The mirror of slavery

I have been listening to Dan Carlin's wonderful "Hardcore History" podcasts. Dan specialises in trying to help his listeners grasp what it must have been like to be a participant in some of the dramatic times of history: the Punic Wars, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, and so on. He really succeeds in creating mental images that I for one will not forget in a hurry. I recommend the podcasts to anyone who can handle that kind of imagery.

One of his recent podcasts was about slavery. What was it like to be a slave, and in particular, what was it like to be a slave owner? Dan pointed out that slaves are the most amazing labour-saving devices: they do all the hard, time-consuming work that you would otherwise have to do yourself. As a result, the people at the top of the hierarchy in slave-owning societies (i.e. most societies since civilisation began) had in some ways an easier life than most of us today in the developed world. He made an analogy between slaves and cars. Paying someone to work for you by the hour or day is like taking a taxi: no initial investment, but quite a high cost per mile. Whereas owning a slave is like owning a car: a significant initial cost, but then (relative to taxis or paid servants) cheap to run.

Dan also read out some of the things people in slave-owning societies wrote in an attempt to justify the practice. They created the myth of the "happy slave", and tried to argue that black slaves in the US were much better off than their ancestors in Africa had been. Such arguments seem (and are) idiotic today, but they're interesting in that they show evidence of people whose consciences clearly were bothering them, but who were loath to oppose slavery because of the work it saved them. And lest the rest of us feel too smug, he also pointed out that slavery tended to occur in places and times where there was a supply of available slaves and where there would otherwise have been a shortage of labour for menial tasks. The inference is: most societies that haven't enslaved others, have mainly done so not because of any moral superiority but either because they couldn't (no available weaker nations) or because they didn't have much need to.

The slave-car analogy set me thinking. Modern democracies don't have slavery -- at least not direct, on-the-premises, "chattel slavery" like that of a couple of centuries ago. But maybe that's not so much, or not only, because of the awakened consciences of campaigners like William Wilberforce. Maybe it's mostly because at the time of Wilberforce's campaign, and a little later, of the American Civil War, the industrial revolution was kicking in enough to provide an alternative supply of labour-saving devices. So the owners could free their slaves and not be plunged into poverty as a result, thus combining relief to the conscience (and freedom from the fear of a slave revolt) with continued comfort. A real win-win.

I would be the last to argue that such a transition was on balance not a good thing. But it has left us with other problems. Most of our present-day labour savings result from using fossil fuels: to ferry us around, to grow cheap food, to make all our stuff. And now peak oil and climate change are starting to bite. So we need to stop, just as our ancestors needed to abolish slavery.

The cost of slavery was paid in an obvious and immediate way by the slaves themselves, and the owners tried to justify it by distancing themselves from their slaves, seeing them as essentially different from themselves because of their race; or by pretending that enslaving them had somehow done them a favour; or by the familiar refrain "what can I do?". Or, I'm sure, just by ignoring the issue as best they could.

The cost of our fossil-fuel dependence is mostly not paid in the present (though the Ogoni people in Nigeria, for example, might have some views on that generalisation). But it will be paid by our children and grandchildren. Their suffering may be just as intense, but we are distant from it because it's mostly not happening yet, and many of the people it will happen to aren't even born yet. Thus we employ very similar psychological defences. We discount our descendants' suffering because they are remote from us in time. Some of us (though fewer these days, as the evidence mounts) deny climate change is real or will do any harm. We expect governments or technology to deal with the problem for us ("what can I do?"). And we carry on driving our cars, flying away for our cheap holidays and running our patio heaters while trying to avoid thinking about the whole thing as much as possible.

I believe our descendants, if we have any, will, as the film title has it, indeed look back on our age as "The Age of Stupid", and find our rationalizations as laughable and contemptible as we rightly find those of people at the top of the pile in the age(s) of slavery.

Maybe nuclear fusion will come to the rescue and provide us with carbon-free cheap energy in time, or maybe we will have to do what no group of humans has ever done in large numbers up to this time: voluntarily sacrifice a significant degree of comfort for the sake of others.

In the mean time, next time you're out travelling by any means other than your own muscle power or power from the wind turbine or solar panel on your roof, you might like to imagine your car is being pulled by a gang of slaves, or that your plane is a galley being rowed by a couple of hundred of them.

And that those slaves look a little like you, because they are your grandchildren.

Actually, I suspect you probably won't like to imagine that -- and indeed, even Dora thinks my suggesting it is well over the top. But I hope the image stays with you anyway, just as some of Dan Carlin's graphic descriptions have stayed with me. It's not comfortable or pleasant, but if it reflects reality, I make no apology for it.