Hoax or inspiring tale?

I tend to think Andrew Sullivan is a rather gullible individual so when he started promoting the following video I was skeptical.



This has all the hallmarks of an urban legend. So I decided to research it. And the more I tried to verify it the more I got suspicious that this story is an invention.

Wintley Phipps is a black vocalist. He is also a Seventh Day Adventist ministet—an occupation that in my opinion indicates he is prone to believing myths. He does some good, of course, but that doesn't make this story true. In this video his claim is that all Negro spirituals can be played with just “the black notes” on the piano. That the black notes are black is not related in any way to Negro spirituals. He also claims that the song Amazing Grace is based on these notes and that the composer, John Newton, basically heard the tune from slaves.

Newton was a slaver. Phipps implies that when Newton became a Christian he wrote this song and suggests that he borrowed the music from African slaves. This is connected, in some vague way, to the idea that you can play the song with “just the black notes.” I keep getting the impression that this man believes that there is some connection between the keys on the piano being black and the slaves being black.

The black keys are known as the pentatonic scale. But Phipps insists that in early America it was called the “slave scale.” Slaves did use the pentatonic scale. But that doesn’t mean much. Pentatonic scales were also common in Celtic and English folk music, and can be found across Europe, Asia and Africa. They are not unique to Africans, or to slaves.

A lot of people on the Religious Right have pushed the idea that Newton’s conversion to Christianity turned him from slaver to abolitionist. The implication is that this double conversion was behind the song Amazing Grace. And Phipps seems to imply that Newton, in perhaps some symbolic gesture to the slaves, borrowed their own music as the tune. That interpretation of the facts is almost entirely false.

Newton did covert and he did change his life. He stopped swearing, drinking and gambling. But he didn’t stop slaving. He continued on as the captain of a slave ship for several more years. When he became sick and thought he would die he got converted all over again. He recovered and continued to work in the slave trade. It was six years after his conversion that he left the slave trade, but only to become a minister, not because he was opposed to slavery. He continued to support slavery. Newton did become an abolitionist decades after he became a Christian—clearly the new conversions were not related. His first abolitionist tract was only written 33 years after he converted to Christianity.

Now, we turn to the question of whether Newton stole the music for Amazing Grace from the slaves. It is generally believed that the music is a variant of a song entitled New Britain, which most certainly is not a slave ditty. It is believed that the music is a Celtic folk tune associated with the bagpipes. Slaves had nothing to do with the music and Newton didn’t steal the tune from them and apply it to the song. Newton didn’t even apply this music to his hymn. The music and Newton’s words were only first combined after his death. He had nothing to do with the music. Even if Newton heard the alleged ballads of the slaves he didn’t write the music associated with the hymn. It is simply not possible that the tune came from African slaves.

What about this alleged “slave scale” that Phipps talks about? Considering that the pentatonic scale was common among European cultures it strikes me as odd that a commonly used musical scale would be associated only with slaves. The white settlers in the United States, in the early years, were largely of English and Scottish origin. Since the pentatonic scale was common in their folk music I find it hard to think that they associated a musical scale they commonly used with that of slaves.

Phipps contends that the term “slave scale” was used commonly in early America. I find no evidence for this whatsoever. If it is true, I would think Mr. Phipps could provide some document, from that period of time, that uses the term “slave scale” in reference to the pentatonic scale. Attempts to do on-line searchers only bring up Mr. Phipps as the source for this claim. Nothing older backs up his story. That indicates to me that Phipps invented his story himself.

I tried Google books since they have added tens of thousands of out of print old books to their system. They have large selection of books from the period in question. There is not a single book from any period of time on Google books that uses the term “slave scale” in reference to music. I find that odd for something which Phipps says was a common reference.

My conclusion is that once again Andrew Sullivan has fallen for what Penn & Teller would call “Bullshit.”

Slaves, shopkeepers and markets.

Here is a riddle for you. Imagine the world where slavery was commonplace. Why did the slaves work to benefit the slave owner? Was it because slaves, on a whole, loved laboring for the benefit of others? Was it a sense of a duty on their part? Was it because the slave master provided them with some water, some food, some shelter and protected them from others the way a farmer protects his herd from the wolf?

I sincerely doubt that most slaves were motivated by a sense of of obligation or gratitude. What they faced was a regime that was cruel but which promised more cruelity, of a more severe kind, if they didn’t comply with the wishes of the slave master.

Today most of us get up in the morning andlabor in one form or another. Much of what we do also benefits others. In a market economy it is difficult, if not impossible, to labor in a manner that only benefits one’s self. What gives labor value is that others value it, not that you enjoy it. If others want the value which your labor creates they have to enter into free exchange with you. If you didn’t gain value from this exchange you wouldn’t agree to it. If they didn’t gain value from this exchange they wouldn’t enter into it either.

The litmus test for the amount of slavery within a political or economic system is the amount of force required to inspire individuals to work for the benefit of others. What the slavers didn’t understand was that the amount of benefit derived from such an arrangment is smaller than it would be in a system of free exchange. The slave may be “inspired” to work in order to escape the lash but his inspiration is limited. He will work as hard as necessary to avoid punishment but is rarely willing to go beyond that.

In a system of free exchange the worker finds that his ability to satisfy his own wants and desires increases as he becomes more productive. He is inspired, by the added wealth that accrues to himself, to shower more benefits on others through his efforts. The entire sytem becomes more productive and what we call “society” tends to benefit.

One shouldn’t pretend that there were no benefits from slavery. The slave master benefited by the coerced labor of his slaves. But the society was poorer than it otherwise would have been if free exchange dominated. Chances are that slavery didn’t just distribute wealth from the slave to the slaver, but also redistributed wealth from the society in general to the slaver. Society was poorer by the absence of free exchange in order to endow the slaver with a small benefit.

The same thing is happening today in our mixed economy. Our society is a mixture of slavery and free exchange. Most of us work voluntarily, directly or indirectly, to produce goods and services that benefit the society at large. We do so voluntarily because such labor makes us better off. But about half the time to one third of the time we also work involuntarily in order to pay taxes.

The excuse for taxation is that it is necessary to benefit the society as a whole. In reality it benefits the class of individuals who decide how the fruits of your labor will be spent -- the political classes. And just as slavery provided the wrong incentives to slaves, and limited their economic output, taxation provides the wrong incentives to workers, and limits their economic output. The society, as a whole, is actually made poorer that it otherwise would have been in a system of pure free exchange.

But like the slave system there is a class of people who accrue small benefits to themselves through the forced labor of others. The political classes, those elected officials and their unelected bureaucratic lackeys directly benefit from the coerced labor imposed by taxation.

You pay your taxes for the same reason the slave gave the slaver as much labor as necessary to avoid the whip. If you don’t comply the state promises to use force against you. If you pay late they are very quick to send you a letter telling you how they will impose this force upon you and immediately penalize you for your failure to comply in a timely manner.

The idea that this arrangement benefits the society as a whole is an illusion. It is a classic example of Bastiat’s “broken window” fallacy where people see the benefits but not the costs. In Bastiat’s example a shopkeeper has a window broken and is forced to replace it. Those who replace the window benefit. They spend the money in various ways benefiting others as well. The conclusion drawn by the fallacious logic is that the broken window was a net benefit. That is what is seen.

But the shopkeeper lost money that he would have spent in other ways. That is not seen. The tailor who lost the sale of a suit is not counted in the equation because he is not seen. All the broken window did was transfer wealth from the tailor to the glazier. And society was the poorer because of it. The total wealth was down by one suit. The new window only replaced the old window adding no net benefit. Certainly the shopkeeper was worse off. He was out the money and never got the suit he wanted. Now imagine how bad this would be if the glaziers were free to go around breaking windows!

The glazier may try to convince us that society has net gains due to the value “created” by breaking windows. And as long as we only look at the one side of the equation this is true. Only when we take into account the lost benefits, and the lower wealth of the shopkeeper, do we see that these benefits turn in net losses.

Government is like the glazier and the slaver. It benefits from the forced labor of the populace. Just as both those special interests would argue that they were creating net benefits, the political classes do the same. And this remains true --- provided you only look at one side of the equation.

Looking in on the Anglican neighbors.

To comment about the internal strife within the Anglican church almost seems to be intruding on the squabbles of the family next door. If you aren’t a member of the family it might be seen as intruding.

Well, not only am I not an Anglican. I’m not even a distant cousin. I possess not one whiff of what purports itself as “spirituality” and tend to place theology into the same camp as phrenology, astrology, divination, spell casting and other imaginary theories for discerning reality.

At its best theological constructs are quant attempts to find meaning without actually doing the hard work of thinking. The old saying, “God said it, that settles it,” is quite indicative of the theological mind. It asserts conclusions while simultaneously arguing that there is no need for evidence or logic. Since the conclusion is the revelation of a supernatural being the rest of us are supposed to shut up and obey. Certainly in olden days, and many Third World religious havens today, those who don’t shut up find themselves permanently silenced in one way or another.

Whatever claims to moral superiority that religion may make for itself the realities of the past often indicate a highly immoral system of persecution, intolerance and coercion. Of course, in a competition between two divine revelations, each in conflict with the other, the only recourse to solve the conflict is an appeal to superior force. And that is how it has been throughout history: the followers of one deity slaughtering the followers of another deity. In Europe sufficient numbers of “pagans” were tortured, put to the rack, set alight, or dealt with in sufficiently painful ways as to pretty much eliminate any competition.

And so it went for centuries. Now and then some poor heretic was publicly exterminated as an example and a certain unity of faith was obtained. Through this same process unity was maintained for some centuries. The problem then arose that European political structure was broken into thousands of small city-states or tiny principalities. The large nation-state of today didn’t exist -- which was a good thing for European development. This division of political power made it possible for individuals to entertain competition revelations from the same deity who apparently was whispering different ideas into the heads of different divines.

With political power diffused the ability to wipe out this competition became more and more difficult. The result was a massive increase in bloodletting. And for some centuries Christians were putting one another to the sword with such relish that the Muslims could only watch with amazement. It seemed to them that Christians were doing Allah’s work for them.

Eventually this lead to such bloodshed that the people started to weary of it. A few centuries of constant warfare begins to lose the thrill after some time, no matter how sure one is of the righteousness of one’s cause. And some thinkers started toying with the idea of toleration. A goodly number of them suffered for such evil ideas but eventually this “sinful” concept spread about. And it didn’t hurt that by now the “one true faith”, of the many one true faiths, had splintered into so many diverse sects and creeds that it was becoming increasingly more difficult for one of them to dominate the others.

Out of this mixture eventually arose the Anglicans, founded by a King intent on remarrying in violation of the Catholic Church’s teaching on such things. When Rome refused to bow to the King he simply grabbed control of church property and started his own sect. Anglicanism thus originated primarily as a vehicle for one King to do that which the church deemed improper. There was no great theological divide in reality.

Of course after Anglicanism separated from Catholicism it began to work on its own theology. Over the next couple of hundred years there did develop, within Anglicanism, a view of the world with much in common with the Enlightenment values that were starting to flourish in Europe and which caused Europe to flourish

Eventually the politicians and public ignored the constant splintering of the faith. And as the one true faith became segmented in thousands of sects, the idea of putting one another to death had pretty much been abandoned. And necessarily so: with so many segments of the church competing any battle to solve the questions of the divine would result in a sea of blood.

The conflict in competing revelations eventually came down to issues of more mundane matters. People were less willing to kill over the Trinity but more willing to kill over whether or not people were acting in a proper way. And the major conflict of the 19th century was over the concept of slavery. Here, much of Anglicanism sided with the angels -- in that they had eventually become opponents of slavery. But certainly not all of them, by any means. And even this shift took centuries to accomplish.

For most of recorded history the Christian Church accepted the practice of slavery and Christians were prominent practitioners of the institution. John Newton is often seen as a prominent figure in the abolitionist movement and in the Reader’s Digest version of his life he became a Christian, an Anglican cleric in fact, and opposed slavery. Well, not exactly.

He did have a religious conversion and was morally outraged at swearing, drinking and sins of the flesh. Slavery didn’t bother him. He continued on as slaver for several years after his conversion. And when he did retire from the slave trade in 1754 it was not related to his disgust over the practice but because of his desire to become a minister. His first discourse against slavery only came 33 years after he left the slave trade.

But Newton did eventually become an anti-slaver. Other prominent “evangelicals” like George Whitefield, the orator who was credited with the “Great Awakening” in the United States, that sowed the seeds for fundamentalist Christianity there, were avid advocates of slavery. Whitefield is the one most credited with legalizing slavery in Georgia and thanks to his efforts some 1 million people had gone through slavery in that state alone.

Eventually the anti-slave theologians dominated in England and, with the rise of classical liberalism and liberal values, slavery was eventually abolished. Anglicans by the time of the American Civil War were more likely to be opponents of slavery. But American Christianity divided over the issue of enslaving human beings. Various “Southern” break off denominations were formed in defense of the morality of enslaving human beings. The Southern Baptists are the largest denomination in the United States today and they were formed over a defense of slavery. Ditto for groups like the Southern Methodist and the Southern Presbyterians.

And that brings me to today. What is the issue that is splintering the Anglican Church? Whether or not they should treat homosexuals really badly or only slightly badly. A few even seem to be more tolerant and want them treated with equality.

And right-wing Anglican churches in the United States are sending berobed bishops and archbishops to Uganda, Nigeria and Kenya, of all places, to be blessed by authoritarian Anglican bishops there. One of them, Archbishop Peter Akinola, finds contempt for homosexuals to be one of the key doctrines of his Christian faith. And antigay American Anglicans see him as the great Black Hope of antigay theology. Akinola is one strange bird. He says silly things like: “Many people say I embarrass them with my humility.” Okay!

Archbishop Akinola is so antigay that he wants the laws changed. Under Nigerian legislation he endorsed it would be illegal for gay people to meet one another or to petition government to change antigay laws. The law would make it illegal to announce meetings for gay people and would ban other churches from providing any blessing of sanction on gay relationships. This sort of Brown-shirt mentality has American Right-wing Anglicans flocking to Africa to get blessed and will splinter the Anglican church.

I guess I think of all this because I was outside Canterbury Cathedral today, the church home of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the head of the Anglican faith. And his conundrum is that Anglicanism is relatively stagnant with few members in the developed world. Where people are largely uneducated, such as central Africa, the faith is large. So the African Anglicans have the numbers. But the Western Anglicans have the money.

The Western Anglicans want the numbers and the African Anglicans want the money. The African Anglican church has been subsisting off funds from the West for decades. But it feels that with the numbers it should call the shots. And when it comes to shots they want to target homosexuals. Western Anglicans tend to be educated and tend to be socially liberal. They don’t find this raw sort of hatred very appealing. And now the church is splintering. The African Anglicans have ordained 17 archbishops for antigay Anglican churches in the West and are gunning for a showdown.


The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, would prefer the whole thing just go away. But how can it? Most Western Anglicans are children of the Enlightenment, whether they know it or not. Most African Anglicans have no idea what that means. They are authoritarians who put faith above reason and obedience above liberty. The gulf between them can not be surmounted. But Williams has attempted to hold these two contradictory views of the world together. And all that does is make the eventual divorce even more explosive.

I would acknowledge that the Anglican Church has the right to any theology it wishes to invent. They even have the right to be antigay, just as they had the right to support slavery for so many years. Any sect has the right to belief anything they can concoct. Unfortunately, when people adopt such beliefs for themselves, and convince themselves they speak for the deity of the universe, the temptation to impose such values on others, through coercive means, is difficult to shun. Most succumb to this totalitarian temptation and look across the kingdoms of this world and dream of dominating them -- for the greater good, of course. Archbishop Akinola is one such man. He stopped playing theology and went to politics much as the Religious Right in the United States has done (the religious Left has done so as well but they hide it better).

There is little doubt that the Akinolas of the world are sincere believers in their antigay theology. But sincerity is a much overrated virtue and perhaps one of the more dangerous ones. Certainly one need only look back 150 to 200 years ago to see that theologians defending slavery were terribly sincere. Churches splintered over slavery. People killed over it. Laws were put into place to defend that institution. Thousands and thousands of people died in a great war, fought in part, over the cultural conflict between Northern abolitionists and Southern slavers.

If you think the cultural conflict that divides America today is new you are sadly mistaken. You need only go back to the 1850s to see competing cultural values tearing the nation apart quite literally. I happen to oppose “Southern” values in both cases, and for the same reasons. The American South was defending slavery while the North was hiding slaves from their owners. The South was whining that the North was imposing impious values on their Christian culture --- George Bush is their revenge for that.

Of course, after more than a century, only the most rabid Southern fundamentalist defends slavery as a Godly institution today. Most have accepted the cultural liberal values that saw each human being as an end in himself and not the property of others. The consensus is that the “Biblical” teaching of slavery was actually not the Biblical teaching and the secularists and abolitionists and liberals were right -- slavery was, and is, immoral.

The massive role of the church in promoting and expanding slavery is now ignored and they prefer to focus any attention on that issue to those individual believers who eventually became abolitionists. To paraphrase Nixon: we’re all abolitionists today.

So I have little doubt that in 100 years the church, as it will exist then, will look on the church of today, with a similar sort of embarrassment. That one of the old, traditional faiths of the West could splinter down the middle over gay people will, I suspect, be a point of shame for the Christians of the future. And Archbishop Akinola will be seen in the same moral light as the men of faith who so adamantly defended the enslavement of individuals, some of whom, no doubt were relatives of the Archbishop.

Archbishop Akinola will be forgotten. He will join the long line of the theologians who preached inhumanity and the faith will move forward -- just a century or two behind the general culture. But in the end the dominant culture will lead and the church will follow. And eventually the church will claim that the culture of today, which so many of them oppose, was actually the culture of faith that they propose. The more tolerant world of liberalism truly has many fathers while the intolerance of the past is an orphan.