antw. re Re: MDDM Gershom's Intervention

[Paul Mackin]

Doug Millison wrote:

> At 7:24 AM -0400 7/6/02, Paul Mackin wrote:
> > No one asks why the Egyptians didn't
> >abolish slavery.
>
> In a literary line that continues all the way to Pynchon, the Old Testament
> prophets certainly had such a judgement  (condemning Pharoah for not
> freeing the Hebrew slaves) in mind every time they compared the lack of
> justice among the Israelites to their suffering as slaves under Pharoah:
> centuries of backwards-looking criticism in that tradition, as a spur to
> treat one another with justice and love in the present. (In their writings,
> the Prophets don't present Pynchon's range of nuance and irony in
> understanding how humans could perpetuate such injustice, of course.)

The "argument" was over the meaning of archaeology not scipture but no matter.

>
>
> If you mean contemporary thinkers, it's perhaps because the Egyptians
> didn't hypocritcally worship a philosophy that enshrined personal liberty
> above all else while owning and profiting from their slaves as Washington

If the fact that the proclamation that All men are created equal was a
visionary ideal and way in advance of the thinking of any of the founding
fathers makes them hypocrites then so be it.  But the FFs never hid their
social beliefs. There is no evidence that Washington pretended to worship
personal liberty for the classes below the lower gentry, the class to which he
belonged.  This was normative 18th C. thinking GW was never  a democrat going
around proclaiming the worthiness of the common people  to be free to lead
their lives in accordance with their own self dictated wishes.  The freedom
and liberty proclaimed by the founding fathers did not technically exclude any
free white males but a lot of white males were not free and what the FFs were
talking about was property owners not indentured servants and the like.

P.