Tuesday 27 July 2004

Pic of the day: Screenshot from the anime DearS. Is it really worth a thousand words?

More on slavery

I have voiced before on these pages the belief that freedom is the highest good, and that the God of the Bible (whether you believe he actually exists or just expresses the thoughts of the writers) considers freedom more important than salvation. This would explain why the Tree of Knowledge was planted in the Garden of Eden in the first place, as well as neatly explaining the existence of Satan, temptation, and the Problem of Evil (as we call it).

Even so, freedom at today's level is a rather new invention. In the middle ages, most people were serfs, bound to the land. And every class in society had its prescribed role to play, in servitude to another class. The serfs worked for the nobles, and the nobles worked for the king (or for intermediate nobles) and the king was (theoretically at least) serving God.

Before that, stretching far back to the dawn of civilization, there was slavery. The Romans had slaves aplenty, the Greeks as well, and yes: The Hebrews continued to have slaves at times, despite their own slavery in Egypt. Some of God's best friends, such as Abraham and Israel, had children with their female slaves (I believe most translations call them "servant girls", as if they had any say in the matter). The Arabs supposedly descend from one such slave, and much of Israel from two others.

The "good master" was an ideal which slave owners were supposed to live up to or at least try. Cruelty and carelessness was frowned upon. But the fact remains that slaves were slaves. A lucky slave might have a better time than a random landless worker trying to get work from day to day. But they were still property. People just didn't make such a fuss of it until the American Civil War.

That was the decisive event, as far as I can see. The victorious Yankees had to portray slave owners as unresevedly evil and innately cruel, in order to justify the extreme violence against their countrymen. God knows what the South would have come up with, if they had won. But also the European allies of the Northerners spread the same messages, and the intellectual elite of Europe would condemn slavery with the same fervor that European merchants had embraced it with not long before when shipping thousands of blacks to the colonies.

The American slavery was also different from earlier epochs in one important detail: Slavery and racism was combined to an extreme degree. In the past, slaves had often been prisoners of war with a slightly different ethnicitiy than the victors, but it was usually a matter of degree such as speaking a different dialect or having different names for their gods. These things changed over the course of a generation or two. But the difference between black and white would not change until after many generations of interbreeding. This would no doubt have happened eventually, but evolution did not get the time to run its course this time. The visible difference between the two "races" was used by some to justify cruel and inhuman behavior, although this was probably less common than the history-writing victors liked to portray.

Finally, let me point out that the freed slaves continued to work for minimum wages, many of them up into my lifetime. Perhaps some still do. Still, I don't think you will find a one of them now who would want to be a slave. Freedom is largely a one-way street. Most people, having tasted freedom, will cling to it at any cost. Whether this is a rule without exception should be found out during the next US presidential election.