On Saturday night of October 7, I had the pleasure of attending this year's South Carolina Heritage Coalition Red Shirt Banquet at a West Columbia facility. Maurice Bessinger's now infamous Bar-B-Q Restaurant supplied the food, and all proceeds went to the Southern Legal Resources Center which has tracked the 140 or so assaults on Southern symbols throughout the South since July 1, the day the Confederate flag came down from the South Carolina State House Dome. We heard from a number of speakers, including State Senators and electoral hopefuls. Awards were made; Maurice Bessinger won a Southern Businessman of the Year Award for this year. There were drawings (needless to say, yours truly did not win anything.) We also heard from representatives of a new organization called the Southern Small Business Association, a network of pro-Southern businesses that are attempting to support each other in these politically correct times.
Later, I began reflecting on the event in light of a question that often gets asked: what is this Southern Heritage thing all about, anyway? Is it more than defense of a battleflag? What's so great about it? Seems we ought to be able to answer this in a reasonable way that will inform those who ask in good faith. Since my personal background as a trained philosopher no doubt gives me a special take on these issues not shared by everyone, I cannot guarantee that everyone who considers himself pro-Southern will agree with me on every point. I don't speak here for any particular organization, political party or other group. However, I would like to believe there is a broad consensus on a number of points I heard reiterated in one form or another several times by various speakers. What does it mean to be pro-Southern, or to believe in the importance of preserving Southern heritage?
It means more than merely protecting symbols, although this is of course important. It also means protecting a set of moral convictions or basic, fundamental values that are under assault today. These include the fundamental goodness of family, understood as one man married to one woman, with their children. The latter are to learn early in life the importance of obedience to their parentsu2014something no longer to be found in the today's American cultural mainstream. They are to learn to respect the experience of their elders. On the other hand, if a man and a woman are going to bring children into this world, they must assume the responsibility that goes with this and raise children who will become responsible adults. These convictions then extend to an attachment to and loyalty to one's community. A community is built around trust and shared commitments. This trust is often generated among those who have known one another for a long timeu2014maybe since childhoodu2014worked with one another, and sometimes fought alongside one another. I fear that one of the drawbacks of a global economy is the erosion of the ties that make neighbors more than strangers. I have felt dismay at being able to send email to Sweden but not knowing the name of woman who lives next door to me.
Another basic value frequently expressed among pro-South types is that of limited government, where the limiting element is a written Constitution. What is meant by this should be fairly obvious, but again, Constitutionally limited government is almost a foreign concept today. First, Second and Fourth Amendment rights have been under attack for years, and sometimes the attacks are not even reported in the mainstream media. Moreover, the Ninth and Tenth Amendments are all but forgottenu2014except by the occasional Maurice Bessinger, whose raising of his flags was intended to make a statement about the Constitutionally proper relationship between States and the federal government. Our federal government was originally created by the Statesu2014as an outcome of the First Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787. Its nature and structure were set out by the Constitution of the United States of America. The Constitution is not a perfect document, and Constitutionalism not a perfect political philosophy. It does not protect itself; it depends on a morally upright and vigilant citizenry. Right from the beginning, critics of the Constitution, the so-called Antifederalists, held that it contained too many loopholes which those who wanted powerful central government would sooner or later squirm through. The core of so-called Antifederalism (which actually had better claim to the term federalism) was Virginia, a proud Southern State and home to Thomas Jefferson, who would become the leader of those opposed to Alexander Hamilton's original efforts to build a bigger central government.
Today, of course, we often hear the argument that the Constitution is a "living, evolving document," or some such. This kind of thinking arose out of the Progressive movement rooted in the late 1800s, which in turn resulted from the statist philosophy that had crept over to this side of the Atlantic from continental Europe, especially Prussia (what is now part of Germany); the Framers of 1787 would have found it quiet alien. What it actually means is that there is no fixed interpretation of the Constitution beyond the decisions of a majority of Supreme Court Justices responding to the vagaries of time and circumstance.
In practice, the living-Constitution dogma has engendered a state of affairs in which the Constitution means whatever those with the power to enforce their demands or their ideology want it to mean. They may find "rights" in the Constitution that the Framers would have found horrifying (e.g., the "right" of women to kill their unborn babies). And they will read in the First Amendment a justification for curtailing sincerely felt public religious expression (e.g., prayers by students before football games), as opposed to an injunction against the federal government's creation of a state church. But the living-Constitutionalists will see it as protecting rap songs advocating vicious attacks on police or the celebrating the sexual degradation of black women, or "art" consisting of crucifixes submerged in urine.
Speaking of religion, here we find another core element of Southern heritage: strong belief in and love for God. Again, it is popular in a lot of circles today to question whether God even exists. It is easy to respond that many of our worst problems, particularly in the schools, seem to have begun when God was gradually removed from them. Coincidence? Some will point out that conjunction of two events does not equal causality, and it is true enough that there were problems in public schools before prayer was taken out of them. Problems are probably endemic to public schools because government-run education was a bad idea to begin with. But clearly the problems in government schools are today worse, beginning with the absence of discipline.
Many libertarians do not believe in God. I must confess my own past flirtations with agnosticism, if not atheism. I suspect this is common among youthful intellectual types. However, many, many thoughtful people have eventually had a kind of epiphany: an experience which brings them into immediate realization of one or more deep truths of human existence. In this case, two such truths are worth noting. First, unlike animals such as cats or dogs, human beings cannot simply exist; in order to flourish, they must believe there is some larger purpose for their doing so. And second, human beings typically derive this purpose by identifying with something larger than themselves. Otherwise, there is a void in their lives. This void will be filled, one way or another. Sometimes the void is filled in ways that are harmless, and even interesting. Science became the god of the Enlightenment, and the periods that built on its foundation. Science has been the source of many fascinating ideas and discoveries. Reason became the god of many libertarians, who also inherited it from the Enlightenment; it certainly became the idol worshipped by Ayn Rand and her followers. In no way is this to detract from the achievements of science and reason, or the defense of liberty Rand supplied. We are all better off for them. But Science and Reason are not gods. They can offer a great deal of practical instruction and useful results, but not moral completion. And in the absence of such they are prone to abuse. Science and technology have given us weapons of mass destruction as well as the computer and cures for diseases, after all.
Another surrogate god rejected by Southern heritage is Mammon. This one is not quite as easy to handle, because in a free society one has the right to earn as much money as one can through voluntary transactions with others, and not have it taken forcibly by the State for any purpose. However, neither money nor the things it buys can give a person a code of values; the latter only reflect the values one already possesses. The pursuit of money as an end in itself, totally, can be destructive in ways libertarians do not always appreciateu2014but perhaps the Bessinger situation will help them appreciate it. When accumulate of wealth becomes your only value, you end up with a Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart has been accused, with some justification of having turned thriving communities into ghost towns, selling products made overseas with de facto slave labor, and now, with caving in to political correctness by refusing to sell the products of an entrepreneur who flies the South Carolina and Confederate flags over his businesses. Of course, Wal-Mart can offer for sale whatever its owners want, and refuse to sell the products of those of whom it does not approve. But when its corporate board apparently approves the continued sale of rap CDs full of obscenity-laced lyrics that offend Christians, one has to snicker at Wal-Mart's “principles” when their spokespersons talk about not selling products that “offend.” These are the fruits of a corporation that has embraced Mammon as its god. With no moral center, you are swept in whichever direction the winds of popularity and fashion blow.
The most dangerous surrogate god, though, is quite obviously the State. Modern State-worship began when the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel conceived of his "organic theory of the State" and his famous dialectical pseudo-logic which also began our slide into historical and cultural relativism. Karl Marx, of course, married Hegelian philosophy with materialism in order to get classical Marxism. The result was a century-long bloody effort, as Marx once wrote, "to dethrone God and destroy capitalism." We witnessed the rise of the bloodiest dictatorships in history. However, it is very easy to get caught up in radical political movements, or the near-worship of some supposedly great man, once one has adopted a theory of reality that is completely materialistic and so necessarily denies that there is a God.
Within the Southern Heritage movement, God is the foundation of truth and morality, and as such, belongs not just in the schools but in one's daily living. Accepting that we all answer to a Being not just larger than ourselves but larger than all of physical reality is humbling, and inspires a sense of obedience to that which transcends the contingencies of history and fashion. Accepting that we are all the creations of such a Being inspires, furthermore, a sense of dignity, and of respect for human life.
This respect for life has been largely snuffed out in mainstream America, the latest symptoms of which being the U.S. Supreme Court's endorsement of the barbaric procedure known somewhat euphemistically as "partial birth abortion" and the adoption, without much fanfare, of RU 486, the so-called abortion pill. Abortion, however, is not the cause of the cheapening of human life. This has been a continuous and very gradual process going back many years ever since our culture began to adopt materialism as its guiding philosophy. The effects include not just abortions but the millions of people, many of them teenagers, who resort to using recreational drugs, abuse alcohol, abuse each other for thrillsu2014or sometimes decide that life just isn't worth in and commit suicide: one of the highest causes of death among young people today.
Man can live without God? I don't think so.
These, in any event, are the thoughts that come to mind when meditating on the Southern Heritage movement, and why Southern heritage is worth preserving. There are alternatives here to political correctness, statism, and mindless materialism. There are also reminders here that there is more to living in a free society than being an atomistic individualist, and more to business than grabbing as many goodies as one can for oneself and saying, in effect, screw the other guy. Part and parcel with the Southern mindset is honor, honesty, loyalty and trust, as well as liberty, all adding up to community.
One thing Southern heritage is manifestly not about is hatred of those unlike oneself, combined with an urge to keep them "in their place," though obviously no one in the movement I am aware of believes in "affirmative action." No one has an automatic right to jobs or promotions they haven't earned. A constant irritant is the liberal who delivers the blanket accusation that all of us involved in freedom and regional movements of one sort or another are nothing but racists in denial. Of course, slavery was a part of original Southern heritage. No heritage is perfect; all have their dark sides. It is pointless to dwell on such things, since the liberal can take whatever any of us says and twist it to suit his ends. At the Banquet I heard no denunciations of blacks (though black "leaders" of the Al Sharpton variety do not come off looking particularly well). What I heard was promotion of these kinds of values, the South being one of the few remaining regions where one can find a large number of people committed to them. The issue is not race but freedomu2014and opposition to the avalanche of centralization and political correctness that are threats to all people everywhere, not just Southerners.
Of course, I would emphasize again that others committed to keeping Southern Heritage alive would not express their beliefs as I have. Few of these people are philosophers (although some are well educated, with Ph.D.'s in their fields and books to their credit). Most, however, are just ordinary folks, and the values that are now almost distinctively Southern are not add-ons but a part of their way of life. This way of life is now under attack, whether through the refusals of corporations such as Wal-Mart (and many grocery chains such as Bi-Lo, Food Lion, Kroger and others) to carry the products of a Maurice Bessinger, or the far less visible and more insidious means such as the stealth assaults on the Constitution coming out of Washington, D.C.
And with this, we come to the truly dangerous ideau2014and the real reason why Southern heritage is under attack, and likely to be assaulted even more fiercely in the future. If the federal government is a creation of States, then States canu2014in principleu2014remove themselves from it, or even dissolve it if enough of their members believe it has betrayed its founding principles and become an instrument of tyranny. Many Southerners believe in the validity of the idea of secession because it follows from their conception of the nature of government. It happened once; the South lost the ensuing war, and the American Empire of today was built. It could happen again, if the number of people who fear that our central government has become tyrannical and can no longer be controlled or changed from within. There are already quite a few such people right here in South Carolina, where the first secession movement started. Their numbers are growing every day.
October 17, 2000
Steven Yates has a Ph.D in Philosophy and is the author of Civil Wrongs: What Went Wrong With Affirmative Action (San Francisco: ICS Press, 1994). A frequent contributor to LewRockwell.com and The Edgefield Journal, he lives and freelance writes in Columbia, South Carolina. He is at work on a new book manuscript, tentatively entitled The Paradox of Liberty.
