KEEPING VS. SHARING

 It's now a week and a day since the assassination of Charlie Kirk. I'd heard his name off and on but only had become aware of him in the last month, thanks in large part to SOUTH PARK. I don't regularly watch the show but some podcast on YT featured Kirk reacting a 2025 SP episode. From the clips shown, the show spoofed Kirk by having Cartman give extremely racist speeches, supposedly modeled on those of Kirk. The real Kirk was highly amused by SP's hyperbolic satire, and he stated something to the effect that he felt he'd "arrived" by getting lambasted by the famous teleseries.  

The SP episode may have been clever or stupid, but it falls within the realm of art, and so it can't be judged as pure political discourse. Not so, the dozens of contemptible reactions on the Left to the murder, in which people felt it more important to virtue signal about Kirk's alleged racism than to show common respect for a man shot down for his words. Even worse were the bottom-feeders who tried to make a hero of the left-leaning assassin, or to romanticize him, or to make him part of some convoluted conspiracy on the Right.

But this is a philosophy-blog, not a political rant blog, so I do have some thoughts about what I consider the "two ethical systems" that underlie all forms of political endeavor-- the Ethos of Keeping and the Ethos of Sharing. They are the two sides of human nature, which have taken many forms in history. In this century we know the Keeping-Ethos as "conservatism," which connotation is baked into the very word "to conserve." Now, the word from which "liberalism" descends means "to free," not "to share." But no actual liberal in modern times advocates simply "freeing" marginalized people without also letting those people "share" in whatever rights or privileges have supposedly been denied them-- ergo, liberalism is predicated on an Ethos of Sharing. The two words are even traced back to the same century, the 14th, and they became inextricably linked as forms of political discourse in another century, the 19th, when they became rhetorically linked to the two dominant US political parties.

Within the liberal view, conservatism is evil, the domain of money-hoarding tyrants, but this is false logic, and not only because there are a lot of rich liberals too. No organized society exists without depending upon an Ethos of Keeping, one that determines the governing hierarchies and the proper activities of tribal members. Societies also define themselves in contrast to other societies. If one primitive society says that marriage between maternal cousins is proper but not paternal, their neighbors will probably say the exact opposite, for no reason but to "Keep" a sense of distinction from one another.          

The Ethos of Keeping also applies equally to the ethos behind slavery, which is in modern times supplies both sides of the political spectrum with a source of conflict. But in archaic times no citizen would have thought that any society was obligated to free slaves. Ancient citizens might have understood a slave wanting to be free, but that would not mean that the slaveholder had any moral duty to free him. The closest thing ancient societies had to the modern idea of universal liberation would be Nietzsche's concept of the largesse of the nobility. Nobles might choose to free slaves-- say, during the Hebrew festival of the Jubilee-- as a gesture of generosity. These, as well as the rituals of charitable donation that become better documented with the rise of the pietistic religions-- Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism-- form the earliest systemic beginnings of the Ethos of Sharing. It's also during this period that two of the greatest empires of the Old World, Imperial Rome and Imperial China, have their Keeping-systems of ethical compass interfused with the Sharing-oriented systems of Christianity and Buddhism. Yet there were limits on the Ethos of Sharing, too, since the institution of slavery continued in both of these, while the Empire of Islam turned what had usually been a local affair into a transnational moneymaking business.    

So when I write something about the American Confederacy and don't do a knee-jerk excoriation of the evils of slavery, it's because I recognize that slaveholders in all of the original thirteen states (except the one that banned it from the beginning) wanted to Keep their slaves as Their Property. They didn't bring Africans to the States for any other reason but to be slaves, the same way they would have been slaves in Persia or Turkey or China. But in the United States, there had arisen a secular "ethic of emancipation" due to the American Revolution. This combined with the Sharing-ethos of mainstream Christianity-- as well as offshoots like Quakerism-- and so produced abolitionism. The abolitionists were far too few to have influenced the nation's course, but their aims happened to coincide with (1) Great Britain's early-19th century ban on slave-trading, and with (2) the desire of Northern politicians to smash the power of the Southern states. The "liberals" of this period were no less devoted to their Ethos of Keeping than were the "conservatives;" aside from real self-sacrificing abolitionists, most of them were all about the Benjamins. But when it is was convenient, those early "liberals" sometimes wrapped their quest for power in an alleged Ethos of Sharing-- preferably, one in which the Southern states did all the sharing of resources.  

And now, about a hundred and fifty years after the close of the Civil War, modern liberals are still telling conservatives that they Must Share whatever liberals think ought to be shared, and to that imperative command, conservatives reply that they Must Keep what they hold rather than becoming de facto slaves to the Left. While there are real racist movements within the Far Right, and while there are reactionary elements within the "Center-Right" that I don't always countenance, the anti-racist screed of modern Liberals has become removed from all practical considerations. Thus, it's ceased to be about Sharing-- as in sharing a common repugnance toward the political murder of a man who only contended with words-- and it's become about Keeping one's political stance in place, no matter what. I'll add that I imagine a lot of Righties want to keep the controversy boiling too. But the Left missed a real chance to participate in a Sharing that would have made them look a lot better than they do now.