Justice, Backward and Forward
I subscribe to various literary magazines, largely as a way to learn about new books. I love reading books. Unfortunately, literary magazines in the 21st century feature relatively little in the way of useful book reviews. I cancelled my subscription to The New York Review of Books after one year, because virtually every issue featured more essays on politics and current events than book reviews, despite the mag’s title. Moreover, the few reviews they did publish were typically essays in disguise. Something similar is true of my still-favourite magazine, the Times Literary Supplement, but it is the least egregious offender, and a rewardingly broad range of perspectives pops up in its pages. A couple weeks back one letter-writer suggested that the US Civil War was to be blamed on Abraham Lincoln. Many negative rejoinders followed, but kudos to the TLS for publishing the letter.
Some months back the TLS also published a letter that was a reaction to a review of a book whose title I have forgotten, but I do remember that one of the letter-writer’s points was that the UK owed (somebody) reparations for its role in the slave trade back in the 18th and 19th century. As I said, this is not the sort of stuff I signed up for when I paid for my subscription, but it was at least written in response to a book review, and it led to a series of letters on the topic being published in further issues that were, to be fair, intelligent and well-written. It sort of stands to reason that if you can’t write, your letter will not get published in the Times Literary Supplement.
Now, to the extent that I think of slavery reparations at all, I naturally think of them in the context of the USA, where slavery did exist until the end of the US Civil War. A straightforward statement about this idea is that any reparations policy in the US would involve payments from people who never owned slaves to people who never were slaves. Accurate as that is, it glosses over some of the discussion that arose in that series of TLS letters. Specifically, the idea that it is the government of the UK (or US) that is responsible for slavery, and so it is that government’s responsibility to pay reparations. (My readers may be aware that Britain in the early 19th century outlawed slavery and set the formidable Royal Navy the task of interdicting international slave trading. This does not, in the view of some, absolve it of the need to pay reparations.)
That governmental perspective does not answer the point that the recipients of the payments would still be people who were never slaves. Still, one could say that societies do compensate the heirs of the wronged in some cases, although how any government would determine if any living individual had enslaved ancestors, I can’t imagine.
So, back to the most recent letter on reparations in the TLS, which is what got me thinking about all this. The writer met the ‘governmental responsibility’ argument head-on, in a way that echoed one of my other thoughts about this. Said writer put it better than I ever could, however.
The writer’s basic point is that any reparations would do more harm than good. He (it is a he) points out that any justice system must look both backward and forward in time. Backward: what happened? Forward: what is to be done about it?
Sometimes, he notes, the best response to what happened is to do nothing. He then provides an example of a situation in which quasi-juridical arguments were used to insist that reparations must be made: The Treaty of Versailles. The punitive provisions of that treaty are widely regarded as providing the fertilizer for the growth of Nazism in Germany, and the ensuing calamity of WWII. The writer’s final two sentences: “The victors did not think through what they were doing. One world war was a tragedy, two was partly carelessness.”
As I noted, folks who write to the TLS can write. This captures, in words better than any I could devise, one of my misgivings about the whole reparations idea: it seems guaranteed to foster ongoing racial enmity. And, what happens when the payment of said reparations results in no material improvement in the lives of most recipients, as it almost certainly will not? A claim that it was insufficient?
Much of what has passed for governmental policy in much of the Western World with regard to race in the last 15 years seems to me to be designed to guarantee that very outcome: ongoing racial enmity. I very much suspect that there has been created a significant class of people whose livelihood depends on that being the ongoing situation. Reparations would further feed this. A large group of people would feel, not inaccurately, that they are being taxed to pay for sins that neither they nor their ancestors had any part in. That could not end well for anyone, with the possible exception of those invested in grievance.