We spent the evening discussing slavery.  Admittedly a depressing topic.  The topic was explored to the extent of our ability and satisfaction.

How do we explain slavery?  Slavery as a legalized practice of owning and utilizing the life force of another, ended in the late 19th century.  There are reports of remaining outlaw human trafficking from time to time in the press.  Our discussion began with consideration that Aristotle would not have thought slavery to be objectionable.  Slaves were a common feature of the world of late antiquity.  There was a world of difference in quality of life between that of a household slave and one that labored in the silver mines.  Jacques Ellul writes:

..such things as slavery are unjust only according to our view of justice and unacceptable only to our mind.  Hierarchy and inequality were “normal.” We have to consider that our ideas about equality and absence of hierarchy are not eternally true and right and good; quite the contrary.

Certainly Aristotle lived in a hierarchically conceived and structured world by comparison with our own.

And then there the the matter closer to home of slavery in the antebellum South.  We must include the New England banking institutions that happily profited by financing the system of labor extraction.  Chattel slavery anchored by the color of one’s skin causes one to shudder today.  Yet as we discussed, the immorality of this practice was decisively trumped by economics, the wealth produced by the system.  Slavery was ended by four years of war and an estimated 650,000 killed.  Death by disease and starvation added an equal number.

My take-away from last nights discussion was how difficult it is to characterize reality.  Our assessment of the nature of reality has to be analogous to many pages in a book, rather than simply the one page reflective of our time, the one we favor the most.

I really like this poem.

Absolutes

(from an ink painting by Seiho)

black on white
crow in snow
hunched
wet lump
on a brittle branch
remembering warmth
remembering corn
miserable
as life
is
black on white.

by Gustave Keyser

Perhaps this poem, every line of it, is the best that one could possibly do to formulate a conceptual snap shot of reality…………….