ONE WAY OUT: AN ESSAY ON SLAVERY
by Frank Newton (Boiling Springs, North Carolina)
Fri. 1-31-2025
1. One Way Out
Per Wikipedia, the song "One Way Out" was written
by Willie Dixon and Sonny Boy Williamson II.
It was first a modest hit for Sonny Boy Williamson (one of the songwriters)
in 1962. Elmore James and his band
recorded it first, but his version was not released (i.e. published) until
1965, after James's death. Then in 1972,
the song was recorded by the Allman Brothers, a Southern white band. I learned about the song from hearing the
Allman Brothers' version on the radio.
The song begins:
Ain't but one way out baby, Lord I
just can't go out the door.
'Cause there's a man down there,
might be your man I don't know.
Lord you got me trapped a woman, up
on the second floor.
If I get by this time I won't be trapped
no more.
So raise your window baby, I can
ease out soft and slow . . .
What the lyrics are saying to me is "God, you got me trapped
with a woman" [who ain't mine].
What I get from that is that Williamson had to leave out the word
"with" because "with" was one too many syllables. That is how I calculate the meaning of
"You got me trapped a woman."
Your results may vary.
I quote the song because I think it applies to the American
culture wars. There ain't but one way
out of the culture wars, The one and
only way out is to try to enlarge the scope of the talk about slavery. So I'm going to try to add to our national
discussion of slavery.
2. Slavery: part one
Slavery is evil. That
is where I start from.
But that's not a full account of what led Europeans to
kidnap men and women from Africa, carry them across the ocean in chains, and
sell them to whites in North and South America who wanted to buy slaves.
I suggest that this evil institution grew out of a power
differential between Europeans and the rest of the world -- a power
differential which was already in place when Columbus discovered the Americas,
from a European point of view.
The imbalance of power was the least between Europe and
Asia. In the centuries after Columbus,
Europeans conquered some kingdoms in Asia, and the enormous but thinly
populated frozen north of Siberia. But
the vast majority of the huge Asian continent was never conquered by Europeans.
The imbalance of power was greater with the other
continents. Europeans conquered all of
the Americas, almost all of Africa (if we include the Arabs with the Europeans),
and all of Australia.
The disastrous history of modern slavery is well known. It has been intensively studied by
historians.
What I will try to talk about here is: What led to the imbalance of power?
3. The Invention and Spread
of Writing
I suggest that Columbus's imbalance of power -- the story of
how Europe pulled ahead of the other continents -- is explained by
literacy. Or as they call it in French,
alphabetization.
This is not a new idea.
But the consequences of this idea have not been properly integrated into
our national and international discussion about slavery.
Writing was invented in Asia and in northeast Africa
(Egypt). Before Columbus, there was a
whole lot of writing in Asia (including the writing of the Bible and the
Koran). That, together with the vastness
of the Asian continent, explains why the Europeans made the least headway in trying
to conquer Asia.
Writing was widely used in Africa north of the Sahara before
Columbus, But in Sub-Saharan Africa,
writing was little used.
Writing did not spread to Australia before Columbus. The peoples of Indonesia knew writing and
discovered Australia, probably before Columbus, but as far as I can tell they
did not begin the process of teaching the people of Australia to read and
write; presumably because they never conquered Australia.
Writing was independently invented in North America by the
Aztecs and the Mayans. But their writing
had not developed beyond the stage of the Egyptian hieroglyphics when the
Europeans arrived in the wake of Columbus. -- Like the Egyptians, the Aztecs
and the Mayans built pyramids. But also
like the Egyptians, their writing may have required learning over one thousand
letters (hieroglyphs). So among the
people, only the very best memorizers could use it. Needless to say, the very best memorizers --
the scribes -- were employed by the kings -- by the Aztec emperors and the
Mayan kings, as in other continents.
4. The Power of
Letters
Writing has specific effects on a culture, and it has
specific properties.
a) The most important property of writing is that it is a
force multiplier. It greatly increases
the power of a culture. It turns
cultures into civilizations.
Along with the writers and scholars of the nineteenth
century, I do not define civilization as a society which has experienced an
increase in virtue (compared to the societies which are simply called
cultures). Rather, we define a
civilization as a culture which has put writing to use -- first as a tool to
run the country and to improve the efficiency of business, and later for other
purposes.
One of the other early uses of writing was to build or
assemble holy books. Holy books -- the
Bible; the Jewish holy books which Christians call the Old Testament; the
Koran; the Vedas of the Hindus; the holy books of Buddhism; and the rest --
originated as anthologies. They were
built up, over time, out of smaller units.
In the Bible and the holy books of the Jews, the smaller units are
called "books" (among the Jews also "scrolls"). In the Koran, the smaller units are called
suras, In the Hindu holy books, the
smaller units are called hymns (what Christian scholars call "hymn
texts" -- the hymn before the music is added); and so forth. By and large, these smaller units were
written one at a time, and then later gathered together.
The thinking which is contained in the holy books may have
given rise to the idea that a civilization is a culture which has been uplifted
to a higher plane of virtue. But the
plain fact is that civilizations are not more virtuous than other
cultures. Instead, civilizations are
cultures which have harnessed the force multiplier of writing.
b) A second important property of writing is that in order
to gain the additional power which writing confers, it is not necessary for
everybody in the culture to know how to read and write. It is highly unlikely that everybody knew how
to read and write in ancient Israel, at any time, during the centuries when the
Law, the Prophets, and the "Writings" (meaning the rest of the holy
books) were being written and gathered together.
Incidentally, Israel is the greatest exception to the
tendency of writing to create great military advantages for the cultures which
use writing. Ancient Israel did not receive
very much military advantage from its cultivation of writing. But over the thousands of years, the culture
and civilization of the Jews (the most persistent descendants of the Israelites)
have profoundly influenced the whole world.
And Jesus' simple statement "Not one letter of the Law will pass
away, not even one accent mark over a letter" insured that the holy books
of the Jews (up to Malachi) were "swallowed whole" into the Christian
holy books. That was an added force
multiplier for the Jewish holy books, and for Jewish civilization.
c) A third important property of writing is that the fewer
the symbols you have to learn, the easier it is to learn the writing system --
up to a point, which we will return to.
That is a linguistic principle, which we will now elaborate
on.
That means syllabaries (explained below) are easier to learn
than hieroglyphics (or ideographs). With
hieroglyphs or ideographs, such as the Egyptian hieroglyphs, the Chinese
characters, and the Mayan hieroglyphs, as we have said, there are over a
thousand symbols to learn -- in the Chinese case (the most complicated), over
five thousand symbols.
The nineteenth century Chinese poet Gōng Zìzhēn wrote "Ancient people tailored [written] words,
ghosts wept in the night." The
twentieth century Chinese intellectual liberator Lŭ Xùn wrote "our written
language is a fearful legacy left us by our forebears" (in his essay
"Silent China," translated by Gladys Yang and included in the
anthology of writings by Lŭ Xùn also entitled Silent China, page 163). In
other words, the Chinese are perfectly aware of the difficulty of their own
writing system.
There is, perhaps, a second level to this hierarchy, namely:
alphabets are easier than sylabaries.
A syllabary is a writing system where each syllable has its
own letter. If English had a syllabary
(or syllabic writing), the word maker
would be written with two letters, first the letter for may and second the letter for cur. (A cur is an ill-behaved mongrel dog.) And the word mason would be written with two letters, first the letter for may and then the letter for sun.
Thirdly, the words for son and
sun would be written with the same
letter. In other words, the letter for may would not be tied to the meaning of may (or May), but only to the sound.
And the same for the letters for cur
and sun/son.
Depending on how many consonants your language allows to
cluster together, a syllabary will give you a writing system of fifty letters
up to several hundred. That is a large
saving of symbols compared to a hieroglyphic or Chinese-type system of writing.
In fact, however, it is not common for a syllabary to have
over a hundred letters. The Cherokee
syllabary which Sequoyah invented has eighty-five letters.
The ancient Hittites, in what is now Turkey, used a partly
syllabic system. But they had only a few
consonant-vowel-consonant letters (in our pretend English syllabary described
above, compare the letter for "sun/son," which is an English syllable
consisting of consonant-vowel-consonant).
Most of the Hittites' syllabic letters were either consonant-vowel or
vowel-consonant. For example, if the
Hittites had a word pronounced the way bond
is pronounced in American English (as any Spanish speaker knows, the vowel
letter -o- in American English bond
is pronounced -ah-), then the Hittites would have written it ba-an-da. In ba-an-, the first syllable would be
written with the letter for bah- followed by the letter for -ahn-. In other words, the vowel sound would be
"written twice," to provide a way to indicate first the B-sound
before the vowel sound, and then the N sound after the vowel sound. -- In the
second letter for -dah-, the Hittites would have treated the vowel part of the
sound as silent (like the E in English love). That strategy means you do not have to have a
separate letter for ban- (think bahn-, if you are thinking in terms of
English). -- For many languages, that would get your syllabary under one
hundred letters.
Alphabets in general.
The Greek alphabet has 24 letters.
The Roman alphabet has 26 letters (in the version used for
English). The Russian alphabet has 33
letters. The Hindi writing system -- an
alphabet-like system -- uses approximately 49 letters (48 for the underlying
Sanskrit letters, plus one for F), not counting the modified forms of the
letters. There do not seem to be many
alphabets with over sixty letters.
Alphabets are easier up to a point. But when your language is written in an
alphabet, then the more words you have with irregular spellings, the more
advantage you lose. It is a reasonable
guess that English has over a thousand irregularly spelled words. Therefore, the advantage of having to learn
only twenty-six letters is severely compromised in English (unlike Spanish).
5. The Military
Advantages of Writing: part one
But in most cases, writing has conferred military
advantages. A simple writing system helped
the Greeks to establish colonies (and business relations with every ancient
nation) around the Mediterranean Sea.
Their simple alphabet also helped the Greeks under Alexander the Great
to conquer all of the Near East as far as the borders of India, and hold on to
various gradually shrinking versions of that empire for several centuries. The Romans modified the Greek alphabet (not a
whole lot), and were able to conquer all the lands around the Mediterranean
which the Greeks traded with and colonized (including Palestine and modern
Turkey in Asia and Greece itself), and more in northern Europe (northern France
and England).
In Asia, writing gave the Chinese a military advantage over
the people to their north -- most of the time.
The Chinese were conquered by the Mongol Kublai Khan in the
twelve hundreds (he consolidated his control over China in 1271). About 1368 to 1372, the Chinese, led by the
first emperor of the Ming dynasty, drove the Mongol rulers out of China. So after a century, the Mongols lost control
of China. And they ultimately lost
control of their vast westward conquests stretching to the borders of
Europe. The enormous Mongol Empire or
empires shrank back to its heartland, the Mongolia we know today, with its
relatively poor climate, surrounded by the giant nations of Russia and China.
But the Chinese were conquered again by the Manchus. From what is now Manchuria, the part of China
closest to Korea and Japan, the Manchu ethnic group was able to take over the
Chinese empire between 1616 and 1683; their dynasty ruled the Chinese Empire
until 1911. But the Manchus were more
Sinicized (more Chinesified) than the Mongols.
The imperial power which brought the Manchu-founded dynasty (the Qing
dynasty) to the height of its glory in the 1700's was run by a system in which,
as Wikipedia describes it, "Han [Chinese] officials worked under or in
parallel with Manchu officials." As
time wore on, the Chinese regained control of their empire (they must have
greatly outnumbered the Manchu invaders), though China's power was gradually
eroded by wars with European countries in the 1800's.
First the Mongols and then the Manchus developed their own
alphabets, and these were simpler to learn, by far, than the Chinese
characters.
But the Chinese had a much longer tradition of writing,
going back to before the time of Confucius; his time was around 500 B.C. The twenty centuries (from 500 B.C. to 1500
A.D.) of successive Chinese dynasties and territorial expansion, with Chinese
literacy, propelled the ethnic Chinese
to a huge population advantage over the rest of East Asia. Their nearest rival, India, was multiple separate
kingdoms until the British conquered all of the Indian peninsula, and later returned
it to native rule as one huge country (two counting Pakistan) in 1947.
Chinese ideas about literacy grew out of Confucius' remark
(in his book The Analects, XVI,
1.11): "If . . . the people of far-off lands . . . do not submit, then the
ruler must attract them by enhancing the prestige (tê) of his culture; and when they have been duly attracted, he
contents them." (This is Sir Arthur
Waley's translation.) Waley comments or
enlarges on this (The Analects of
Confucius, translated and edited by Arthur Waley, pp. 39-40; I have in my
hand the 1938 paperback edition or printing, published by Vintage Books):
In particular, wên [Chinese word for culture
plus literature -- Newton] denotes the arts of peace (music, dancing,
literature) as opposed to those of war.
The arts of peace, however, everything that we should call culture, have
a tê [a prestige, according to
Waley's translation] that is useful for offensive purposes. They attract the inhabitants of neighbouring
countries; and it must be remembered the States of ancient China were just as
anxious to attract immigration as modern European states are to repel it. [A sentence written by Waley in the 1930's --
Newton. Waley continues:] For vast areas still remained to be opened up
for agriculture [n ancient China];
there was room for everyone, and fresh inhabitants meant fresh recruits for the
army. 'If the distant do not submit,
cultivate the power of wên to bring
them to you.' "
"The arts of peace, however, everything that we should
call culture, have a tê that is
useful for offensive purposes." -- That is part of Waley's commentary on Confucius.
-- As a reminder, we would add, that the arts of peace include writing.
Waley's last-quoted sentence (with its single quotation
marks and footnote reference to Confucius's Analects
XVI,1) is a paraphrase of the passage which we quoted above -- which was Waley's
stricter translation of XVI.1 (Waley p. 203), with our three dots indicating
where we omitted words of Confucius not fully relevant to our purpose.
This ends our discussion of Confucius and his
translator-commentator Waley.
We could also note that the encouragement of immigration --
actually, emigration -- was part of colonial policy in Britain (presumably in
Spain and France also) in the years after Columbus. The British and the other Europeans tried to
encourage their people to go and colonize more thinly populated parts of the
world, by offering inducements to colonists.
6. The Military Advantages of Writing: part two
Our thesis is that, beginning with Columbus, writing also increased
the military advantages which the Europeans had over the Africans, the Native
Americans, and the Native Australians.
We can see several individual military advantages of writing:
a) It speeds up communication between rulers and their
armies. (With writing, you no longer
need to worry whether the herald is repeating the King's words accurately.)
b) It increases the efficiency of navies communicating with
armies.
c) Writing allows inventions and technologies to spread and
accumulate faster.
d) Over the long run, writing increases the efficiency of
commerce and the economic success of the cultures that use writing.
e) Writing enables cumulative increases in power, leading to
consolidation of smaller kingdoms into larger kingdoms and empires. Evidently, that also occurred in China.
f) To the extent that Confucius was on the mark about cultural
prestige attracting foreigners -- and creating a "brain drain" --
then writing will tend to increase both the size and the collective
intelligence of the population.
Evidently, Columbus's opening up of the Americas to European
influence, colonization, and conquest proved to be a tipping point.
Where the European immigrants ended up outnumbering the
native inhabitants, as they did in North and South America and Australia, the
ultimate result was the spread of European culture and languages from one
continent to three, plus the Pacific archipelago of islands.
In Africa, where farming had probably been practiced for
thousands of years longer than it had been practiced in native North and South
America, the population was far too great to be overwhelmed by European
immigrant-colonists. But the large
military advantage still remained in European hands -- as well as the cultural
attractiveness of European culture.
7. Slavery: part two (Slavery
imposed by Europeans in the modern era)
John Francis Bannon, a Jesuit historian of the twentieth
century, wrote an account of the French Jesuit mission to the Kaskaskia Indians
in Illinois in the early 1700's in an article entitled "Black-Robe
Frontiersman: Gabriel Marest, S.J." (The
Bulletin of the Missouri Historical Society, vol. 10, pp.351-366); with
commentary by Bannon from a Christian point of view. I have seen a partial reprint of Bannon's
article in Carl Masthay's book Kaskaskia
Illinois-to-French Dictionary edited by Carl Masthay; St. Louis: published
by the author, 2002 (757 pp.). Bannon
writes:
". . . acts of violence [against the Christian missionaries]
could [often] be traced to the
shamans [native religious leaders]. . . .
But the missionaries feared them less than they did another sort of
enemy to their work.
Fellow
Frenchmen were too often the missionary's problem children on the
frontier. Of course, this was not a
peculiarly French phenomenon. The
irresponsible white man has been a thorn in the side of the missionary
everywhere. Mission records are full of
reports of conflict of interests and of the dire results to Christianizing
efforts. Away from the restraints of
civilization, some white men act as though there were no law beyond the
necessity of catering to their lusts and feeding their greeds. The same story comes
from Mexico, from the lands of the Incas, from the forests of Paraguay, from
the coasts of Brazil. Back in New France
[French North America] the traders
with their loose morals and their brandy were threatening, and very seriously
so, the whole Christianization enterprise.
. . . [A few sentences later, on p. 10:]
It was most disheartening to the
missionary, who had worked so zealously to bring his Indians to a knowledge and
practice of Christian morals, to have fellow Frenchmen flagrantly violate the
principles which he was striving to inculcate.
The Indians often asked if there were two Christian codes, the one which
the missionary preached and the other which the white men followed; certainly, there
was little agreement between the two.
(This quoted passage is from Masthay 2002, pp. 9-10. It will be noted that Bannon seems to use the
word "civilization" in a way we have criticized near the beginning of
section 4 above.)
I have two comments on Bannon's remarks in the sentences
quoted above.
a) To describe the bad Europeans as "the missionary's
problem children" is an understatement.
b) I believe "the traders with their loose morals and
their brandy" is an overstatement. Other
reading I have done suggests that some of the European traders in the Americas were
genuinely interested in the Native Americans.
I expect that some of the traders were by no means the worst that Europe
had to offer to other continents.
That said, I believe that Bannon points out the enormous
difficulty clearly. Namely: military advantages worked in favor of both
good Europeans and bad Europeans. The
good Europeans were those who struggled to make sure that the natives who came
to them did not starve, and that those who were interested learned to read and
write. The bad Europeans were those who
brought all the worst that Europe had to offer (not to mention alcoholic
beverages and diseases, which were brought by good and bad Europeans alike) to
the Americas, and doubtless to all continents colonized by Europeans.
In this context I quote my own poem, "A Language That Is
Hard to Understand" (about the Jewish holocaust):
A LANGUAGE THAT IS HARD TO
UNDERSTAND
Mon. April 3rd, 1995
The ghosts of those who were
wrongly killed
Speak a language that is hard to
understand,
And society is of two minds:
One says they clamor for revenge,
One says they thirst for the
higher ground to be proclaimed.
It is not to avenge the
slaughtered saints:
But punish the killers of the
people of average virtue.
It is not to speak of
victimization:
But proclaim the need for
massacre prevention.
It is not to reject the century
of my birth:
But separate good Europe from bad
Europe.
It is not to exaggerate the
claims of the baser needs:
But remember the claims of the
intermediate needs.
It is not to disoblige the
feeding of dependents:
But reject it as a reason for
killing civilians.
(If your wife and child will
starve if you
Do not kill the civilians that
Your commander commands you to
kill,
Then let your wife and child
starve.)
In our discussions about slavery, as well as in our discussions
of the Jewish holocaust, we need to "separate good Europe from bad Europe,"
as Bannon tried to do in his essay on the Jesuit missionaries.
8. Slavery: part three
(The arc that bends towards justice?)
The Wikipedia article "Timeline of abolition of slavery
and serfdom" (which printed out to 38 pages on 8 ½" x 11" paper,
and ended with 217 endnotes with references to sources, as of Jan. 31st, 2025) makes
it clear how difficult it has been for
good people to eradicate slavery in human history. It lists bright spots in the history of
abolitionism from 500 B.C. to 2022 A.D. (291 bright spots by my count, counting
just the boxes down the left side of the various pages). It would appear that hundreds of
jurisdictions have enacted laws to abolish or curtail particular kinds of
slavery.
That might suggest that efforts to abolish or curtail
slavery have been ongoing throughout recorded history.
(It would take a lot of further reading to understand all the
antique legal terms which are used in the descriptions of these bright spots.)
The Wikipedia "Timeline" also suggests to this
writer that there has been a lot of backsliding in the abolition of slavery in
the last 2500 years. In fact, at the
beginning of the section headed "Medieval times," the article states "Many
of the listed reforms were reversed over succeeding centuries."
It may be too soon to estimate how many of the listed
reforms for the modern centuries will be "reversed over succeeding
centuries."
We conclude that abolishing slavery is hard -- or to put it
another way, human beings are not very good at abolishing slavery.
9. Conclusions
9a. Slavery (or enslavement of others), to our way of
thinking, is probably a sin endemic to powerful nations. It is not just a European sin. In our evaluation of history, we really do
need to separate good Europe from bad Europe.
9b. Liberals should take seriously the claim of conservatives
that, in defending European-American culture and western civilization, conservatives
are trying to protect advances in human thinking and genuine civilization which
have occurred over the last two thousand years and more.
9c. The studies in comparative religion, comparative law and
the evolution of law, and the study of the empowerments conferred by writing (and
the moral effects of those empowerments) are in their infancy. There is much much more light and truth
waiting to be broken forth from the study of the history of slavery, and the
history of oppression in general. There
is a balance of good and evil in history, and we need to go much deeper than we
have gone so far, if we want to calculate the costs and benefits of
civilization.
Frank Newton
