Judging History (branch off from election thread)

[Lemur]

Owning slaves is wrong.

Gah. At the risk of Epic Thread Derailment ... I kinda disagree. If you read too much history, you'll see that slavery had a very different character in various societies. In Republican Rome, for example, slavery could function as a sort of welfare or unemployment insurance. Can't feed your family? Sell yourself into slavery as a tutor, hang out with some rich dude's kids for a decade or so, expect an early emancipation and a new patron at the end. (Beats starving to death or selling your children off as prostitutes, anyway.)

Which is not to say that I think slavery should be around. It should not. The extermination of slavery is one of the things I point to when cynics assert that nothing ever gets better.

But ... here's how I would formulate it: Slavery was extremely open to abuse. (And the way it worked in the Americas, with a racial basis and no realistic hope of emancipation, was pure evil.) But there were responsible slave owners. To draw on a modern analogy, it's like getting assigned to a job with the same boss and no hope of transfer. If you had a great boss, then it wasn't such a bad gig. If you had a bad boss? Ouch. Just ouch.

So slavery: not inherently evil, but steeply tilted toward misuse and abuse. And it seems like there was a direct correlation between the degree to which law and custom made slavery permanent and the likelihood of systemic abuse. In ancient civilizations where the border between slave and freedman was porous, things were a lot more sane.

Anyway. Forgive me Father, for I have contributed to the derailment of mine own thread.

-edit-

As long as I'm contributing to the delinquency of a thread, might as well relate a story:

When I was maybe twelve or thirteen, I was reading some text or another about Roman slaves. A detail that jumped out at me was how upper-deck galley rowing slaves would segregate from lower-deck rowers, asserting that since they were on the upper benches, they were a better class of human being. (Note that being a galley slave was pretty much a death sentence, and that a lifespan of more than two or three years was rare.)

This informed my view of human nature in a big way.