The Benefits of Slavery.

Philosophy Forums Society, Government, and Economics
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The Amer Indian was enslaved in the deep Southwest where the Catholic Church came up from South America and Mexico. They enslaved them under the guise of Missionary work. The tribes were forced to labor for the church. While typical forced enslavement would not work, Superstition did what soldiers could not. The Catholic church still utilizes such techniques thoughout the world with under educated people.Work for the greater good of the church and you will be rewarded. Unfortunately some Church members did give violent punshments up to and including death for those that were troublemakers. The devil owned these people’s souls and so they must be cleansed, all for the good of course. A hundred years ago they sill practiced such tactics in the states.

My family passed down one such story of the Catholic Church doing atrocities to the local tribe in Southwest Az. The local priest had a few young men publically whipped to death. The priest claimed they were possessed of demons. Truth was these young men refused to pay tithes and instead feed their families, they fought to keep their supplies and so were declared evil. This incident was frowned upon by the non catholic community but, since they were only Indians it was not of great concern. It did get reported but, well you know how that goes.

Indentured servitude provides an interesting twist on slavery. In today’s economy the indentured servent replaces what was slavery.

IMO though if one is being subsidized by the taxpayers, one should work for their money. There are plenty of ways welfared people can work to earn their keep. This would be an acceptable form of indentured servitude or modern slavery.

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Tentative

Never inevitable. As always it is in the habits of the last man standing. Perhaps there were many societies which did not take up slavery, for whatever reason, when it was ‘available’ as an option, but, that these societies are lost.

Say we are in a race. A quarter mile drag race. For many years advances in engine capacity dictate who wins. Then engines become robust enough for Nitrous Oxide to be used, a short cut to extra horse-power. Some purists snub the new technology as somehow… I don’t know, untoward, unbeffitting an honourable dragster. They stay competitive for a while, but once Nitro is perfected, they slowly fall form the league tables.

If then, the league tables are only recorded after the event of N2O, then nothing of the purists remains.

It is the same with slavery. Highly probable perhaps, at best. Logic, I think, is only something that occurs after the event.

Cyrene:

I don’t think you can compare sexual ‘slavery’ to outright slavery. The ends are different even if the means are similar. Slavery in its pure form, if it can be regarded as such, is economic, rather than reproductive. If I take a woman by force, and remove her from her tribe for the purposes of offspring then I am also accepting responsibility for her support, or if not her’s directly, at least the support of her child, or rather my child. A slave is taken rather for the work they can do to benefit me.

If you wish, look at it like this. In taking a slave I am paying a certain cost to aquire and maintain that slave, but saving on the cost it took to raise that individual from infant to adult, which is by far the greater. Essentially, I get a worker for ‘free’ at the small cost of bending that individual to my will, under threat of extinction, which again costs the slave greatly, but myself only the expense of buying another slave.

When the cost/benefit divide becomes wide enough between ethnic groups disparate enough to render reciprocal empathy defunct, slavery is almost a given.

You repeat, so as will I. There exists a distinction between reproductive ‘slavery’ and economic. Roman nobles, goaded by kin-selection perhaps, used to free many of their children resulting through liasons with their female slaves, but not the mother herself. Such a degree of altruism would not be extended to your average enslaved farmhand.

One could argue from your expressed POV. then that any form of aquisition of a female from one family to another, for the purposes of reproduction, is a form of purchase, and therefore, at least by your definitions, a form of slavery, which, according to modern and historic conventions, it is not.

Kriswest

Acceptable…? I don’t know, if we are saying “slavery is bad” then really, the only way for a society to escape accusations of enforced servitude within its populace is to give everyone the option of living a life of reasonable luxury and the opportunity to raise at least one child per capita, without having to resort to work.

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Their warfare was 20x more deadly/efficient than our own. Theres some reason (a lot of reason) to believe that both natives and africans had specialization. Raiding people with spears/arrows and being that efficient is a level of specialization that we don’t see outside of savages.

I think its fair to say, it was easier for hunter-gatherers/tribes to do this even existing to later time periods and more specialization, through taking slaves. If only because, if you didn’t take slaves, it was going to be you who were the slaves.

Crow creek, south dakota, is a gravesite for hundreds of mutilated people by American Natives, the women were gone. Having slave-women to continously produce offspring keeps a population level high enough, that you’re not wiped out by a next-door tribe. Which has happened to plenty of groups, like at crow creek. that town was destroyed, the people butchered, the women taken. the stealing of those women would enable that tribe, within a few years, to do exactly the same thing to another tribe.

violence rates among hunter-gatherers are so high that somtimes raiding women is probably a necessity of not getting wiped out in the next decade by warfare.

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The raided women weren’t treated the same as the tribes original women either. (Well thats not true, i’ve seen current tribes which treat the stolen women as their wives (well they were at that point).

but historically we see examples of raided women being treated like shit. IE: rape slaves.

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Cyrene:

That’s a very specific number. On what evidence, or criteria of comparison, do you compare the two breeds of warfare in question…?

To give you an example: There was a man named Charlie Savage who, armed only with a musket and ammunition, arrived in the Figi islands in 1808. A crack shot, he single-handedly upset the balance of power within the kingdom. Amongst other exploits he paddled up a river to the village of Kasavu and, stopping a pistol shot away from the village fence, opened fire. His victims apparantly became so numerous that the villagers left alive piled them up and used them as cover to cower behind.

Whilst I agree that violence within primitive state tribes is prinicipally over women, I do not agree that such a policy, undertaken in large numbers, would strengthen a tribe, or a band of hunter-gatherers.

Logistics. To a nomadic band, movement is key. Movement is food. Movement is safety. A sudden influx of many rebellious, and recently pregnant women into the band - women perhaps ignorant of local plantlife within the band’s range and therefore not much help in gathering, and women ignorant even perhaps of the bands dialect… Are unlikely to either to increase the mobility of such a band, nor the food surplus. As for the numbers, hunter-gatherer bands are small populations for a reason. And that reason is supply and demand.

Sometimes extra mouths simply steal the food from everyone else’s stomachs, and weaken the collective, rather than strengthen it.

From what I have read, the raiding of other tribes for the purpose of aquiring females is rife, however it seldom expands into total genocide, for the simple reason that the peoples involved do not have the extreme numerical advantages needed to achieve such a total extinction, without severe losses to their own men.

There is no point decimating your own population to aquire all the females of another, if after the dust settles you have neither the manpower left to support them, or to protect yourselves.

If I were a neighboring tribe, I’d wait till tribe X half killed itself raiding and anihilating tribe Y, then go in, slaughter tribe X with relative ease and take the women of both. Again, as far as I have read, raiding for wives tends to be small-scale, and reciprocal, ending in vendettas rather than outright inter-tribal wars.

Think “cattle rustling”.

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…it’s all about utilising resource, and who can take advantage of who to acheive that: resource being whatever it is that that society needs to thrive/progress: be it women, land, labour, whatever…

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… And…

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My own ancestors were responsible for such savage atrocities, it is the only perspective I can relate to and understand, but modern times call for more civil behaviour and resource distribution, but I fear we have far from perfected that level of co-existence…

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But your ancestors didn’t see it as atrocity, nor savage. Why should you…?

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I’m sure they did whatever they deemed neccessary to survive, but they often raided their neighbouring tribe just for fun/for the taste of more blood - I can see it however I want, it’s my call to make!

The innate part of us that bore those qualities admires such traits that we harboured, but what use of them now!

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Anvil,

If slavery provides an evolutionary advantage, then slavery becomes a defacto step in socio-cultural development. As you say, there are no societies that survived without slavery because they were destroyed by those who practiced it. To build a better war machine, the specialists in metallurgy and forging appeared as slaves made it possible for those specialists to devote the time and energy perfecting their skills instead of gathering and preparing their own food. While there may have been other reasons to gather slaves, those societies that chose to forego the practice perished. The masters had the sharpest blades. Those who didn’t became slaves didn’t survive.

It would seem then, that every person today has been “involved” in slavery at some point along the ancestral line - either as master or slave. Those who refused slavery became extinct. We’re all slaves or slavers… :-k

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Yeah, but why are we assuming that they weren’t slaves in the purest sense on top of that? Slaves as in, forced to have children and raise them, cook, clean, etc. SLAVE.

Theres also absolutely no reason to assume that raiding men didn’t trade the women, as well.

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All the stuff you say is great anvil, except is wrong. All signs point towards true slavery on top of sexual slavery for these women. On top of that, the raiding of women is beneficial because we see it again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again in prehistory and modern-hunter-gatherer groups. You can give a bunch of personally thought out reasons for why it wouldn’t be beneficial, but when 40% of the adult males die in warfare, and you have 0.5 percent of the population dying off yearly, well, you need to raid females.

as to calling hunter-gatherer/tribal warfare 20x more deadly, yeah, its a specific number, because thats what you get when you calculate the average death-rate in hunter-gatherer groups due to violence compared to our own.

34

Slavery’s benefits are outweighed by its detriments, which is why it is frowned upon now. It essentially places an enemy force in your cities, and causes your people to become decadent and dumb. Competition is no longer based on a man’s virtues or skills, but on the number of slaves he owns, and thus the weak and lazy are allowed to survive where they would usually be selected against. Also, creating a slave-driven society made it more likely that the masters in that society would become slaves in the future.

viewtopic.php?t=150558

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We’re all slaves. Always have been, always will be. The fact that we have stomachs that need food demands it.

Everything is ruled by action and consequence. I am a slave to my employer because I have to do what he says. Of course I don’t have to, but If I don’t, there will be negative consequences. It’s the same situation black slaves were in 400 years ago. He didn’t have to do what his master said, but there would be negative consequences if he didn’t.

Now, you may say the difference is that I am free to choose my employer without consequence (assuming I make the same wages). Granted. But all that really is is the power to choose which slave-owner I belong to. That’s not essential. I’m still a slave.

So the reality is that the civil-war in America was fought over the ability to choose one’s master, which in turn brought a lightening of the consequences for disobediance.

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Thankyou Thezeus18. I will read through the thread you began, and quote up some of the points to answer from it here.

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Knox, I would disagree about being slaves, indentured servants is what the masses are. It is a step above slavery but, an important step.

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I know. That was an idea I had when I was a teenager. It’s a lot of semantics and definition and not much meat.

Still, there’s a lot of cultural rhetoric associated with the term “slavery,” and I think defining it the way I did can remove that and put it in a more rational perspective.

Slavery is often treated as the most evil and vile thing one human can do to another. Quite frankly, I don’t see it that way. A significant step is a good way to put it. It was a significant collective step we made in the evolution of our labour market.

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I think that raiding neighbouring tribes/villages for survival is one thing: enslaving others to build empires is another, but if those who were enslaved globally/throughout the millenia were too passive not to be, then perhaps they suffered their true fate…

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Uh, why?

the only reason its ‘for survival’ is because so many tribes are so violent/religious scared/insane. And lots of hunter-gatherer’s/tribes take slaves when its not for survival, say when its for slavery’s sake.

Don’t see how forcing some dead man’s children to cook/carry wood for you when you could potentially get other people to do it as ‘for survival’. Though in lots of cases, as i argued above, its probably almost a ‘necessity’ i mean, if some tribe takes all your women, its essentially, take other women or die out.