Some good people are against slavery for good reason. There are many levels at which one could be against slavery; one “I don’t want to be a slave,” this is a personal and subjective approach; two, “slavery is cruel,” this is a humanitarian perspective; and “slavery is wrong,” approaches a moral or ethical perspective, when we say moral we may imply religious and when we say ethical we may imply universal principles based on civic principles and law.
Contextually it is difficult to say that any of these ideas are themselves wrong since the goings of the day mandate that slavery is wrong just as much as they mandate that the right to vote is some kind of natural inherent privileged that needs to be the right of all peoples at all times; even as for instance, the right to vote is practiced by a few as perhaps naturally it should be, and so it is.
You would then not expect to go to any civilized parties today and engage in a conversation where a character might argue for slavery and its benefits. But let us remember that there are benefits to slavery which though perhaps inhumane, still accrue a benefit to an industrial or pre industrial production environment. The pyramids were built by slaves, we all like the pyramids, tourism aside the pyramids culturally connect us to our Egyptian heritage so we must in some ways, specially if we are historians, be grateful to the pharos and their crews.
It is then that I propose to make the argument that there was a time when slavery was the right choice and the correct approach to solving a particular environmental production issue. It was not feasible to approach the matter from another perspective, feudalism, slavery, serfdom were all, while not humane, constructive in their times and allowed us to migrate towards what might be construed as higher levels of civilization, technology and in its turn greater ethical constructs.
By noting that there was an evolution in ethical thought as slavery allowed the creation of a leisure class as much as it subjugated the lower classes, what we are saying is that the very condition of slavery gradually generates the conditions that abolish it. It was inevitable that slavery would be abolished be the very reason of its own existence; as a leisure class, created by slavery, was greater able to assume the sensibilities required to comprehend an ethic based on humanistic principles. There was however a time when it would have been dangerous to have those thoughts, at the beginning of the slave trade the prevailing wisdom did not question the use of slaves, further it treated them as property, and more it treated them as a subhuman species. This, hindsight tells us was a wise approach to the matter at hand, as societies that exploited and benefited from slavery could not bring themselves to question the practice, for if that were the case they would destabilize their production and economic progress.
But once slavery was had it had in someway to seed its own abolition and this would also come with the rise of the industrial age and its need to liberalize the labor, in a sense the industrial age gave way for the social dynamic to require a mobile and more alert and less dependant labor force. In short slavery due to industrialization became an unsustainable approach to the management of labor. For in the end that is all that slavery was, a way to manage a labor pool.
Slavery offered a squanderable supply of labor for an environment that was as unpredictable as the next season’s climate and crop. But the industrial age offered a higher degree of certainty, the birth of the production line added definition and certainty to the task of production. The rise in health care added longevity and so with that came a labor force that would be productive for a greater amount of time, and hence the need to imagine that labor would have to be retired and cared for, as they weren’t going to die on the job as was the case for serfs and slaves.
The production line also brought in the need for educated labor, which would indeed cost more for the society to produce and introduce into the laboring cycle, and so there was the need to gain as much productivity as possible from the individual and in part that productivity had to be managed by creating a more flexible worker bee, that could perform many mundane and varied tasks while at some point reaching some kind of tradesman, foreman experienced status.
That scenery would beget the argument, “have we really abolished slavery?” probably not, we just can not see our form of slavery because we are contemporary frontiersman living our times without the benefit of hindsight. Though one would have to go no further than the American/Mexican border to see the million slave march, where labor is constantly funneled so as to maintain affordable vegetables at the supermarket.
Still one could say that migrant labor has a relative freedom that is not afforded to a professional as it might be crueler still to be an entitled professional laborer; the need to maintain a resume’ and to demonstrate stability, proper training, discipline, community participation and self improvement could just as well be an indiscernible ball and chain.
The point is that it is possible that a mortgage, car and credit card debt create a different kind of slavery as such things mandate the slave; but more important what we are saying here is that slavery could have migrated into more fashionable constructs which could make it indiscernible and thus acceptable to a modern morality or ethic.
It is then under such arguments that we do not have the conditions to judge the practice of slavery when it was at its zenith throughout the world. To which any respectable human being will reply, “Slavery is wrong for all times and all circumstances.” That is a moral imperative, it assumes that morality is true for all times, a none evolving morality could be misconstrued as immoral; even the catholic church has managed to evolve its morality, just the concept of celibacy is rather modern for the church.
But what about the ethical argument as that is argued from the point of civility, that all peoples are born free as part of some infallible right and as such the individual has the right to his own freedom; thus slavery is wrong for all times and all environments. The ethical case is an argument that can equally go on for all time much the same as that of capital punishment or the right to an abortion; the premise of any such argument is the assumption that we know some truths beyond all doubt and hold them to be absolutes, the preposition for that mandates zero doubt: “we know what is right, we know what will be right for our posterity 3000 years from now.”
We could assume such things only today, and only to guarantee our rights of action hitherto, based on everything that we know, which by the way is not everything there is to know, but based on everything that we know today we think all peoples are born free; more we assume that they want to be free and perhaps we are willing to risk that they will know what to do with that freedom. All of these assumptions are true today, today and today only, don’t try to spend them 3000 years from now as they might be intolerable or unusable assumptions in the year 5005 AD.
I would be hard put to testify in front of the highest court in the land and say that I had better uses and knew better what to do with the hundreds of thousands of slaves used by the Pharos to build the pyramids. Is their labor not creative in the immortal monument that it created? I hate to answer my own questions but sure it is! It was, that was the most brilliant use of labor, and if only a job creation program that would give rise to new engineering feats, what magnificent accomplishment, I rather have the slaves building pyramids, no one much bothers to recognize the accomplishment of freeways. And besides all that the pyramids were the first monumental endeavor, and that alone immortalizes every slave that participated in it.
Nor is it for us to judge the harems as plenty of ugly evidence that is generally not redacted by revisionist historians that not only were the women happy with the arrangements but that a lesbian community thrived in good health; and even the eunuchs were handsomely rewarded for their castrations. It may seem horrid to us all this thing the harem, but there is more to the harem than meets the eye, just as there is more to be said for arranged marriages.
One thing is perhaps hesitantly true for all time: no civilization and no people have ever suffered for long the dictator or the law that didn’t meet with their expectations. A people, a civilization, a culture all have an innate awareness of what is right for their times, and they will those intimate rights to themselves and live within them their times; haphazardly perhaps but within their restrain and potential all peoples are willing victims of their epochs and only barbarians to posterity.
RC
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