I don't think that Industry and Slavery are perfectly analogous. Like I said before (in the aforementioned post), there are no perfect analogies in history. By nature, history doesn't allow for it: history is a sequence of absolutely unique events. History is not a science, and we cannot treat it like one. As N.T. Wright pointed out - in one of his Christian Origins books; I'm not about to flip through thousands of pages to tell you right now, but it was probably The Resurrection of the Son of God - 'Caesar's Crossing of the Rubicon' happened once and for all; it is not the sort of phenomenon you can repeat and therefore test. Science, an empirical art, requires exact duplication. History forbids it.
I digress. So Industry and Slavery are unique in history and not perfectly analogous. That doesn't mean we shouldn't be learning by comparing them, because all analogies must at some point break down, anyway - but not necessarily before they prove their worth.
I'm a little too tired to give you a full-blown comparison of Slavery and Industry here. But here are a few thoughts.
I'm a little too tired to give you a full-blown comparison of Slavery and Industry here. But here are a few thoughts.
We're all pretty much on the same page when it comes to Slavery. No one, practically speaking, advocates for the renewal of Slavery. But I'm not sure we all really get what makes Slavery bad. And Slavery is bad. As I wrote in my previous post, Frederick Douglass does a really good job of pointing out the evils of Slavery - what keeps the machine ticking and the humans dehumanised.
I've met people who don't like this word, 'dehumanisation.' They don't like it because, they say, it is 'vague.' What does it mean? What is a human? Well, I say, that's fine; I can see you think it's safer to refrain... but, in some cases, this being one of them, playing it 'safe' is simply more dangerous. When we fail to discuss dehumanisation, we risk that very evil. We risk turning a blind eye to the stripping of our neighbour's humanity and thereby our own.
And Slavery strips away our humanity. Slavery lays claim to the self and to the land, to the perpetrator and victim alike and to the very Earth. Slavery's end is the plutocracy, in which the few wealthy stand victorious upon the trampled bodies of the many broken poor. It is able to do so because those few wealthy back it with a myth favourable to them - that the order of the universe has determined what they and others deserve, and that this order is unquestionably natural and good. It demolishes the goodness and joy of work by perverting it.
Now to Industry. Industry strips away our humanity. Industry lays claim to the self and to the land, to the perpetrator and victim alike and to the very Earth. Industry's end is the plutocracy, in which the few wealthy stand victorious upon the trampled bodies of the many broken poor. It is able to do so because those few wealthy back it with a myth favourable to them - that the order of the universe has determined what they and others deserve, and that this order is unquestionably natural and good. It demolishes the goodness and joy of work by perverting it.
The point in abolishing slavery wasn't to check one off on our moral to-do list. The point was to put an end to a dehumanising economic practice that destroyed our people, that preyed on the weak and disregarded their communities. But when we forget the point, we slip right back into the same old habits.
It's not about moral lists. It's about people and their communities. These people, for example.
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