By Mike Yuan
Mike Yuan will graduate from Emory College of Arts and Sciences in 2025. He majors in Political Science. Outside of Diverge, Mike is also a member of Emory Live, a digital platform of Emory news for Chinese international students.
Slavery at Emory
America has been plagued by slavery since its very foundation, and its legacy lasts till this very day. During the Antebellum Era, Southern defenders of slavery gradually transforms their narrative of slavery from “necessary evil” to “”, arguing that African Americans are child-like population that needs to be governed by nature. For instance, Jamieson’s 2011 archival research at Oxford College of Emory University reveals that William Sasnett, a moral philosophy professor at Emory in the late 1850s, joined by other instructors of the institution, offered “proslavery lectures and textbooks at Emory” and “discussions on the evolution of slaveholder paternalism narratives”.
Such a pseudomoral, paternalistic approach to slaves and slavery, however, is not unique in the American South. Instead, after reviewing some Platos and some Aristotle’s and their ramblings (you know… the kind of books people put on their desks to look smart), I argue that the moralization of slavery has a long tradition rooted in ancient times of the Western world, that is, both pro-slavery and anti-slavery arguments seek to explain the phenomenon of slavery within a well-defined picture of morality. This morality, due to its privileged position shaped by the Western philosophy canon, is still reinforced in many contemporary education systems.
Greeks: Slavery is a Structural Necessity
Ancient Greece is a slave society. In Athens, slavery is the pillar of economic production.
Such structural irreplaceability was reflected in Plato’s Republic, where he discusses the roles of producers in the ideal city, which implicitly includes slaves as part of the labor force. Plato posits that in his ideal city, one must be diligent, industrious, and committed to the role of economic production as it defines one’s role and existence in the society. First, Plato argues that the sole purpose of state formation is that structural mutual commensurability—“between one man and another there is an interchange of giving, if it so happens, and taking, because each supposes this to be better for himself.” Later, the discussion quickly posits economic production as the chief task of a state: “the result, then, is that more things are produced, and better and more
easily when one man performs one task.” Notice that Plato firmly believes the predestination of one’s role-specialization, for “one man is naturally fitted for one task, and another for another.” Slaves are best to do the works of slaves, and such one-to-one rigidity is by nature.
Plato’s argument for the role of producers and one’s loyalty to one’s assigned economic roles can be complemented by his later discussion of class hierarchies. In Book IV, Plato constructs a strict hierarchal order of the society: “so that there are not three but two kinds in the soul, the rational and the appetitive…also in the soul there exists a third kind, this principle of high spirit.” The division of labor and class is strict, scared, and unchallengeable in the Platonic state. In his view, slaves are obviously the irrational and the inspirited. They are a people of no parts in the intellectual domain and are thus subjected to domain of domestic productions.
Another famous, canonical Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle supplements Plato in his endorsement of slavery. In Ethics, Aristotle posits that the good of having a slave is not just the “positive good” of having a paternalistic relationship, but is also extended to the dimension of “structural necessities” for household productions. In Part III of Book I, Aristotle makes this point explicit: “seeing then that the state is made up by households, before speaking of the state we must speak of the management of the household…and a complete household consists of slaves and freemen.” If slavery is necessary to a household, and state is in essence a magnified household, then slavery is indeed necessary to the state structure’s management, production, and more.
The support for slavery remains strong throughout Ancient Greece beyond what has been discussed in this essay. Aristotle, after affirming slavery as economic utilitarian tools as aforementioned, immediately shifts focus to the moral basis of slavery: the institution of slavery symbolizes the nature of hierarchies and dichotomies. Nature, argues Aristotle in Politics, “exists many kinds of both rulers and subjects” and “such a duality exists in living creatures, but not in them only; it originates the constitution of the universe.”
One may argue that it is not the Aristotelian belief that one is born into a slave, but one “chooses” to be the direct opposite of virtue and happiness and thus devolves into slavery. Yet that argument is no less detrimental and hypocritical, for whether one can be happy in society depends on the ruling class, which is the slave-holding class in this case, as they decide the morality of the society through the power they hold. The idea that institutional correction is a necessary and positive good for the morally defected population still haunts the modern.
It is always a sad thing to say that America has the world’s largest incarcerated populations. Many of them are the byproducts of the legal punitive approach that was precisely based on the afore-discussed philosophy of moral subjugations. The War on Drugs, for one instance, has lasted for more than half of the 20th century in America and peaked during the Reagon administration, resulting in 1.43 million Americans incarcerated in total with the black and brown communities 9 times more prone to the state-sanctioned violence. Immigrants from China, Mexico, Ireland and other financially insecure communities found themselves particularly vulnerable to cultural assimilation crises and became the subjects of both drug abuse and anti-drug corrections, giving the War another cultural dimension of “correcting” the exotic, morally inferior culture through institutional channels. Even for the little kids, many school of urban Chicago choose to militarize themselves, using police force as an replacement of quality education for the so-called “delinquent children”.
Another attempt of moralizing slavery is Ancient Rome’s philosopher Seneca’s view over the “appropriate ways of treating the enslaved”. In Letters from a Stoic, Seneca wrote his famous piece on the seemingly humanization of slavery (Letter XLVII). “There are human beings…they share the same roof as ourselves…they are friends, humble friends”, said the old wise man Seneca. However, the seemingly benign picture of social hierarchy that Seneca advocates for is in fact a “welfare slavery” approach that if realized, not only normalizes slavery but also moralizes it. Furthermore, Seneca argues that instead of using lashings and beatings as technologies of discipline and punish, shall adopt “love” as the ultimate instrument that bonds a slave to his master. Love is the currency of morality among freemen, and if slaves were to be elevated to the status of freeman, they must love each other and their masters as freemen do. Thus, Seneca explicitly rejects the emancipation of slavery—“someone will tell us that I’m now inviting slaves to proclaim their freedom and bringing about their employers overthrow…Anyone saying this forgets that…to be really respected is to be loved”—and solidifies his reformist position of substituting visible yokes with the invisible ones.
From the Aristotelian perspective of moral duality to the Senecan proposal of “moral enslavement”, later narratives of slavery has been drastically changed from the argument of state necessity. Instead of producers, labors and/or war prisoners, slaves become wandering children and beloved “family members” in popular discussions.
Neo-Slavery and Intellectual Slavery
Slavery, unfortunately, is still happening in the contemporary society, around me and you, although on a less explicit basis. Understanding the full range of the implications of the legacy of the slavery world requires a better definition of slavery that transcends what’s abolished by the 13th Amendment of US Constitution (i.e. involuntary servitude in physical terms). I would thus like to introduce the Foucauldian discourse of power and the technologies of practicing power: “Between every point of a social body between a man and a woman, between the members of a family, between a master and his pupil, between every one who knows and everyone who does not, there exist relations of power …” (Interview, “The History of Sexuality” 187). Power is not simply a “force of a prohibition”, nor it is a code of law that limits individual freedom by saying no, rather, it “traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse”(Interview, “Truth & Power” 119). Power, and this “involuntarily” nature of slavery, transcends state functions and state limits, and are diffused into all aspects of human social and economic productions. Therefore it is not surprising that in the classical world, slavery, as the utmost manifestation of power, has quickly ceased to be a mere code of law saying no to the people in chains but expands to a produced and still productive social discourse of morality and corrective punitiveness.
It was still quite accurate to describe that the Civil War and the following Constitutional Amendments did not free the Southern blacks from the yokes of slavery, but merely put them from one form of slavery to another. That new enslavement may take shape in the organizations of factory productions, the ever deteriorating work conditions that leads to the infamous disaster of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, or the great railroad project that cost many lives of the laboring immigrants. Every employee has their legal rights to terminate their employment, yet none of them has the “power” of doing so. At this day, it could be a college kid who remorsefully relinquish their history major for career prospective concerns, or the same kid many years later making themselves work overtime for more end-of-the-year bonus, yet only getting laid off by the end of October because of some arbitary economic downturns due to Feds’ rising rates. One must notice that these fomrs of dominations rely not exclusively on the punishments or deterrence of undesirable acts, but through a structural construction of a grand picture of culture, an organizational value system that induces natural compliances from individuals.
For every time there is an assignment to be done or a passage to be read for each and every social science/humanities class at Emory, I could not help but wonder if I am myself object of an unconscious project of intellectual enslavement. It might be a conspiracy theory type of argument to describe this process as a group of powerful individuals sit around a table inside a dark, smokey room while discussing the details of consciously modeling students into desirable social products. No, that is not how it works. It is, again, a structural design that is not consciously controlled but an extra-human, organic process that seamlessly proceeds generationally in acdemia settings. To earn a desirable grade, there are dogmatic norms one’s writing needs to be tendered for, structures needs to be followed (say, “use class material only), or ideological scheme that needs to be confronted (say, one is never allowed to draw criticism against American liberal democracy in Political Science classes), all resulting in a self-censorship, self-reinforcement of this slavery, to conform to the structure. There are no words that could accurately or sufficiently describe the scope of the problem nor the fullest extent of such terrifying power. It could only be felt—-felt by the international students’ inevitable feeling of “weridness” when they are to be tamed or assimilated, or felt by anyone else who feels the same intellectual uncomfortableness at this Emory institution.
Many thinkers and intellectuals seek to devise the cleverest sophistry of justifying the unjustifiable. They may quote the narratives of inevitability, morality, necessity, and more to accomplish the goal. Moral elements in the Classical world could be employed by both pro-slavery and anti-slavery stances, yet that process of moralization is what this paper seeks to point out.
I argue that even the Augustinian abolitionism is insufficiently radical and still relies on a moral construction. Both Aristotle and Augustine believes in the potential of “badness becoming goodness” and rejects natural slavery, yet neither of them are willing to clarify the tangible standard of “becoming” in practice. As a result, a Southern slave holder could argue that his slaves is “always” in this process of becoming, and will endlessly need his paternalistic guidance.
As for Professor William Sasnett, who is clearly not an Augustinian abolitionist, I wish he is a sincere Senecan for the best, and a pseudo-moral entrepreneur for the worst.
