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120 Chapter 4 tainty means embracing a paralyzing uncertainty. This is the reason that “latitudinarianism” is a devil term. Latitudinarianism promotes a broad, inclusive, and tolerant approach to the problem of meaning in scripture— it presents certainty and uncertainty as ranges on a continuum—which allows for multiple authorities in perpetual and productive conflict. In struggling to come to terms with proslavery ideology, I have found this authoritarian epistemology/hermeneutics particularly difficult. It is conventional to describe authoritarians as naïve realists (that is, to reject the role that interpretation plays in understanding, and to believe that knowledge comes directly and easily from direct perception). There is no difference between hermeneutics and epistemology: it is no harder to interpret a text than it is to perceive a sensory phenomenon.Certainly,that is the epistemology explicitly advocated by authoritarians,who have a strong tendency to reject arguments for complexity or nuance as obfuscation. For instance, the March 21, 1836, Kentucky Legislature’s “Resolutions Respecting Abolition Societies” (Communication From the Governor, transmitting resolutions from the Legislature of Kentucky on the subject of abolition societies) abuses abolitionists because they “imagine themselves the special executors of the divine will” (4). This is not a condemnation of that stance; the third paragraph of the communication asserts that it is through God that “dominion has been given to the white man over the black” (3). Slavers are executors of God’s will; abolitionists are not. Authoritarians generally say that reality (including any text) has one specific meaning; this one interpretation is accurately perceived by some people and not others; there is no process of interpretation or possibility of their making a mistake.9 Yet, oddly enough, at other moments, proslavery rhetors seem to endorse the principle that reality can be constructed through using coercion to create consensus. For instance, if one considers the problem of whether proslavery rhetors really believed that criticizing slavery was a violation of the Constitution (or the Constitution prohibited the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, and so on), then the possibility arises that what they really believed was that, given sufficient credible threats about secession or sectionalized politics, they could manufacture agreement on those points. Whether that was an accurate reading of the framers of the Constitution would be displaced by whether that reading was acceptable to the people threatening violence. Naïve realism and epistemological authoritarianism appear to be opposite , but both share a conflation of perception, truth, belief, and ingroup consensus. Naïve realism presumes that, because truth is easy to perceive by good people, and ingroup members are good people, then in- Manly Politics 121 group consensus is true. With authoritarian social construction, the causality is slightly different: it presumes that ingroup consensus is truth, and that changing a community’s belief will change their perception. With either epistemology, one answers the question of “How do you know this is true?” with evidence of ingroup members’ strong feelings of conviction. The possibility of manufacturing consensus through repetition and intimidation is demonstrated in the spread of the belief that abolitionists advocated and incited slave insurrection. When it was pointed out that the pamphlets did not call on slaves to engage in violence, one proslavery editor responded in a telling way: “The Abolitionists have published a card denying that their papers and pamphlets are insurrectionary in their tendency. Fortunately the pamphlets and papers speak for themselves to all who can read them, so that none can mistake their infamous character” (Charleston Mercury August 21, 1835, emphasis added). But, who could read them? The whole point of the, apparently successful, seizure and burning of the pamphlets at the Charleston post office was to keep anyone from receiving them. Rather like people today who argue for banning books they brag never having read,this editor appears not to be troubled by the logical tangle. The various laws that banned abolitionist pamphlets did so on the grounds that they would lead to murder and rebellion. North Carolina’s 1830 antiliteracy law begins, “Whereas the teaching of slaves to read and write, has a tendency to excite dissatisfaction in their minds, and to produce insurrection and rebellion.” The Missouri law (signed February 1, 1837) titled, “An Act to prohibit the publication, circulation, or promulgation of the abolition doctrines,” begins: “If any person shall publish, circulate , or utter by writing, speaking, or printing any facts, arguments, reasoning , or opinions, tending directly to excite any slave or slaves...

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