Since culture is purely an invention, why do we invent national politics that has no accountability?

My wife and I are traveling in the south-eastern US. We’re in South Carolina today and much is different. At one point I instructed my wife, driving our rental car, to “hang a rufus.” But then I wondered, “Does that mean something different, here?”, I looked it up on the web- no, it’s safe. But it might have- you can never tell in a foreign culture. And, it’s clear that our notions of the forces in southern culture are purely invented, by us, by the stories we’ve heard, as well as by southerners.

Culture is purely an invention.

The one thing we know about the south is that for years it encouraged people to have horrible moral judgement. The northern states had figured out a century before that slavery was wrong and had done a lot to abolish it. But the south held tightly to its principles that good Christian morality included beating, whipping and killing blacks to force them to work for nothing. It took a war to stop most of the practices, and today, 150 years later, there are still vestiges of those principles.

My lineage is Jewish. My people came from the same kind of humans, people who used culture to justify slavery, as is well documented in the bible. And we whitewash that history. I had heard the “fact” that slaves were freed every 7 years.  I looked it up today- only Israelite slaves were freed. Foreigners and their off-spring were slaves for life.

Do you think ancient Jews didn’t beat their slaves? In The Old Slave Mart Museum in Charleston, I believe it said about 50,000 slaves ran away each year. Do you think humans in the days of the bible were any less eager to escape slavery? Back then the lines of communication were slower and less written records were kept. So slaves probably ran away all the time. What kept the practice alive? It could only have been corporal punishment and the thread of more corporal punishment. I come from a line of humans. Humans are susceptible to thinking horrible things, and having them justify horrible actions. We all are.

This is the point. Culture brain-washes us. Completely. We’ll investigate this more in the next post.