Contextualising Slavery as a Labour Issue
It is sometimes useful to think about slavery as a solution to a labour need.
The set up goes this way: societies often require undesirable work done in order to achieve some goal. All things (and people) being equal, there’s just a tiny fraction of individuals willing to commit to get such work done. In a world of complete individual sovereignty, devoid of coercion, such work will not get done.
The consequences of the above situation are unavoidable and undesirable: a society that fails to get such work done will be out-competed by those that do, and on the other hand, individuals within the more competitive societies face the prospect of being sucked into whatever system is set up to rob them of enough sovereignty to get the hard things done.
If we are to infer from the success (so far) of settled civilization, the “doomer alternative” — where all would-be competitors volunteer to not play the game, seeing that it leads to less-than-ideal outcomes — would mean the extinction of our species.
The stakes are that high.
So compete we must, and people will be screwed along the way for the greater good. The problem of picking the winners and losers is solved by hierarchy, which I imagine is the fruit of common group dynamics. I think it is fair to assume that the organising principle scales, and the diversity of human temperaments practically guarantees that, all other things being equal, there will be losers found and forced to pay the price for the success of everyone else.
But why slavery?
For too many years the empath in me has struggled to understand how one human could look another in the eye and regard them as property. It sort of flies in the face of how people relate to things. There’s an obvious, observed tendency in humans to value things the more they are like us. Relatable-ness is a pretty firm foundation when you think about all the ways it manifests.
The one thing in the natural world that is most relatable to humanity is…other humans. This reality finds expression in various social norms, often in the severity of punishments meted out when other humans are wronged, compared to, say, inanimate objects or non-human life. Relatable-ness is a pretty firm foundation, so why slavery?
I have two plausible answers. The less interesting one is an argument from economics. Supply & Demand is such a powerful force. It can blunt the instinct to value human life. This is true even at the micro-level of the individual, and it scales. I have no evidence for this claim, but I will argue that the lowest rungs of more populous societies will have a harder time of it, and where human-life is relatively scares, everyone gets to be a little more special.
(I am hardly in the pro population-control camp, but I guess there is some merit to the Malthusian concerns that bubble up in certain circles. I can’t make up my mind.)
The more interesting answer, I find, is that the pressure for societies to succeed in a competitive landscape is often strong enough to override our instinct to value other humans like ourselves. This is true at the micro-level of the small group (say, a company, family or sports team), it scales. Oh boy, it scales.
Organised groups of humans are more effective. Organisation (literally, organ-isation, heh) means coercion into a system that, on a macro-level, has a greater chance of success. On the individual level, everyone sacrifices some of their individual sovereignty to be subsumed into the system. The winners — those who get to keep the most of theirs — assume the executive function of said system. The losers do the grunt work: the manual data-entry, the toilet-cleaning, the inbetweening, the dirty resource extraction, the being-the-cannon-fodder.
The flowers of successful settled civilisation: excellent public records, sanitised spaces and clean streets, multimedia productions, cheap energy and fine jewellery, peace through strength, and wars already won, necessarily sit on a substructure oppressive to the individual.
And, ignoring for a moment the moment of inflection where the returns rapidly diminish, at some point in the lifecycle of a society, the maximum amount of sustained coercion is employed to reap the most benefits from the system. That’s when we get slavery.
My favourite YouTube historians suggested that the subversion of traditional ideals the Christian religion introduced into European life was instrumental in morphing slavery into serfdom. They also suggested that, even before Rome was Christened, the empire began to ease the pressure on its society’s most victimized demographic.
I buy both ideas, and the hint that some fragment of humanity refuses to die even after centuries of normalised brutality. Or maybe the comfortable classes got so detached from reality they couldn’t imagine why they would let people live that way. Could be both, to be honest.
Either way, at some point, various groups of people have developed less harsh solutions to the labour problem at the foundation of their civilisational achievements. Technological improvement has been such an amazing force-multiplier, practically reducing the need to have to ̶e̶n̶s̶l̶a̶v̶e̶ ̶i̶n̶d̶e̶n̶t̶u̶r̶e̶ employ vast numbers of people to get work done.
But the need will not go away. Here’s to better solutions! 🥂
