How Important Is Slavery?
How important is slavery relative to other forms of evil? That is, where does slavery rank in the hierarchy of bad things one human being can do to another?
Here’s a list of some bad acts. If you were to rank them from bad to worst, where would you place slavery in the list?
- murder
- rape
- genocide
- incest
- abortion
- torture
Why Is Slavery Rare in Modern Times When It Was Prevalent in Ancient Times?
Lots of people seem to assume that the reason slavery is relegated to the past is that modern man has progressed and is more moral than our ancestors. If men were more moral today, we wouldn’t still have that list of evils you see above. These are the same evils that have always been a part of the human landscape. Why then has slavery disappeared? The short answer is the Industrial Revolution. When machines could replace human laborers, slavery could eventually be done away. Machines were cheaper and easier to maintain than human beings. If that reasoning sounds pragmatic rather than moral, it was. People invented machines to make money, not to eradicate slavery.
The Information Age has come along behind the Industrial Revolution and done the same thing to knowledge work that the Industrial Revolution did to physical work. So successful have been the efforts to automate brains as well as brawn, some economists are now suggesting a “universal basic income” to support citizens because future economies will not require as many human workers. In other words, even with slowing population growth, there won’t be enough jobs to go around.
For these reasons, it is absurd for modern people to strut about as if we were morally superior to our ancestors who enslaved each other.
Our Ancestors Were Tempted by Slavery in Ways That We Are Not
Even if the law and conscience allowed it, and for the reasons implied above, there’d be more trouble than benefit associated with having slaves today. In fact, employers are always looking to technology for ways to reduce headcount because it’s constantly becoming more and more expensive to manage a person than a machine. And if more employees is bad, more slaves would be worse.
People who lived before the Industrial Revolution and the Information Age were tempted to enslave others because of the economic benefit slavery, and slavery alone, provided them. Besides that, slavery was an institution that they all inherited from their ancestors because no one could remember a time when some form of slavery didn’t exist. For people in the American South to give up slavery in the early 19th century would mean likely bankruptcy and foreclosure on the property they owned and also would likely mean poverty and starvation for the slaves that they would be setting free.
I hope it is obvious to you that I am not making an argument for slavery. Instead, I am simply trying to show that a 21st-century person who faces no temptation to enslave is hypocritical to be outraged that an 18th-century person did not reject slavery at every turn. The British paid money to end slavery, and Americans paid with their lives. But they both paid dearly to eradicate slavery – whereas modern Americans and Brits pay nothing to keep it eradicated.
Condemning Slavery in the 21st Century Is Not a Moral Act
Condemning sins in others that you have little temptation – or even opportunity – to commit yourself is cowardly as well as hypocritical. Besides that, it costs you nothing to condemn a sin; there is no virtue in such an act. Nevertheless, many people today seek to rack up cheap virtue points by condemning a practice that has long been abandoned and is universally condemned in this age. Do we not have actual sins of our own for which we will have to give an account?
Are Pre-Industrial Societies to Be Judged by Post-Industrial Standards?
What are we to do about statues and other honors bestowed on our ancestors? Are these signs of respect to be withdrawn or destroyed? Are we to condemn those whom we once honored?
A man should be judged on the totality of what he contributes to the world. If you deem acceptance of slavery to be a subtraction from his account – even if you believe it should be a great subtraction from his account – does this wipe out all the good he did? I hope not. No man – save one – is without sin. If a failure to condemn and renounce slavery is required of every person who lived in a pre-industrial society, we’re not going to have very many people from the past to honor. Do we want future generations to condemn us because we currently hold some view that they will one day consider repugnant?
Neither Jesus nor His apostles condemned the institution of slavery. They even exhorted slaves to obey their masters. A discerning person recognizes this strategy on their part was not to preserve slavery, but ultimately to undermine it. Yet it is clear that Jesus did not instruct His followers to protest slavery and condemn slaveowners. Shall we therefore stop revering Jesus?
Conclusion
Today’s social justice warriors obsess over slavery because it is a way of coercing others with guilt and intimidation, and because it requires so little virtue to condemn others. In fact, it requires no virtue at all. On the contrary, all it requires is hypocrisy and hubris.
Our ancestors got us to where we are. If they did not do everything perfect, does that give us the right to be ungrateful for all that they got right? If we see some things more clearly than they did, is it not because we stand on their shoulders?
At the root of Western Civilization and all the progress we have made – including the eradication of slavery – stands Jesus and the Bible. To curse the root while eating the fruit merely because some of the branches were not shaped as we would shape them is to be blind, ungrateful, and monumentally self-righteous.
The Duty of a Man 