Slavery was legal then.

Doesn’t make it okay.

Judging the past without context is akin to judging your neighbor through a -blind- third party’s verbal description.

Meaningless.

Placing current societal norms on the past is also meaningless.

Understanding is only achieved through proper context, research, and discussion.

You’ve chosen none of these.

We don't have to condemn Jefferson as a man to acknowledge that his thinking was influenced by his position as a land owning slave owner. This isn't some minor detail. It is essential to understanding his worldview. I actually think Jefferson had many quite brilliant insights but much of his thought is tainted by his belief in racial hierarchy. Knowing the source and the context, I would like to be careful about lifting up the thought of figures like Jefferson without carefully considering the subtext.

Plenty of philosophers and other learned men of past centuries were chattel-slave owners or ruled serfs. But to claim about some non-slave-involving practice that their slaveowning is “essential to understand their worldview”, is not productive. It tells us little about the merits of the practice in question, and on an internet forum it allows parties to derail the conversation towards a political theme for prestige points.

I'm quite certain it influenced his thinking. I fail to see how that's reflected in his "how to have a good dinner party" ideas, other than that the servants bringing the food to a southern US dinner party would have been enslaved, and the ones bringing them to a northern US or UK dinner party would have been free. They wouldn't have been invited to chime in in most cases. Kind of an unavoidable consequence of having servants at all.

Even at a self-service potluck, someone has to provide the utensils, the drinks, the food refills, and the cleanup. Usually someone volunteers for that role because it's easier for them than making a dish, and it is contributing to the party.

You're using a website and internet infrastructure that were built on the backs of slave labor. If you're worried enough that a conversational concept was named held humans as property to bail, you should probably be boycotting this too.

To become more enlightened about Jefferson and slavery and his times, this episode from 2006 of The Thomas Jefferson Hour by Jefferson scholar Clay Jenkinson tackles it in depth:

https://jeffersonhour.bandcamp.com/track/615-slavery

Is it possible that despite slavery being unpalatable to today's norms, the idea of having a dinner structured around intellectual debate is one worth considering?

We should downgrade our expectations of the usefulness of this debate since the champion for the intellectual debate couldn't be talked out of the evil he was perpetrating. Slavery was unpalatable to a lot of people Jefferson knew, like James Hemings.

You should spend a few minutes and educate yourself on TJ and his views of slavery.

If the event were named something else, would it be acceptable?

> If the event were named something else, would it be acceptable?

Almost certainly yes - which is very troubling to think about.

Literally walking out of a gathering because a dead person's name was brought up demonstrates deep emotional immaturity, regardless of whatever perceived negatives that word may or may not be associated with.

Since the gathering's goal was to engage in philosophical and intellectual debate; OP's reaction is even more troubling. Since it's TJ, OP's reaction is also very ironic.

Had the concept been referred to by some other name, OP wouldn't have felt the deep desire to signal their "position" on a dead person's name. I believe this is the emotionally "triggered" concept.

Assuming it actually happened, this strikes me more as performative virtue signaling than a response to an emotional "trigger."

>I believe this is the emotionally "triggered" concept.

"Triggered", when it first entered the popular lexicon, used to refer exclusively to people with PTSD experiencing something that triggered (!) a heightened stress response, panic attack, etc.

Nowadays to be triggered is to be vaguely upset at something.

Do you refuse to use the Julian calendar, for the same reason? This has to be trolling.

"This has to be trolling."

Never attribute to malice what can be explained by ignorance. Most people (myself included) have no idea of the connections between everyday things and their negative connections due to the lack of knowledge on such a large domain. Some people think the few things they do know about are the only ones or the only important ones and proceed on that basis.

Maybe not the best example. Except for some Orthodox Christians (who even then only for religious purposes -- which is why Orthodox Christmas and Easter are celebrated on different dates than what others celebrate it on), the Julian calendar isn't used, having been replaced by the more accurate Gregorian one.

> This has to be trolling.

No, this is a serious position, and you have to be trolling by being so dismissive of it. Julian calendar, what kind of argument is that? Don't you know we use the Gregorian....

See how that feels? That wasn't very constructive, was it? Try to assume good faith.

It is implausible that a person bothered by this could operate in society. It’s deep into conservative-parody-of-liberals territory. It’s possible for a claim to be so outlandish that no amount of good faith with preserve it.

To be fair the julian calendar is rather illogical even if you ignore the heaps of cultural baggage... don't even get me started on the gregorian calendar (which is the one we actually use)

nice, so other things you'll probably want to also avoid:

  - printed books
  - anything government related
  - banks

You know, for all the whataboutism going on in defense of Thomas Jefferson, I’d like to point out that his contemporary, John Adams, never owned a slave. Neither did Thomas Paine, Alexander Hamilton or Roger Sherman.

People were capable of understanding that slavery was wrong, it was just an inconvenient truth for most of them(them being the wealthy land owners in America).

I’m not going to go so far as to say it’s a good reason to forget about him, Jefferson was a great thinker, but the whole “product of the times” is kinda BS. People who act shitty don’t deserve forgiveness because they could get away with something immoral through the contemporary legal framework.

I say this because very rarely are people lionized for being ahead of their times in important practical moral ways.