lecture 4: Professor Gregory Moses

For accessibility and further referencing, please find a script of Professor Moses’ talk below:

Hello, my name is Greg Moses, and my pronouns are he/him. I am recording this talk on indigenous lands of the Tonkawa. I have been teaching philosophy since 1988. My philosophical work focuses on the philosophy of nonviolence, especially as developed by Martin Luther King, Jr., and I am humbled to be the recipient of the William R. Jones Award, conferred by the Philosophy Born of Struggle Conference. I currently serve as Editor of The Acorn: Philosophical Studies in Pacifism and Nonviolence.

Over the years, I have drawn a lot of inspiration from the work of the Nobel Prize winning songwriter Bob Dylan. I recommend two songs in relation to today’s talk. When we discuss the lion spirit, I would play a soundtrack of the song “Arthur McBride,” featuring Dylan’s cover of Paul Brady. And when we mention the transformation of the lion spirit into the child, I would recommend Dylan’s “My Back Pages,” especially as it appears on two YouTube videos: one of them shows the song being rehearsed for the 30th Anniversary celebration of Dylan’s first album; the second video shows the live performance, featuring Dylan, Roger McGuinn, Tom Petty, Eric Clapton, Neil Young, and George Harrison.

The image behind me is filtered from a Wikimedia Commons photo taken by Daniel Ziegler of a Black Lives Matter rally at the Texas Capitol on June 7, 2020.

**

Today we will take a look at five texts posted as readings for Week 2, Sitting 2 of the oxfordpublicphilosophy(.com) course on Insurrectionist Ethics. 

The texts are 

Ch. 3: “New Descriptions, New Possibilities” from Lee McBride’s book, Ethics and Insurrection

A chapter from the Leonard Harris Reader, “On Honor and Insurrection”

Ian Hacking’s chapter on “Making Up People” from the 1986 book, Reconstructing Individualism

A journal article by Robert Gooding-Williams on “Race, Multiculturalism, and Democracy”

And Nietzsche’s, On the Genealogy of Morality

I will offer a reading of the texts and then pose some questions for discussion.

In chapter three of Ethics and Insurrection: A Pragmatism for the Oppressed, the author tells the story of his black American great-grandfather, who fought his way out of a general store in Mississippi, escaped a Lynch mob, fled the state, and re-established his life under the new family name, McBride.

Lee McBride the Third says that family stories like this QUOTE afforded me descriptions of proud, indignant black forefathers. When met with racism or injustice, they took a posture of resistance; they challenged the racial apartheid, the racist terrors of the time.END QUOTE

McBride goes on to say: QUOTE Whether true or fictional, such descriptions opened new possibilities for me. They allow me to imagine myself a lion spirit, more confident and less afraid to flare with indignation when met with injustice. END QUOTE

When McBride imagines himself as a lion, he is referring to an early passage in Thus Spake Zarathustra where three metamorphoses of spirit are presented: the spirit becomes a camel, then a lion, and then a child. In the metamorphosis between camel and lion, the load-bearing camel goes into the wilderness and becomes a lion: QUOTE freedom will it capture, and lordship END QUOTE. As a load-bearing camel it had followed the law of “thou shalt.” But when the camel changes into a lion, it assumes the law of “I will.” It is QUOTE forced to find illusion and arbitrariness even in the holiest things, that it may capture freedom from its love END QUOTE.

Finally the lion becomes a child. The child is innocent and forgetful, the better to begin QUOTE a new game — a self-rolling wheel END QUOTE— creating its own will and its own world.

McBride’s chapter on New Descriptions says philosophy has a two-fold role: to QUOTE critically assess the descriptions of oppressed groups that contribute to those groups remaining disempowered END QUOTE and to QUOTE creatively articulate new descriptions that offer new possibilities and direct oppressed groups toward liberation END QUOTE. (84)

The story of his grandfather becoming grandfather McBride by fighting, fleeing, and starting a new life, is an example of the kind of description that McBride is looking for.

Leonard Harris describes QUOTE the character traits that enlivened David Walker’s famous “Appeal” END QUOTE. While others may praise Abolitionists such as Henry Lloyd Garrison or Frederick Douglass, Harris argues that QUOTE The character traits exhibited by David Walker, such as as tenacity, irreverence, passion, enmity—and the associated actions of insurrection—are due esteem. Insurrectionists, with their absolute belligerence and disdain for slavery’s authorities, were magnanimous in ways different from abolitionists that relied on moral suasion to change civil and government behavior.  END QUOTE

David Walker’s pamphlet, published in three editions between 1829 and 1830, made a Christian based argument that QUOTE the Blacks or Coloured People, are treated more cruel by the white Christians of America, than devils themselves ever treated a set of men, women and children on this earth END QUOTE

What have Black people done to white people that would provoke such punishment as the institution of American slavery? QUOTE I have been for years troubling the pages of historians, to find out what our fathers have done to the white Christians of America, to merit such condign punishment as they have inflicted on them, and do continue to inflict on us their children. But I must aver, that my researches have hitherto been to no effect. I have therefore, come to the immoveable conclusion, that they (Americans) have, and do continue to punish us for nothing else, but for enriching them and their country.”END QUOTE

Walker, who lives in a world governed by a just God, predicts that an awful judgment will come, very likely in the form of a civil war that will cause white people to kill each other in large numbers.

Walker is especially outraged by a newspaper story of sixty people who were purchased at a slave auction in Kentucky. As they were traveling down the road, some of the men got loose from their chains and fought for their freedom. Two men in charge of the transport were killed and a third one left for dead. But when the third slave driver  recovered his senses, one of the women in the group helped him onto a horse, and he was able to get help. Everyone was recaptured: men, women, and children.

Walker observes that QUOTE there is a solemn awe in the hearts of the blacks, as it respects murdering men, Which is the reason the whites take the advantage of us. END QUOTE And he denounces the woman who helped the slave driver escape. Slave keepers are the enemies of the Lord, and they ought to be destroyed. QUOTE Any person who will save such wretches from destruction, is fighting against the Lord, and will receive his just recompense. END QUOTE

In support of his argument that slave holders should be destroyed, Walker submits the text of The July 4 Declaration of Independence: QUOTE all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights: that among these, are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that when ever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it. END QUOTE

 Legend tells us that David Walker’s insurrectionist spirit inhabited John Brown as he planned and executed his attack of the US arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, in 1859. The arsenal was defended by townspeople and militia, driving John Brown and his small band of insurgents into a fire station, where they were eventually captured by Army Colonel Robert E. Lee. John Brown was hanged six weeks later.

In a famous meeting prior to the raid, the insurrectionist John Brown sat down with the abolitionist Frederick Douglass and pleaded with him to join in. As we know, Douglass declined.

Frederick Douglass is considered to be in the moral suasionist category of activism. As Harris describes them: QUOTE Moral suasionists believed that the power of moral argument, particularly arguments that emphasized Christian moral requirements, could persuade persons to radically change their behavior. . . . In addition, suasionists believed that if they, or members of the enslaved racial/ethnic type, demonstrated enviable character traits, the demonstration would help convince government and civil authorities of the humanity or potential humanity of the slave community. END QUOTE

As we have seen already, insurrectionists called for the destruction of slavery and slave holders outright.

As McBride argues in his second tenet: insurrectionist ethics supports QUOTE Advocating a conception of personhood that militates moral action against obvious injustice or brutality, justifying militancy and radical action on behalf of oppressed peoples. END QUOTE

In the words of Harris, insurrectionist ethics advocates a conception of personhood such that QUOTE  The virtues of tenacity, irreverence, passion, and enmity were features of full human persons and they could be instrumental in ending slavery. END QUOTE

Harris also points out that abolitionists and insurrectionists shared different visions of their ultimate goal. Abolitionists called for a more egalitarian arrangement of relationships across society. Insurrectionists just wanted to end slavery, that’s it. But social goals will be the subject of another sitting. Today we are chiefly concerned with conceptions of personhood. 

Harris extends the work of Bernard Boxill to argue that militancy is required as a ground of honor and self-respect. But the system of slavery precludes honoring enslaved persons as a class, denying them the freedoms of family relationships, and excluding them from social acknowledgments of QUOTE trust, empathy, admiration, and obedience END QUOTE. Therefore, the system of slavery and its vestiges constitute a morally insulting system that justifies all the enmity that insurrectionists can muster against it.

If people want to counter that insurrection is unwise, because it is unlikely to succeed, Harris replies that insurrections rarely have odds in their favor. Therefore, justification of insurrection cannot be sought from either QUOTE a phenomenologist, existentialist, nominalist, rationalist, empiricist, or utilitarian END QUOTE

Walker’s deeply Christian justification for insurrection comes from the very demand of personhood itself. As Harris puts it: QUOTE There is an a priori, apodictically knowable, structure of personhood that should be mirrored in each person’s life. Self-ownership of one’s labor, family bonds, and the ability to transfer assets across generations, for example, are definitive of full personhood. END QUOTE Any system that does not satisfy these a priori demands is a system that deserves to be destroyed.

Says Harris, QUOTE Actual revolutionaries and insurrectionists are driven by a sense of deep-seated responsibility to take unfathomable and unrewarded risks. END QUOTE. On this view, David Walker and John Brown were genuine activists, while Frederick Douglass was a mere observer. The ethical difference between John Brown and Frederick Douglass is that they held QUOTE different conceptions of honorable character traits and warranted forms of representation. . . . Douglass was right in his perception that an attack on Harpers Ferry would occasion a response by the federal government and right about the unlikelihood of its success. He was wrong if he thought that Brown should not attack END QUOTE. We should honor the example of the insurrectionists. QUOTE There should be plaques, awards, statues, monuments, honoraria, schools, churches, and children named after insurrectionists END QUOTE.

Modern day insurrectionists should therefore QUOTE pursue assets and take control of their lives, using the same means as every individual or group in human history, including subterfuge, guile, disdain, and belligerence toward maniacal and malicious authorities. END QUOTE

The insurrectionist ethics of McBride and Harris resonate well with Nietzsche’s analysis of The Will to Power in his 1887 essays on The Genealogy of Morals. Trained as a philologist, or expert in ancient languages, Nietzsche cautioned his readers to understand where the word “good” comes from. Good is what ancient ruling classes called themselves, especially to distinguish themselves from QUOTE the dark-coloured, and above all as the black-haired . . . pre-Aryan inhabitants of the Italian soil, whose complexion formed the clearest feature of distinction from the dominant blondes, namely, the Aryan conquering race [whose] knightly-aristocratic ‘values’ are based on a careful cult of the physical, on a flowering, rich, and even effervescing healthiness, that goes considerably beyond what is necessary for maintaining life; on war, adventure, the chase, the dance, the tourney—on everything, in fact, which is contained in strong, free, and joyous action. END QUOTE. The good and the true are words that people name themselves who are capable of exercising a superior power over others. Is this a fearful power that is exercised by the QUOTE beast of prey or aristocratic blonde brute? END QUOTE. Well, yes. But QUOTE who would not a hundred times prefer to be afraid, when one at the same time admires, than to be immune from fear, at the cost of being perpetually obsessed with the loathsome spectacle of the distorted, the dwarfed, the stunted, the envenomed? END QUOTE. Insurrectionists may inspire fear, but they refuse to contort their a priori humanity into the QUOTE bad conscience of the resentful man . . . the reacting man END QUOTE. Rather, they take up the source of true and good law that is laid down by the QUOTE active, strong, spontaneous, aggressive man END QUOTE — laws which are QUOTE subordinated to the life-will's general end . . . , that is, as means to create larger units of strength END QUOTE.

Nietzsche’s analysis of power was an influence upon the work of Michel Foucault, who in turn influenced Ian Hacking. Hacking’s QUOTE dynamic nominalism END QUOTE asserts that descriptions shape the possibilities of who we can become. Foucault famously demonstrated how the description of homosexuality emerged as a social force in the 19th century, making necessary the counter-descriptions articulated by gay rights and Queer Theory. 

Robert Gooding-Williams applies Hacking’s insight to the social construction of race and racism. Just as the descriptions of Black people by white supremacists have sustained socially constructed, racist practices and stereotypes, so also may anti-racists  respond with creative descriptions that enable what Susan Wolf calls a QUOTE politics of recognition END QUOTE. The point of this work for insurrectionist ethics is the emphasis that it places upon the power of description and the complex use of that power. 

In sum, David Walker’s Appeal could be read as David Walker’s Description. And David Walker’s Description could be read as a primer on the Insurrectionist Ethics of Description. David Walker described a system that ought to be destroyed and he objected to any descriptions that would refuse to destroy it.

Flipping the mirror around so that we are no longer looking at the slave system, we turn to the personhood of David Walker himself, and we find that an insurrectionist ethics of personhood demands the freedom to remake the world according to QUOTE an a priori, apodictically knowable structure of personhood that seeks self-ownership of one’s labor, family bonds, and the ability to transfer assets across generations END QUOTE.

==

Now that we have shared a reading of the texts for this sitting, here are 14 or 15 questions you may want to discuss: 

Was it wrong to say that the cruelty of American slavery was the worst example in history?

Was it wrong to hold Christianity responsible for American slavery?

Is it wrong to say that the institution of slavery in America should have been destroyed at the earliest possible opportunity?

Is it wrong to say that condemnation of such a system requires no justification beyond something like an a priori assertion of personhood? Is some other justification required?

Is it wrong to say that John Brown did the right thing?

Is it wrong to call Frederick Douglass a spectator?

How do the comportments of insurrectionist ethics compare to the cardinal virtues of faith, hope, love, wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice?

How would you devise a list of cardinal virtues that represent insurrectionist ethics? Would you carry forward any of the traditional cardinal virtues?

If we adopt Nietzsche’s account of the genealogy of morals, is there any approach to power that does not require an underclass?

If we adopt a concept of freedom to comport with insurrectionist ethics, how does that concept of freedom compare with the freedom of Nietzsche’s blonde brute?

What role do descriptions play in support of systems of oppression today?

What role do descriptions play in resistance to systems of oppression today?

Do our descriptions of resistance fall prey to Nietzsche’s diagnosis of resentment?

How does one destroy a description?

In my remarks today, I have attempted to give a concise and sympathetic account of certain texts, which I hope will be of some use to students. I do not claim that this is the only way to describe these texts, and I encourage each listener to explore what these texts mean for themselves. 

However, while my reading may differ from yours — as I hope it will — I do request that any descriptions at this point should be fairly put, representing what the late Thich Nhat Hanh called deep listening. I am a scholar of King’s nonviolence and the editor of a journal on pacifism and nonviolence. If you happen to share these interests, I just want to emphasize that a secure path to King’s nonviolence will travel through these texts and the questions they raise, not around them.

Thank you for inviting me to share these remarks today. Take care.