Saturday, January 05, 2019

What Price Beauty


On Christmas morning, when millions upon millions of Americans were opening their presents, my wife and I were taking a road trip down Highway 95.   It can be one of the most congested, nightmarish freeways in America.  But on Christmas morning, it was practically a private drive.  Good weather, good music, no other cars – Christmas indeed.

Our destination on that day was Charleston, South Carolina.  I had once spent an entire summer at the other Charleston – the capital of West Virginia – but had never before visited the Carolina coast.  Neither had my wife.  For years we’ve heard about how beautiful it was.  Finally, we bit the bullet and saw it for ourselves.  I was blown away – by the beauty, the history, and the timeless lessons it can teach about the human condition.  Sadly, however, I left the area feeling worse about humankind rather than better.

Aesthetically, I adored Charleston and its surrounding area.  Ogling mansions has always been a hobby of mine, and I’ve never seen such an impressive array of mansions as I saw in Charleston.  The care and artistry that went into the building of those structures puts to shame any contemporary home I’ve set eyes on.  And though I’ve certainly seen a number of beautiful old homes in my life (Versailles comes immediately to mind), the sheer quantity of those structures in the historical district of Charleston blows away anything I’ve seen before.  Some would call these buildings gaudy, and surely they were built with the goal of showing off wealth.  But to me, they were gorgeous museum pieces – I felt that we were walking in a living, breathing outdoor museum and every mansion was just another work of priceless art.  I was in love.

Like any other visitor to Charleston, I had expected a considerable amount of architectural beauty.  I had also expected to hear about Charleston’s checkered past – a past grounded in slavery and Jim Crow laws.  The thing is though, what I wasn’t prepared for is the EXTENT of that architectural beauty, or just how many profound lessons Charleston’s history has to teach us about our contemporary world.

Consider, to begin, some basic facts. During the latter part of the colonial period, Charleston was far and away the most affluent city in the American colonies.  Not coincidentally, it was also the hub of those colonies’ slave trade.   Charleston was a city in which religion flourished – it became known for the quantity of its churches.  But as the contemporary visitor to Charleston is reminded upon visiting some of these places of worship, all these religious communities made their peace with slavery.  In fact, even among the religious groups now viewed as “progressive” (like Reform Judaism and Unitarian-Universalism), the white Charlestonians were as pro-slavery and as ruthless to their slaves as everyone else.

That’s not to say that all whites in anti-bellum Charleston had slaves.  But even those who didn’t benefited dramatically from the institution of slavery; the increased consumer demand generated by that institution enriched even those “humble” merchants who couldn’t afford to buy slaves of their own.  As for the less humble merchants, the planters who traded not only in rice and indigo but also in black people from Africa, they didn’t consider their African cargo to be “people.”  That enabled these merchants to rationalize a lifestyle in which they and their families could cultivate themselves with the finest of art, music, dance, literature, philosophy, science, architecture, religion, political theory, jurisprudence – ostensibly becoming our hemisphere’s greatest Renaissance Men -- while at the same time capturing, whipping, and at times even branding human beings as if they were beasts of burden. 

In fact, Charleston was so rich that the “owners” of the enslaved could develop the greatest rationalization tool of all: that they treated their “property” better than their counterparts on the cotton plantations further west.  In South Carolina, you see, it made economic sense to allow field hands to work limited portions of the plantation each day, and then allow some free time after their job was done.  The planters commonly even encouraged them to have families and pursue religion, both of which would motivate them to maintain their current lifestyles.  To be sure, by contemporary American standards, the enslaved suffered lives of unspeakably horrid abuses; nevertheless, the planters developed a system that was maximally designed to ensure obedience and economic productivity, building not simply on fear but also on a sense of appreciation that the enslaved had something to live for and something to look forward to once they pass away.    

After the war, life changed in Charleston for one and all, yet not nearly as dramatically as many might think.  Slavery soon gave way to Jim Crow -- and the same families who used to whip and brand their “property” continued to exploit these same individuals’ labor power through tenant farming.  Add in the institution of segregated schools, and you can see how the class system remained more or less intact, even though “freedom” had supposedly become universal.    

And now, here we are, in the 21st Century.  Most of the anti-bellum plantations are gone.  But the planters’ second homes in Charleston remain.  Indeed, they often continue to function as second homes for families who spend the rest of the year earning millions or tens of millions of dollars in cities that were never so dependent on the institution of slavery.  I saw people of color come in and out of these homes, yet once again, they were kept around to work, not to play.  The residents, it seems, are as white today as they were back in the 17th and 18th centuries.  Now, their property resides primarily in stocks and bonds – rather than in arms and legs – but their extreme wealth is as notable today as it ever was. 

Those are the facts that are difficult to ignore by any tourist.  It is up to each tourist to decide what to do with them.  For me, though, one set of lessons reign supreme.  They involve our capacity and inclination both to pursue great wealth for ourselves and our families and to rationalize our entitlement to that wealth if we are fortunate enough to satisfy our goals. 

Today, we look down our noses at the slave-owners of yesteryear who helped to build Charleston into the crown jewel of the Confederacy.  We decry their racism.  We deny their love for liberty.  But truly, how different is our society than theirs?  Are we not also growing by leaps and bounds in economic inequality?   Do we not have our own one percenters, whose wealth rests on the toil of overworked people?   If we compare the lives of the one percenters to those of their janitors, field hands, and other subordinates, do we not view the former as society’s “winners” and the latter as society’s “losers”?  Do we not continue to see human dignity as something that is enjoyed by some, but far from all, of our society?

Private planes, gated communities, prep schools, trust funds, bi-annual trips overseas, you name it – the successors to the old plantation owners continue to play in ways that their workers could only dream of.  And just as the plantation owners rationalized their right to enjoy all their play toys, so do the one percenters of today.  They attribute their wealth to their “intellectual property,” superior skills on the basketball court, or the God-given right of their parents to decide what to do with hard earned money.   Because the workers who clean their toilets or water their gardens are purportedly now “free” to pursue their own dreams of extreme wealth, rather than serving as someone else’s “property,” the one percenters don’t see themselves as violating anyone’s rights.  In fact, they believe that they are fully entitled to seize whatever the market economy gives them and to oppose any tax policies that are remotely seen as “leveling.”  

To me, however, nobody has the right to the degree of wealth enjoyed by the 18th century’s plantation owners or today’s one percent.  Such wealth is the product of living in a society that fails to recognize human interdependence, the true value of all human labor, and the universality of human dignity.  Make no mistake -- I support capitalism, recognize the value of private property, and appreciate why some degree of economic inequality is crucial in order to incentivize human productivity.  But when a society’s level of economic inequality blows up too much, the results can be a horror show.  Such a society makes a mockery of such concepts as freedom, justice, and above all else, religion.

It has become a truism that underneath its breathtaking beauty, anti-bellum Charleston was such a horror show.   Unfortunately, when I went to visit the scene of such a crime, I found everything to be way too familiar.  Do we really think that our species has learned the lessons from that episode of history?  Or are we simply revealing yet again our capacity for selfishness, greed and rationalization?  And if our sense of beauty is totally intertwined with our love for luxury goods and services, how are we ever going to break out of this trap?

These are a few things I’ve been thinking about since my vacation.  Now perhaps you can see why I generally prefer to spend my vacations reading and writing rather than traveling.  Traveling can be as sobering to the soul as it is awe-inspiring to the eyes.

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