Slavery, the bible, and the changeability of institutions
2024-09-19 18:12:00 +07:00 by Mark Smith
I listenned to several very interesting podcasts this week. One of the themes that came up several times is slavery. It's an on-going conversation that our societies are having now, and have been in one way or another for a very long time.
Historian Gregory Aldrete, who specialises in the Roman period, was on the Lex Fridman podcast. Elon Musk recommended the conversation on Twitter, and I think he was right, it’s not normally a period in history I’m particularly interested in, but there were a lot of very interesting takes.
For example the Christians were the first to say everyone is created equal in the eyes of God. That’s pretty cool! Apparently it really got up the Romans noses though. It’s now the basis of many democracies around the world! [2:35:51].
Noah Harare was on both the Bankless podcast talking about AI and democracy and the NYT’s Hard Fork podcast talking about AI Fears. He tells a fascinating yet somewhat different story, namely that the Bible’s 10th commandment appears to endorse or at least allow slavery. So that seems like a bit of a contradiction. How can you have everyone is created equal but also slavery? Hold that thought.
The other very interesting thing Noah talks about is institutions in general and how their changeability, their updatability varies enormously. And this is a good thing. Newer institutions tend to be easier to update. Older ones not so much.
The US constitution is difficult but not impossible to update. There are quite a few amendments that have been made to the original document. The bible on the other hand is pretty much impossible to update, but also it’s context is some rather crazy stories so it’s kind of clear much of it is not meant to be taken literally. But it’s written to last thousands of years, and has lasted that long, no easy feat, through civilisation collapses and renaisances too.
Anyway I‘d been thinking about the apparent contradiction all week and one thing that had occurred to me, is similar to a point I’d made recently about the importance of giving things a name so you can actually talk about them. The fact that slavery is mentioned at all is significant, and the specifics might not actually be all that important. Remember 2000 years ago things were very very different.
Matt Walsh on Rogan [14:05] makes some really interesting points about the realities of how our societies view racism and slavery:
Of course the issue is that everybody who lived on earth prior to about...certainly prior to about 100 years ago, was racist by our standards today. Every single one. There was no one on earth that lived 100 years ago who we would not consider racist. Of any race.
If you go back 200 years or earlier than that, almost everybody either owned slaves or was okay with slavery as an institution. You go back 500 years, and there was nobody on the planet who considered slavery to be wrong fundamentally. They might have had issues with how slaves were treated in some contexts. But it took like 1000s of years for it to ever even occur to a single human on Earth that slavery is actually fundamentally wrong, which is a crazy thing [...]
Why is that? It’s so obvious to us, but some of the greatest minds of history, they never thought of it. But we can’t talk about that, we have to talk about slavery and racism as if they are an exclusively white western phenomena.
It’s mindboggling that it took 1000s of years to make this discovery. And it is a discovery, an enormous one. It’s humanity as a whole discovering about itself. That’s the pace of the big questions in humanity. It’s imperfect, but we are making progress. The insututions are layered ontop of each other. Yes sometimes there are contradictions, but seen in context as a massive living document of all of our societies this patch work is pretty amazing.
I’ll leave you with those 3 thoughts, because the world has become very blocky, prickley with red anger goading, as I wrote most of those last few paragraphs.
Perhaps I’ll write more about this at a later stage.
I’m finding it’s so unbelievably difficult to think and write about anything of substance these days. It’s like two opposing forces are constantly at odds with each other in the literal world that surrounds me, and I’m always caught in the cross fire.