowe presented to show that her novel was not just "propaganda."  She published a book--A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin: Original Facts and Documents--in which she provided extensive documentation to confirm her claim that the fictional story of her novel was an accurate depiction of what American slavery was like.  Now, maybe Yarvin would want to say that her evidence is not persuasive, but he would have to argue for that, which he has not done, because he never wants the burden of responding to possible criticisms of what he says.