Statue of Robert E. Lee on his horse, Traveller, in Charlottesville, Virginia 
                                             (credit: Cville dog, via Wikimedia Commons)

Today I write of the importance of wisdom, which to me means thinking about the concepts on which we base our thinking. It is only when we analyze our most basic ideas that we have at least a chance of gaining what we call "wisdom". What ideas are we taking so much for granted that we never even examine them? Why do they matter?  

The photo above is of the statue of Robert E. Lee in Lee Park in Charlottesville, Virginia. As of this writing, it is still in place. Attempts to remove this statue caused a lot of trouble when protesters who buy into an obsolete version of U.S. history demonstrated against the statue's being removed. These protesters who still honor Lee were confronted by counter-demonstrators who find the statue offensive and long overdue for removal. It is worth mentioning that there are dozens of memorials to Lee across the U.S. South and hundreds of other public reminders of him, including roads, counties, and public schools named after him. 

But across the whole U.S., there are thousands of statues of thousands of people. Why have the ones of Lee caused so much controversy in recent weeks? The answer is complex and nuanced as most issues involving people are when they're examined closely.  

Lee was the most famous of the Confederate generals in the U.S. Civil War that occurred from 1861 to 1865. That war killed more U.S. soldiers, North and South, than all of the other wars that the U.S. has been involved in combined. It tore the young nation apart. The psychological wounds are still raw for many Southern white people, whose short-lived Confederate States of America was ravaged by Union (Northern) soldiers, in some places for hundreds of miles. The Northern general, Sherman, told his soldiers to steal, burn, and smash, and they did. 

On the other hand, African-Americans see the Civil War war as being an attempt to correct one of the most immoral social institutions ever put in place in the U.S. or any other nation in history. 

Slavery is ugly, even as a concept, let alone when put into practice. The heroine of Toni Morrison's novel "Beloved" murders three of her children rather than let them fall into the hands of the slave catchers. Morrison makes that horror and tragedy totally believable. In a true life case, Solomon Northrup spent twelve years in slavery in the U.S. South even though he had been born a free man in New York state. He was kidnapped and sold into slavery as a grown man. His descriptions of the abuses he saw sound honest even today. And terrible. No clever justifications given for slavery - and plenty can still be found in the newspapers of the Old South - could ever justify this barbaric practice. No one should be permitted in any society to own another human being like we can own a horse or a dog. Slavery is a dysfunctional, perverse practice; it leads to rape and murder as a way of life. But who in a slave-based society could tell the cruel owners that they were wrong? In the slave states, it was all legal. 

Lee was only one Southerner. There were millions of them and they owned millions of African slaves. Lee was a very smart man. First in his class at West Point before the Civil War started. Lincoln asked him to head up the Northern armies, but he declined, returned home, and in a few weeks took over as the general of the Army of Northern Virginia. Then he fought a bloody war which ended finally in the utter defeat of the Confederacy. 

Now let's be clear. Lee was a very smart man. No one in West Point during his time there was near as clever. He was also very brave man and a capable one. He could devise and implement strategies that really got results and won him nearly all of his battles. But in spite of all of these things, he was wrong. 

It is quite possible and in fact, fairly common, for brave and clever people to make mistakes, not just about the time or whether they are smelling pork of chicken cooking in the kitchen or who was the Roman general at the Battle of Zama. All of us, sometimes, screw up. We make mistakes, sometimes even about the most crucial matters in our lives. Lee did. As did Jefferson and Washington, and many others all through history, not just in the U.S., but in nearly every nation on earth prior to the 1800's. Slavery was widespread including in the Orient, Africa, and the Americas. And it was a foolish, painful error every time. No one can own another human being and call her or himself "moral". 

In this space, I have many times argued that moral values that work - i.e. that lead the people who live by them to happiness and prosperity - are the responses of human societies to the real, physical world. In this space, moral realism has been, and continues to be, my main thesis. 

So why is slavery wrong? Because more than anything else - more than its being condescending, cruel, or corrupt - it's just stupid. 

Over the long haul, a society has to deal with the uncertainty of reality. Always, the community must meet and handle challenges that no one could adequately foresee. We try to learn from the past and we make what provision we can to prevent disasters, but always surprises, some of them potentially deadly to millions, come crashing out of the future toward us. That is reality. There is no changing that characteristic of reality. 

Our smartest strategy over the long haul, not so much if we want to be nice, but just if we want to survive what the future is going to throw at us, is to build a community and a nation in which there are all kinds of people with all kinds of talents and knowledge bases, and they all get to develop the gifts that they have. Then, when disaster approaches, we have better chances of having someone in town who can see how to stop the disaster or dodge out of its way. 

This is why freedom and loving your neighbor matter so much. Yes, those values sound nice, but no, that is not the reason why they are precious. Properly speaking, they should not even be called "precious". They're crucial. They raise our odds of going on, as much now as they ever have. We've spent literally milennia learning them and teaching them to the kids a little more with every generation because ...over the long haul ...they work.

So yes, Lee was a clever and brave man, and yes, he was sincere. He was just wrong. And it is in that light that he should be presented, like Washington and Jefferson, and for that matter, Edmund Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville and thousands of other famous people who supported slavery. 

They were just wrong. They were right about lots of things, but in this vital area of their lives, they made an error. My watch can be wrong. The thermometer hanging outside of my door can be wrong. "Wrong" does not mean evil. It means mistaken. But wrong is still wrong. Slavery is wrong because, over generations, it doesn't bloody work. It makes the society that allows it weaker and sicker with each generation that passes. 

So yes, it is long since past time when the monuments to Robert E. Lee were taken down. Or at least, taken out of public spaces. They could perhaps be tolerated in museums if the talks given to all who visited the museum closed with some remarks like these: 

"This man was brave, clever and sincere. But about the Confederacy and the social institutions that it was trying to preserve, he was wrong. Those institutions were centuries out of date and long overdue to be abolished. Subsequent events, evidence, and experience have shown us over and over that there are some good people, some bad, and some mistaken people in every group of people on Earth. As you leave this museum, it would be wise to meditate on how easily any of us can make a mistake. And sometimes cling to that error for a lifetime. Leave here more determined to be the best you that you can be but also leave here determined to let all other persons, as long as they are not directly harming you, be the best version of themselves that they can be. Love freedom and love your fellow human travellers on this journey from womb to grave. Live these values and teach them to your children. Do all this with the aim constantly in mind of preventing a war far worse than any of the ones in the past that destroyed the lives of so many intelligent but mistaken people like the Confederate general, Robert E. Lee."

                        

                                  Lee's statue being removed in New Orleans (May 19, 2017)                                                         (credit: Infrogmation of New Orleans, via Wikimedia Commons)

                                                         

                               

                             statue of Lee being removed from park in Dallas, Texas (Sept. 15, 2017)
                                             (credit: Reuters news service, via the BBC)