Modernity and Slavery

  

Modernity and Slavery

Peter Schultz

 

                  A question: Does modernity starve or feed slavery? This question assumes that slavery is natural; that is, is intrinsic to political life, whether it is just or unjust.

 

                  Herbert Storing argued that Locke’s natural rights provided “an uncomfortably large opening toward slavery.” This makes it sound as if this “opening toward slavery” was a by-product, an accidental result, as it were, of Locke’s understanding of natural rights. Slavery was a result, but it was not the agenda. Locke’s understanding of natural rights allows slavery to emerge, but that understanding doesn’t enhance slavery’s status. Slavery exists but it isn’t valued.

 

                  However, it could be both. That is, slavery is, and it is valued. It was chosen and not just accepted because it was unavoidable. And, as an aside: Is this the meaning of what is labeled “realism?” That is, realists embrace slavery, e.g., as valuable. Being realistic means embracing both war and slavery, along with torture and other inhuman practices.

 

                  In reading Edward Baptist’s book, The Half Has Never Been Told, two considerations emerge. First, there is the role, the central role that slavery played in the creation and development of the United States. Baptist does a marvelous job of illuminating just how central slavery was to the economic and political development of the United States, serving to create a wealth producing economy that eventually made the United States the economic powerhouse it has become. But slavery also served to unify the politics of the United States, as that unity built around slavery, its extension, and fears of slave revolts.

 

                  Second, there is question of slavery’s role in political life. That is, can the political be affirmed without affirming slavery in one form or another? Affirming the political is best understood as affirming the quest for greatness, for empire, for political, military, and economic greatness. Given the overwhelming appeal of such greatness, the question arises over how slavery can be starved or deterred. If Storing’s take on Locke is correct, then it would seem that modern natural rights, modernity that is, will not, cannot starve slavery.

 

                  The Enlightenment, as it is called, might be more limited in its ability to ameliorate the human condition than many have claimed. And, perhaps, those limitations stem from the Enlightenment’s disparagement of hedonism, understood as the joys of contemplation of the beautiful or the joys of discovering and participating in the beautiful, which some have thought of as the promise of mysticism, of some “revealed” religions. Insofar as enlightenment is understood as secularizing for the sake of “progress,” just so far enlightenment cannot starve the appeal of slavery. And as Baptist shows, the enslaved in the United States embraced hedonism, e.g., song, dance, and love to maintain their humanity, insofar as that was possible. Could it be that a genuinely human politics is hedonistic? It just might be.