The Cult of the Sacred Negro

When you spend a few days in Washington DC, as I just did, your cultural antennae really get attuned to the great religious observances of our liberal friends in the practice of The Cult of the Sacred Negro. It seems that hardly a minute goes by without the smoke from some cult altar ascending into the heavens. And this is, of course and addition to and apart from the all-important National Museum of African American History. For instance, the section at the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Insitution next to the portraits of American presidents is "The Struggle for Justice."

We are talking about the Civil Rights Era here.

But really: Struggle? Our liberal friends were having the time of their lives during the Civil Rights Era. Struggle? They got up every day with joy in their hearts and set forth with a spring in their step. The problem with life today is that liberals desperately long for the joy, the exaltation, the excitement of "The Struggle for Justice" in the years gone by.

If you look at the various topics on the home page of the National Portrait Gallery, it is almost all about the worship of the Sacred Negro.

Of course, if we bring in René Girard and his victimage mechanism and the whole question of the scapegoat, we get to understand this as the collective worship of the whole community in the cult ritual to drive out the demon of racism.

And our liberal friends are the priests of this cult, ritually slaughtering white supremacists whenever they can get their hands on them in order to purify the American community, and purge its guilt for centuries of slavery and oppression.

As for me, I'm more interested in another sacred narrative, the centuries-long Expulsion of the Serfs from the lands of the feudal magnates into vagrancy and beggardom, starting no later than the Vagabonds and Beggars Act of 1494 in England. But I am not ready to elevate it into a Sacred Narrative of the Cult of the White Trash. Not yet. Because I am still working on the details and designing the forms of service and the rituals of sacrifice.

Meanwhile, our masters are fascinated with the question of the Sacred Negro, and want to talk about it, and exhibit it, and virtue signal about it, and sacrifice a few white supremacists before breakfast to appease the racial gods.

And I think that it would be fine if our liberal masters found victims willing to be sacrificed on the Altars of Slave Propitiation. But the problem is that our priestly masters -- and priests, said Naughty Nietzsche, are the chaps that want us to hate ourselves -- don't want to sacrifice their supporters on the altar. They want to sacrifice polluted white males instead of innocent people of color.

All I can say is: can't we put the whole Cult of the Sacred Negro to bed and start worshipping another god and sacrificing something else in our cult rituals?

My Three Theses: Slavery Does Not Pay

I had a brainwave a week ago, about slavery and race, and I announced my brainwave in a piece at The American Thinker. I call it My Three Theses on Abolition.

1. We abolished slavery because slavery Does Not Pay.
2. We abolished racism because racism Does Not Pay.
3. We will abolish liberal race politics because wokism Does Not Pay.

Oooh look. I already mapped the idea out in "Stop Moralizing about Race, Slavery, Empire" back in January 2020.

What on earth is this idea of Three Theses all about?

Obviously it issues from the first principle of my life, that all my ideas must cut across the grain of liberal ideas, creating confusion. Hopefully, strategic confusion in liberal-land.

But we are bigger than that. We really want to know. Why should we, in the current epoch, have decided to abolish one of the most ubiquitous human institutions, probably dating back to the beginning of agriculture.

Yes, what do the scientists say? Nils Petter Lagerlöf of York University:

The institution of slavery is found mostly at intermediate stages of agricultural development and less often among hunter-gatherers and advanced agrarian societies.

Oh oh. There's a clue. We just emerged from the agricultural age. So maybe there is something about agriculture...

We know all about the Romans and their slaves. They had Triumphs, parades in downtown Rome, to exhibit the slaves and plunder from their successful military -- shall we call them colonial imperialist? -- campaigns.

Don't forget the Vikings, bless their Scandinavian hearts. Sarah Pruitt:

Historical accounts make it clear that when they raided coastal towns from the British Isles to the Iberian Peninsula, the Vikings took thousands of men, women and children captive, and held or sold them as slaves—or thralls, as they were called in Old Norse. According to one estimate, slaves might have comprised as much as 10 percent of the population of Viking-era Scandinavia.

Dublin, Ireland, was the principal slave market in Northwest Europe.

Then there were peasants that actually requested to become slaves. You can read about that in The Year 1000 by Danny Danziger and Robert Lacey.

People also surrendered themselves into bondage at times of famine or distress...  [I]n the year 1000 the starving man had no other resort but to kneel before his lord or lady and place his head in their hands...  It was a basic transaction--heads for food.

Oh, and let's not forget the women slaves from Circassia that were sold at Kaffa in the Crimea and distributed to harems all over the Middle East. As I understand the Venetian and the Genoese merchants were very much into that business.

But, writes Max Weber in The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, slavery is problematical. Yes, the slave-owner enjoys "a more complete power of disposal over the worker than is the case with employment for wages.:" But there are costs (p.276):

1. Capital to invest in slaves is usually more expensive than "employment of free labor," including the "capital risk" of slave ownership.
2. Fluctuations in the price of slaves, and problems with recruitment of slaves.
3. If slaves can marry, then cost of women and children is borne by the slave-owner.
4. Difficulty in using slaves to operate "tools and apparatus" because of need for "high level of responsibility and... the operator's self-interest."
5. Impossibility of selection, hiring and firing.

Thus, writes Weber, slavery only works where slaves are cheap, with a well-supplied slave market, and put to work in slave plantations or "very simple industrial processes."

Of course, it would be remiss not to mention the greatest slave experiments in all history, the slave state of the Soviet Union, 1917-89, and the slave state of Maoist China, 1949-79. And why did Maoist China take the capitalist road under Deng Xiaoping in 1979? Because slave socialism Did Not Pay. And why did the Soviet Union start "perestroika" under Mikhail Gorbachev and collapse in 1989. I wonder why the noble Commies, devoted students of Marx and Engels, decided to end their experiment in slavery? I will tell you, it is because communism -- i.e., slavery -- Does Not Pay.

This is not to completely marginalize the noble activism of people like William Wilberforce, son of a wealthy British merchant in the Baltic trade, or the importance of the abolitionist movement that helped end the slave trade and thus make slaves a lot less cheap.

And it is not to hide the guilt of Venetian merchants that invented slave plantations on Cyprus to grow sugar cane. Or the Brits that made money growing slave sugar in the West Indies, or the Virginians that grew slave tobacco, or the Southerners that grew cotton with slave labor.

But if slavery Does Not Pay, then maybe we didn't need to have a civil war over it.

Yes, imagine what would have happened if the abolitionist activists and their mostly peaceful protests had cooled their jets? Suppose US had not decided to turn the question of slavery over to a civil war? Suppose our fearless leaders had just ended slavery by buying off the slave owners with 10 cents on the dollar for their slave investments as they did in Brazil and elsewhere. The Brits paid out £20 million in compensation to slave owners in the Slave Compensation Act of 1833 when Brit GDP was about £500 million. That's about 4 percent of GDP. So, in today's money that would cost the Brit taxpayer about £80 billion., Here in the US 4 percent of GDP is about $800 billion. I think that, in today's terms, with $2 trillion infrastructure programs it would be chump change. I bet it would have been cheaper than the Civil War.

Of course, in our day we have reintroduced the voluntary slavery of the Year 1000 where people can "surrender themselves into bondage." We call it "welfare."

Next up: We abolished racism because racism Does Not Pay.

Narratives: 1776 Commission, McClanahan, Gottfried, and Anton

There's been a little spat in intellectual conservative circles lately. I caught up with it by reading Michael Anton, who was criticizing Paul Gottfried who was criticizing Brion McClanahan who was criticizing Trump's 1776 Commission report. Or the other way around.

McClanahan didn't like the 1776 Commission report because it advanced the "proposition nation" notion that "all men are created equal" that was advanced by President Lincoln. The Founders, he writes, were not particularly interested in phrases from the Declaration of Independence. 

In McClanahan's view the Americans involved in the Founding of the Constitution were interested in state sovereignty and that "the people had a right to “alter or abolish” either a state government or a central government." Nor was anyone that interested in the "proposition" that "all men are created equal" in the 1850s.

The question is whether this is an original sin or not, whether the Founders should have known that slavery was the great sin of the ages etc., and whether the Founders are to be eternally banished for not endorsing the modern agenda of rights including votes for blacks and for women.

I think all this misses the point. First of all, back at the Founding, the various actors were politicians, playing both ends against the middle as politicians did then and do now. A lot of people wanted a Constitution, and so they looked to what would get a Constitution written and ratified.

By the 1850s there were different issues moving men's minds, and so the argument was different. And in the Civil War and afterwards the various participants were creating narratives to justify the war and the regime that came after it. 

The ruling class of the Founders was pretty well a ruling class of landowners, and in the South those landowners were slave-owners.

By the time of the Civil War a new ruling class was arising in the North, around the new economy of industry and steam transportation.

Our present ruling class is an educated upper class of credentialed bureaucratic careerists, and they naturally think that the old landowners and the industrialists that replaced them were moral cretins compared to themselves. So any pejoratives or insults that diminish the guys of the old era are just part of the narrative that extols the present rulers as moral and political giants.

In our time we are faced with easing our present corrupt ruling class out of its sinecures and power positions and encouraging them to get a real job. One of the things we need to do is create a new narrative that damns the present rulers into the moral basement as people who have created "human rubble" with their failed government programs and created a new lower class where the men don't work much and the women don't marry much. That's how you play politics; you try to put your adversaries on the back foot.

In other words, one of the things we need to do is to create moral fairy tales that teach the young'uns to hate the moral turpitude of the present rulers just as the present rulers regale the kiddies with their moral fairy tales about racism and white supremacy as Literally Hitler.

I have a fantasy that helps me get up in the morning. It is that we are transitioning to a new era in which the ordinary Commoners that obey the law, go to work, and follow the rules, are reaching critical mass and are beginning to demand that the rulers take account of their needs and their right to live their lives according to their beliefs.

My fantasy is that if you want to understand Brexit in Britain, and Trump in America, and the movement of the white working class in Britain from the Labour Party to the Conservative Party and the movement of the white working class in the US from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party, then you need to understand the phenomenon of the rise of the middle-class Commoner.

There's a good piece by Melanie Phillips on Substack about the recent by-election in Britain where a solid Labour constituency just elected a Conservative woman to Parliament. She points out that in Britain the "working class people are deeply attached to their country as the place where they know they share basic values, traditions and assumptions[.]" But the Labour Party

had become instead the party  of the educated metropolitan upper middle-class, which was committed to liberal universalism and trans-national “human rights” law and up-ending basic values such as the traditional family or even what is to be a man or a woman — and which denounced people like themselves as racist and privileged, simply on the basis that they had a white skin. It was no longer the Labour party; it had become the North London Dinner Party.

Sound familiar? That's exactly what we have here in the US. We are ruled by an urbanist educated elite that doesn't get that the world is full of people that are not like them, and have a right to live their lives just as much as educated liberal activists.

My view is that all the talk about the Founders and racism and equality misses the point; they are old narratives heading for the scrap-heap of history.

What we need is a narrative that glorifies ordinary middle-class Commoners living ordinary lives. And I believe that the narrative has to start with the proposition that you can take your pejoratives, your accusations of racism and white supremacy and patriarchy and put them where the sun don't shine.

Implementing a National Liberation from Lefty Colonialism

Over at American Greatness Stephen Balch comes up with a good idea. He says that we the people are presently suffering under a colonialist regime, and we need a national liberation project.

To be sure, the colonial analogy is far from perfect. Western colonies often gained from being colonized; for us, it’s a dead loss. But there are enough similarities to help us understand the strategies our elites are following, how they could be better resisted, and why, as with most colonialists of the past, they’re likely to fail.

If we are to neutralize our colonialist ruling class we need not just "mass activism" but also "mass education and inspirational ceremony," Balch writes. Yes. Ceremony.

We should also organize mass observances of traditional and newly created holidays, commemorating events like the Yorktown surrender and D–Day, or solemnly memorializing the victims of totalitarianism... so let’s consider the creation of a counter-calendar to our elite’s parade of apologetic commemorations, filled with holidays reinforcing national consciousness and pride.

Brilliant idea. Actually, when you are talking ceremony, you are talking religion, the celebration of the sacred. And we need to re-sacralize our national myth, to make holy again the sacred history of the American Founding. I say, for instance, that we should counter the lie of the 1619 Project with my "1584 Project." In case you didn't know, 1584 was the year that the first shipload of White Trash arrived in North America.

Yes, let's celebrate the "waste population" of Europe that was cast upon these shores by the hoity-toity ruling classes of Old Europe. Instead of sneering at white trash and rednecks.

This is all part of the downstream notion: politics is downstream from culture is downstream from religion is downstream from the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything."

When we are not celebrating America in religious ceremonies, like President Trump at Mount Rushmore, I think we should push back on all the lefty pejoratives.

Racism? There's nothing more racist in today's America than Black Lives Matter. Period.

Sexism? There's nothing more sexist in America than the old tired movement of feminism. Which has done what, exactly, for women lately?

Violence? There's nothing more violent in America today than a lefty Antifa "mostly peaceful protest."

Homophobia? What could be more oppressive than the brutal cancel culture promoted by Big Gay? Imagine what would happen to you if you got up at a Critical Race Theory session at work and said: "you know, I think we should teach children that, while gay is all very well, you will probably live a better life if you act hetero, and marry and have children.

Slavery? Apart from the fact that the biggest slave states in all history were founded in the 20th century in Russia and in China there are other questions to consider. What do you call a regime that forces its people to go about wearing masks? What do you call a regime that taxes over a third of its peoples' income? What do you call a ruling class that metaphorically flogs any impertinence from the plebs with cancel culture? What do you call a regime that drafts the whole nation into a Green New Deal to "save the planet?"

Hate? I'll tell you what. Every politician, at every level of government, is in the hate business. That's because, stripped of all its fol-der-ol, politics is about two things: foreign war and civil war. In the foreign war the politicians teach the people to hate the horrible Frogs, or Krauts, or Nazis, or Commies. In civil war the politicians teach the people to hate the N-word, the white trash, the white oppressors, the white supremacists, the robber barons, malefactors of great wealth, the conspiracy theorists, the armed insurrectionists. Etcetera.

Colonization? There is nothing more colonizing that the rulers and the swells telling ordinary American commoners that they are subhuman white oppressors or deplorables or bitter clingers or white racists. There is nothing more colonizing that the top-down administrative state. There is nothing more colonizing than forcing workers and students to attend diversity training or critical race theory sessions. Colonization of the Curriculum? Yeah. Starting with the uber-colonizing 1619 Project.

We all of us need to be ready with the comeback. Racist? I'll tell you what's racist: BLM. Hate? If you are in politics, you are in the hate business. White Oppressor? Yeah, and I could be fired tomorrow for saying the wrong word -- in private. There's always the Mary McCarthy line. Everything the left says is a lie: including "and" and "the."

Yup. First we celebrate America in every way possible. Second, we push back whenever the left uses a pejorative. Onwards and Upwards

Missing the Point of Jane Austen

Apparently there's a whole industry out there criticizing Jane Austen for not being woke enough. Or praising her as the world's first feminist. Or taking her to task for not turning her novels into tirades against slavery. That's what I get from a fairly sensible article about "Interrogating Jane" by Lona Manning.

Oh dear. What fools these mortals be.

I want the novels of an era to be drenched in the conventional wisdom of the time. That's because I don't trust history, don't trust politicians, don't trust historians to tell me the truth about the Good Old Days.

Instead, I want to be able to winkle out of the text and the story what was really going down back then. The value to me in Jane Austen is precisely that. That servants don't exist as people. That when Fanny Price asks a question about the slave trade there is a dead silence. That Anne Elliot is good dutiful girl that rejects the marriage proposal of the young Captain Wentworth without a fortune on the advice of elders, and then grows up to marry him anyway. When he is as rich as Croesus.

I want to be able to feel the grinding harshness of life in the English countryside that is described by Thomas Hardy. I want to be able to experience the social crosscurrents in George Eliot's Adam Bede, from the rising young carpenter, to the woman preacher, to the twerpy orphan girl to the twerpy son of the manor. And I want to read about the pride of long-term farm tenants and their tradition of honor and respectability. I want all this without so much as a single fashionable word from today's moral framework.

I want to experience the emergence of the servant as almost a person in North and South by Mrs. Gaskell, in the person of Dixon, the servant of the Hales.

I want to read what Anthony Trollope writes about blacks and creoles and whites and what have you when he travels to the West Indies in the 1850s in The West Indies and the Spanish Main. And I don't want to hear any wokey flim-flammery about his whiteness and his upper-class Victorian sensibility and his apology for European colonialism.

And I don't want to hear a single word about how the slavery in the United States was uniquely evil and has condemned the United States to bottomless perdition forever.

What is interesting is that slavery, ubiquitous since forever, became a scandal during the 18th century. What is interesting is that after the abolition of African slavery in the 19th century in Europe and the Americas the world saw the founding to two slave states held up to the world as the very incarnation of truth and justice. What is interesting is that after the 19th century saw the elimination of whole forests of subordination the 20th century saw the replanting of a sort of neo-feudalism in the welfare state.

What is interesting is that after the righteous elimination of eevil absolute monarchies and their subjugation of the people and commerce for their dynastic adventures, the 20th century has seen the growth of monster state loot and plunder, where the ruling class extracts 40 to 50 percent of the income of ordinary people in order to reward their political supporters -- who are often, but not always, the very people that cough up the revenue.

What will be the fate of today's authors when knowing commentators from the virtuous future bemoan today's moral obtuseness and cowardice. And conclusively prove how today's writers deliberately and hypocritically avoided facing up to the monstrous injustices of our age.

A Panorama of Slavery: The Privateersman

Captain Marryat, he of The Children of the New Forest, was a naval officer during the Napoleonic Wars and served under Lord Cochrane. His last naval adventure novel was The Privateersman, which turns out to be a reflection on slavery, for our hero, a disinherited gentleman from the north of England gets tricked into the slave trade, is then enslaved and then... Well you shall read the story.

The story opens in media res with a series of naval encounters in the Caribbean while our hero is a crewman on the privateer Revenge commanded by Captain Weatherall. First the Revenge captures a Frenchman, then is overwhelmed by a French and a Spanish ship acting together, then our hero is freed by the Hero and sent to hospital in Port Royal, Jamaica to recover. Then it's back to Liverpool, England and he meets the owner, Mr. Trevannion, of the privateer on which he had served in the Caribbean.

Now he sails as mate on a ship trading to Senegal, but is wrecked and captured by "natives" and carried off into the desert and sold as a slave to a fierce Negro desert king. But one of the king's women, Whyna, takes pity on him, and he becomes her personal slave. But then he and his companions are ransomed, return to the coast and sail back to Liverpool.

His time with the Negro queen excited interest in the gentry of Liverpool but soon it was time to ship out as first mate on another trip to Senegal. He uncovers a plot to capture the ship, foils the conspirators and sails back to Liverpool.

After a trip to London our hero gets command of his own ship for a bit of privateering. But first he takes some escaped Jacobites to Bordeaux, France and makes the acquaintance of the French that he fought in the Caribbean. Of course the Frenchie wants another fight, but our hero beats him and takes his ship as a prize back to Liverpool. But then he is arrested for helping the Jacobites escape. After being condemned to death and a short stay in the Tower of London as a traitor condemned to death he is pardoned and returns to Liverpool.

But his imprisonment in the Tower of London has persuaded our hero Elrington that privateering is not for him, and so he tells his employer -- in the hearing of the employer's daughter, the fair Miss Amy Trevannion, who is much impressed. He agrees to one more privateering cruise in which he captures three ships. But first he rescues a drowning man from a sinking ship that turns out to be his younger brother, Philip.

His employer is so pleased with him that he proposes to take him into business after a year's trial, but at the end of the trial Elrington refuses partnership because his employer's business is privateering. Miss Trevannion is cold towards him, and yet our hero observes her, later, weeping.

After numerous trials and excursions Elrington -- did you know his real name was Musgrave? -- heads to London to enroll his pal Captain Levee's ship to sail for the Royal Navy as a naval rather than a private ship. Then he captains a ship to Senegal for his employer, to take advantage of a special deal in elephant tusks and gold dust. 

But then Elrington gets the fever and when he wakes up his crew has exchanged the tusks and gold for slaves and they are on their way to Brazil and he is a prisoner of the mate Olvirez who hatched the slave plan. And when the ship arrives Rio de Janeiro in Brazil Elrington is sent off to a government diamond mine, for life, as an effective slave. But of course, he gets released by an extraordinary coincidence, and soon gets on a ship to return to England.

Only the ship gets wrecked on an island off North America. Elrington and the captain repair the ship enough to float it and get off the reef but they and the crew are captured by pirates and stripped of everything from clothes to money. The pirate soon anchors off the coast of America and cut the captives adrift in a rowboat.

By the way, did I mention that Elrington -- or Musgrave -- had scored a diamond from the diamond slave mine that he hangs around his neck in a leather pouch?

The former captives land and separate, and Elrington and a companion find a canoe and paddle up the coast, but then get captured by Indians, escape, and then recaptured. His companion is killed but he is forced to marry an Indian woman: slavery? One day while out hunting with the Indians he encounters a white man and would have joined his ship, except its crew were called the "Jolly Rovers:" pirates. He walks on and comes to a house on a hill. It is a plantation run by a woman who employs two convicts as slaves, and now also our hero, who finds himself once more a prisoner, a slave. But pretty soon he find out he is to be her sex slave as well: marriage or your life. Impossible: because Miss Trevannion! He tries to escape, but is captured and put in irons.

Pretty soon the plantation is attacked by Indians and set afire. He and his mistress run off in the smoke, and then he runs away from her and into the Jolly Rovers and joins their ship. But he refuses to join their crew or become their pirate captain. Even so, it's back down to the Caribbean and Jamaica. On the way they run into the pirate ship that had despoiled Elrington before and capture it. While engaged with the other pirate ship a British corvette shows up and blasts the pirates to smithereens.

Guess who the captain of the corvette is? Elrington's brother Philip.

So Elrington, first name Alexander, real surname Musgrave, makes a swift passage to England, sells his diamond for £38,000, finds out that his baronet father and his two elder brothers are dead, so he is now Sir Alexander Musgrave, and he can go to Liverpool and make his beloved Amy Trevannion into Lady Musgrave.

What a life: enslaved three times, imprisoned twice, captured any number of times. But things are much better now.

In Humiliation, Rage. Solving America's Race Problem

I just solved America's Race Problem. It's simple really.

Just ask yourself: why are blacks so angry?

The answer is obvious. Because blacks never had to fight for their freedom. All along, from Wilberforce to Waters, they have been mascots, political toys with which whites play their virtue-signaling games.

Anti-slavery campaign? It was started by William Wilberforce, rich-kid son of a merchant from Hull, England, in the Baltic trade. One thing about rich kids, from Wilberforce to Marx and Engels to Horkheimer and Adorno to Marcuse: They desperately need to do something to make their meaningless lives meaningful.

Civil War? It was a war between virtue-signaling whites in the North and Southern whites who vowed that the prissy Northerners could take their slaves out of their cold dead hands.

Civil Rights era? It was mostly a whites affair. Smart Jewish kids going into the South to register voters as Freedom Riders. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.? Cherished mascot of white liberals. And King used the non-violent protest concept that Gandhi developed. And how did Gandhi develop it? Because the Brits allowed this high-caste Indian to go to Britland to study to become a barrister and get inside the whole culture of British law and figure out how to beat it.

But whatabout slave rebellions? Here are PBS's five favorite slave rebellions:

1. Stono Rebellion, 1739. "About 20 slaves."
2. New York Conspiracy of 1741. Never got to a rebellion, but about 130 blacks and others were hanged, exiled, or "sent to the stake."
3. Gabriel’s Conspiracy, 1800. Bit of a cock-up on the rebellion front. Gabriel planned to rally more than 1,000 to his revolt, but bad weather made his supporters lose heart.
4. German Coast Uprising, 1811. Charles Delondes and "about 25 slaves" rose up and attacked their plantation's owner.
5. Nat Turner’s Rebellion, 1831. Nat Turner and "about 70 armed slaves and free blacks set off to slaughter the white neighbors who enslaved them."

Notice that two of the five rebellions are termed "conspiracies;" they never made it to full-blown rebellions. Not exactly Kirk Douglas and Spartacus, when about 70 slave-gladiators were eventually "joined by 120,000 men, women, and children" forming "a surprisingly effective armed force" in the Third Servile War.

So, basically the whole slave and civil-rights and critical race theory thing was all about whites virtue-signalling each other. With blacks as the mascots, the sacred objects to be sacrificed to the gods on liberal feast days.

If I were a black I would be humiliated by all this. No wonder that black males have such a super-macho culture. It is a compensation for their actual humiliation at the hands of rich-kid white liberals.

Now let's get all Churchillian about this. Remember his immortal lines:

In War: Resolution,
In Defeat: Defiance,
In Victory: Magnanimity,
In Peace: Good Will.

Yes, but whatabout the humiliation of blacks in being the 200-year special mascots of whites from Hull to Our Nance's San Francisco? Exactly,

In Humiliation: Rage.

Now you know why blacks are so angry.

OK. I've identified the problem. Now, how about a solution? 

Thank you, Senator, I'm glad you asked that.

The solution is simple, and comes right out of the current mass frenzy about police killings of blacks.

I agree with blacks. It is intolerable to have white police officers offing their best and brightest, when they are only mildly resisting arrest.

So I propose that no white policeman be allowed to arrest or use lethal force against any black suspect. Period. Because justice. 

But wait, you say! That means that our Democratic cities will all go up in smoke and violence, and the murder rate will double and triple.

Exactly. And then, maybe, blacks will form an organic movement -- trained Marxists need not apply -- and demand that their municipal leaders fund the police, crack the heads of the gang-bangers and homeboys, and restore peace to "our communities."

Then the rest of the Churchillian homilies will apply.

In War: Resolution,
In Victory: Magnanimity,
In Peace: Good Will.

For blacks will finally, organically, in the teeth of opposition from all the white liberal virtue-signalers, achieve what they have always lacked. Self-respect.

Ain't I a stinker? As Bugs Bunny put it so many moons ago.

The Problem with Anti-Whiteness

All the usual idiots are coming up with comical indictments of "whiteness." There are several charts about "whiteness" in Edward Ring's American Greatness piece on "The Origin and True Agenda of Anti-Racist Politics." I wrote about it last week. They really are sophomoric.

The problem with "whiteness" as the foundation of all evil in the world is, of course, that those bloody whites are the ones that invented the modern world -- the good, the bad, and the ugly. And everybody else is playing catch-up.

So why did Western Europeans pwn the world from about 1500 to 2000? How did they do it? What was the secret to their success, their Baldrick's Cunning Plan?

It wasn't just one thing; it was everything. Europeans had developed ships that could sail around the world. They had developed financial systems to finance long trading voyages. They had guns. And they had young men that were prepared to go to the ends of the Earth to earn a living.

Now I've been doing a bit of reading about pre-1500 Europe. If you read "The Saxon Chronicles" of Bernard Cornwell you read about a world where the bloody Danes had developed amazing longships which were dandy for raids on the bloody Saxons in England. But the Danes couldn't really think beyond capturing slaves and looting silver and seizing good arable land.

Or there is Britain's Edward II that I am reading about through a biography of his Queen Isabella. You see the beginnings of reliance on Italian bankers. But otherwise kingly life was about juggling earldoms and valuable agricultural estates, and tuning up for the Wars of the Roses in the next century.

But read what this Chinese guy, a "Dr. Wu," said about Europeans at the beginning of David Aikman's Jesus in Beijing published in 2003. Dr. Wu and others had been tasked with accounting "for the success, in fact, the preeminence of the West all over the world."

We studied everything we could from the historical, political, economic, and cultural perspective. At first we thought it was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity. That is why the West has been so powerful. The Christian moral foundation of social and cultural life was what made possible the emergence of capitalism, and then the successful transition to democratic politics. We don't have any doubt about this.

Somebody tell President Xi about this.

The error that our lefty friends make about "whiteness" is that they cannot think outside of a political context. They seem to imagine a white conspiracy to conquer the world, and to dominate and subjugate all non-whites.

Not at all. For instance, the conquest of the world began with a bit of a cock-up on the exploration front. Christopher Columbus was not trying to discover America in 1492; not at all. He was trying to find a sea route to India. For trading purposes. Guess why they called the native Americans "Indians?"

When the Portuguese started trading with India around the Cape of Good Hope it was to avoid having to pay the high prices for spices from the Arabs. And it is pretty amazing that you could make money on months-long voyages from Europe to India. The Portuguese weren't trying to conquer India. They wanted to trade with India.

But here's the thing. What do you need to organize a round-the-cape trading system with India? You need ships that can do the trip. You need guns to keep the pirates down to a dull roar. And you need capital, to fund the months-long trip. If you ask me, it ain't as easy as gussying up some Critical Race Theory training course in "white fragility" and forcing all the white kiddies to show up, or else.

One fine day the current religious, cultural, political and economic society variously created by peoples out of Western Europe will be superseded by something else. Not a doubt about it. But the superseders will not be CRT academics or activists. I promise you that, on a stack of Das Kapitals.

Meanwhile, here are a couple of mysteries to ponder over.

Why did the Brits and others create the anti-slavery movement in the 18th century? What did they mean by that?

And why did the US write the Civil Rights Acts to give full civil rights to a small minority population of ex-slaves from Africa? What did they mean by that?

See, it's easy to understand our liberal friends today who want to change the world for climate change and beat up racist whites because systemic racism. That's easy. Every ruling class needs to be heroically battling against some existential peril, or against some frightful and hateful enemy, otherwise who needs the bloody ruling class?

But why bother about slavery? Why bother about civil rights? That is the mystery.

The "Bondman" in More's "Utopia"

I've been reading Sir Thomas More's Utopia, because I thought I oughta. And there I was cruising along, trying to decipher the very thick prose, when suddenly I came upon the word "bondman."

What! There were slaves in the perfect state of Utopia? I had no idea.

Actually, I have two translations of Utopia. One is a chatty translation by Paul Turner in 1961, and the other is the original translation from the Latin by Ralph Robinson in 1556. I've been reading the original translation, but I think that the Sixties version is easier to understand. Here is the start of the original:

They neither take bondmen of prisoners taken in battle, unless it be in battle that they fought themselves, nor of bondmen's children, nor, to be short, of any such as they can get out of foreign countries, though he were there a bondman.

But let us look at the original Latin. That I just downloaded, old chap. And you can too! The paragraph begins:

Pro servis neque bello captus habent.

So, More is using the Latin "servus" that Robinson translates as "bondman." It's interesting that Google Translate has two synonyms for "servus:" "mancipium" and "famulus." Let's write these up with Google's suggested meanings:

Servus -- servant, slave, bondman 

Mancipium -- slave, property, manicipation, possession, bondman, thrall 

Famulus -- servant, slave, house slave, housecarl, valet, varlet

See, what I experience here is that back in the good old days there were all kinds of gradations in subordination. And we, who have so nobly cast slavery aside -- Commie socialist paradises excepted -- really don't know what we are talking about when it comes to human bondage.

Of course, by the Sixties we call a slave a slave. Here is the modern version from Turner:

By the way, the slaves that I've occasionally referred to are not, as you might imagine, non-combatant prisoners of war, slaves by birth, or purchases from foreign slave markets. They're either Utopian convicts, or, much more often, condemned criminals from other countries, who are acquired in large numbers, sometimes for a small payment, but usually for nothing.

The reason for slaves in Utopia is that they don't have any of your modern prisons of which we are so proud. Whaddya do with the antisocial, anyway? Put 'em in jail or put 'em to work?

Both types of slave are kept hard at work in chain-gangs, though the Utopians are treated worse than foreigners. The idea is that it's all the more deplorable if a person who has had the advantage of a first-class education and a thoroughly moral upbringing still insists on becoming a criminal -- so the punishment should be all the more severe. 

Hmm. Compare the following with our current illegal immigration and work-under-the-table economy: 

Another type of slave is a working-class foreigner who, rather than live in wretched poverty at home volunteers for slavery in Utopia. Such people are treated with respect, and with almost as much kindness as Utopian citizens, except that they're made to work harder, because they're used to it. If they want to leave the country, which doesn't happen often, they're perfectly free to do so, and receive a small gratuity.

Now, the thing to remember about Utopia is that it is hard to be sure when More is serious and when he is joking.

But I would say that our present notion that slave equals negro slave equals Middle Passage equals the crime of the ages equals white supremacy equals systemic racism is desperately adolescent.

Slavery is part of a continuum of domination and hierarchy, and subordinate status in human society. There are all kinds of gradations in human freedom and human subordination. (Was there ever a slave more abject than the Soviet prisoner in the Siberian Kolyma gold mines?) 

And there are all kinds of different people. Some people want to be free and a bird and damn the torpedoes; others want security, whatever it costs. Most of us want to be free and expect to be protected. Ain't we all stinkers, as Bugs Bunny put it?

What made plantation slavery scandalous in our age, I suspect, began with the fact that, for a while, plantation slavery was very profitable for enterprising men that were not out of the top drawer, especially in the production of cane sugar, from Cyprus to the Caribbean. It was especially annoying when they brought their wealth back to England and built Mansfield Park and bought baronetcies and went into Parliament.

It is interesting that More's bondmen were not conquest slaves; the Utopians were done with that. But it is fascinating that "immigrants" from poor countries were put to work as slaves, and no doubt thought themselves better off than in their previous life. And it is interesting that the immigrant slaves were given a bonus if they decided to leave Utopia.

See, in my view the American immigrant story is not that different. Many peoples that have immigrated to the US had to start out working very hard for meager wages, under near slave conditions in those famous "sweat-shops" of which we've heard tell.

And in my view the union worker is working in a kind of quasi-slavery, the creature of his union boss and his corporate boss who both play power games using the helpless worker as a pawn. Like many a slave, they were cast out when they were no longer useful.

In my view, the gubmint worker with lifetime employment and a pension is not exactly a free person.

Nor is the employee of a corporate colossus.

And what is the status of the current American citizen that must contribute 30-40 percent of his earnings to the government? Is he a free-man? A serf? A bondman? A "famulus?" You tell me.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb on Slavery

Everybody knows that the only thing you need to know about slavery is the Middle Passage and Negro Slavery and plantations and white racism.

I'm sure that's what you were carefully taught, to hate and to fear, in school.

I had my first warning that it ain't necessarily so years ago when I read The Year 1000: What Life Was Like at the Turn of the First Millennium by Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger.

See, back in the feudal era you could ask your feudal lord to make you a slave. Sure, the most notorious source of slaves was war: "conquest slavery." And you could be made a slave for a criminal offence; of course you could, because prisons are expensive. 

But voluntary slavery? Here's how Lacey and Danziger put it.

People surrendered themselves into bondage at times of famine or distress, when they simply could not provide for their families any more... [I]n the year 1000 the starving man had no other resort but to kneel before his lord or lady and place his head in their hands. No legal document was involved, and the new bondsman would be handed a bill-hook or ox-goad in token of his fresh start in servitude. It was a basic transaction -- heads for food.

Of course, this is not particularly scandalous to me, because my reductive Three Peoples theory understands that a lot of people are Subordinates, or people that believe they need a protector. Just like in 1000:

In the year 1000 people could not imagine themselves without a protector. You had a lord in heaven and you needed a lord on earth. 

Nassim Nicholas Taleb expands on the topic in his Skin in the Game. It is covered in Chapter 3: How to Legally Own Another Person.

First, Taleb talks about the roaming monks of early Christianity, that were banned and enslaved into monasteries by the edit of St. Benedict. What was going on? The problem is that the vagrant monks were free, and

Complete freedom is the last thing you want if you have an organized religion to run.

But that is not all. Whatabout the corporation and the company man?

Total freedom for your employees is also a very bad thing if you have a firm to run[.]

Why? Well suppose you have a small airline and the pilots are contracted. Suppose that tomorrow you have a fully booked flight to Munich for the Oktoberfest, and at 5pm your pilot calls you to cancel, because he got a better deal that day from a Saudi sheik. You can see that it would be better to have salaried employees, even if they spend a lot of time sitting around, rather than risk a contract pilot saying, sorry Bob, I got a better offer today. As Taleb says:

People you find in employment love the regularity of the payroll, with that special envelop on their desk at the last day of the month, and without which they would act as a baby deprived of mother's milk.

And so we developed the culture of the "company man" who was guaranteed employment until retirement and then retired with a pension.

The system worked when large corporations survived a long time and were perceived to be longer lasting that nation-states.

But now, Taleb says, in the tech age, the important thing for security is to be "employable," to have skills that employers want.

Here's another curious form of slavery. To employ someone, say in a foreign country, at a salary and benefits way over the market rate back home. "The best slave is someone you overpay and who knows it, terrified of losing his status." 

Or suppose you are a high-ranking civil servant. You are terrified of losing your reputation and your sinecure, and so behave exactly as required -- say by the deep state -- in order to keep your status and your perquisites.

Yes, you say, but these examples are not really slavery. Maybe not, but they do illustrate that the dominant narrative -- that back in the old days people were brutally enslaved, but now, in the glorious light of enlightenment those days are gone forever and everyone is free, except for the remaining "oppressed peoples" that we "allies" are determined to liberate -- is a little too simplistic.

And I say, with my Great Reaction notion, that the left, despite its glorious devotion to ending all oppression and domination, is in fact reintroducing subjection: thus I argue that socialism is a return to slavery and the welfare state is a return to feudalism.

In fact, all social animals are hierarchical, not egalitarian. True equality, true freedom don't exist in the real world. Every living thing lives in a hierarchical world and obtains protection from its subordination to the hierarchy and its place in the power hierarchy.

Some people want a lot of protection: at some point the level of protection and subordination approaches what we like to call slavery. Other people want very little protection; they are what we might call "free spirits" after Nietzsche. It ain't black and white, but all shades of gray.

But, of course, we Hegel scholars have always known that. Because, having taken the short cut and read Alexandre Kojève's Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, we know that the Master and Slave relationship is not as simple as we might like to think. For instance, the Slave knows a lot more about the Master than vice-versa. And knowledge, as they say, is power.

One fine day, I predict, our lefty friends will completely change their minds about slavery. Because their political power will depend upon it. But don't ask me when.

Meanwhile keep your nose in the air, knowing that you know a lot more about slavery than your virtue-signaling Black Lives Matter liberal neighbor.

Lefty Ally-ism, and What Real Allies Look Like

It is a couple of months since I read the definitive word on our current Woke witch hunt and first commented on it. It was from Matt Taibbi's piece on "white fragility." The "antiracism" movement, he wrote, is based on the following three-layer theory of society.

It sees the human being as locked into one of three categories: members of oppressed groups, allies, and white oppressors.

Of course, I jumped on it, because of my interest in three-layer theories, which are the typical way that humans understand each other -- that is when they have the sophistication to graduate from a simple Us and Them theory. I lay out the theories in a table here.

I call this meaning-of-life theory "ally-ism." Because, of course, the point of "antiracism" is not being against racism but being an activist force for good, being the ally of "oppressed peoples."

Notice that, like the original Marxism, this ally-ism is not a theory of society but a theory of conflict. In Marx's concept, humans are engaged in an eternal Us vs. Them conflict, feudal lords vs. serfs, and now capitalists vs. proletarians. But there is hope! The Communists, the vanguard of the proletariat, will ally itself with the proles and smash the capitalist domination and hegemony. And then the problem of good vs. evil would be solved for all time.

In the new concept, we have the "white oppressors" dominating and oppressing the "oppressed peoples." But along come the "allies" who heroically insert themselves into this dominatory hellhole and join the battle of the oppressed against the oppressors as the allies of the "oppressed peoples."

Do you see the absurdity of this analysis? That it reduces human society to a war of all against all. Really? So how does the concept of humans as social animals come in?

And by the way, whatabout the notion, that I have advanced with respect to slavery, that some people actually voluntarily place themselves into slavery? Bad boy Nassim Nicholas Taleb updates the notion in Skin in the Game. He suggests that monasticism is a form of slavery. It was invented by St. Benedict to deal with the problem of itinerant monks that were totally out of the Catholic Church's control. Says he (p.96)

Complete freedom is the last thing you want if you have an organized religion to run. Total freedom for your employees is also a very, very bad thing if you have a firm to run[.]

So, Taleb argues, in this supposed post-slavery age, there are all kinds of dependence going on, especially in the corporate world. By offering security of employment -- and dependence -- an employer buys loyalty. The high-water mark of this was the old lifetime employment deal offered by big corporations in the post-WWII era. That worked when the life of big corporations was sixty years or so. But not in the current era where "firms stay in the top league by size (the so-called S&P 500) for only about between ten and fifteen years."

That's why my maxim about the Great Reaction says that the welfare state is a return to feudalism. It works because a lot of people prefer the life of subordination to the life of responsibility.

In other words, a big chunk of your "oppressed peoples" may be subordinate by choice.

That's why I think that a good three-layer theory is descriptive before it is prescriptive. Who are these "oppressed peoples" these "white oppressors" when they are at home? And who are the glorious white-knight "allies?"

Well, my reductive Three Peoples theory does just that. It describes the Creative people, that want to create something new; the Responsible people that just want to obey the law, go to work, and follow the rules, and the Subordinates, that look to someone else to tell them what to do.

Let us try to mesh my theory with the Ally-ism theory. I'd say that the "oppressed peoples" align with my Subordinates. But what if, for many "oppressed peoples," their Subordination is a choice. Nobody, for instance, is forcing you to take welfare. In fact, you demand your welfare and your unemployment check and your Medicaid as a right. Really? You mean that your average "oppressed" person has enforceable "rights?" Oh, I forgot: they would have nothing without the heroic assistance of the "allies."

Whatabout the "white oppressors?" Are these graduates of prestige universities and prestige media or NGO jobs? Certainly not? Are they Tech Lords? Certainly not! Tech Lords are for the people. Are they Trump supporters, the kind that often get suspended and censored on social media and can be found enthusiastically cheering at Trump rallies? I think you have a funny notion of oppressor if the average "white oppressor" can be fired for expressing the wrong opinion, James Damore.

And whatabout "allies?" Are these graduates of prestige universities with prestige media or NGO jobs? You betcha! Are they Tech Lords? You betcha! Are they nice liberal ladies in swank gentrified inner suburbs with #WeBelieve yard signs out front? You betcha.

Hmm. I am getting a sneaking suspicion that the Mary McCarthy Rule applies here. You remember Mary McCarthy. She said of Lilian Hellman:

Every word she writes is a lie, including "and" and "the."

I'd have to agree with Mary, since the day I saw Lilian Hellman's play "The Watch on the Rhine" at the Berkeley Rep. 

Against this putrid philosophy I offer an notion of real Ally-ship. It is based on my Three Peoples theory and recognizes that different people need and want different things. 

I'd say that Subordinates -- or "oppressed peoples" -- need a decent support from society but should be encouraged to lift themselves out of dependency. That's what I think a real ally would do.

I'd say that Responsibles -- or "white oppressors" -- need to be allowed to just be ordinary people and go about their business without being hassled by credentialed "allies" and accused of being monsters when they are not. But Responsibles also need to be encouraged to rise above mere responsibility and try something new. That's what I think a real ally would do.

I'd say that Creatives -- or "allies" -- need to be encouraged in the courage of creativity, but not if it means running about being white knights and beating up on "white oppressors." True creativity means being willing to sacrifice yourself rather than sacrifice others, to be a sacrificial hero rather than an ego hero, and Creatives need to be told that in no uncertain terms. That's what I think a real ally would do.

Now let us look at the bigger picture. In our era, the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years, the wages of cooperation have been immense. Take just one statistic: there are 3.8 billion smartphone users in the world today. In a world of 7 billion humans.

Just sayin'. How oppressed can you be if you have a smartphone? For one thing, it means that if you are one of the Factory Girls in southern China you can text with your friends about the best -- and the worst -- employers.

Now I think that the emergence of the Great Reaction, of well-born allies that went to selective colleges proposing to right the wrongs of the world with politics, is a sign that the Age of Politics, the age of using force to make people get along, is coming to an end. It is clueless scions getting the wrong end of the stick. It is a sign that the rule of the educated Gentry is coming to an end. Because we Commoners can get on perfectly well without the supervision of our Betters. Why? Because with smartphones and credit scores and cashless transfers there is a gigantic "nudge" encouraging each of us to be faithful and trustworthy in every life transaction.

In other words if there is a crisis in the modern era it is the crisis of people that are not trustworthy: people that crash their credit scores, that can't keep a job, that get pitched out of the circle of trust because they demonstrate untrustworthiness. The Fools.

Back in the day, the untrustworthy could disappear. A Brit could take a ship to the Americas. A New England Puritan could disappear and head Out West. People could give themselves a fresh start. But today, I'd say, the penalties for untrustworthiness are huge.

Hey, Wokies! How about a program for you guys to go out in the world and teach the "oppressed peoples" how to earn the badge of "trustworthiness?"

But meanwhile, we "white oppressors" will do our thing with the "oppressed peoples" and give them jobs and reward them for trustworthiness. And in the fullness of time they may become rabid Trump voters too. 

That's that I call real allies.

My "1584 Project"

Remember when the peerless New York Times journalist put up her "1619 Project" and the editors announced it thus?

The 1619 project is a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative. [emphasis added]

Yes, of course, that bold bit has since been memory-holed. Because reasons, chiefly because a lot of historians weighed in and said this narrative is, as they say in Critical-Theory-Land, "overdetermined." And, I understand, the chief writer in the 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones, has taken her Twitter feed private, because reasons.

I get all this. It's because we humans all want to recite "the story so far," the comforting story about how "we" -- whoever "we" happens to be -- are the culmination of the history of the world so far. Educated blacks like HNJ want a narrative special to them. And our liberal friends are deeply in love with the "oppressed peoples, allies, white oppressors" narrative which is all about how liberals are the saviors of the world because they are the allies of the oppressed peoples and plucked them from out of the clutches of the eevil white oppressors.

The purpose of the 1619 Project is, of course, to throw offal on the "founding narrative," that the American people are the best people in the world, the United States is the best country in the world, and our founders are the best politicians in the world.

Which is really cool if you are a liberal, but not so much fun if you are, say, a gap-toothed white redneck. Where do you fit in to all this virtue-signaling?

Enter my "1584 Project." It is critical theory on steroids, because it is a critique of the "1619 Project" as a prime example of the domination and hegemony of the educated class. You see, it may very well be that August 20, 1619 marked the arrival of the first slave ship in North America. But back in 1584 the first ships from England arrived off the coast of North America to found the Roanoke Colony.

What was the Roanoke Colony? According to La Wik, It was the brain-child of Sir Walter Raleigh, who was awarded a charter by Queen Elizabeth I to "discover, search, find out, and view such remote heathen and barbarous Lands, Countries, and territories ... to have, hold, occupy, and enjoy." He sent an expedition out in 1584 which made landfall at "Port Ferdinando" by Roanoke Island. Raleigh's people spent the next couple of years trying to establish a colony, but gave up, probably abandoning a few colonists to their fate.

But what was this colonization all about? If you read Nancy Isenberg's White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, it is all about the problem of "waste population" in England in the 16th century.

I know, let's tell a story.

Back in 1000, let us say, the Brits lived in a pure feudal system where they lived as serfs in a medieval manor. They could, if they chose, become slaves of their lord, and get their three squares a day directly from the loving lord rather than scratching for it as agriculturalists farming the open field system.

But in the 12th century, according to La Wik, "some fields in England tilled under the open field system were enclosed into individually owned fields." Then came the Black Death and that really got the break-up of the feudal system going.

Many farms were bought by yeomen who enclosed their property and improved their use of the land. More secure control of the land allowed the owners to make innovations that improved their yields.

The nobles also liked the enclosure concept. Their idea was to enclose land so they could graze sheep. This became a political issue by 1500, so that in his Utopia Thomas More could speak of how when gentlemen "that carry about with them... a great flock or train of idle and loitering serving men" die, their heirs "thrust [them] out of doors."

And what do they do, these landowners?

[They] leave no ground for tillage: they enclose all into pastures... and leave nothing standing but only the church to be made into a sheep-house.

The money, says More, is in the growing "of the finest and the dearest wool" and that is what the "noblemen and gentlemen" were doing. Not coincidentally, the first vagabond act was passed in 1495.

To add insult to injury, monarchs in the 16th century started disarming their nobles and creating national armies. This created another reason for nobles to kick their "idle and loitering serving men" out of doors.

By 1584, Richard Hakluyt in his "Discourse Concerning Western Planting" proposed not just the advantage of merchants and artisans improving the waste lands of the Americas, but the benefit of exporting the human detritus from the improvement and enclosure movement. Isenberg:

[T]he bulk of the labor force was to come from the swelling numbers of poor and homeless... Idle and unused they were waiting to be transplanted to the American land and be better... put to use.

Then the convicts. Here is what Hakluyt planned for them in America.

Among the first waves of workers were the convicts, who would be employed at heavy labor felling trees and burning them for pitch, tar, and soap ash; others would dig in the mines for gold, silver, iron, and copper. The convicts were not paid wages. As debt slaves, they were obliged to repay the English commonwealth for their crimes by producing commodities for export.

Anyway, after the Roanoke Colony failed the Brits tried again with Jamestown, founded in 1607. It struggled as badly as Roanoke, but then in 1609 John Rolfe introduced a strain of tobacco from Bermuda, and "tobacco quickly became the new gold --  the ticket to wealth."

But for that the planters needed labor, and so they pleaded for "more indentured servants and laborers, who, like slaves were sold to the highest bidder." Actually, the normal game was that men that did not pay for their own passage to the Americas paid instead with a term of indentured labor. And contracts of indenture bound servants to their masters and even their heirs. If an indentured servant died, his wife and children were expected to work out the term of indenture.

So the waste population of England was not that different from the conquest slaves of West Africa.

Of course, some of the indentured servants escaped, and learned to live off the grid as squatters and crackers.

They lived off the grid... disappeared into unsettled territory and squatted down... anywhere and everywhere.

As early as the 1750s they were called the "scum of nature" and "vermin"; they had no means of support except theft and license.

Thus the whole pejorative vocabulary of White Trash, from Nancy Isenberg:

Waste people. Offscourings. Lubbers. Bogtrotters. Rascals. Rubbish. Squatters. Crackers. Clay-eaters. Tuckies. Mudsills. Scalawags. Briar hoppers. Hillbillies. Low-downers. White [n-word]. Degenerates. White trash. Rednecks. Trailer trash. Swamp people. 

Don't you think it is time for a new movement among the elite, to champion the White Trash against their oppressors? Oh wait. In that case the moral narrative would be about "oppressed white trash, gentry oppressors, and don't cares."

Did you know about the "maroons?" They were communities of escaped African slaves all up and down the eastern coast of the Americas. They usually lived just far enough out of town that the powers-that-be wouldn't be bothered to bother them.

So really, the maroons were the same as the white trash, the squatters and crackers, that lived far enough out of town that the powers-that-be wouldn't bother them. Both white trash indentured servants and negro slaves were useful to the ruling class to work in their money-making plantations, if they could keep them from escaping.

In my narrative of The Story So Far, I reckon that, at some point, the benefit of slave labor began to burn out. Eventually the powers that be started to realize that free labor was much more profitable than slave labor. And so indentured servitude and slavery became a scandal to the great and the good.

However, I maintain that the pendulum has swung back somewhat to feudalism, for in my critique of the left as a Great Reaction, I call socialism a return to slavery and the welfare state a return to feudalism. In the welfare state the workers give a lot of their wages back to the government in return for benefits. And what is that, in effect, but a kind of quasi-serfdom?

There seem to be only two ways of recalling the past. Either it was a golden age or it was a shameful barbarism. Or both.

But I think a better way is to be understanding about the past. It was what it was. We should be hesitant to praise it unduly, and we should be disinclined to sneer at it.

For who knows how our own age will be judged by those that come after us.

The Two Kinds of Slavery

I just had an epiphany over the weekend with respect to slavery. And it came to me as I puzzle over my Great Reaction notion that socialism is a return to slavery and the welfare state is a return to feudalism.

But, of course, under feudalism they also had slavery: voluntary slavery. It is described in The Year 1000 by Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger. You could go to your feudal lord in Britain in the year 1000 and place your head in his hands and become his bondsman. The lord gave you a bill-hook and three squares for the rest of your life. It was called "head for food."

So there are two kinds of slavery: conquest slavery and voluntary slavery. You can become a slave in the aftermath of your tribe being conquered. Presumably all the adult males would be killed and the women and children sold into slavery. But you can also place yourself into slavery, and say "I give up. Look after me, Master, because I can't take it any more."

Yes, but we are beyond all that, right?

I don't think so. Let's rewrite my Great Reaction maxim like this.

Great Reaction: Socialism is a return to conquest slavery; the welfare state is a return to feudalism; welfare is a return to "head-for-food" slavery; identity politics is neo-tribalism; etc.

I have done a piece or two on welfare that indicates how close it is to slavery. In "A Brief History of Welfare" I note the various stages in England since the year 1000.

• "Head for food" slavery.
• Early vagrancy laws.
• First Poor Law in 1597.
• Workhouses in 1830s: "indoor relief."
• Modern welfare: "outdoor relief."

Let us try to think what happened between each stage. I imagine that in the "head for food" slavery days that there was no social space outside being the vassal of your local lord. And if you caused any trouble the lord had no trouble in dealing with you. But in the Tudor era of the 16th century two things were going on. First, the feudal monarchies supported by feudal nobles were turning into absolute monarchies financed by merchant credit. This meant that monarchs could finance their armies through the credit system rather than the private feudal hosts of the nobles. So the nobles weren't interested in "head for food" slaves eating their heads off that might be useful in the odd little war.

Second, the feudal lords themselves got involved in the money economy and started to "improve" their lands by draining the swamps and trying new agricultural methods: the agricultural revolution. Oh, and also by "enclosing" common lands. This created a "surplus population."

The first Poor Laws at the end of the 16th century were a way to keep the poor out of the cities, and dispersed in the countryside. Each parish had to look after its own poor, and the poor were not allowed to move around. Then, by the early 19th century, there was enough money to build "workhouses" to imprison the poor and put them to work. Was this just "head for food" slavery by another name? You tell me.

But really, the problem of the poor and vagrancy didn't get solved until the Industrial Revolution put the poor to work in factories. Then the landless, starving poor headed for the industrial cities where they got jobs. But here is a question: in the disciplined work of factories are things any different? Workers are extremely disciplined and ordered around, and after a while they start to believe that their employers "owe" them their jobs and benefits as a lifetime obligation. Is this that different from "head for food" slavery? You tell me.

In our age, with its real per-capita income about 30 times what it was two centuries ago, we can afford to throw our hand up with regard to the poor. So the poor apply to their local social-services bureaucrat for welfare and housing vouchers and EBT "cards for food." Is this not a kind of slavery? Do not the modern welfare recipients place their heads in the hand of the social worker in return for three squares a day?

And how different is this from the situation of the average corporate or government worker that works under an informal job-for-life contract? When a corporation or a government "down-sizes" do not the workers feel betrayed? Have they not, in fact, enslaved themselves to their corporate or government master in return for three squares?

This is thrown for me into stark relief with the situation of teenage migrant Chinese workers -- described in Factory Girls by Leslie T. Chang -- that have left the farm, because nothing is happening -- for the crazy world of the big city factories, where they learn that it is up to them to get ahead, because they are on their own.

It makes me wonder what the English factory workers of the early 19th century thought about their lives and their work.

In our day we make a big deal about the conquest slavery of the plantations, where West Africans were sold by African chiefs to Brit and Dutch slavers and sent to the Americas.

And we've made a big deal about freeing the plantation slaves and how we owe them reparations.

But we don't make much of a deal of the hundred million Russians that were bundled into slavery in the Soviet Union. And how Mao Zedong enslaved hundreds of millions of Chinese into his slave-state hell. It seems, to our more advanced citizens, that these horrors are just "stuff happens."

But I think that subordination, slavery if you will, is still very much alive today, and for two reasons. First, there are a lot of humans that get off on subordinating other humans to their physical and moral hegemony. Second, there are a lot of humans that prefer to live as subordinates rather than accept the risks of responsibility.

So I think that we should be careful about patting ourselves on the back for "ending slavery." I think there is still a lot of slavery around. We just don't call it "slavery" and we don't call the subordinates in question "slaves."

The Question of George Washington and His Slaves

My line on slavery is the same as my line on conquest and plunder.  Slavery Does Not Pay. 

And that is why we don't have slavery any more. Not because we are moral giants but because we can calculate profit and loss.

But then I read an interesting biography George Washington, Entrepreneur: How Our Founding Father's Private Business Pursuits Changed America and the World, by John Berlau.

Did you know that George Washington started work as a surveyor at age 14? His dad had died and the kids from dad's first marriage got all the money. So the father of our nation had to get a job.

When Washington married his Martha, he was marrying money, for Martha was rich from her first marriage. Lots of slaves and all.

Here's the deal: Washington had a few slaves personally, and when he died he freed them all. This was considered a bit radical in 1799.

But the big thing for me was that George Washington, and a number of other slave-owners, had determined not to buy and sell slaves if it broke up the slave families.

In other words, he experienced his slaves as people, rather than commodities. But, when you experience your slaves as people there are all kinds of other issues, like what do you do about slaves that are too old to work.

That is where the Does Not Pay comes in.

The thing about slaves is that while you get work out of them -- if you are lucky -- you are also responsible for housing and feeding them. And clothing them and I know not what. 

OK, here are the details. In his will Washington stipulated after the death of his wife Martha all his slaves should be freed, and that former slaves unable to support themselves due to advanced age or disability should be clothed and fed by his heirs. And he provided for the education of "many of the former slave children." And no slaves were to be sold.

So if you actually care about them as people, they could cost you a bundle.

In other words, as soon as you start to care about slaves as people, Slavery Does Not Pay.

Do you see how free labor might appeal to the business class? If you are a good guy like George Washington the care and feeding of your slaves is going to cost a bundle. But if you free them and give them wages in return for their work then the responsibility for the care and feeding falls on the now-freed slaves.

So now it occurs to me that my line that conquest and plunder and slavery went out because They Do Not Pay has an important qualification.

If you do not care about the Other as people, then conquest and plunder and slavery are cool. If you conquer and kill, nobody cares about the widows and orphans of the conquered. If you plunder the conquered of all their grain, who cares if they all die of starvation. If you enslave the conquered, who cares if half of them die on the Middle Passage, or the voyage from Kaffa in the Crimea to the harems of the Middle East.

But once you do start to care about the Other as people, then everything changes. And all of a sudden the cost of treating people like people starts to come into view.

So you tell me the answer to this moral dichotomy: which is moral, to have people as virtual slaves and thralls and accept the responsibility to look after them? Or to employ them as free labor and just have to worry about the work they do and how much you pay them?

So, in our welfare state we have struck a middle course. We expect people to get a job, but we also look after the people that fall by the wayside. Is that a middle course, or a muddle? You decide.

Here's an interesting way to look at it. Our wokey friends divide the world up into oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors. Makes life pretty easy, don't it? You care about the "oppressed peoples" and the "allies" -- who are people like us wokies. The "white oppressors," whoever they are, can go hang.

Here's my take on morality. It's a lot more complicated than you think.

Yes, Let's Have a Talk about Slavery

Since we are all in the middle of being carefully taught to hate the 400 years of slavery and oppression suffered by African Americans, let us just review a curious tale of slavery, in the naval novel, The Privateersman, by Captain Marryat.

Captain Marryat, all you wokies will know because you are all so well-read, is the chap that invented the naval novel genre, that we now enjoy with Patrick O'Brien and a host of others. Marryat was an actual naval officer during the Napoleonic Wars and served under Lord Cochrane, the inspiration for all the heroes of O'Brien and the others.

In The Privateersman, our hero works for a shipowner in Liverpool -- a port that you scholars will know was a notorious slave port. The shipowner, father of the most perfect girl in the world, used to make lots of money in the slaving line, but now prefers the less abominable trade of privateering.

Privateering, all you scholars will know, was a second-tier thing in the Napoleonic Wars, where ship captains with "letters of marque" were licensed to prey on the King's enemies for loot and plunder.

Our hero is the captain on a couple of privateering voyages but then, partly influenced by the daughter, he tells his boss that he's not going to go a-privateering again.

One thing leads to another, and he goes down to West Africa and gets captured by West Africans and made a slave -- to the lovely concubine of a West African chief. But eventually the Brits come and free him.

Then he makes another trip to West Africa, this time to trade goods -- for gold dust and elephant tusks -- but one thing leads to another and his ship gets taken over by a villainous Portuguese who puts him in irons and exchanges the tusks for slaves. When the ship arrives in Brazil with its African slaves, our hero gets imprisoned and sent as a white slave for life to the Brazilian diamond mines.

Hmm. I wonder what Captain Marryat means by that.

One thing leads to another and our hero gets freed after a couple of years, and sets sail in a xebeque for North America, on the way home to Britain and the most perfect girl in the world. But the ship gets wrecked on the coast of North America and our hero gets captured by Indians and forced to marry an ugly old Indian squaw.

One thing leads to another and our hero escapes and presents himself at a small tobacco plantation in the wilderness run by a six-foot woman and two indentured servants, criminals branded on their hands, and forced to work as virtual slaves. She decides she wants to marry him and puts him in chains until he agrees. Well, but soon enough the Indians attack their log cabin and set fire to it. But our hero manages to escape in all the smoke.

One thing leads to another and our hero climbs on board a pirate ship, and is more or less forced to become a crew member because if he didn't agree to become a pirate the crew would kill him.

But one thing leads to another and the pirate ship gets captured by a Royal Navy ship, that just happens to be commanded by our hero´s younger brother. Everything ends happily ever after, including getting the most perfect girl in the world.

Now I don't know exactly what Captain Marryat was trying to say, but I'd guess that he was trying to make the point, in 1846, that there was a whole lot of slavery going on back in the day. And just about everyone was doing it, from Liverpool merchants to West African chiefs to Portuguese colonial regimes to native Americans to white women running tobacco farms in tidewater America. And anyone could be taken into slavery. For the rest of their natural life.

Now, I'm bound to admit that the slavery of African slaves on North American plantations was a particularly villainous kind of slavery, because the capitalist plantation owners made it pay, as capitalists are wont to do. Usually, slavery was a muddle, a sign of status, rather than profit, for you either were a slave or you owned slaves. Back in the day.

But soon enough lots of people, including many of the most perfect girls in the world, got to feeling that slavery wasn't really Christian. Even William Wilberforce, the son of a merchant in Hull, England, agreed.

Well, one thing led to another, and the Americans of 1860 decided to have a war over it.

Then one thing led to another and the socialists of the world decided to give slavery another try in the two biggest slave states in history. Guess which states I am talking about.

Then our progressive friends decided to go half way to slavery with neo-feudal welfare states in which about 40 percent of peoples' incomes are extracted from them by force for the ruling class to give out as free stuff to the supporters of the progressive regime.

I wonder what our progressive friends will come up with next. In the slavery and feudal line.

To Be Continued.

Slavery -- Contents

Untimely thoughts on slavery

1. Capitalism Ended Slavery
   
   
2. Idiotarianism, A Brief Survey
   
   
3. Britain's Flourishing Slave Trade
   
   
4. Is Abortion the 21st Century Equivalent of Slavery?
   
   
5. Modernity's Original Sin
   
   
6. "Care About" or "Care For"
   
   
7. The Slavery Issue of Our Time
   
   
8. Fifty Years After
   
   
9. Big Government and Big Business: What They Leave Out
   
   
10. A Brief History of Welfare
    
    
11. A New Kind of Corporate Welfare
    
    
12. How Would Corporations Become the Employers of the Poor?
    
    
13. Contra deBoer: Antiracist
    
    
14. My Theory of Slavery and Other Oppressions
    
    
15. The Fundamental Reality of Our Times, Four Ways
    
    
16. The Left's Conceit About "Resistance"
    
    
17. Return to Slavery in Islamic Lands
    
    
18. What Do #MeToo Want?
    
    
19. Omnibus Bills and Us
    
    
20. The Power of Nostalgia
    
    
21. Daniel Quinn's Rickety Path to the Future
    
    
22. Great Reaction: Slavery and Scapegoating
    
    
23. Yeah, Let's Talk About Reparations, Concentration Camps, etc.
    
    
24. Forget 1619 NYT. Learn About 1917
    
    
25. The Weird Benefit of the NYT "1619 Project"
    
    
26. Stop Moralizing About Race, Slavery, Empire
    
    
27. Suppose We are Approaching the End of the Age of Politics
    
    
28. Yes, Let's Have a Talk about Slavery
    
    
29. The Question of George Washington and His Slaves
    
    
30. The Two Kinds of Slavery
    
    
31. My "1584 Project"
    
    
32. Lefty Ally-ism, and What Real Allies Look Like
    
    
33. Nassim Nicholas Taleb on Slavery
    
    
34. The "Bondman" in More's "Utopia"
    
    
35. The Problem with Anti-Whiteness
    
    
36. In Humiliation, Rage. Solving America's Race Problem
    
    
37. A Panorama of Slavery: The Privateersman
    
    
38. Missing the Point of Jane Austen
    
    
39. Implementing a National Liberation from Lefty Colonialism
    
    
40. Narratives: 1776 Commission, McClanahan, Gottfried, and Anton
    
    
41. My Three Theses: Slavery Does Not Pay
    

Suppose We are Approaching the End of the Age of Politics

Here's what I think is interesting:

• That about 250 years ago slavery became scandalous. Then we had the two biggest slave states in history. What was that all about?
• That about 150 years ago war became pointless. Then we had the two biggest wars in history. What was that all about?
• That about 250 years ago educated gentry decided that government power could and should be limited. Now we have the biggest governments ever that supervise endless details of people's lives. What's that all about?

I think that, following Crane Brinton in The Anatomy of Revolution, the sign that an age is ending is a frantic effort to keep it going, no matter what. That is, when you need a Reign of Terror to keep your movement going then your movement has a problem.

Let's recall slavery. We've all been carefully taught to hate and to fear slavery. But the fact is that 1,000 years ago it was ubiquitous. Viking society was divided into earls, peasants, and "thralls." Thralls were slaves. And the Vikings had a grand old time trading in slaves, from Dublin to the Volga River. At that time in England, according to Danziger and Lacey in The Year 1000, you, as a serf, could make yourself into a slave -- and the three squares that came with it -- by kneeling before your lord and placing your hands within his. And, if you want to know, the Venetians and Genoese did a grand trade in shipping Circassian beauties to the harems of the Middle East. And, I believe, the Circassian beauties were often sold by their families to the slave traders. Then, you may say, a curious thing happened. Slavery started to pay, as Venetian capitalists started slave sugar plantations on Cyprus. And then slave sugar spread west to the Atlantic, and then South America, and then, in 1640, the Brits got into the sugar slave game on Barbados. A grand old time was had by all except the slaves for about a century until, with the rise of evangelical Christianity and William Wilberforce, plantation slavery became a scandal. And we the US had the granddaddy of all civil wars over slavery. And then socialism inspired the two biggest slave states in history. You know who they were.

Today, of course, everyone hates slavery with a passion. Only, some people say that we are enslaved to our worker-bee corporate jobs, and work harder than any humans in history. What's that all about?

Let's think about war. Let's admit it: war was ubiquitous since whenever, whether it was hunter-gatherers contesting territory, or marcher lords patrolling the borders of feudal agricultural empires, or the Romans marching their legionaries all over the Mediterranean area, or the Frenchies and the Swedes marching all over the German lands in the 17th century. The trade of high-status males was war. And everyone down to male serfs was likely to get involved in the lord's nice little wars. Then, of course, the northwest Europeans conquered the world, starting in 1492. Europeans completely took over North America in flat-out conquest. And dominated the Central and South Americas without actually killing off the inhabitants. But then a funny thing happened. The Brits went to India and didn't really conquer it. They just wanted to trade, and keep the native princes from their traditional loot and plunder. And when it came to China, the westerners couldn't or didn't want to get anything more than a foothold in China and demand the right to have treaty ports where they could trade with the Chinese interior. Then we had Napoleon wrecking French primacy in Europe with his abortive conquest of Russia. But Bismarck cleverly united Germany with three finely sewn wars against Denmark, Austria and France. Then we had the reign of the idiots and World War I and II. What were they thinking?

I don't think we have really begun to process what has happened to the war culture over the last two centuries. Except that war really is not the cosy thing it used to be back in the day when the Franks did a nice bit of loot and plunder every year beyond the eastern borders of the Frankish empire.

And now politics. Politics used to be a natural hierarchical thing, with the king the lord of his lands, and everybody in their place beneath him. The king was mainly concerned with keeping his barons in check, and the barons mainly concerned with keeping their yeomen and serfs in their place. The fact is that political power had a limited reach because it lacked the technology to extend its power. But then, during the second millennium, an idea began to grow about limiting political power. First the barons pushed back against the king in Magna Carta. Then came all the theories of politics from chaps like Montesquieu proposing a division of powers between various political sectors that got instantiated in the US Constitution. What was that all about? And then we get what I call the Great Reaction of the last 160 years in which rich-kid sons of bnourgeois businessmen and merchants developed a theory of totalitarian unification of all human sectors: religion, politics, and economics, under a single leader, in which all life was militarized into a quasi-military hierarchy under a Great Leader. We have, now, the idea of the great war leader extended into all areas of life, so that administrative and hierarchical power from the top is concerned in all areas of life, political, economic, and religious/cultural.

I have a whole jumble of ideas about this, but I have an overall notion that politics is past its sell-by date, that we don't really need a vast political-ideological structure, that the human future is something completely different. And I believe that the current frenzy in the educated gentry for political and ideological power is a sign of the end of the political era. See, I don't think we need powerful muscular political institutions. Modern people are remarkably pliable and cooperative; they don't need a blow in the solar plexus to teach them a lesson. They respond pretty well to the social and economic cues they get from the people they interact with in day-to-day life. It is a conceit in the educated gentry, in my view, to think that the power and wisdom of the educated gentry is needed to keep us all from falling into a dark place of hate and bigotry and exploitation and poverty.

They say that every human generation thinks it is living in the end times of irreversible decadence, and that strong action is needed to reverse the slide. Probably not.

What is probably true is that the world is heading towards a future that nobody has a clue about. And that, indeed is scary. But the chances are that our descendants with muddle through. Imagine that!

But meanwhile we have to get through the current mania in the Democratic Party -- symbolized by unreconstructed lefty Bernie Sanders -- to have comprehensive and mandatory administrative solutions for everything for all time. Which is merely to say that the mess that comprehensive and mandatory administrative solutions have created in our society is reaching the crisis point, and that comprehensive and mandatory solutions for everything have reached their sell-by date.