Race and the Politics of Suffering

The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and
ill together [...]. — All's Well that Ends Well (4.3)

Effective popular politics are coalition politics. — Traditional

 

 

I'm going to sidle in on my topic, starting with a hint or two on, as we used to say, Where I'm coming from. 

Sidle 1
    Part of Where I'm coming from is Chicago ca. 1960 ,when at 17 or so I peaked out, not sexually, as the folklore has it, but in terms of achievement and status. At 17, I was elected President of the high-school charity group, the Merton Davis Memorial Foundation for Crippling Diseases of Children, and since we incorporated shortly thereafter, I may've been the youngest legally-established charitable foundation president in the area, or maybe in the USA. or world.

    It was a transition time for the group, since it had been a long time since Mert Davis had died — long in high-school years — and none of us or our constituents had known him, and enthusiasm was running low.

    And so my first speech to the executive board was a kind of pep talk where I said that I was grateful for the altruism and sense of civic duty they brought to their job but hoped that they also wanted to work on the board for status and an entry on their college applications and other baser motives: because we had a long haul ahead of us, and they'd need all the motivation they could get, and ambition and self-interest are strong motives.

    Year's later I would read T. S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral and see the justifying context of the line — martyrdom and Christian sainthood — but I knew from a blurb on a book I'd read the lines, "The last temptation is the greatest treason: / To do the right deed for the wrong reason"; and I said at the time, "Bullshit." Outright hypocrisy is pretty nauseating, but I felt then and think now that the key thing always is to do the right thing. And I knew that motives will be mixed and that the tackier ones can be useful.

Sidle 2
    A striking point, mentioned I believe by Timothy Snyder's in Bloodlands and by others elsewhere, is that people who sheltered Jews during the Hitlerian Holocaust usually downplayed their efforts when asked about them, and said that they only did what anybody would do: simple decency. That's beautiful and reaffirms the possibility of heroic decency, but it's blatantly incorrect. People doing the decent thing were rare, and a constant and urgent question is how to get more people to act decently, especially when they can do so with far less danger than in defying the Nazis.

    In terms of what can be done with words, among the most powerful motivating statements is that by Martin Niemöller, rendered in English in one version,

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
     Because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
     Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
     Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

This is a fine call for human solidarity; it is also an appeal for behaving decently as a matter of self-interest.

Sidle 3, Getting Repetitious but Closer
     My cousin (of some degree) Joy Erlichman Miller organized the Holocaust memorial in Peoria, Illinois, and tried to make the body-count more understandable by collecting buttons: eleven million of them. The strategy of collecting buttons is brilliant, and, more to the point I'm slowly moving toward, the number is correct. Humans aren't wired to understand deaths in even the hundreds or thousands, but the sight of millions of buttons can aid our imaginations. More, having kids collect everyday items like buttons is a good way to get them to relate to the extraordinary human costs of slaughters such as the Nazi Holocaust.

         The number, though, may also be unfamiliar to you. The Peoria committee used the figure of approximately eleven million murders, and they were wise to do so: both truthful to the best estimates, and politically prudent. Some five to six millions Jews were murdered in the Nazi extermination programs, plus some five to six million Roma ("Gypsies"), Communists, homosexuals, unionists, and other "inferiors," or real or imagined enemies of the Reich. That adds up to eleven million people, approximately, not the more frequently heard figure of six millions. Some six million Jews died, and even if the actual figure is "only" five million, it is a number to remember in itself and is central to the exterminations: "The Final Solution of the Jewish Problem" was the impetus for large-scale, systematic, routinized massacres. 

    Still, if the Shoah is uniquely Jewish and unique in more than just the technical sense applicable to all historical events — if it's literally and absolutely unique, "sui generis," one of a kind — then the Shoah is of only limited usefulness for historical understanding: There aren't many lessons to be learned from a literally unique event. If it is "The Holocaust," and that is that, there is little to be learned beyond "Sh*t can really happen to the Jews." Using the eleven million figure teaches that once a program of genocide gets started, all sorts of people can be sucked in and destroyed. And that point is crucial; if the Shoah just happened to Jews, why should non-Jews do more than sympathize? Fitting the Hitlerian Holocaust into a larger pattern of massacres, as Hannah Arendt does in detail in Origins of Totalitarianism, makes it historically and politically relevant for many people, and aids building "Never Again" coalitions.

    It is also useful for "Stop Now" coalitions.

    And here I am going to give some free advice, which can be received with, "And worth every penny we paid for it," or as a free gift, freely given, to accept, modify, or reject.

    When we get serious and start talking reparations, who suffered what at the hands of whom will be contentious. For now, though, and outside of politics, suffering is not a zero-sum horror, and books like Nell Irvin Painter's popular study, The History of White People (2010), can be useful for Black Lives Matter and other parts of the the continuing movement for Black liberation.

 The year 1616 was not the beginning of slavery in the Americas, African slavery was not America's Original Sin (dispossession and extermination of Indians preceded), some Whites as well as many Blacks were kidnapped to the New World and unfree in British America and the early United States — Painter's calls attention to classifications of Whites in the first couple of US censuses: and such points can be useful in expanding support for Black liberation. On the solid grounds that who gets exploited by whom shifts over history and it takes an only mildly enlightened perception to catch on that it is in the self-interest of most people most of the time to disassemble systems of exploitation and oppression. Check out the numbers: the usual rule is a large class of the exploited supporting a small group of the elite. 

    But note that elites over the centuries have evolved ways to make the system more subtle, primarily a hierarchy that — in its most respectable form — became a Great Chain of Being that put human society within Nature and a divine order, and provided a place for everyone and everyone in their places: some high and some low, as a couple famous sermons had it, some rich and some poor, some in authority and some in subjection/subjugation — but most poor, and many (often a majority) unfree. At that best, in theory, it was a truly Great Chain held together by love; at its more usual worst, what nasty-minded guys of my generation recommended we picture as a multistory outhouse, with most people well-trained to kiss up and shit down. 

    Parallel to this, there were tribalisms and nationalisms and most recently hierarchies of races that allow people to feel themselves parts of the Arya, the noble people, the Herrenvolk: one Master Race or another. Except, as usual, of course, most members of the group were not masters at all. Most people, most of the time, would do better with equality, equality under the law, to start with, and then more social equality. 

    And why has equality even just at law been so rare in human history? That old conservative, in most ways, Sir (and Saint) Thomas More could think through to an answer both traditional and revolutionary, as that fictional traveler Raphael Hythloday tells us in the conclusion of Utopia (1516), about a country where there was imperfect but wide-spread equality.

I cannot think but the sense of every man’s interest, added to the authority of Christ’s commands [...] would have drawn all the world over to the laws of the Utopians, if pride, that plague of human nature, that source of so much misery, did not hinder it; for this vice does not measure happiness so much by its own conveniences, as by the miseries of others; and would not be satisfied with being thought a goddess, if none were left that were miserable, over whom she might insult.  Pride thinks its own happiness shines the brighter, by comparing it with the misfortunes of [others ...]. 

 Translating out of the Hebrew and Greek, "Raphael Hythloday" means something like "speaker of healing nonsense," and More in Utopia is both ironic and quite serious ... and logical and politically astute, what might be called in the time of More (more or less), "politic."

    My free advice, freely given (and, like most unsolicited advice, arrogantly given) is that Black Lives Matter and others striving for Black liberation, and reparations, should make that appeal to self-interest. That History of White People includes many Whites who were enslaved or "enserfed," indentured or transported for crimes — and remained in servitude for life: given in British America how many people expired — as in died — before the expiration of their indentures.

    "White" in a racial sense has been a flexible term over time, usually taking in more people over time, but subject to change over time. And what gets defined as race, and as human can change radically and quickly, as the Nazis and others have demonstrated quite strongly. 

    In the US and the colonies before that, mostly, "They came for the Blacks"; but some poor Whites early on were kept in subjection, and radical immigrant Whites later on were lynched. This should be understood by First Peoples-Americans (Indians), massacred and removed, and by Chinese, once excluded, and Japanese, once interned. (Jews who don't get it are a special kind of stupid.)

    To recycle and redirect my rhetorical question on Jews, the Holocaust, and non-Jews: If the massacre of Jews was a uniquely Jewish problem, why, beyond decency, should others care a whole lot, and why not take Jewish suffering as a pressing reason to remain silent and safe? If racism in the US is a uniquely Black problem and systemic; if racism is based in privilege that profits all Whites — why, beyond decency, should others care a whole lot? 

     As much of the history of the Hitlerian Holocaust teaches, and the history of race in America teaches for a longer period — don't count heavily on the power of decency and the higher virtues.    

     If there is White privilege and hegemony, and racism is systemic, then the answer to why Whites should help probably lies in some combination of the sacrifice of a lot of young Blacks in attempts to force Whites to concede power — and in less costly ways to get large numbers of Whites to see that greater freedom and equality for all, as a general principle, is in their enlightened self-interest long term, and quite possibly in their self-interest pretty immediately. 

    Crudely put, there's very little room at the top of that multi-story outhouse. More elegantly put, there are the words of Martin Niemöller (or the fine animation, The Hangman). 

    Patriotism to American ideals, however poorly realized; decency, morality, ethics: all these demand support of the principle that Black Lives Matter. So does self-interest. That "web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together [...]," and the combination shouldn't bother us. When something is right to do, and pretty directly in our interest, then we should bloody-well just do it. So while stressing the right, do bring in when you can, self-interest.

 

 

     

 

 

 

 

 

 

    

 

RacISM-1: Hard-Core Racism (and We Still Need the Term)

On my mind, as often: words. In this case "racism," recently discussed on my time-line on Facebook in a meme I can no longer locate. Anyway, re: RACISM:
I informally edit for a big-time scholar who had to use the same word in different senses and finally resorted to assigning a number to each different meaning. Elegant that was not, but it recognized a problem and, down and dirty, dealt with it.
There's clearly a need — several needs — to talk about structural racism and racism woven into the history, culture, folkways, political unconscious and figurative psyche and "DNA" of the United States and other countries and cultures involved in the slave trade, Early-Modern and Modern colonialism, and other exploitation. 
But we also need to talk about Racism-1: a necessarily conscious ideology (an "-ism") that races exist, that they are in competition for limited resources and (necessarily) in conflict; that some races are better than others, and that (of course) one's own race is best and had damn well better destroy or keep down the others, rightfully functioning as Master Race in order for that Master Race to survive and for the fully-human species to prosper.
Bigotry and prejudice are more insidious than racism, and deserve their own definitions and condemnations.
Arguably, we can get pogroms and lynchings with bigotry and prejudice but for full-scale modern slavery or genocide one needs racism. BIGOTRY AND PREJUDICE CAN STILL PRODUCE POGROMS AND LYNCHINGS, and those are bad enough. And maybe the phrase "institutionalized racism" will serve for subtler horrors.

"Anti-Jew" / "Anti-Semite" (There's a difference.)

In a matter before Queen Elizabeth I's Privy Council involving the playwright Christopher Marlowe, Richard Baines, a semi-pro if not professional informer offered "A note containing the opinion of on[e] Christopher Marly Concerning his damnable Judgment of Religion, and scorn of Gods word" (1593). One blasphemy Baines attributed to Marlowe was "That he [Christ] was the sonne of a Carpenter, and that if the Jewes among whome he was borne did Crucify him theie best knew him and whence he Came." 

Baines's quotation is not very good evidence for what Marlowe said since Marlowe was soon too dead to confirm or deny it; it is, however, excellent evidence for what a knowledgeable guy in a nervously Christian country would judge would really interest and upset the authorities. 

If nothing else, the argument "The Jews knew him best ..." was always potential to oppose Christianity, and if nothing else made the presence of Jews a potential problem for Christians. In any event, off and on from antiquity and more so after the First Crusade, England and other European countries had anti-Jewish currents prior to nation and race in the modern sense. That's anti-Jewish stuff.

Later in the 17th century, there was movement into more (Early) Modern theories of race (I'm thinking of Thomas Rymer on Othello, 1693), and by the 19th c. we got full-blown racism and nationalism. If Jews were out of place in Christendom, how about in a White Christian nation if Jews were neither White nor Christian? If the emphasis is on "Nation and Race," you get anti-Semitism: Jews as Semites, not Aryans.

Not all of the Tiki-Torch trolls of Charlottesville are conscious of such matters, but some are, and in an era of return to open racism and virulent nationalism, we need to spell out such distinctions. 

Usage Note: "Bigotry," "Racism" ... and Cave 76

But when we come to sin upon reason and upon

discourse, upon meditation and upon plot, this is […]

to become the man of sin, to surrender […] reason

and understanding to the service of sin. When we come to

sin wisely and learnedly, to sin logically, by a quia [because]

and an ergo [therefore …]. — John Donne, Sermon 138

            The repeat on my 11 AM trash-TV watching today was a Cleveland Show episode on Black History Month, and then I noted a draft for this note on my iMac desktop. So apropos of little, but unfortunately usually relevantly, here's a word or two on a term it's unlikely you know, plus some loaded common usages.

Bigotry, Xenophobia: The Amity-Enmity Complex and "Cave 76"

            Like a fair amount of anthropology from the first part of the 20^th century, the idea of "the amity-enmity complex" has some problematic, rather gamy associations. Think of it, then, as a fancy way of characterizing what Mel Brooks's 2000 Year Old Man was getting at with the first national anthem: "Let 'em all go to hell, / Except Cave Seventy-Six!" Or we could note that the injunction in Leviticus (19.18) to "Love your neighbor as yourself" got quoted in the Gospels of Mark (12.30-31) and Matthew (22.39) and gets a whole lot of play, while the near-by injunctions to love foreigners, "the stranger," as yourself (Leviticus 19.34) — although part of the point of the Parable of the Good Samaritan — is much less known.

            Generally, we tend to feel amity toward members of our in-groups — the folks of our family and figurative Cave 76 — and sense "stranger danger" with out-groups. What varies is our sense of who's "In" and who's "Out," who's "like us" and who is, "Well, different."

            The amity-enmity complex may have roots deep enough to reach into parts of our biological inheritance as social animals. It doesn't much matter: the tendency is long-standing, a given of our nature, and a trait that makes sense in terms of the evolution of reproducing groups and some sense of "The Selfish Gene."

            Bigotry, xenophobia, fear of the Other, the often-misplaced idea of "Stranger Danger"  — these are relatively "natural" to people, and we have to work to balance them with our curiosity, reason, compassion, and ethics. Biblical teachings get contradictory here, but the Holiness Code in Leviticus says God said to love the stranger (foreigner, alien) as ourselves, "For you were strangers in the land of Egypt," and some of us may be — indeed, some of us at some time will be — strangers again, refugees ourselves. And statistics can tell us (middle-class, White?) American kids are in more danger from people they know than from random people they don't.

Racism

            Race-ISM is an ideology stating that there are certain large groups that form biological races, that those races differ significantly from one another, and that those differences create a hierarchy of superiority and inferiority. Until fairly recently, "race" could be applied to groups that were relatively small, nonbiological, and pretty parochial: note Winston Churchill's (sometimes perverse) comments about "the British race" or the English despising Irish and vice versa on the basis of "race" — back when the world in a sense was smaller, and "country" was another way to say "county." Nowadays, that wouldn't be RACE-ism, because most of us most of the time work on the color-coded big races: White, Black/Brown, Red, Yellow, although manners may have us using non-color terms. (Personally, I like the color-coding because it's so obviously wrong and silly: e.g., the truly Yellow race is the Simpsons.) And the color-coding/biological idea didn't get firmed up until the Early Modern period, which can be documented in a work like Thomas Rymer's attack on Othello, and Rymer's dumb-ass countryfolk — in Rymer's early-adopter racist view —who really liked Othello because into the late 17th century a lot of even sophisticated city-bred Brits hadn't learned that "Blackamoors" were inferior. "A for instance is not a proof," but Rymer's Short View of Tragedy (1693) is useful for dating when specifically racist ideology — in our sense of "race" — started coming in among the English.

And the date makes sense.

            In his "General Introduction" to The Norton Shakespeare (2000), Stephen Greenblatt has an admirable quotation attributed to Elizabeth I referring to Her Majesty's Loyal Pirate, Sir John Hawkins and his first slaving voyage, where he transported "some three hundred blacks from the Guinea coast to Hispaniola." She "is reported to have said of this venture that it was 'detestable and would call down the Vengeance of Heaven upon the Undertakers.'" Elizabeth was Head of the Church of England and knew a wicked act when she learned of one. However, Hawkins's venture grossed £10,000 — a huge sum during the period — and so "she invested in Hawkins's subsequent voyages and lent him ships" (23); business is business.

            John Hawkins et al. a century before Thomas Rymer didn't need ideology to kill some people, kidnap others, and sell them into slavery: Hawkins and crew were goddamn licensed pirates, and highly profitable organized crime is what they did. It's when the loot went to respectable heirs and assigns and new investors that there was a need for ideological rationalization; and ta-da!: theft, repression, murder, greed — and bigotry — got packaged together and theorized, and we got modern RACE-ISM. Injure first, theorize later, then get to injure more, with a relatively clear conscience; and repeat ....

             We're doing better since the 17th c. — even counting two World Wars and other assorted recent atrocities — but it's a long slog.

            The "slog" will be helped if we're careful with our language.

            Since the 17^th century and modern, Western, race-based slavery, we've built into what became American society racial/racialist components, intimately intertwined with class exploitation and other nastiness. What is called "systemic racism," however, is systemic, part of a system, and not something individual, or, frequently visible to those within the system and profiting from it. It shares with prejudice and bigotry the sort of problem pointed at with the mostly-rhetorical question, "Does a fish know it's in water?" All of these are the more insidious insofar as they are semiconscious or even unconscious. But they are not racism, which is an ideology, conscious by definition.

            The distinction is important because bigotry will lay the basis for pogroms and lynchings and other relatively short-term, usually mob-based horrors. Racism, can work in a vicious cycle of long-term, systematized, bureaucratize, theorized, legally-rationalized horrors: US slavery into the mid-19^th century, Jim Crow, final solutions to various ethnic "problems."

            It's hard to argue with a bigot, but they can learn from experience and — in a hypothetically pure form of bigotry — have no ideology to renounce. Racists can be argued with, but, well, good luck with that. Bigotry is like unto the fleshly sins, racism is a more serious, intellectual sin. It comes from twisting reason, and is difficult to reason people out of. Still, if you're dealing with an otherwise decent racist, say of the Huck Finn variety, someone brought up in the system, experience can teach and logic can reach.

            Sometimes.

            It happened with some religious Southerners of my generation, one I knew personally.

            It is our duty, o decent, ethical reader, to help make it happen. To start on that project we need to know the problem and label it carefully.

Slavery and the Continuum and Continuity of Cruelty

THIS IS A ST. PATRICK'S DAY REPRINT (so to speak) AND UPDATING OF AN ESSAY FROM NOVEMBER 2011.

I'll start with a disclaimer of sorts.

            The word "presentism" apparently has technical uses in philosophy and for literary and historical analysis, but I found an almost colloquial usage more immediately useful. In this sense, "presentism" is the dumb-ass cousin of a belief in progress and is shown when people too literally think, "In every day / In every way," people have grown "better and better and better," and believe the way we live today is, across-the-board, the norm. If that's the case, then — given where we are today — our ancestors must have been pretty damn stupid and unsophisticated.

            I ran into this attitude when some of my 18-20-something students made clear they thought pretty ignorant and unsophisticated such folk as noble and royal politicians in the courts of Richard II and Elizabeth I, or London theater fans ca. 1600. There are a lot of things you can say about rulers and courtiers in the late medieval and early modern periods —words like "criminal" and "immoral" are frequently apt — but, as a rule, unsophisticated they were not. King Richard II had some weird weaknesses of character, but he wasn't stupid, and when it came to running the family business (England and such), the Tudor Queen Elizabeth was very, very, very bright, sophisticated, and good at her job. And, of course, London audiences ca. 1600 supported a good deal of crap, but they also saw, heard, and apparently appreciated some of the best drama ever produced.

            It is useful to avoid "presentism" in this sense when doing literary criticism so you don't find yourself thinking that the writing of Chaucer and Shakespeare and such couldn't be as sophisticated as your instructors have suggested because Chaucer and Shakespeare and their audiences couldn't have been that sophisticated. Now one or more of your instructors may have been overly ingenious or, well, even just full of shit with a reading or two  — but not because an idea we can have was necessarily too clever for the likes of our ancestors.

            If useful to avoid presentism in this sense in LitCrit, it is actually important to avoid it when doing politics — nothing in LitCrit is truly important — it is important to avoid presentism in talking politics since we shouldn't often change current practices on the assumption that our ancestors were idiots when they came up with them. (For example, after the 2008 financial crises, the "Glass-Steagall" Banking Act of 1933 looks like a really good idea after all.)

            Sometimes our ancestors were stupid, of course; see above on professors sometimes being stupid and apply the rule broadly: even bright humans, even bright humans acting where we're experts say dumb things and do even dumber. But not all that often: Usually our predecessors knew what they were doing, thank you, and the conservatives are correct in the traditional conservative belief that we shouldn't muck around changing things unless we have strong reasons to change things.

            So, our ancestors weren't stupid, or incompetent.

            Having said that, however, I want get to what is, as I write and update, a newly-released movie I have not seen (and may not) and to the serious implications of the idea a character in Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness summed up in his reference to his "criminal ancestors": i.e., us and those predecessors I've been defending.

            The movie I want to take off from is 12 Years a Slave (2013) and the inevitable viewer reactions to the cruelty of nineteenth-century Black slavery in the southern United States. The reactions are better nowadays than with Roots in 1977, when I heard and read from some of my fellow Americans — adults, and people who could read — "Why didn't they tell us?!" i.e., why weren't we told that slavery was so bad. Well, indeed they didn't tell us as much as they should have, but the basic information was there. People are told more nowadays and at least quieter about being shocked ("Shocked!") that cruelty was going on, but I want now to point out that in many ways, important ways, things were worse in the past than most of us assume.

            Sorry gang, but you need to know this — and the upshot will be rather hopeful.

            In Origin of Totalitarianism (1951) and Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), Hannah Arendt makes clear that people won't understand the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jews if they think of it as the Holocaust and don't put the Shoah in its historical context, including a tradition of massacres. Furthermore, those of us who talk of the eleven million victims of the Hitlerian Holocaust, and not just the five to six million murdered Jews, sometimes have the prudent political motivation of reminding people who are not Jews that they have more at stake here than sentimental sympathy for victims. The "First they came for …" litany has become a cliché, but it remains one of the most practical bits of wisdom that history can teach. "The Final Solution of the Jewish Problem" was central to the Nazis systematic slaughter, but the machinery of exterminations found a variety of victims and had roots in soils in addition to anti-Semitism.

            And even as you have to have some feeling for the history of massacres to understand the Hitlerian Holocaust, even so you need to know the continuity of the cruelty of slavery, and you need to know that slavery was at the extreme end and a logical extension of a continuum of cruelty that lasted into modern times, and came back for a season of hell in the 20^th century.

            Since my form in these blogs is the meditation or personal essay, I'll start with a personal observation from my PhD candidacy in the late 1960s, when, in theory, I learned to read Latin.

            I was using for homework The New Collegiate Latin & English Dictionary (1966) and one day noticed how often on the way to looking up something else — we were mostly reading Aesop's Fables, for God's sake! — how often I saw Latin words referring to things military, violent, and/or violent in relationship to managing slaves. Slavery was woven into the fabric of the Latin language, as was the idea that slaves had to be kept in line, fairly often through terror: beatings, blindings (altero oculo captus 'to blind in one eye'), breaking bones, branding, … well, a series of horrors up to and including crucifixion. Educated and valuable slaves might be treated well; however "Unskilled slaves, or those condemned to slavery as punishment, worked on farms, in mines, and at mills. Their living conditions were brutal, and their lives short." Legal testimony from slaves was admissible only after slaves had been tortured.

            Roman slaves gained rights as time went on, but there was continuity, with some slavery in the European Middle Ages, moving more toward serfdom, which got into full gear in parts of Russia in the 17^th century and lasted until fairly recently: 1861. Literal slavery in Russia got a significant boost from the medieval Mongol and Tatar invasions and lasted until 1723.

            There was also continuity of slavery in areas in more constant contact with western Europe than most of Russia: The Mideast slave trade lasted from the 7^th century C.E. through the 19^th, and it ranks #8 on Matthew White's list of "The One Hundred Deadliest Multicides" in human history, accounting for some 18.5 million deaths, to say nothing of families torn apart and lives reduced (by definition) to slavery.

            So slavery was known in Europe from their neighbors, and when the Reformation and Renaissance got into full swing, such knowledge was increased by reminders that slavery had been regulated but accepted in the now much-translated and much-read Bible and had been accepted and defended by the now born again, so to speak, classics: the revitalized and revitalizing admiration of ancient Greece and Rome and their cultures (renaissance). If the Hebrews practiced, and the noble Greeks and Romans accepted, practiced, and, as we used to say in academe, theorized slavery — how bad could it be?

            In his "General Introduction" to The Norton Shakespeare (2000), Stephen Greenblatt has a beautiful little quotation attributed to Elizabeth I referring to Her Majesty's Loyal Pirate, John Hawkins and his first slaving voyage, where he transported "some three hundred blacks from the Guinea coast to Hispaniola." She "is reported to have said of this venture that it was 'detestable and would call down the Vengeance of Heaven upon the Undertakers.'" As I said, Elizabeth was bright and sophisticated, and as Head of the Church of England she knew a wicked act when she learned of one. However, Hawkins's venture grossed £10,000 — a huge sum during the period — and so "she invested in Hawkins's subsequent voyages and lent him ships" (23); business is business.

            And business for some was most excellent in the early part of early modern times as the voyages of exploration and discovery discovered silver mines in the New World and empires loaded with gold to plunder and new marketing opportunities with sugar and then tobacco and rum (making fortunes through drug-dealing is old news in the Americas).

            There was money to be made, and if some of the methods were "detestable," well …. Well, by the late 17^th century, racism would theorize why a little detestable slavery was OK for Black people, and there was the tradition of slavery from the Holy and semi-holy scripture of the Bible and the classics. Say what you will about the Romans, they were equal-opportunity oppressors. If they could enslave the two known races of White and Black, plus every ethnicity they could conquer, surely Europeans could enslave Africans, who could be presented, in a Christian variation on Aristotle, as by nature servile and, indeed, who could profit infinitely from contact with Europeans, and getting Christianized (although that Christianizing bit got problematic with conservative or proto-liberal Christians — depending on how you saw them — who disapproved of enslaving other Christians).

            There is one other item to add to the hell-broth as we moved into the slavery inherited in the New World colonies that became the United States. The detestable cruelty of slavery in itself, the terrorism required to maintain people in slavery, was less obvious in its time, including in the years of the Atlantic Slave Trade, from 1452-1807 (#10 on Matthew White's list, with 16 million dead), until the end of slavery in the United States in 1865. Slavery was indeed opposed by an abolitionist movement that over time moved from the political fringe to the mainstream; but that movement took a long time, in part precisely because Black chattel slavery was the extreme end of a continuum of cruelty but definitely part of a continuum.

            In 2011, Steven Pinker published an impressive book on The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, which required him to come up with some strong hypotheses on Why Violence Has Declined but more so required for him to demonstrate that, indeed, violence has, in fact, declined.

            He was able to perform that demonstration for a reason crucial here: Violence in our time is less than in earlier times, even acknowledging the horrors of the "hemoclysm" (blood deluge) of the two world wars of the 20^th century; but violence is less not because this generation is all that good but more because life for many people before quite recently was very, very bad. As Pinker summarizes much of his book: "Tribal warfare was nine times as deadly as war and genocide in the 20th century. The murder rate of Medieval Europe was more than thirty times what it is today. Slavery, sadistic punishments, and frivolous executions were unexceptionable features of life for millennia, then suddenly were targeted for abolition. Wars between developed countries have vanished, and even in the developing world, wars kill a fraction of the people they did a few decades ago. Rape, battering, hate crimes, deadly riots, child abuse, cruelty to animals — all substantially down."

            Pinker has been critiqued, and figuratively attacked, for his conclusions, but they jibe with a Latin-English dictionary of decades earlier with no political agenda, and with such works as Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century (1978), and the fictional but very well researched BAROQUE CYCLE by Neal Stephenson (2003-4). They also go along with a side comment by the US Army colonel who taught my American military history course ca. 1961. In 1776, the Continental Congress increased the maximum number of lashes a court martial could order from the Biblical 39 to the decimal 100; as the colonel noted, it could have been worse, since the 100 limit "at least meant it was unlikely you'd be whipped to death," as could happen in the British tradition of having someone "whipped through the fleet" or receiving up to a deadly 200 lashes. And then there was reading Herman Melville's, White Jacket (1850), the book arguably most responsible for ending flogging in the US Navy. One memorable and undoubtedly effective — if problematic — sentence: "The chivalric Virginian, John Randolph of Roanoke, declared, in his place in Congress, that on board the American man-of-war that carried him out Ambassador to Russia he had witnessed more flogging than had taken place on his own plantation of five hundred African slaves in ten years."

            In the words of an old joke, as H. Rap Brown (of the Black Panther Party) might've said of the chivalric slave-owner John Randolph, "damn White of him." Still, the point remains that sailors and soldiers, servants and prisoners were often treated with great cruelty. As Pinker stresses, it was part of everyday life to encounter brutality toward non-human animals, children, wives, and others in positions of weakness, people in culturally-sanctioned and enforced inferiority. And one definition of "liberty" included the liberty to practice such brutality without interference by the state in family matters or labor management or doing what the social superior thought right to do with "my own."

            Books like Pinker's Better Angels and essays like mine here are — or should be — unpleasant to read, but there is that hopeful upshot. Things really have gotten better, and there is hope for getting them actually pretty good for increasing numbers of people.

            As part of that improvement, it's necessary to remember that sympathy for the oppressed is nice as a form of altruism, but politically more effective when aspects of good character are reinforced by insightful self-interest.

            It wasn't just Jews caught up in the Nazi exterminations, and it was not just Blacks who suffered: these atrocities happened in worlds that kept up traditions of cruelty and fitted them to newfangled ideologies of racism and very old-fashioned sins of pride and greed. Jews and Blacks are strong contenders for the "Grimmy Award" for some areas of worst suffering, but there are many out there to join us.

            Americans in the 21^st century are not particularly exceptional nor are we all that much smarter than our ancestors; and our current relative decency is a matter of culture, inheritance, and, in a sense, fashion. There was great continuity of slavery and other oppression, and bad old days can return. One way to prevent such a return is to be at least smart enough to do the arithmetic: slavery is a great way to live, for a rich slave-owner; an oppressive hierarchical society is great, if you're on the top. But that's not how the numbers work: If we return to worlds with a long continuum of cruelty, there's a good chance each of us will be receiving most of that cruelty, not dishing it out.