These rigorous philosophical advances gave the white slavemaster the
moral intuitions necessary to…participate in and uphold industrialized
chattel slavery.
Also, slaves didn't consider themselves oppressed, because the Haitian Revolution never happened, and also Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman never existed. It was all just *European culture* that ended slavery. TIL.
Shortly after the revolution, Dessalines' successor King Henry Christophe construction a citadel (La Citadelle Laferrière) using slaves as manpower, literally forcing hundreds of thousands of people into laboring on it and killing an estimated 20,000 of them. This was 18 years after the Haitian revolution. He also forced slaves to continue working on their plantations, and they were unable to leave and work elsewhere. In 1826 Boyer also enacted a set of laws called the Code Rural that restricted agricultural workers' autonomy, required them to work, and prohibited their travel without permission. Police and government authorities could force residents to work temporarily without pay on roads. Interestingly, slavery is still extremely common in Haiti -- more common than any country in the world but Mauritania -- with 2% of the population being slaves!
Ferguson, J. (1988). Papa Doc, Baby Doc: Haiti and the Duvaliers. John Wiley & Sons, Limited. ISBN 978-0-631-16579-8. Retrieved 22 February 2013.
Dubois, L. (2012). Haiti: The Aftershocks of History. New York, NY: Metropolitan Books.
of course you’d just completely gloss over the role that the US occupation in 1916 played in contributing to the present day situation- or for that matter the role that France played in instigating the code rural by demanding 90 million francs in return for freed slaves.
you’re not so stupid that you didn’t know about these details- you made a deliberate choice to omit them because you’re intellectually dishonest
Not to mention, slavery's continuance doesn't mean the slaves didn't consider themselves oppressed. Nor does it mean others in Haiti (not just Europeans!) didn't see slavery as immoral. This person is so full of logical holes, one might as well argue with Swiss cheese.
Does he think that the typical antebellum slaveowner spent his Sunday afternoons on the veranda, sipping mint juleps, and debating the finer points of Voltaire, Smith, and Bentham? The only "literature" that mattered to them was the parts of the Bible where it says slavery is okay, and the only way the enlightenment affected their lives was by bringing them the cotton gins and steam engines needed to make their plantations profitable. They did have access to 200 years of enlightenment philosophy, but they *studiously ignored it in order to continue owning human beings as slaves*.
I have to disagree with the part about slaveowners only reading the bible. Slaveowners also enjoyed bad Victorian fanfiction about medieval knights by Sir Walter Scott.
> They did have access to 200 years of enlightenment philosophy, but they studiously ignored it in order to continue owning human beings as slaves.
Let's not pretend that enlightenment philosphers were so enlightened on the issue.
Some were not. But by the end of the enlightenment, philosophical opinion (along with popular opinion throughout most of the west) had turned pretty decisively against slavery.
\--The late French enlightenment philosophers -- Voltaire, Montesquieu and the encyclopedistes -- were firmly opposed to slavery. See, for instance, this passage from Candide:
*As they drew near to the city, they came across a negro stretched out on the ground, with no more than half of his clothes left, which is to say a pair of blue canvas drawers; the poor man had no left leg and no right hand.*
*‘Good God!’ said Candide to him in Dutch. ‘What are you doing there, my friend, in such a deplorable state?*
*’‘I am waiting for my master, Monsieur Vanderdendur, the well-known merchant,’ answered the negro.‘*
*And was it Monsieur Vanderdendur,’ said Candide, ‘who treated you like this?*
*’‘Yes, Monsieur,’ said the negro, ‘it is the custom. Twice a year we are given a pair of blue canvas drawers, and this is our only clothing. When we work in the sugar-mills and get a finger caught in the machinery, they cut off the hand; but if we try to run away, they cut off a leg: I have found myself in both situations. It is the price we pay for the sugar you eat in Europe. Yet when my mother sold me for ten Patagonian écus on the coast of Guinea, she told me: “My child, give thanks to our fetishes, and worship them always, for they will make your life happy; you have the honour to be a slave to our white masters, and therefore you are making the fortune of your father and mother.” Alas! I don’t know if I made their fortune, but they certainly didn’t make mine. Dogs, monkeys and parrots are a thousand times less miserable than we are; the Dutch fetishes who converted me to their religion tell me every Sunday that we are all children of Adam, whites and blacks alike. I am no genealogist; but if these preachers are telling the truth, then we are all second cousins. In which case you must admit that no one could treat his relatives more horribly than this.’*
*‘Oh Pangloss!’ cried Candide. ‘This is one abomination you could not have anticipated, and I fear it has finally done for me: I am giving up on your Optimism after all.’*
*‘What is Optimism?” asked Cacambo.*
*‘Alas!’ said Candide, ‘it is the mania for insisting that all is well when all is by no means well.’ And he wept as he looked down at his negro, and was still weeping as he entered Surinam.*
Or the first two lines from the entry on the slave trade in the Encyclopedie:
*Slave trade is the purchase of Negroes made by Europeans on the coasts of Africa, who then employ these unfortunate men as slaves in their colonies. This purchase of Negroes to reduce them into slavery is a negotiation that violates all religion, morals, natural law, and human rights.*
\--The same is true of the utilitarians, who despised the slave trade and fought for the abolition of slavery (although Mill did approve of colonialism, so long as it was benevolent and temporary, supposedly for the betterment of savage peoples). At any rate, here is a passage from Mill's 1862 letter to Fraser's Magazine, written in support of the Union cause in the Civil War:
*Let me, in a few words, remind the reader what sort of a thing this is, which the white oligarchy of the South have banded themselves together to propagate and establish, if they could, universally. When it is wished to describe any portion of the human race as in the lowest state of debasement, and under the most cruel oppression, in which it is possible for human beings to live, they are compared to slaves. When words are sought by which to stigmatize the most odious despotism, exercised in the most odious manner, and all other comparisons are found inadequate, the despots are said to be like slave-masters, or slave-drivers. What, by a rhetorical license, the worst oppressors of the human race, by way of stamping on them the most hateful character possible, are said to be, these men, in very truth, are. I do not mean that all of them are hateful personally, any more than all the Inquisitors, or all the buccaneers. But the position which they occupy, and the abstract excellence of which they are in arms to vindicate, is that which the united voice of mankind habitually selects as the type of all hateful qualities. I will not bandy chicanery about the more or less of stripes or other torments which are daily requisite to keep the machine in working order, nor discuss whether the Legrees or the St. Clairs are more numerous among the slave-owners of the Southern States. The broad facts of the case suffice. One fact is enough. There are, Heaven knows, vicious and tyrannical institutions in ample abundance on the earth. But this institution is the only one of them all which requires, to keep it going, that human beings should be burnt alive. The calm and dispassionate Mr. Olmsted affirms that there has not been a single year, for many years past, in which this horror is not known to have been perpetrated in some part or other of the South. And not upon negroes only; the Edinburgh Review, in a recent number, gave the hideous details of the burning alive of an unfortunate Northern huckster by Lynch law, on mere suspicion of having aided in the escape of a slave. What must American slavery be, if deeds like these are necessary under it?—and if they are not necessary and are yet done, is not the evidence against slavery still more damning? The South are in rebellion not for simple slavery; they are in rebellion for the right of burning human creatures alive.*
> They did have access to 200 years of enlightenment philosophy, but they studiously ignored it in order to continue owning human beings as slaves.
More than that - they consciously *reacted against it*:
>If the political task of the abolitionists was a difficult one, the burden facing the South was even more challenging. A stream of books, pamphlets, and editorials poured forth from Southern presses in response to abolitionist demands. Louis Hartz called this theoretical effort of the South to justify slavery the reactionary Enlightenment. [...] Hartz was trying to convey the nature of the concerted effort on the part of Southern intellectuals to reexamine the entire nature of America as a liberal society based on the triumph of the Enlightenment. Hartz asks, "Had America suddenly produced, out of nowhere, a movement of reactionary feudalism?"
>Southern writers began by seeking to find historical precedents that would justify slavery. Men like George Fitzhugh, Thomas R. Dew, and J. D. B. DeBow pointed to the existence of slavery in the Old Testament, in Greek and Roman democracy, and under feudalism. In their search for models the Southern writers began to turn against modernity itself. They attacked the doctrine of individualism; they attacked Locke and Jefferson; they attacked capitalism; they attacked what they called free society itself.
([The Southern Reactionary Enlightenment](https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=tncywOkITOwC&pg=PA145&lpg=PA145#v=onepage&q&f=false) in *Political Thought in America* by Philip Abbott)
Neoreaction has quite a lineage.
This obviously isn't the biggest issue or anywhere close, but, assuming he's talking about American slavery, that'd presumably be 1865 at the latest. So .. is he arguing the Enlightenment started in the mid 15th century? I'm not a historian, but that seems off.
(1500 years of literature is also weirdly specific, and for whatever reason excludes the most widely read book in 19th century America)
Western slavery was more moral than slavery in other parts
of the world. The Muslims would cut off genitals, which is why there are
no Africans in Baghdad today. White folks allowed most slaves to form
families.
Ah, yes, “allowed to form families”, out of the pure goodness of
their heart. those virtuous whites never sold off anyones kids!
Westerners have a strange fixation on castration being practiced in the Arab slave trade. I'm not sure of the total figures, but the number of male captives who would have been castrated to be sold as eunuchs would be in the minority overall. Eunuchs were employed for specialized purposes like the administrative bureaucracy, palace positions, or to manage religious sites and the procedure obviously carried a fair amount of medical risk. People seem to think that castration was routine for all forms of slaves, even slave-soldiers like the Janissary corps (which is obviously nonsense). I blame Game of Thrones partly for the modern popularity of this belief, but this particular Orientalist hysteria has been around for centuries and probably won't ever go away.
I would also think that people looking to justify American slavery wouldn't bring up castration, since that was such a notorious tool in the arsenal of violence used by American slaveowners to punish and terrify their captives. Rationalists never pass up the opportunity to be hypocritical, though.
> Does theMotte not know this?
Do you really have to ask if rationalists are making bold assertions about a topic as if they were the first ones to discuss it without any effort to engage with or even be aware of existing arguments on the subject? Of course they're doing that, they're rationalists and this is *any subject*.
None of them are historically literate in any way whatsoever. They cite "history" all the time, but it comes in the form of pop culture knowledge on a topic, things they learned from video games, and contrarian shit they pick up from weird internet subcultures that have latched onto particular ideas about history to justify their ideologies (e.g., how so many internet Nazis ~~and SSC readers~~ are able to rattle off a bunch of anecdotal trivia about Rhodesia they memorized from stormfront). They have no depth of knowledge whatsoever about the past and no comprehension of how historians go about studying it. When they encounter actual history, they generally resent and reject in the same way that they reject most other legitimate academic experts, like mathematicians that think MIRI is full of shit.
They don't need those things, because rAtIoNaLiSm means that they believe they can just logic themselves into a perfect understanding, without ever worrying about whether the premises they're starting from are correct or even relevant.
This is also why they never give a shit about anyone's actual lived experience, because they think that their intellectual knowledge of any subject is AT LEAST as good as, and often better than, any possible experiential knowledge.
Y’all are ripping apart every little detail in this abomination of a
post and I’m over here eight hours later still trying to figure out what
the fuck “statistically moral” means.
the master was more moral than the slave, in terms of moral knowledge
and culpability.
And yet they held slaves, so wtf is the value of any of those
“terms,” shitbrains?
Hey guys, I know it’s wrong to fucking exploit the ignorant, but
they’re ignorant, so I’m more moral by the fact that I know what I’m
doing is wrong and they don’t.
This is a very odd conclusion to draw
This. This is what I sneer at. Not the obviously horseshit assertion
that moral knowledge makes slave owners more moral than slaves, which is
absurd on its face, but this well-meaning, deferential disagreement that
pretends that what it’s responding to is merely “odd.” Or maybe they
sincerely think it’s merely odd, which I can’t even.
> This. This is what I sneer at. Not the obviously horseshit assertion that moral knowledge makes slave owners more moral than slaves, which is absurd on its face, but this well-meaning, deferential disagreement that pretends that what it's responding to is merely "odd." Or maybe they sincerely think it's merely odd, which I can't even.
Exactly. These guys haven't figured out that for stuff like this polite disagreement is just providing shitty ideas with a spurious aura of dignity. Sometimes the only decent thing to do is tell someone to fuck off.
i got really mad at the linked post so here's a point-by-point telling him to fuck off. note that the 'you' in this post is the linked author, not you, my dearest sneerer friends.
----
> The slaves would not even have been able to articulate a moral argument against slavery, given that their culture had not developed literacy yet.
because pre-agricultural people have absolutely no concept of morality. lmao go fuck yourself
> Almost every slave was originally enslaved by an African before being sold to a European.
you're drawing a through line from "black people" to "slaves": some tribes raided other tribes for slaves, and therefore those slaves were amoral people. ???
> Western slavery was more moral than slavery in other parts of the world... White folks allowed most slaves to form families.
so they could sell their kids
> North Africans routinely raided Europe for slaves -- millions over centuries -- and their identity was so absolutely destroyed that there was never a "reparations" movement in North Africa. The men would be castrated and the women were sexually imprisoned.
yes, other people have done slavery. that doesn't make your favorite cuddly plantation owners better people
> If the average ancestor of American slaves were compared to the average ancestor of his cousin who wasn't enslaved, the level of development would be incomparable. Most of Sub-Saharan Africa was illiterate even into the 1960's.
gosh i wonder what factors could have contributed to africa's troubled development in the past few centuries
> The first African American to ever set foot in the new world, Anthony Johnson, actually sued in order to practice slavery
still doesn't make *slaves* less moral than their masters
> Many freed Africans practiced slavery. The popular myth is that they were enslaving their lovers and children to effectively free them. In reality, many owned large plantations and abused their slaves just like White folks did.
yes; in 1830, [1/100th](https://www.theroot.com/did-black-people-own-slaves-1790895436) of free black people owned slaves: in that year, black people owned 12,907 slaves, out of 2,009,043 slaves in the whole united states. from this we can definitely infer that all slaves were actually greedy opportunists who would have turned on their fellow man as soon as they were freed
> Africans and their progeny are not magically imbued with the philosophical rigor required to denounce slavery.
what the fuck are you talking about, "progeny", "philosophical rigor", you eugenics-masturbating freak. read frederick douglas and tell me that he lacked philosophical rigor. read [any of these writings by freed slaves](https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/chronautobio.html) and tell me they were *animals*, which is what you're too cowardly and self-involved to just come out and admit you think. *they. were. people.*
> In fact, it took Mussolini's invasion to finally end slavery in Ethiopia. That's right -- Mussolini.
gosh it's weird how you have a boner for mussolini
> I'm not writing these bullet points because I believe it's the new, superior narrative. I'm writing them because the media-driven narrative cannot account for these discrepancies. All narratives need to be publicly hanged, drawn, and quartered, their ashes scattered to the four winds (televised, of course).
next sentence:
> The way the media treats race relations in the 19th century is just astonishingly bad. It invariably shows the slave as the Enlightened Oppressed Virtuous Man -- who would never do such a thing, by the way -- and the slave owner as a morally backward husk of a human.
right, you've got no narrative at all. you prissy fucking ignoramus
> Factually speaking, the slave was no more moral than the master, and statistically, the master was more moral than the slave, in terms of moral knowledge and culpability.
these words don't fucking mean anything. you haven't done any statistics and you haven't cited any sources, you're just spinning stories in the air. *there is no science here*.
this whole argument is just masturbation to the idea that "we superior whites have to go civilize the lesser races", it's so goddamn *boring*.
bonus, in one of the replies:
>Modern people have trouble internalizing the idea that most of our pre-20c ancestors were terrible human beings, by our standards. (Hopefully our descendants will one day be able to say the same about us.)
don't worry, you don't have to wait
Right, it's Ye Olde "Western Civ Invented Everything We Think of As Human Rights And Therefore No Black or Brown People Can Complain About Slavery and Colonialism." It is very boring and no matter how much it gets refuted, racists keep bringing it up in a pseudo-intellectual tone and expect people to take them seriously.
I can’t even with this. Dude argues that people who were
systematically beaten, raped, and murdered wouldn’t know that they were
oppressed. Then further argues that HAVING MORALITY REQUIRES
LITERACY!
Oh, and apparently American slave owners were super moral because
they “allowed” their slaves to create more slaves for them???
Scott: "The culture war threads aren't a hotbed of deranged fascists, it's just my evil and sociopathic enemies taking things out of context to slander me and my fans."
SSC readers: "In my rambling defense of slavery, where I deny that enslaved Africans were aware that they were being oppressed, let me now take a moment to justify and lionize the militaristic imperialism of fascist dictator Benito Mussolini."
It's also dishonest in terms of the implication that there were no attempts to end slavery in Ethiopia. There were, in fact, such attempts, however one of the major blockades to doing so was the prominence of slavery in surrounding *colonized* countries and a market that had been created and established through Western demand in the first place.
There's a ton of cherry picked data in that comment. Yes, mostly it's technically true, but it implies things that are clearly not.
Like the thing about African slaves being initially enslaved by other Africans and only then sold to Europeans. Yes, that fact by itself _is_ true. But African slavery had nothing to do with the industrialized system of chattel slavery in the Americas. And the fact that the massive enslavement and the wars around it were driven exclusively by European demand.
And of course when he strays into subjective stuff (like the relative morality of slave owners) he's completely wrong unless you're a white supremacist.
Yes, Mussolini just wanted war (because fascism), and the first Abyssian Italian war didn't go that well (for the italians) and was a big national trauma iirc. (Same with WW1 and the Germans).
Wow, I appriciate how hard the Scotts have been gaslighting others
about the culture war threads. This is objectively monstrous. Reminds me
of an batshit MRA who years ago wrote something along the line that
“actually, in every society that had slaves, slaves were the most
powerful of social groups.”
We really need to turn these QCs into a book or wiki or library
of some kind. So much good thought, observation, introspection, etc.
exists in just this one thread alone–to say nothing of the other QC
posts in past CW threads. It would be nice to have a separate place,
organized by subject matter, to just read these insightful
posts
oh my god, this is such valuable discourse, holy fucking shit, don’t
stop i’m gonna cum, keep posting, keep the speech free, oh my god baby
tell me how every dumbass racist argument people made for colonialism in
1800 is true, i’m gonna bust, fck this discourse is so valuable, ugh,
there’s no other place on the internet where you can post such LOGICAL
DEBATE OH MY FUCKING GOD I’M GONNA FUCKING BUST BABY KEEP DISCUSSING
EVERYTHING BECAUSE BEING OPEN MINDED MEANS YOU HAVE TO LISTEN TO
EVERYTHING ANYONE WANTS TO SAY AT ANY TIME NO MATTER HOW BRAINDEAD
RACIST IT IS FUCKKKKKKKKK IM GONNA CUM
The problem is always narrativization. I’m not writing these bullet
points because I believe it’s the new, superior narrative. I’m writing
them because the media-driven narrative cannot account for these
discrepancies. All narratives need to be publicly hanged, drawn, and
quartered, their ashes scattered to the four winds (televised, of
course).
And here, a beautiful synthesis of MSM ‘fake news’ nonsense and
‘postmodern’ incredulity toward narratives.
For the purpose of denying the immorality of slavery.
To be fair to the rationalists, this guy is not coming from a place
of rationalism. He’s an ultra hardcore non-consequentialist (thinks that
moral value of acts depends only on intention and what books
the actor has read)
Yeah at some point they realized that "I'm not a consequentialist" functions as a philosophical get out of jail free card (and of course you can equivocate if you later need to explain why something heinous is right on consequentialist grounds).
But usually that's a function of redditor laziness rather than a considered position (e.g. the same ppl often seem to think that Christians are deontologists, which they very explicitly aren't; this is not a mistake you'd make if you'd thought seriously about it).
The enlightened white masters were more moral than the savage black slaves because they had access to 1500 years of literature and 400 years of Enlightenment philosophy, as compared to the uneducated Africans.
These rigorous philosophical advances gave the white slavemaster the moral intuitions necessary to…participate in and uphold industrialized chattel slavery.
Ah, yes, “allowed to form families”, out of the pure goodness of their heart. those virtuous whites never sold off anyones kids!
[deleted]
Y’all are ripping apart every little detail in this abomination of a post and I’m over here eight hours later still trying to figure out what the fuck “statistically moral” means.
And yet they held slaves, so wtf is the value of any of those “terms,” shitbrains?
Hey guys, I know it’s wrong to fucking exploit the ignorant, but they’re ignorant, so I’m more moral by the fact that I know what I’m doing is wrong and they don’t.
This. This is what I sneer at. Not the obviously horseshit assertion that moral knowledge makes slave owners more moral than slaves, which is absurd on its face, but this well-meaning, deferential disagreement that pretends that what it’s responding to is merely “odd.” Or maybe they sincerely think it’s merely odd, which I can’t even.
I can’t even with this. Dude argues that people who were systematically beaten, raped, and murdered wouldn’t know that they were oppressed. Then further argues that HAVING MORALITY REQUIRES LITERACY!
Oh, and apparently American slave owners were super moral because they “allowed” their slaves to create more slaves for them???
Well, that was worse than a look into someone’s unflushed toilet.
That… is some interesting framing around the Italo-Abyssinian war.
It is a bit like the ‘Hitler made trains run on time’ argument. Yes… but you are missing a few points.
Well congrats. You found the worst poster of all time. Move aside TPO, you have been
bestworsted.Lol that place is beyond parody.
Wow, I appriciate how hard the Scotts have been gaslighting others about the culture war threads. This is objectively monstrous. Reminds me of an batshit MRA who years ago wrote something along the line that “actually, in every society that had slaves, slaves were the most powerful of social groups.”
oh my god, this is such valuable discourse, holy fucking shit, don’t stop i’m gonna cum, keep posting, keep the speech free, oh my god baby tell me how every dumbass racist argument people made for colonialism in 1800 is true, i’m gonna bust, fck this discourse is so valuable, ugh, there’s no other place on the internet where you can post such LOGICAL DEBATE OH MY FUCKING GOD I’M GONNA FUCKING BUST BABY KEEP DISCUSSING EVERYTHING BECAUSE BEING OPEN MINDED MEANS YOU HAVE TO LISTEN TO EVERYTHING ANYONE WANTS TO SAY AT ANY TIME NO MATTER HOW BRAINDEAD RACIST IT IS FUCKKKKKKKKK IM GONNA CUM
I have seen the Basilisk, and it turns out it is Hegel.
At least people are pushing back against this…
And here, a beautiful synthesis of MSM ‘fake news’ nonsense and ‘postmodern’ incredulity toward narratives.
For the purpose of denying the immorality of slavery.
To be fair to the rationalists, this guy is not coming from a place of rationalism. He’s an ultra hardcore non-consequentialist (thinks that moral value of acts depends only on intention and what books the actor has read)
[removed]