If you’re ever in court, and you want to inject a little humour into the proceedings, try speaking into your flip phone, “Beam me up, Scotty!” But if instead you think a little honesty might help your case, try “You Honour, it seemed like a good idea at the time!”
But apparently that doesn’t help when it comes to slavery in America and the Indian Residential Schools (IRS) in Canada. The new orthodoxy requires that both were unmitigated evils. And those in charge could have, and should have, known so at the time.
I’m not sure of either. That is, I’m not sure they should have thought so at the time, because I’m not sure either was an unmitigated evil. I guess that makes me a slavery and IRS apologist. By which, for those unfamiliar with the historical use of the term, is not meant someone who apologises for these ‘injustices’, but rather someone who defends them.
Hindsight is not 20/20. By that I mean there’s nothing we know today that we didn’t know then. Or even if we had known, that knowledge wouldn’t have altered our behaviour. Everyone knows now, and everyone knew then, that given a choice between slavery and freedom, most people would have chosen freedom, and they would have then. Otherwise there’d have been no need to put them in chains. But that doesn’t settle the issue. It doesn’t even begin to settle the issue. My dog has to be trained to bring me its leash. Is leashing it for its own good? Yes. But that doesn’t settle the issue either. So what does?
Even the vegetarian accepts that animal husbandry is the sine qua non of human survival. It’s unclear whether the same can be said of human husbandry, but certainly it’s the sine qua non of (what Thomas Hobbes called) “our delectation only”. So we might have survived without human husbandry, if guarding the mouth of the cave 24/7 counts as survival. The mere recruitment of others who, as Hobbes put it, “are in like danger with himself”, might have helped against the saber tooth tiger, but pretty much anything beyond taking turns on the watch entails superior and subaltern. Think of the hunting party. The war party. The construction of a watch tower. Or of a wall. To imagine there were, are, or could be, alternatives is to imagine some other species. The introduction of some kind of subalternity was, is, and always will be, as definitive of our species as the opposable thumb.
Though not, of course, invariable. As Marx argued – and as most feminists concur – slavery takes many forms. But what holds the slave is almost never chains. It’s that she has nowhere else to go. And no other way to feed herself and her children. Could it be otherwise? In the absence of patriarchy, certainly. Then, because human nature abhors a vacuum, someone else would control her.
She is to her owner what her plow horse is to her. She could set it free. Why doesn’t she? It may or may not starve to death if it’s sent off to forage for itself. But it might like to take its chances. But then so might the Indian child. How can she know what her life will be like if she doesn’t learn to read and write the settler’s language?
But, it’s countered, not unlike the domesticated horse, she wouldn’t have to learn to read and write the settler’s language if the settler hadn’t appropriated the resources upon which she – or at least her ancestors – otherwise had survived. Perhaps. But could she survive now if those resources were returned to her? Doubtful. But even if she could, would she be content with that level of survival? I think not. By all accounts my so-called Indigenous students are as ‘chained’ to their flush toilets and smart phones as are their white settler colleagues.
So the Department of Education in Florida, and the critics of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) here in Canada, are underplaying their hand. In the case of the former, instead of the cartoon Frederick Douglas reminding his wide-eyed listeners that slavery was, after all, ubiquitous throughout the world, and that it was to their credit rather than their shame that Americans got rid of it, or pointing out that slaves did, after all, acquire certain skills they might not have had they not been slaves, what he should have allowed them was to compare the 2023 life of the African American and that of the descendants of those who were left where they were in Africa. And in the case of the TRC, defenders of the IRS program could ask its detractors what they think the conditions of indigenous Canadians would be like had they been left to their own educational devices, without the resources – resources that were soon to be no longer there – that would have left their pre-contact education the least bit useful .
But to be fair, counterfactuals are ugly to look at. That’s why critics of what has been, as distinct from what would have been, are loath to look at them. And especially loath to let others look at them. Given their agenda, hard to blame them. And I don’t. But I do wonder what damage to their agenda they think would be done if they did allow themselves to look. I suspect they know their constituency in much the way that I don’t. Clearly that’s why I keep writing such obviously feckless entries like this.
Categories: Everything You Wanted to Know About What's Going On in the World But Were Afraid to Ask, Social and Political Philosophy, Why My Colleagues Are Idiots
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