In the last post we saw how culture is an invention. Early Christian Americans created for themselves that their cultural beliefs were justified. Most believed cultural truths that slavery, including beating and killing blacks, was moral. Then we looked at Judaism, and saw that it had justified slavery as well. Plus it whitewashed some of its history.

What made Jewish culture of the 1800’s better than southern culture is that their culture had given up slavery many years before. Does that sound true? It’s not. There were Jews in the south and in general they owned slaves, argued for slavery and fought in the civil war. There was moral difference between Jews, Christians and Atheists in those days. But they all justified inhumane treatment of some humans. In the south, most of them were taken in by cultural beliefs.

It was the cultural beliefs that were evil. People naturally adopted the culture. Sure, those who happened to be black saw the lie of it, but few people listened to them. And not all blacks saw the lie. There were a significant number of free blacks who owned slaves. In the museum were stories that some were known to be as cruel as the worst white slave owners.

This isn’t to disparate southern culture or Jewish culture. It just illustrates that humans are susceptible to societal norms, and it’s very difficult for us to see the evil in our own culture. We think of ourselves as good people and justify the way things are. Our culture blinds us to much of the evil. When we do see the evil, we often justify it as unfortunate, or we create an attitude of resignation or powerlessness that justifies our tolerance of it. You and I continue to do this today.

People are not good or evil. But they become evil when they believe and act according to evil beliefs. It they give them up and see the evil, if they repent and adopt new truths, they can be become good. Mostly we’re all somewhere in between. We adopt good truths, but still have some evil truths hidden in blind spots. It’s usually much easier to see the blind spots of others, especially of people who don’t share our truths.

My point is that the pull of the culture is incredibly strong. If everyone’s obeying something as morally corrupt as slavery, including the whipping and killing of slaves to keep them enslaved, that something must be incredibly strong. Culture can even blind us to the humanity of others, causing us to ignore strong instincts of empathy. Most people naturally are kind to each other. But slavery skewed morality to allow stealing freedom from others, tolerating extreme evil and justifying it.

Culture is an invention. But when we don’t realize it’s an invention, when we think it carries truth, we stop being responsible for good and evil and we’re capable of huge evil.

In the next post, we’ll tie this back to democracy and political accountability.