Geek alert

This is totally a nerdy aside, so be warned.

I am reading a really excellent book written by my undergraduate thesis advisor, David Ericson, the most thoughtful and decent political science professor or professor of any kind I studied with at Wichita State University - that's why I wanted him as my advisor - called Debate over Slavery: Antislavery and Proslavery Liberalism in Antebellum America - that argues the exact idea that is responsible for why Dr. Ericson had so much influence on my thinking and on me.

His book is a brilliant and elaborated argument for how proslavery and antislavery arguments before the civil war were both made in the tradition of American liberalism - "a general set of ideas that appeal to personal freedom, equal worth, government by consent, and private ownership of property as core human values" - and how those arguments, and Abraham Lincoln's historically contexual antislavery argument of "a house divided against itself cannot stand," in particular - guided the historical events that led to the civil war.

Dr. Ericson puts responsibility for war squarely on the shoulders of Abraham Lincoln, arguing, I think correctly, that the American civil war was not inevitable, but rather the result of Lincoln's argument and the reaction of Southern moderates to that argument.

Civil war military historian James McPherson has argued, I think accurately, as well, that the American civil war could likely have been resolved diplomatically with intervention by the French government admidst the war.

But Dr. Ericson gets to the heart of the matter in this book: the American civil war could have been averted by the participants, up front, and specifically by Lincoln, by other options. And the most serious option that matters to me and I think follows from Ericson's overall reasoning is that it could have been resolved given a commitment to a more genuinely and liberal democratic argument in favor of peaceful debate over the matter of slavery arriving at a consensus that would resolve the question as a matter of law and, in the process of having that debate, persuading the consciences of slaveholders and non-slaveholders, alike, to give up slavery as an illiberal institution. The fact of so many European countries, including the British Empire, abolishing slavery by law rather than by civil war is prima facie evidence that the United States could have resolved the question of slavery than by other means than civil war.

That war is the bloodiest in American history. It killed 600,000 people. And it is the avoidance of such civil wars, ironically, that inspired Thomas Hobbes to make his original argument, in the Leviathan, for governments premised on reason rather than on the domination of one religious group over another or on religious premises, at all, and which helped Great Britain and other countries to adopt governing principles that aimed and largely succeeded to transcend the kinds of civil wars that divided the American union.

It is an important argument about arguments, ideas, and choices and their responsibility for the unfolding of world events. And it is the most important influence that Dr. Ericson had on my thinking and on my life.

The failure to take the debate over ideas and arguments seriously enough likely, in my mind, led to the unecessary deaths of 600,000 Americans that might have been avoided with a more sustainable and workable political resolution based upon a democratic debate that persuaded Americans of the need to abolish slavery.

And it is the failures of power and the failures of those who have it and aspire to have it to take seriously such debates, the arguments that underpin them, and better ideas arrived at by such reason, that is the most serious and tragic mistake of governance and humanity in all of its history, I believe. It is responsible for more human misery than any of the mistakes that humanity has been subject to, I believe.

And it is a legacy that can end only as humanity and its governing leaders take responsibility for the mistake.

And correcting that mistake is the focus of my writing and my life.

Talk about a teacher having an impact on a student's life.

Thanks, Dr. Ericson. For everything.