What Were þe Origins of Abolitionism, Anyway?; &, BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2021-11-30 Tu
Things that went whizzing by that I want to remember:
First:
The typical left-wing position on slavery back before the Industrial Revolution was, more or less: masters should treat their slaves well, because only chance and the wheel of fortune have made you the master and him the slave—Plato, after all, was reputed to have been sold in the Aegina slave market for 20 minae—and while there may be some people who are slaves by nature, many are slaves against nature and only by convention. Even where the left-wing position went beyond that, it tended to stop at “we should not be slaves, or enslave others of us” where “we” are members of the tribe of Judah, or fellow Germans, French, or Englishmen. That slavery as an institution is repugnant to Natural Law and to Reason itself—that was an overwhelming step that nearly nobody who wrote things down was willing to take. Peasants asked:
When Adam delved, and Eve span
Who was then the gentleman?”
But they were not participants in the debates of moral philosophy.
Why the literate used to believe that the peculiar institution was also a necessary institution is, I think clear. Under Malthusian or semi-Malthusian conditions, average productivity is going to be low. If you are going to have a literate, leisured class that aspires to a civilized life of refinement with the time to devote to philosophy, there have to be slaves to grow and serve them the food that they eat. Thus Aristotle:
If each of the tools were able to perform its function on command or by anticipation, as they assert those of Daedalus did, or the catering vessels of Hephaestus (which the poet says “of their own accord came to the gods' gathering”), so that shuttles would weave themselves and picks play the lyre, master craftsmen would no longer have a need for subordinates, or masters for slaves…
But, Aristotle presumed, we never had such and never would. And so outside the realm of fantasy slavery was a societal necessity.
If I were a cynical historical materialist, I would say that a blanket prohibition of slavery for all (rather than just for members of the in-group) as against Reason and the Law of Nature is a position that could only be seriously advanced, before the Industrial Revolution, by inhabitants of a commercial kingdom that bought massive amounts of the work of slaves from elsewhere—that had the usufruct of slavery without formal ownership. Thus William Blackstone:
William Blackstone (1753): Commentaries on the Laws of England: ‘Pure and proper slavery does not, nay, cannot, subsist in England: such, I mean, whereby an absolute and unlimited power is given to the master over the life and fortune of the slave. And indeed it is repugnant to reason, and the principles of natural law, that such a state should subsist anywhere. The three origins of the right of slavery assigned by Justinian are all of them built upon false foundations.… Upon these principles the law of England abhors, and will not endure the existence of, slavery within this nation; so that when an attempt was made to introduce it, by statute 1 Edw. VI. c. 3… spirit of the nation could not brook this… even in the most abandoned rogues; and therefore this statute was repealed in two years afterwards. And now it is laid down, that a slave or negro, the instant he lands in England, becomes a freeman; that is, the law will protect him in the enjoyment of his person, and his property…
LINK:
And yet, and yet, after the Napoleonic Wars ended in 1815 the British Empire committed its battlefleet to the suppression of the slave trade worldwide. And yet, and yet, in 1833 the British Empire moved toward the abolition of slavery within its borders.
And yet, and yet, in 1776 Thomas Jefferson had planted a time-bomb in the founding of the United States: declaring it a self-evident truth held by those who called themselves Americans that all men were created equal, endowed with rights to life, liberty, and… something: hold property? pursue autonomy? pursue happiness? And that governments that did not secure these rights were illegitimate. Many tried to unwrite Jefferson’s words—chief among them pre-Civil War Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney. But the words could not be unwritten. Jefferson may not have meant them—Jefferson may have only wished to appear the kind of enlightened Enlightenment sage who could mean them, or wished but found himself unable to be the sage. However, what Jefferson the Virginian said when he meant it was less important than what the millions who read him heard the voice in the air that was Thomas Jeffersons who lived in their imaginations.
And yet, and yet, over 1861-1865 400,000 young men, predominantly but far from exclusively white men, went south to sacrifice their blood and their lives to try to make that version of Thomas Jefferson and his 1776 words the controlling founding moment of America, rather than James Madison and company and their 1787 words of fussy and limited compromise, or Captain Jope of the White Lion and his 1619 sale at Jamestown of 20 enslaved who he had found on board the Portuguese slave ship San Juan Bautista.
The historical materialist in me boggles at the early strength of the abolitionist movement—not just no slavery to be inflicted on us, but no slavery to be inflicted on anyone.
One Video:
Christos Papadimitriou: Language in the Brain <https://cbmm. mit.edu/video/language-brain>
Very Briefly Noted:
Carl Shurz: ’My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right… <https://www.thoughtco.com/my-country-right-or-wrong-2831839>
Ed Baptist: The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery & the Making of American Capitalism<https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Half_Has_Never_Been_Told/dSrXCwAAQBAJ>
Trevor Burnard: Edward Baptist, Slavery and Capitalism<http://trevorburnard.com/wordpress/?p=30>Matthew Desmond: In Order to Understand the Brutality of American Capitalism, You Have to Start on the Plantation <https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/slavery-capitalism.html>
John J. Clegg: Capitalism and Slavery<https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/683036>
Nikole Hannah Jones: Our Democracy’s Founding Ideals Were False When They Were Written. Black Americans Have Fought to Make Them True<https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/black-history-american-democracy.html>
P.R. Lockhart & Ed Baptist: How Slavery Became America’s First Big Business<https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/8/16/20806069/slavery-economy-capitalism-violence-cotton-edward-baptist>
Alan L. Olmstead & Paul W. Rhode: Cotton, Slavery, & the New History of Capitalism<https://web.law.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/microsites/law-economics-studies/olmstead_-_cotton_slavery_and_history_of_new_capitalism_131_nhc_28_sept_2016.pdf>
Ernst Renan: What Is a Nation?<https://web.archive.org/web/20110827065548/http://www.cooper.edu/humanities/core/hss3/e_renan.html>
Paragraphs:
Noah Smith & Brad DeLong: History, Slavery, & National Narratives: ‘PODCAST: “Hexapodia” Is þe Key Insight XXXI, with Special Guest Matt Yglesias…
LINK:
Kwame Anthony Appiah: Digging for Utopia: ‘One question is how persuasive we find the book’s intellectual history, which mainly unspools from the early Enlightenment to the macrohistorians of today and tells of how consequential truths about alternate social arrangements got hidden from view. Another is how persuasive we find the book’s prehistory, in particular its parade of large-scale Neolithic communities that, Graeber and Wengrow suspect, were self-governing and nondominating…. Among its most arresting claims is that European intellectuals had no concept of social inequality before the seventeenth century because the concept was, effectively, a New World import…. This claim is plainly wide of the mark. Look south, and you find that Francisco de Vitoria (circa 1486–1546), like others of the School of Salamanca, had much to say about social inequality; and he, in turn, could cite eminences like Gregory the Great, who in the sixth century insisted that all men were by nature equal, and that “to wish to be feared by an equal is to lord it over others, contrary to the natural order.”… Graeber and Wengrow could be all wrong in their intellectual history, of course, and completely right about our Neolithic past. Yet their mode of argument leans heavily on a few rhetorical strategies. One is the bifurcation fallacy, in which we are presented with a false choice of two mutually exclusive alternatives…. Graeber and Wengrow tend to introduce a conjecture with the requisite qualifications, which then fall away, like scaffolding once a building has been erected. Discussing the Mesopotamian settlement of Uruk, they caution that anything said about its governance is speculation…. Yet a hundred pages later… we’re assured that Uruk enjoyed “at least seven centuries of collective self-rule.”,,, A reader who does the armchair archaeology of digging through the endnotes will repeatedly encounter… discordance between what the book says and what its sources say…. Çatalhöyük…. You may still find yourself persuaded that a preponderance of nude women among depictions of gendered human bodies is, as Graeber and Wengrow think, evidence for a gynocentric society. Just be prepared to be flexible: when they discuss the Bronze Age culture of Minoan Crete, the fact that only males are depicted in the nude will be taken as evidence for a gynocentric society…. Two half-truths, alas, do not make a truth, and neither do a thousand…. Human beings are riven with both royalist and regicidal impulses; we are prone to erect hierarchies and prone to topple them. We can be deeply cruel and deeply caring…. Facing forward, we can conduct our own experiments in living. We can devise the stages we’d like to see. That’s what Rousseau came to think…. Never mind the dawn, he was urging: we will not find our future in our past…
LINK: <https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/12/16/david-graeber-digging-for-utopia/>
Sean Illing: The Remote Work Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet: ‘Charlie Warzel and Anne Helen Petersen… new book… Out of Office… is the best thing…. The book isn’t really about remote work—it’s about work. And not just what it has meant and could mean, but also why the status quo isn’t sustainable, for anyone…. The world they hope we build… in which our jobs don’t trump everything else… we think differently about our own labor and the ways we advocate for others…
Jamelle Bouie: Bill Clinton, Race & the Politics of the 1990s: ‘Clinton concluded his remarks with a now-notorious denunciation of the rapper and activist Sister Souljah, an attack by proxy on Jackson, who had brought Souljah to the event…. “What Clinton got out of the Sister Souljah affair,” noted the historian Kenneth O’Reilly, “were votes, particularly the votes of the so-called Reagan Democrats like the North Philadelphia electrician who said ‘the day he told off that [expletive] Jackson is the day he got [mine].’”… If Shor’s analysis is correct, then this is what it could be like to change course. Progressives would complain, as they did in 1992, but—a proponent of this approach might say—Clinton still won 85 percent of the Black vote. And once in office, he would try to reverse course: to moderate and to show his commitment to the people who put him in the White House…. But there is no such thing as idle presidential rhetoric…
LINK: <https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/09/opinion/democrat-shor-politics-bill-clinton.html>
Stephen Diehl: The Token Disconnect: ‘To the overwhelming majority of us in the software engineering profession who live closest to the metal, we see blockchain as a technology that barely works and whose use cases (if any) are vanishingly small and niche. Blockchains are a solution in search of a problem, but in the meantime we’re expected to pre-invest in “tokens” while the decades roll by with seemingly no progress on the fundamental question of “For what?”…. If there is any innovation in crypto assets it’s not in software engineering, but in financial engineering. We’ve created a new financial product like an option contract on a startup potentially building something real, but in case they don’t you can always exercise it early by simply dumping the stock on the public to cash out completely untethered to the company’s success. You don’t need to file a S–1 or have a coherent prospectus about attracting customers or business or revenue. Hell, the company doesn’t even have to have a business model at all, and in fact the best performing crypto assets are the ones that literally don’t do anything at all. They just need to tell a good story. What’s even more appetizing about the crypto-token-as-equity-proxy scheme is that instead of having to wait a decade for an initial public offering to dump your shares on the public, the shares can be made immediately liquid whenever you want, and you can dump the smoldering carcass of a “company” on the public markets directly without Wall Street getting their cut. Oh, and it’s also like the 1920s again and you can insider trade, wash trade, and pump and dump and there’s basically no enforcement. And in the rare case where there is enforcement the AG is probably only going to want the scalp of the entrepreneur who ran the scheme, not their investors. In a way, good for them for figuring out this lucrative loophole in our system. But at the same time shame on them for exploiting this loophole because of its horrible externalities. At the most broad macro level, offering these unregistered securities on highly manipulated markets, on rails that you control, with no regulation or consumer protection means that your average fool from the public is getting taken to the absolute cleaners when buying these things…. With crypto we’ve decided to do the most American thing ever, to commoditize our rage at the financial system into a financial product. Because after all, we’re just temporarily embarrassed millionaires and the only problem with CDOs wasn’t the moral hazard, but that you didn’t have a piece of the action. This time you have a choice, but I suspect history is going to have the same lesson to teach us about the perils of greed untempered by reason… ’
LINK: <https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/disconnect.html>
The piece by Stephen Diehl is the best I've seen as a critique of crypto currency. I've always had misgivings on the general rule that if it seems too good to be true, it probably is. Block chain sounds like an interesting method of producing secure and anonymous transactions. However, any institution or activity has opportunity costs attached. These seem to me to be inadequately considered. Perhaps this results from most crypto touters being evangelists rather than analysts.