[In January 1801,] Whitney made his entry into a room of dignitaries in blue coats, knee breeches and silk hose, assembled most likely in the newly occupied president's mansion. He took a large box with him and laid out its contents on a table. It was not a musket but all sorts of anticlimactic bits and pieces--or so it seemed for a few moments. Then he surprised the observers, including [his original mentor's] more skeptical successor, by quickly assembling the bits into fine new muskets. He picked apparently at random among ten different firelocks and with a screwdriver fitted them to ten muskets. On the testimony of Thomas Jefferson, he also assembled the actual firelock mechanism from a random selection of the internal pieces (tumbler, sear, hammer, lock plate, etc.), a far more impressive accomplishment, since it was the most delicately calibrated part of the weapon. In a letter introducing "Mr. Whitney of Connecticut, a mechanic of the first order of ingenuity," Jefferson told Virginia's governor, James Monroe: "He has invented molds and machines for making all the pieces of his locks so exactly equal that take 100 locks to pieces and mingle their parts and the hundred locks may be put together as well by taking the first piece that comes to hand. This is of importance in repairing, because out of ten locks e.g. disabled for want of different pieces, 9 good locks may be put together without employing a smith.""They Made America: From the Steam Engine to the Search Engine: Two Centuries of Innovators," by Harold Evans, Gail Buckland, and David Lefer.
The military-industrial complex
In 1798, we scarcely had one, or even an ordinary industrial complex. Something I didn't know about Eli Whitney was that his famous cotton-engine, or "gin," was a bit of a financial bust; patent protection was hit-or-miss back then, and the idea was easily appropriated by an enthusiastic public. Broke, he managed to finagle a defense contract with an uneasy young U.S. government for 10,000 muskets. He used the progress payments to set up a new kind of factory from scratch, not yet owning so much as the mill he intended to use to power it. He held off his nervous government contact for years, until four months after the original due date, with reports of how he was assembling a team of workers and first building the tools that would facilitate the new steam-powered assembly process. Then he blew his client away with a demonstration of interchangeable parts:
A very important development in the history of industry (weapons and otherwise).
ReplyDeleteOne wonders what the county would have done without Eli Whitney. Been better off, most likely -- it was his cotton gin, pirated or not, that made mass slavery an attractive proposition. Before him slavery was limited to a few sea islands, where a sub-species of cotton (called Sea Island cotton) was grown according to practices unknown outside of Africa. The ordinary kind of cotton wasn't tenable for profitable business, because getting the seeds out was too hard; and the subspecies could only be grown in the brackish soils of the sea islands.
But perhaps we'd have lost our wars. So it's hard to say. Still, in a way, I tend to think we'd have been well off without him, poor fellow.
I don't think he was the problem. He is not responsible for the slavery practiced by others.
ReplyDeleteValerie
Not morally; but if he'd never thought of a cotton gin, slavery might have never gained a foothold in the South. It was not profitable except in a few isolated industries, which were themselves dying. Instead it became so wildly profitable that it contaminated the whole society.
ReplyDeleteIt's not the sort of thing I think he'll answer for on Judgment Day. But speaking historically, we'd have been better off without his efforts.
I find it hard to imagine that someone else wouldn't have thought of the cotton gin. Once the idea of powered tools was out there, lots of alert people started thinking about ways to mechanize simple, repetitive tasks. It's not like you could go back in time, take out one moderately clever guy, and the rest of the world would drift along dreamily in pastoral stasis. Mostly you'd just make small changes in the timing and location of innovations.
ReplyDeleteAnd anyway, I have trouble with the moral premise: a succession in timing is not the same thing as moral culpability. Whitney's innovation made it possible to process green-seed cotton (the messy sort that grew well inland) so that people weren't confined to growing long-staple cotton (the easily-cleaned sort that thrived on the coast). Suddenly a lot of acres opened up to cotton production. Should we conclude that this is a sufficient explanation for what it is within people that spurs them to control others and to appropriate the fruits of their labor by force?
Slavery has been a persistent temptation and tradition for many thousands of years. Someone always "needs" someone else's uncompensated labor and will try to exert whatever deadly force is necessary to get it. If only we could eliminate that profound human flaw by altering what crops can and can't be feasibly grown in any particular decade!
I already agreed that the culpability is not moral; it just makes it sad, in a way, that his greatest invention brought him neither wealth (because it was stolen) nor glory (because it was materially responsible for a terrible evil).
ReplyDeleteYou know, the Aristotelian tradition distinguishes between four kinds of causes; although these normally collapse into two, they remain distinct conceptually at least. Moderns decided they only needed an efficient cause, so it sounds strange in modern English to say that his invention 'caused it' but that he is not responsible for it in any other sense. Still, it's a sensible thing to say: the material cause is not enough by itself. The moral responsibility lies with the person who added a final cause, i.e., the ones who decided to pursue the option of enriching themselves by slavery.
By the way, Wikipedia says -- for whatever that's worth -- that Whitney didn't actually make fully interchangeable parts. He just figured out how to fool the Feds into thinking he had. Still, it's an important feature of of contemporary weapons.
ReplyDeleteThere's a kind of culpability that isn't moral?
ReplyDeleteThere's a kind of responsibility that isn't. You can be part of the cause of something without being morally responsible for it.
ReplyDeletePerhaps it's more a cause of "your actions might have made it possible for someone else to do something wrong"?
ReplyDeleteNot sure that's the same as being morally culpable yourself.
We all agree about the fact that Eli Whitney was not morally culpable for the use to which his (stolen!) design was put. :)
ReplyDeleteMost inventions are not sole source ideas- The pump is primed by the body of work to date and there is a sort of critical mass that occurs among a group- firearms development is a good example, particularity in the late 19th century.
ReplyDeleteFeudal aristocracies based upon blood caste and untouchables, as in the ancient South, don't particularly need technology. In fact, technology tends to make unskilled workers less valuable.
ReplyDeleteWhen any society like that is built, they will make a slave class merely because there has to be one for the aristocracy to claim elite status. Somebody has to be above and somebody has to be below. If it isn't based on the plantation model, then it will be the Indian model. And if it is not the Indian model, then it will be the LEft's communist model.
Rome had centuries of slavery, although their version was looser and more of a servant class, but they did not have certain technologies.
What contaminated the society was the combination of profit, religion, and political power invested into the land owning class, specifically the slave land owning class. People like Robert E Lee may have had a vote in their original state, but it might as well have been disenfranchised given that most of the voting power rested in those who owned the most slaves. Blacks, for being property, conferred specific additional votes to their owners. As such, even if whites in the South hated slavery in greater numbers than the whites that loved slavery, it wouldn't have mattered. The society itself went with the most votes, and the most votes demanded that all religious institutions adhere to this practice, which meant if you were against the South's religion or their aristocratic class, you were exiled or destroyed by the greater society.
ReplyDeleteThere would be no nails sticking out, and thus no chance or desire for reform, change, or improvement. The people that made the most money, that owned the most slaves, that controlled and dominated the social and religious positions of influence in the South, also had the most political power. Compared to that, a cotton gin or two would have made little to no difference in the end result.
If it was merely profit that convinced an aristocracy that the plantation was the way to produce Virtue and Goodness in humanity, it would still not have led to the South of 1850. A society can deal with profiteers, if the religious and political castes are independent and sane.
The overall frame of the argument reminds me of one of the nuclear scientists at Los Alamos, at the first rounds of testing of the atomic bomb.
ReplyDelete"I have become Shiva, destroyer of worlds" was a partial quote or sentiment from one of those scientists.
Now of course they didn't destroy any world, yet, but the world was being destroyed and would be destroyed if the Nazis built the first A bomb. And no individual scientist or physicist or engineer was involved, yet the sentiment was "I" not "we". That showed an individual will, that was apart from the group mind.
For Eli, the responsibility was partitioned even more, due to other circumstances. For any individual mad genius scientist or sane inventor, their inventions often go against the social norm or common sense expectation. As a result, society either rejects them and burns the inventor, or society adopts them. Both have consequences.
By the time we start using "culpable" or even "responsible" to include any action that's followed more or less closely in time and space to anything else that happens, we've kind of lost the usefulness of the terms. If I drive my child to the hospital and we're struck by a meteor on the way, am I responsible because I chose route A instead of route B? It wouldn't have happened otherwise, but it's an untenable moral system.
ReplyDeleteIt's not just a hollow philosophical quibble. We are responsible for our choices, and that includes being reasonably aware of the foreseeable results of our choices. If we don't distinguish between that duty and a free-floating sense of responsibility for everything that might not have happened "but for" our random actions, we lose any ability to behave as consciously moral beings.
You're fighting very sternly against a position I have said three times now that I don't hold. To be responsible causally doesn't require any moral fault.
ReplyDeleteMy argument is that the South would have been better off if the cotton gin had never been invented. It was a better place before slavery became the core of its economic system -- slaves were forbidden from importation in the colony of Georgia, but that was when the wealth to be generated by them was small enough that moral considerations could be entertained in drafting laws.
The cotton economy didn't just lead to the shift to a slave-based society. It also ended the Jeffersonian yeoman-farmer experiment, which was designed to bring about a free people who owned their own means of production. So we not only obtained a great evil by gaining this technology, we lost what was potentially a great good.
Now that leaves open the possibility that you and Raven have both floated, that someone else would have come up with it if Whitney had not. That's possible, though we have only the one case before us.
ReplyDeleteYou realize that one of the reasons for banning the importation of slaves was to hike the price of 'domestically produced' slaves, right?
ReplyDeleteBut it is interesting and sometimes useful to consider counterfactuals like that.
Would the south have ended up a sort of pastoral agrarian arcadia, full of middling yeoman farmers?
Would industrialization come to the South the same that it did to the North?
Maybe all the Irish fleeing the potato famine (assuming it still occured) would have ended up mostly in the agrarian south, rather than the industrial north.
Or something else altogether?
You realize that one of the reasons for banning the importation of slaves was to hike the price of 'domestically produced' slaves, right?
ReplyDeleteYou're thinking of later. The colony of Georgia banned slaves because its founder, Sir James Edward Oglethorpe, was morally opposed to slavery. The whole idea of Georgia was to free people from debt slavery in England, in fact: to get them released from debtors' prison and give them land and a new chance at life.
He didn't go as far as the Yeoman Farmer concept that Jefferson would come up with -- he wanted them to live in town, serve in the Savannah militia as a defense against Spaniards in Florida (the purpose for which he was able to convince the crown to go along with the idea), but also have a plot outside that was their own for food production and some salable crops. The Jeffersonian Democrats after the Revolution went further, distributing the state's land in a lottery to small farmers.
Which was a start; but when slave-based cotton-gin cotton production came along, it was so much more valuable a way of farming the land that the practitioners quickly became rich enough to build plantations by buying up all the small farms.
Although the cotton gin probably did extend the life of slavery, industrial technology viewed more broadly contributed greatly to making slavery uneconomic.
ReplyDeleteThe great GE scientist Charles Steimetz was once asked for help by a young PR man who was desperate to get good press coverage of a new steam turbine that GE had sold and was looking for an angle to use in his press release. Steinmetz pulled out his slide rule and calculated that this one turbine would generate more power than the entire slave population of the U.S. at the time of the Civil War. The PR man got his press coverage.
Quite likely, one reason why the Greeks and Romans of classical times did not make more use of waterpower was that slave labor was readily available and cheap.
By the time we start using "culpable" or even "responsible" to include any action that's followed more or less closely in time and space to anything else that happens, we've kind of lost the usefulness of the terms. If I drive my child to the hospital and we're struck by a meteor on the way, am I responsible because I chose route A instead of route B?
ReplyDeleteIt comes under moral luck.
Meaning, if a person drops their keys and spends 5 minutes finding it, and just happens to avoid a crash or meteor that kills everyone involved, is that due to virtue or luck?
Even if an individual rejects moral luck, society itself has demonstrated that it will enforce morality and luck. In the case of involuntary manslaughter, luck plays a great part. Yet society utilizes the result of luck to deem what level of punishment exists.
So while I don't quite believe in the morality of luck or vice a versa, I do believe that society behaves as if moral luck exists.