One Way Out: an Essay on Slavery

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