In order to write for a non-Roman audience I have been compelled to use the services of a certain Jerry Toner, a teacher in one of our miserable northern provinces, who knows something of our Roman ways but shares few of our virtues. Indeed a man so soft I have never encountered outside the servile class: he has not once fought in battle, can scarce drink a small amphora of watered wine, and even stoops so low that he himself will clean his baby’s backside rather than leave such foul tasks to the slaves and womenfolk. He is, however, most blessed to be married to a wife of great beauty and intellect (though she is perhaps more forward with her opinions than a woman ought to be), to whom I am most grateful for ensuring that the meaning of my text is clear for you barbarian readers.
Slavery had a competitive advantage over free labor:
And the beauty of it was that none of these slaves was liable for military service, since the army naturally cannot rely on slaves to serve in defence of the state.
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As to the threat of slaves, the worry was not so much that they would revolt, but that they would eradicate the freeborn peasant, on whom the Roman elite relied to serve in the army and keep them in power.
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So it was decreed that no citizen over twenty years of age and under forty should serve in the army outside of Italy for more than three years at a time in order to give them a chance to keep control of their smallholdings at home.
[...]
Thankfully, the slave owner today need not trouble himself with such concerns. The army is now professional and it is many, many years since there has been a great slave revolt.
“But a household is just a house if it has no slaves,” Falx reminds us.
This looks like it could be a fun read.
There are lots of interesting things about the disadvantages of slave economies, and one of the best examples is the damage done to the Roman equivalent of the Roman “working class” by the slave economy…
The most insidious damage done by slavery isn’t to the slave, but to the master. To a degree, I think that an awful lot of the insanity we currently see displayed by the Democrats in the US stems from their lost status as slave owners, able to dictate the minutiae of daily life to their property. Having lost this, they’ve been trying to get back into that position over the rest of us ever since. They absolutely love to be able to dictate things, command things, and cannot master themselves. As a cultural “thing”, being a slavemaster is a terribly seductive position to be in–You can see it in the Arabs, as well, and in the Russian Communists, who took over for the Russian aristocracy.
If you pause to look at it from a particular angle, that “lost status as master” explains and illuminates an awful lot of the entire issue we’re currently dealing with around the world. The slave master thinks they’re owed fealty and that the world should order itself to their desires, when the reality is that they’ve lost their primacy, hopefully forever. It’s a mental disease that they’ve retained, wanting to tell everyone around them what to do, when to do it, and how to do it. Free men don’t think that way, or really understand the drive to mastery that these ass-clowns have.
Similarly, the Chinese oligarchy sees itself as heir to the Confucian mandarin class, entitled to tell their social inferiors what to do whenever they like. This disease is transmitted along the same lines as power generally is, and if you look at the power-seekers like Lenin or Mao, they’re all frustrated little men who feel entitled to the prerogatives of the old nobility.
It’s also true of the over-educated excess numbers of the elite we’ve bred up in our education/indoctrination system. They all feel entitled to run things, and they’ve been brainwashed to think that they can run things better than anyone else, but the sad reality is that they’re merely the latest version of the sad old “ancien regime” excess of nobles.
Our schools churn out myriads of these losers every year, and like the old aristocracy, there’s not enough room for them at the table–Which is why they churn so self-destructively at the door, demanding power that they think they so richly deserve. The reality is that the vast majority are no more suited to responsible wielding of civil power in our society than a howler monkey.
“The most insidious damage done by slavery isn’t to the slave, but to the master….”
This too!
As usual, Kirk finds the decisive angle.
Today, while reading an article about Thomas Jefferson and his plans for education reform, I came across this passage about his experience as a student;
…”Taylor demonstrates that Jefferson, who had begged to enroll at “the College” at age 16, nurtured an ambivalence about William & Mary that eventually hardened into distaste. His late-in-life accounts of his time there almost invariably cast the school in a negative light. The campus was full of rowdy and haughty young men who looked down on the townspeople of Williamsburg and were given to drink, debauchery, and violence. Jefferson admitted that in his earliest days there he had participated in some of the riotous battles himself.
Taylor cites an example from Jefferson’s first year, when “students gathered in the gallery of the Williamsburg church during services and spat and urinated on the townspeople below.” The capstone of these chaotic events had the students shooting off guns and whipping “some captive apprentices.” The students’ adolescence was part of the problem. They lacked judgment. But these young men, born and raised in a slave society, were also used to having unbridled power over other human beings. They carried this sense of entitlement with them to college….”
Up to a point that sort of gown on town violence and class abuse had a long history in Europe, and vice versa, as well as between colleges if there was more than one. Makes most modern stuff seem tame, and seems both striking and incredible to some today. It’s not immediately clear to me from that passage that what Jefferson saw was just a Southern thing.
There’s a decently strong history on the degrading influence of a slave society on the master class, though, and it’s not quite eliminated by removing all the overwrought, bodice ripping mandingo fiction. It pervades post-1865 Southern writing, and some American fantasy literature.
The thing I find most striking about that passage, though, is that such a race-conscious society would have so poorly inculcated its core distinction in those boys’ minds. Presumably tearing up the white townsfolk and their shops had unexpected consequences for them. If it didn’t, that really showed an example of society kowtowing to the Slave Power.
Kirk: It’s also true of the over-educated excess numbers of the elite we’ve bred up in our education/indoctrination system. They all feel entitled to run things, and they’ve been brainwashed to think that they can run things better than anyone else, but the sad reality is that they’re merely the latest version of the sad old “ancien regime” excess of nobles.
Yes–this is Peter Turchin’s “elite overproduction.” The British could send their excess to America or India or Australia. We have nowhere to ship ours off to.
Kirk says,”…I think that an awful lot of the insanity we currently see displayed by the Democrats in the US stems from their lost status as slave owners, able to dictate the minutiae of daily life to their property…”
The whole comment above is excellent.
I can’t imagine owning slaves. It would drive me nuts. Having had to supervise people I hate trying to get people to function properly.
I guess if I could whip them it might make it easier but don’t care to whip people either unless they deserve it.