[ExI] all of them

[Dan TheBookMan]

On Jun 23, 2020, at 7:32 AM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> The people who lived in the past are all guilty of benefiting from the work of slaves.  If they did not directly benefit, then they are guilty of not doing anything about racism and slavery.  Sins of omission.
> 
> I haven't done anything either, so I am as guilty as all the rest.  They should pull my statue down.  (Wait, I don't have a statue - yet.)
> 
> Once overgeneralization gets going there is no logical place to stop.  They smeared Voltaire's statue.  Voltaire?  VOLTAIRE??  OK, well, everyone everywhere benefited from buying and selling slaves, and their labor.  They influenced the price of cotton all over the world, for one thing.
> 
> Will someone tell me how this is going to stop?
> 
> In the analogy of the mind, where the unconscious is an elephant and the conscious is the rider, the elephant has clearly started going wherever it wants to.  What is it going to trample next?
> 
> bill w

Hunter-gatherer peoples in general did not and do not today have slaves. So, there are peoples who never had slavery in their history and slavery didn’t exist before a certain time in history. I believe there was no slavery in Australia before the arrival of Europeans.

Also, even in societies with slavery, one can argue there were huge asymmetries in benefits. Obviously, the lowest slaves didn’t benefit on net. And the lowest class of people — ones who couldn’t afford slaves — probably didn’t benefit on net. They were even competing for positions slaves might have — where it was permitted for them to do similar work or hold similar positions. There’s a big difference between owning slaves and being a poor but free worker in the same society. (Which isn’t to say the poor free worker didn’t have some privileges that slaves didn’t have.) 

I also see nothing wrong with pulling down public statues of slavers. To me, this is little different than Eastern Europeans tearing down monuments from the Soviet era.

Any large scale social change, such as we seem to be seeing is likely to have unforeseen consequences. Like with your use of the elephant analogy, all social change is like that. It’s not really controlled from the top and can be scary when it happens quickly. (This is what happens in protest movements generally: a small group might try to steer them but they can quickly shift away from that group — maybe to be exploited by others (such as happened with OWS which started out as basically anarchist but has been mostly coopted by politicians over the decade since it started). New movements may arise from within or parallel to it. And minor grievances might morph into calls for radical change.)

Regards,

Dan
   Sample my Kindle books at:
http://author.to/DanUst
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20200623/67fcba09/attachment.htm>