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Saturday, January 21, 2012
100 Years Ago Today Part 2
In the first post upon this topic, your Curmudgeon examined Belloc's foundation for his concept of the servile state. We proceed thence to Belloc's conception of what constitutes individual slavery:
A man binds himself to work for life and his children after him so far as the law may permit him to bind them in a particular society, but that not for a bare subsistence, but for so large a wage that he will be wealthy in a few years, and his posterity, when the contract is completed, wealthier still. Does the state in enforcing such a contract make the fortunate employee a slave? No. For it is in the essence of slavery that subsistence or little more should be guaranteed to the slave. Slavery exists in order that the free should benefit by its existence, and connotes a condition in which the men subjected to it may demand secure existence, but little more.
Here your Curmudgeon must take exception. Yes, it is indisputable that in a society that embeds the institution of slavery, if the free failed to benefit by it, they would not tolerate it. But a benefit adequate to secure the tolerance of the free need not be the maximum benefit possible under the laws of Nature. There are other values than monetary profit, and the law of diminishing marginal value applies to the relations among them. Were it otherwise, we would never see a captain of industry league with forces overtly determined to limit the profits possible to him; consider environmentalism as a test case.
Nevertheless, Belloc has a point. The free must benefit from the enslavement of others for slavery to persist. More, the benefit must exceed other considerations that would militate against slavery (e.g., conscience qualms, technological advance, or the desire for others' approval). Therefore, a very slender benefit is unlikely to serve; it must be substantial, or otherwise differentiated from conditions that obtain outside the zone where slavery is tolerated, to keep the institution alive.
The phrase ringing in your Curmudgeon's thoughts is "peculiar institution."
The antebellum South was the last bastion of slavery in what we now term the "Western World." That makes it possible for America-bashers to distort the history of slavery, a worldwide institution that had also been tolerated in Britain until 1833, into a unique stain on the American conscience. The facts speak otherwise, though this is not the place for an extensive exploration of them.
Slavery in the Southern, pre-Civil War United States was indeed a peculiar institution. Economically, it would have struck an objective analyst as insane. The emergence of machines that would hugely out-produce any plantation slave ought to have brought the institution of slavery to its end...if economic concerns were the item of greatest importance. To be blunt about it, they were not.
Slavery in the pre-war South was far more important to the South as a component in its regional culture than as a source of economic benefit to slaveholders. The best demonstration of this is the well-recorded willingness of the great majority of Southerners to defend slavery, even though only a small minority of Southerners were slaveholders.
The quality of the arguments presented in defense of slavery is of no moment. There is no argument strong enough to overcome the natural right of every human being to his freedom. The significance of the argument was and is that antebellum Southerners regarded slaveholding as "a Southern thing," a component of the South's distinct regional culture. The "rights" of the few dozen black slaveholders were as much a part of that culture -- and as fiercely defended -- as those of white slaveholders.
Historian Clarence Carson considers the core of the matter to be sectionalism: the view of Southerners that the South was sui generis. Southerners held that the criticisms of non-Southerners, who were therefore outside Southern culture and Southern norms, were inherently invalid and irrelevant, and that the South had every right to maintain its uniqueness. This accords with the historical record far better than any economic thesis. It also meshes well with the persistence of slavery entirely without economic benefits in non-Western lands, of which the Arabian states are the best examples.
Belloc's approach to the servile state is entirely economic. Therefore, we must expect that in some of the analysis he presents, there will be generalizations that fail to apply to "classical" slavery," as your Curmudgeon has delineated above. However, he is on target in his core consideration: For slavery to persist and be tolerated, whether legally, socially, or otherwise, free men must feel that they benefit by it.
More anon.
Comments
One small quibble about what is otherwise a fine column: Slavery in Brazil outlasted the institution here, being abolished nearly two decades after it was done away with here. I worked in Americana, a small city in the interior of the state of São Paulo , founded by Southerners who left the vanquished Confederacy specifically to relocate in a slave-holding jurisdiction. There were still people, Brazilian citizens of long standing, who spoke English with a Southern accent there.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 01/21/2012 at 10:47 PMHm! I didn’t know that. Thank you. But in the Nineteenth Century, perhaps people concerned with slavery would have been reluctant to include Brazil in the civilized, and therefore Western, world.
Legally sanctioned slavery persisted even longer in other countries, of course—and sub rosa, it’s still practiced today in the Middle East. It’s a hard institution to eradicate, for reasons we might not yet grasp.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 01/22/2012 at 06:23 AM
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