Reading Democracy in America: That Manners Are Softened As Social Conditions Become More Equal 11-1-2010 (1)

 [I believe some of my notebooks have gone missing. There is a gap of over a month, and I am pretty sure I read both volumes of Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America while in pretrial detention. Even if I read only the second volume, That Manners Are Softened As Social Conditions Become More Equal is not the chapter starting that volume. sch 7/22/2023.]

Reading That Manners Are Softened As Social Conditions Become More Equal may be of interest to anyone wanting to know more about American political history, or needs marketing ideas, or just psychology. Here I see the ideas for promoting our better class of war: The Spanish-American, Vietnam, Granada, and Iraq.

What I have here remarked of individuals is, to a certain extent, applicable to nations. When each nation has its distinct opinions, belief, laws, and customs, it looks upon itself as the whole of mankind, and is moved by no sorrows but its own. Should war break out between two nations animated by this feeling, it is sure to be waged with great cruelty. At the time of their highest culture, the Romans slaughtered the generals of their enemies, after having dragged them in triumph behind a car; and they flung their prisoners to the beasts of the Circus for the amusement of the people. Cicero, who declaimed so vehemently at the notion of crucifying a Roman citizen, had not a word to say against these horrible abuses of victory. It is evident that in his eyes a barbarian did not belong to the same human race as a Roman. On the contrary, in proportion as nations become more like each other, they become reciprocally more compassionate, and the law of nations is mitigated.

What of turning that same mentality upon domestic opponents? What do you do to another when political opponents are turned into inhuman barbarians? What do we call those egging on this civil division and strife?

Although the Americans have, in a manner, reduced egotism to a social and philosophical theory, they are nevertheless extremely open to compassion. In no country is criminal justice administered with more mildness than in the United States. Whilst the English seem disposed carefully to retain the bloody traces of the dark ages in their penal legislation, the Americans have almost expunged capital punishment from their codes. North America is, I think, the only one country upon earth in which the life of no one citizen has been taken for a political offence in the course of the last fifty years. The circumstance which conclusively shows that this singular mildness of the Americans arises chiefly from their social condition, is the manner in which they treat their slaves. Perhaps there is not, upon the whole, a single European colony in the New World in which the physical condition of the blacks is less severe than in the United States; yet the slaves still endure horrid sufferings there, and are constantly exposed to barbarous punishments. It is easy to perceive that the lot of these unhappy beings inspires their masters with but little compassion, and that they look upon slavery, not only as an institution which is profitable to them, but as an evil which does not affect them. Thus the same man who is full of humanity towards his fellow-creatures when they are at the same time his equals, becomes insensible to their afflictions as soon as that equality ceases. His mildness should therefore be attributed to the equality of conditions, rather than to civilization and education.

How odd to hear of an America not awash in blood, almost lusting for capital punishment. What happened? Did we exert the energy put now into vindictive justice against the Native Americans and the African slaves? Or is it entirely a new growth?

I know Indiana's penal laws are required to promote reformation and not vindictiveness. I also know we in Indiana must thank the Quakers for this idea about penal laws.

sch

[Continued in Reading Democracy in America: That Manners Are Softened As Social Conditions Become More Equal 11-1-2010 (2). 

Americans got to hear this on January 20, 2017:

...These are just and reasonable demands of righteous people and a righteous public, but for too many of our citizens a different reality exists. Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities, rusted out factories, scattered like tombstones across the across the landscape of our nation, an education system flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge, and the crime, and the gangs, and the drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential. This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.

As I listened, I thought what country is he talking about? However, it is the drugs and the gangs stealing rather than the service a need felt by Americans. We have failed too long to ask why the need for drugs exist (and why suicide should be so popular, or why stress is killing us in other ways) because to do so might explode a myth, might make us all complicit in creating a society bent on eating its own, particularly its young. sch 7/22/2023.]