Daniel Schmachtenberger:

Welcome everyone to this session on The Stoa, a conversation between Professor Gilbert Morris and myself. Thank you to Peter Limberg and the people at The Stoa for letting us host this conversation here and for the community that will be engaging afterwards. Gilbert, thank you so much for making this time, you and I have had so many conversations on the way to this public conversation that have taught me so much. Would love to hear your opening thoughts on our intention for this dialogue, your intention.

Professor Gilbert Morris:

Thank you so much Daniel, and thank you to your colleagues at The Stoa. Anytime that one can engage in a meaningful discussion about a great and important social issue that becomes important as I myself believe in the marketplace of ideas as John Stuart Mill once called it. And that is where there’s a continuous dialogue moving back and forth on social issues without necessarily the intention to win an argument as much as understand its coordinates. And so, I’m pleased that we have that relationship in exchange. And so I welcome the opportunity for this discussion.

Daniel Schmachtenberger:

I’ll share a bit of a long preface of my intention and hopes for this piece before we dive in, because I asked for us to do this piece. Actually, we discussed what turned towards us doing this piece starting during the George Floyd protests, which is quite some time ago now, and have intended to do this ever since. So this is going to be a conversation on the topic of race, racial inequality, injustice, the history of it, and where understanding some of that history brings us to today in terms of framing up what possible better way of going forward might look like. And so for my side, these are not the topics that I am schooled in, that I was a student of in any deep, more than just cursory ways, someone who’s been interested in activism, and human welfare in general.

 

And during the George Floyd riots in particular protests, I was not mostly engaging in the deep scholarly work, but the things that made it on their way to YouTube. So I was seeing the public intellectuals and I saw arguments from people like Ta-Nehisi Coates or Cornel West on one side, people like Thomas Sowell or Glenn Loury on the other side. And I didn’t see what seemed like a bridge towards an agreement that was a way of moving forward. I saw what seemed like arguments that landed for people who already resonated, gave more intellectual support and ethical support for the people who resonated. But the continued polarized approach.

 

And so I was really without being able to become a deep enough student in the topics to make sense of it myself, wondering if there were any people who had a sense of what a synthesis position between the various positions, that might be able to help us forward look like. And Professor Morris, I’ll call him Gilbert throughout, as he’s asked me to. And I had actually talked other topics previously regarding mostly his work in the history and philosophy of ideas, history of philosophy, legal scholarship related to some of my work on catastrophic risk.

 

But when we had discussed these topics, and I knew he had actually been a director of racial studies at George Mason University and taught and worked both in academic contexts and as an ambassador to many different countries around the world, had both an American and an international and a kind of legal and philosophical perspective. He was able to steel man all the various positions. Well, here’s how the libertarians would think of it, and here’s how the critical theorists would think of it, in a way that was legitimately sharing their points of view very well. And this was extremely valuable for me. And so, as I was in this fortunate position to be getting educated on these topics by someone who could share the historical, philosophical, economic contextual perspectives and share the various different groups perspectives and how those perspectives had evolved over time, I felt I was getting such an invaluable opportunity that I hope to be able to share with other people.

And so, one of my aims in this was simply to be able to take a little bit of what I’ve got over dozens of conversations with Gilbert and introduce that to other people who may be like myself, care, would like to understand, are not already well educated and don’t know how best to approach the topic. So, that’s one of my goals.

 

The goal that had us starting to talk originally was, is there actually a way forward for how deeply entrenched the American racial injustice issues are and the various perspectives on it. Is there a way that could be anti polarizing? And I don’t think we’ll get all the way there in this conversation, I think we’ll lay groundwork. Because one of the other goals that it merged for me is that I’ve done talks that have wound up adjacent on the internet to a bunch of anti woke perspectives, and that’s strange for me. I think it’s because I’m interested in synthesis of different perspectives and a conciliant approach. And so I’ll often try to explore a heterodox, orthodox distinction, and find the dialectic, which put me in the heterodox camp, which put me where the main trending heterodox thoughts are anti woke. And I’m super uncomfortable, being in an anti woke camp is not my position.

 

And I would hope that, and this is one of the reasons why I think The Stoa is a good place, is that the people in The Stoa are really interested in synthesis. How do we explore the thesis of anything, the antithesis, the synthesis? How do we explore more clear, nuanced, trans ideological thought? And Peter Limberg’s original work that helped launch it on Mimetic Tribes was, can we actually inhabit everyone’s Mimetic Tribe and feel what the world feels like from their perspective? So I’m hoping that after this dialogue, The Stoa community that chooses to engage with this will be able to have deep rich dialogues about these topics and Gilbert and myself are both happy to come back in and engage in those dialogues if it makes sense.

 

But I found so many people critiquing straw mans of the woke perspective, or particularly unsavory aspects of how some people were expressing what they called woke ideologies without seeming like they had ever steel manned the underlying real issues of systemic inequality and systemic injustice where woke originally meant awake to systemic injustice. And so I actually feel obliged to help to steel man that perspective. To say, if we’re being anti woke, make sure you actually understand, because otherwise you might be a very moral person taking a position that is immoral in ways you don’t know, because of the depth of the history.

 

So, I think the main thing we’re seeking to do here is to construct elements of the history and the critical pieces of philosophy and law that happened, some of the tenant economic elements, to really get where the racial issue in the U.S. is today. What’s unique about the U.S. issue relative to other global issues. So that then if someone wants to say, well, how do we better move this issue forward? We at least have some better shared understanding of the history up to this point. So that would be it for my intention of why we’re here.

Professor Gilbert Morris:

I think that that’s an excellent introduction. One of the things that I talk about when I lectured on this, as you mentioned at George Mason. George Mason is the most conservative, if not one of the most conservative schools, I served on that faculty with Robert Bork, who I found to be an absolute genius. Kenneth Starr was also on that faculty and so was Carl Ruth. And everyone knows Walter Williams, the great economist, great personality. And so at the same time, Roger Wilkins was on that staff, whose father was one of the founders of the Urban League and for a time [inaudible] for Martin Luther King Jr. And A. Randolph Philip and so on.

 

So one had these two sides, and coming from both a Caribbean and a British perspective, you can understand that I had been schooled in all these perspectives, but being in the thick of it at that time, raised a great deal of questions, of least of which they then appointed me as chairman of the African American Studies Department, which meant that the knives were out, should I step in the wrong direction or concede the program in a manner that had not been conceived before.

 

But it was an excellent time with a bunch of great scholars, Professor Jeffrey Stewart, Rose Truman and Ben Carson, Katya Vladamirov, and so you hear that already, quite a diversified group of people teaching in the African American Studies Department. And so I enjoy that kind of Catholic in the small sea sense, that Catholic spread of ideas because it’s consistent with J.S. Mill’s concept of the marketplace of ideas.

 

When I teach this subject, I explain, the overarching frame that we want to get is whether on the whole we are moving our behavior towards our values, or our values towards our behavior. Because no matter what side of an equation you’re on, if you establish a set of values that you’re not living up to, it is important for each group to exercise some self-policing and culpability to ensure that what we say about what we believe is what others can expect of us, both in the way we continue to speak and certainly in our behavior.

 

In addition to that, or within that, there’s the Christian virtue, which when you talk about slavery and race that’s relevant. There is the legal issue, which when you talk about human bondage and the removal of freedom, that’s an important issue. I already mentioned the values proposition. And then there’s an economic issue, and some people say that the other three are inflected by the economic issue, but we’ll dive into that and see where that goes.

 

The last point I’ll make in this preliminary phase is that we must be careful about historical monumentalism, and that is where we treat history as a monument to ourselves, so that our status making and our sense of ourselves, our sense of our own prestige requires history with a certain narrative no matter what the actual history is. And when we come up against that, this is one of the ways in which you and I talk about this all the time, Daniel, when someone may have a wrong perspective innocently, and then if that person is curious and seeks a right perspective, but when they’re presented with the facts and still refuses either to engage on the facts, raise questions, or to change their position, then this becomes disingenuous. And that person is not an honest person with whom to speak in an effort to solve social problem or at least generate some sort of understanding.

Professor Gilbert Morris:

And so we have to astute and reject monumental history. And I’m afraid that both sides to some degree, have now gone to the extremes of establishing history as a monument. It’s unassailable, elements of the history cannot be questioned, cannot be challenged, because the historical narrative is so important to us in one way or the other that we can’t bear criticism of it in any degree. And that is those anti-human and anti-democratic. You’re muted.

Daniel Schmachtenberger:

What you’re saying about viewing history as a monument to our current narrative and position is a special case of the general case of motivated reasoning. And as you were kind of mentioning, the economic case for slavery created a motivated reasoning basis for a whole bunch of weird gymnastics, mental gymnastics in terms of how to interpret Christianity and how to interpret law and how to make the Declaration of Independence commensurable with slavery and really weird stuff. So, what we are seeking to do is to be able to look at which arguments are earnest and they’re partial, they need reconciled, versus actually hold their partiality and claim it to be more complete than it is out of motivated reasoning. And the hope is to be able to strip the motivated reasoning, have an earnest inquiry that can give us a clear enough sense of at least some through lines of the history up to this point.

 

And I think why this is so important, why this is so important for me is, that I’m really speaking to people who might be in a position somewhat like the position I found myself in a couple years ago when Gilbert and I started speaking on this. Is, I would hear people that knew more about the topic say things very differing from each other, and I didn’t feel that I had the knowledge to be able to say, these people who’ve put 20 or 30 years of study and that radically disagree with each other, how am I going to figure that out? And they would say things that sounded superficially compelling. Like people who would argue that mostly the issues of slavery and race are over, and we should take a more libertarian perspective. Would say things like, as bad as slavery was, Genghis Khan killed five times as many people in his own life as the entire Atlantic slave trade ever even engaged with.

 

And there was some sense that slavery was just part of history everywhere, and the American case was not all that particularly unique. And that we actually bought the slaves from African slave traders. And those sound compelling on the surface, as I got deeper, those all were either red herrings or specious, or at least cherry picked in a way that really did not indicate the truth of the overall perspective well. But simultaneously, the critique of the American situation, oftentimes cherry picks in the other direction in a way that doesn’t acknowledge just the real politic nastiness of humans largely. And I really wanted to try to get a fair sense for that. So I’m hoping, while mostly constructing, what about the American slavery system and then post-slavery, the continuity of that all the way up to the current day where systemic injustice associated with race. And it must, I just have to say, we’re not going to be dealing with the issue of the Native Americans.

 

We’re not going to be dealing with the issues of feminism and intersectionality and biracial discrimination and the million nuances that are really critical that are just well beyond the scope of this. And for everyone who has that deeper background. Wonderful. And this is really intended to be introductory, but the hope is an introductory, pre the American slavery situation, to the American slavery through the post-slavery all the way up to current, that can give some contexts of what is unique and uniquely problematic about this case, that makes it so challenging.

Professor Gilbert Morris:

Yes. And so with that, I would say that first we have to keep slavery and race separate for the time being. Let them come together organically as the process goes and they will come together and we will see that the slavery was the thing that seemed to be a forerunner, and then race was brought in to create certain justifications. And even though slavery has ended by certain definitions, the race issue continues in the most pernicious ways.

 

So the beginning of that, if you look, I think it’s well established and it’s basic history that the reasons for slavery were war, so if you were captive in a war. Debt, if you had some debt that you couldn’t pay. That these were the two main reasons why people found themselves enslaved. There’s a sociological and anthropological point to that. And that is, in the ancient period, if you go back as far as 32, 3500 BC, one of the things you find is, if you were engaged in war, so there was a scrabble for resources and so on, hunting grounds and these sorts of things, and if you were engaged in war, once you captured the people who did not succeed, the question was what to do with them?

 

They didn’t have advanced sociology or anything like that and other cities to send them to. And people became sensitive about slaughter. You mentioned, Genghis Khan, it was thought considerably that his own wives said to him at some point, “My God, must you kill so many people, slaughter entire cities and so on?” So if you’re not going to slaughter them and you’re going to integrate them and there’s limited resources and there aren’t other cities for them to go to, slavery was the means of integrating them into one’s society. You see this in Greco-Roman situation where slaves rose to become important, hold important political and official offices. They rose of the Roman. Are setting to become great generals and were trusted aids and allies of the people who enslaved them.

 

So slavery was never about the humanity of the person. It was always about some sort of social process to integrate these people into our society if we did not wish to slaughter all of them. That was a very, very crucial thing. The change-

Daniel Schmachtenberger:

Specifically in the context where as a people that had just been dominated and captured, loyalty was in question and integrating them without some controls might have led to the breakdown of society.

Professor Gilbert Morris:

Yes, yes. The vanquished were not likely to be cooperative in the most meaningful ways. And so, once vanquished one had to pledge one’s allegiance to the certainty of whomever else, [inaudible] of the vanquishing power, one had to pledge to that. Now, in the politics book one, and I’m not going to go into the reference here, it’s very long, but you can read people viewing can read Michael Sandel’s Aristotle Politics in the Oxford Reader, and you’ll come to the same conclusion. But you’ll find it in book one of the Politics where Aristotle talks about natural slavery. This has been a frustrating thing for both the Aristotle in society and for Aristotle scholars throughout history because they think it’s a blemish on him. Although, he was a menuances to Alexander the Great who did abscond thinking that he would not meet the same fatus Socrates should things go badly. So, one can make an assessment of him that way.

 

But the question is, when Aristotle spoke about natural slavery, so he made two main points, about five points, but two main points, and it’s about five paragraphs where he talks about this. But he’s really trying to set up the state and he’s saying that the household and the individual are to the state as the arms and the legs. These are components. And then he moves on to the individual and he wants to define how the individual acts as the arm or the leg of the state. And he’s worried because he says there’s a certain type of individual who is a natural slave, and this is someone who ought to be, this is a person who’s given up his rational capacity. And so that’s one leg of it. And the other leg is someone who refuses to labor.

 

There’s a third leg where Aristotle talks about akrasia. Akrasia means weakness of the will, and that is when you know to do something right, you tell yourself to do it, and then you don’t do it anyway. So Aristotle said this is the weakness of the will, it’s akrasia, and this is another type of self enslavement. And so this natural enslavement. The problem with this is, it’s kind of an open concept. He is not really thinking of anyone, he doesn’t think about, in fact, he includes the Africans in the Asiatics. So he says the Asiatics are full of intelligence, but no spirit. The Europeans are full of spirit, but less intelligence. And the barbarians have no intelligence or spirit, and so they are natural slaves.

Professor Gilbert Morris:

And so he’s justifying the formation, the building of empire in the Greek setting. So these are the people that he’s referencing as he’s thinking this. And so his notion of natural slavery is that they haven’t really created anything. They are not interested in industrious and productive labor, which is confusing because later on in the politics, he talks about agriculture and productive labor and the necessity of putting slaves to work there. Anyway…

Daniel Schmachtenberger:

If I remember right, he said something that really kind of shows the view of, the domesticated animal has a better spirit-

Professor Gilbert Morris:

Yes.

Daniel Schmachtenberger:

… [inaudible] animal. And that’s in the same way the domesticated beastly person is better off-

Professor Gilbert Morris:

Right, because the domesticated animal is acting within its own nature, whereas the human being is not. And so, the main thing that listeners should take away from this is it leaves an open vessel into which people can put all sorts of interpretations and say, but Aristotle said that. And we’ll see that this has a through line all the way down from slavery to racism.

Daniel Schmachtenberger:

And just to give the listeners context of the arc we’re going to follow, we’re starting with Aristotle and we’re going to talk about the American case that doesn’t come for a couple thousand more years. We’re starting with Aristotle because this is significant enough to the Western canon of thought that it became something that got built upon.

Professor Gilbert Morris:

Absolutely, absolutely. No question about it.

 

Now, the second thing I should like to say is that slavery was always contested. And so, one of the things we must reject is that slave holders in any period were just people of their times. They were in every civilization where there was slavery. As we said before in prehistoric times, it was a question of do we slaughter people or do we integrate them to society? And if you think about, let’s say in China, there’s a book or a set of narratives called the Magical [inaudible].

 

The Magical [inaudible] is actually a Chinese national cartoon, it’s a series of texts, mythology, and the central character is an African. And this was, I would say around 8620, something like that. That you had these stories in China. So they had a concept, they had slaves in China at the time, but they didn’t necessarily think race and slavery went together. So the hero of their mythological stories was a great tool. And you can read, I think her name is Wolinsky, julie, I think Julie Wolinsky is her name, and she wrote about this extensively.

 

And then if you look at the Indian situation, in the [inaudible] text, the [inaudible] and so on, the slave master could not eat before he fed his slave. There were rules about whether you could rape a slave and so on. All these things were important. And another thing for people to remember is, the reason that you would want rules for slavery is everyone was susceptible of being a slave. So your country could get overrun, you could be vanquished, and you wanted to know at least there was some rules in place to protect you, should you become a slave. And so the rules around slavery were very, very strong. Of course they were violated in many cases and so on, but every major society had them. And so that’s very important. Once-

Daniel Schmachtenberger:

I hadn’t thought of it quite this way, what you’re presenting is that the agreement on slaves is a very rawlsian kind of thing, saying, I am making a position where if I end up being on the other side, I’m okay with it because I might be on the other side because the power asymmetry is not so perfect. Whereas in the later case, the power assymetry became so severe that people stopped needing to consider they might be on the other side.

Professor Gilbert Morris:

Absolutely. The inherent superiority that according to themselves meant that they didn’t reflect on that at all. And that’s part of what Americans call the pushback that you’re seeing, when they are held to task for some of their behaviors that assumed superiority seems to infiltrate their points of view.

 

So, you have this situation with Aristotle, and so I make the point again that slavery was always contested. So when we come into the period of what is called the Dark Ages, loads of writers, what are called the Pratistic fathers, generally around the Pope and so on, mystics and these sorts of people constantly railed against slavery. And that has been true from that day to this, that there were always constantly people making very, very rich, powerful arguments against slavery. If we move quickly to Saint Thomas Aquinas, St. Augustine thought that he agreed with Aristotle, they were natural slaves, but if they had fallen away from God.

 

Saint Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologica, he makes this point also agreeing with Aristotle, also agreeing that if they’ve fallen away from God. But then he says in the commentary on politics, later on, he says something like, there are those persons who are naturally masters and those persons who are naturally slave, and they ought to know themselves well enough. So someone who is not a natural master should not in fact present himself as a master over a slave, because he will not have the internal character and proper conduct. And so that also becomes a useful frame for people who want to justify enslavement. So we’ve got these open frames, there’s one more open frame, which is very interesting.

 

Frames. There’s one more open frame, which is very interesting. The Moors dominated Spain for 800 years, were thrown out finally in 1492, same year that Columbus sailed out of Grenada. And you’re not likely, and this is what tells you that race is a new type of thinking, not attached to any profound history, to think yourself superior to some group of people that have run your country for 800 years and given you all of your intellectual development, your writing, your technological prowess, your art, music, all these sorts of things, not likely to think yourself superior to.

 

What happened is in Spain, people retreated to the mountains and built these small societies in the mountains and they astute sunlight and sought to become very pale to distinguish themselves from the Moors and those who were mixed with the Moors. And their veins could be seen through their flesh and their veins were bluey. And this is where the notion of blue blood came from. At the same time, the breeding of horses and so on became very, very significant. And this idea of the prestige of horses based on breeding and the notion of a blue blood somehow got melded together. And this was already beginning to distinguish now race as a separate categorization for human beings. Those are the upper framings that we should work under. And with those things in mind, we can get now to the issue of enslavement.

 

There had been slavery on the continent of Africa, just as there was in Europe, both in the north coast of Barbary Coast as it was later called. That’s Tunisia and Libya and all those places, Morocco and so on. In sub-Saharan Africa there had been slavery. And in this early period, certainly you had significantly large societies. Large societies, up and down what is called the Swahili Coast so that’s the east coast of Africa, just off of Madagascar, all the way up to Egypt, running along the Nile and all the way down to what is now Tanzania and then somewhat inland as well. You had these great civilizations, all of them had slaves for the same reasons. Debt and war. They’re very significant. And if you think about the center of Africa on the North Coast, this is to say Morocco, Mali, these sorts of places, these were where the greater kingdoms were located that the most well known.

 

The Portuguese began their incursion into these areas with the Canary Islands, which are just off the coast, just off the coast there. And spent about 100 years wrestling with the dwellers on the Canary Islands to achieve control. They would lose some wars win some, they would go away for five or 10 years, come back and we’re talking between now the 14th centuries, so the late 13th and throughout the 14th century.

 

They could not seem to get a hold here, but eventually established a foothold in the Canary Islands and then attempted to make incursions into the mainland. At the same time, the Spanish were observing this and observing the opportunities. Columbus was gearing up at the time to head out to what is called the New World, New World for Europeans. And what is very, very significant in this period is that slavery was not the main driver. When the Portuguese and the Spanish first began, they were all trying to traverse the west coast of Africa all the way down to the Cape. And this took about from the first incursion about 100 to 2040 years to get done. But slavery, slaves were not the main focus. Gold was. Gold was the main focus-

Daniel Schmachtenberger:

Is the main thing that made them start succeeding much better than taking 100 years to get a little bit of foothold mostly gunpowder revolution?

Professor Gilbert Morris:

Yeah. What you had in West Africa, you had many small kingdoms. The Arabs were the dominant group up in the upper north of the continent at the time. And trading routes between Morocco, Spain, the rest of the Mediterranean and so on, were already very well established. You had to-

Daniel Schmachtenberger:

It’s worth just noting the Arabic influence in Northern Africa was already before what you’re describing as the European influence coming into Africa but it had many similar properties.

Professor Gilbert Morris:

Absolutely. What I’m saying is that the Portuguese incursion into the Canary Islands, while that occurred, the relationship. Particularly the Moors, once they left Spain, they entered all along the Barbary Coast but largely into Ethiopia and they began trading into the Mediterranean from those countries. Not only slaves but all sorts of products that were very important to Europeans at the time, very few agricultural products. But gold was one of the main things that everyone was in search of. Part of the reason was a king at the time called Musa Mansa. There’s a wonderful book. I thought I had it somewhere around here by Howard French, which is called Born in Blackness and it’s a wonderful book to read to get a sense of what was going on. What is the real argument being made here and by that book? That history has overshadowed this period and jumped straight to Christopher Columbus and the raiding of the African coast for slaves.

 

But they’ve missed about 200 years of open trade for gold during the 13th and the 14th century. Excuse me. If you look along the coast, there was a place called Elmina, which is in modern day Ghana, which the Portuguese eventually found. And there they were able to correct much of their fiscal problems and most of their economic problems. And they saw an economic expansion and economic boom from dealing gold from Elmina where they built their first port. The Elmina Castle and this completed the search for, when I say complete, I don’t mean that that was the end of it, I mean that finally they found what they were looking for.

 

The association with slavery and enslavement of blacks didn’t come organically out of that situation. Henry The Navigator was the brother I believe, of the King Alfonso of Portugal. And Henry The Navigator hit upon an idea where he thought he needed… He thought that there was an opportunity in trading in African slaves, and slaves from the continent of Africa. It wasn’t called Africa at the time. He was concerned with that because he saw from the Canary Islands that the plantation construct that they had there was insufficiently developed. Then he began to plead with the popes because he recognized that the king of Portugal could not give him dominion over these lands. There could be a declaration, but in order to get a real declaration and prevent other Catholic powers from incurring into these lands and to give himself a monopoly that he needed the Pope’s in premature.

 

He was the first to have gone to Pope Eugene, I think in 1418, and to convince Pope Eugene that Saracens, basically Muslims, were lurking all throughout the west coast of Africa and that he needed to form what was called the Army of Christ to go and proselytize to the Africans and get rid of the Saracens completely untrue. But Eugene issued the bull, I think it’s called Sane Charisimus, S-A-N-E, Charisimus. And that was the first papal bull aimed at identifying Africa not yet for slavery but putting the Portuguese and Henry The Navigator, in particular, on this track for incurring into the continent itself beyond the search for gold. You’re muted.

Daniel Schmachtenberger:

And for those who aren’t familiar, papal bull simply means a dictate of the Pope, which is a particularly significant thing during that time. You’re mentioning the content of Africa, and you’re mentioning that it wasn’t called Africa and this very spacious notion of they sold their brothers into slavery, which assumes that this giant continent that China and the US and many other countries would all fit on as just this one thing. Maybe speak to that for a moment because I think that helps to start to frame for people who haven’t thought of it a bit about the history.

Professor Gilbert Morris:

Yes. It’s fascinating some degree. There were a host of small kingdoms along the west coast of Africa at the time, the continent of Africa. And none of those people could see themselves as Africans, so to speak. This Appalachian came much later when Europeans could not be bothered to learn the particulars or specifics of their assemblages and merely referred to everyone by the continental, by this continental catchall. And there is a deep sense in which one can’t possibly… The notion of brotherhood that the idea that there was a brotherhood amongst them, that is an unfortunate notion. I will say that Henry The Navigator, learned the lesson. He actually learned it in his lifetime. I think he died in 1460, but in his lifetime in dealing with the kingdom of Benin. When he went to Benin, he met a magnificent wall city with great metal work and art and a king that it took him almost six months to get an appointment, so to speak, because they did their due diligence.

 

You didn’t have the freedom. Two things, you didn’t have the brotherhood and while you had some raiding that went on in the earliest phases, you’re not going to move 12.4 million people by chasing them around the coast of Africa so they went to Benin. Benin drove a very hard bargain. It was a very significant civilization at the time, had its own art, had its own culture, its own music. He wrote about the hospitality of the royal court and that one could not see the king at will and that there was a process involved. Why is this important? Because when we come to the racial argument, the racial argument is that there was nothing there anyway. Why find slavery enslavement so abominable? Here’s a racial argument that categorizes all these people that have been around for all this time and say that they have never amalgamated into anything significant and they have no great accomplishments.

Daniel Schmachtenberger:

I just want to add to this, that it is not necessary that someone has advanced metal work in giant walled cities to say that their life is worth something and should not be taken by force ethically. I think the Hobbesian idea that pre advanced civilization, people historically had these short brutish, nasty mean lives in a war of all against all is just absolute apologism for the narrative of progress as defined. If we look at the Kalahari or many of the Bushmen Africa or whatever that didn’t have the great walled cities, some of them had types of art and poetry and wisdom that is mind blowing. And I wouldn’t want to make the argument their lives are worth something because they had advanced technology. It’s worth noting that is a part of the history.

Professor Gilbert Morris:

It’s worth noting in this way as well. That is the European definition of an advanced society. And the point that I’m making is not that I think that that makes them advanced, but the very people who accuse them of not being advanced, categorize them as not being advanced when they encountered them, met them with these implements of civilization that they themselves prioritized and that is very significant. And you’re absolutely right. If you take the Sand People, people refer to them as the Bushmen of the Kalahari. They have no great structures. But if you want a PhD in linguistics today, you’d better be going to them to learn one of their clicking languages or the Maasai who can control 200 head of cattle with their inter-species linguistics and so on. Those are not great buildings, but those are actual processes that now human beings want to use.

 

In fact, it’s people in the machine learning and AI area, so the most advanced western disciplines, who are going into these places now to study the linguistics of these ancient people. You’re absolutely right, and I wouldn’t want to leave that impression. I think it’s a good point to make. In addition to that, I will say this though, that for those who thought that great civilization were important, there’s a dishonesty about this because the framing of people at that time on the African continent was that they were not advanced yet we see, as I say, diplomacy with Benin. And then Benin finally cut off the Portuguese for slaves and cut off their trading with the Portuguese. No argument, just they were self sustained and self-satisfied and did not feel that they gained any advantage by dealing with the Portuguese.

And this is what gave Henry The Navigator the idea that he had to come up with another concept and needed another papal bull. But before we get to that, for those of your listeners who want to review the case, you can look at the pre Egyptian societies in the Sudan as examples of one type of civilization, so to speak. You can look at places like Bulawayo or an area called, you can look it up, Great Zimbabwe in what is now Zimbabwe. All the way down the island, then below the Limpopo River and so on, you can see great civilizations which existed long before the European incursion. Schroeder is another great city, something called the Swahili Construct, which is a series of Swahili speaking countries or small kingdoms along the east coast in what is now Tanzania and that entire area.

 

For those persons who believe, as you pointed out, in a Hobbesianism that these kinds of societies where not only examples of progress and other philosophers Kant, Hume all believed that this was a example. Writing systems, big buildings, art, all these sorts of things. This was proof of civilization. And I’m saying that proof was there. It was ignored. And this is the second grade deception.

Professor Gilbert Morris:

We said the first grade deception is Henry The Navigator attempting in some way to ingratiate himself to the popes. And if you think about this period in European history, he goes to then to Pope Martin, and Henry The Navigator gets another papal bull this time that specifically gives the concession to the Portuguese king as opposed to the Spanish king. And these bulls come all the way down in 1444, there is a what would be called a treaty. And this treaty lays out because of the paper bulls now they’re free to do business. And this treaty lays out all the dominion now of the Portuguese side. And then in, I think it was 1455, that you get the papal bull that changes everything, that literally gives Portugal the right to enslave people from the African continent in perpetuity. And then the final-

Daniel Schmachtenberger:

This I think is a critical piece as you had mentioned, that historically many cultures, including European cultures, enslaving other European cultures where there was no difference of race, Greeks enslaving Greeks, that the main reasons for enslavement were either debt, so a peonage enslavement system, some types of crime where that was a punishment to work the crime off and war. But that unlike this later system, there were limits on that slavery. And you were starting to mention some things of limits of rape and like that, but there was also that it was not a forever system.

Professor Gilbert Morris:

That’s right.

Daniel Schmachtenberger:

And I want to make sure that you make that clear so that the rights that one kingdom inside of the continent of Africa may have had with a warring tribe that they conquered inside the continent of Africa, who would not have both considered themselves Africans any more than two European groups at war would’ve. Europeans, they would’ve been Vikings or Frenchmen or whatever it was. That they would’ve had binds on what that slavery was that when the slaves sold changed completely. And I think that’s one of the key cases were building.

Professor Gilbert Morris:

You are precisely right about that and the papal bull, which changed everything was called Romanus Pontifex in 1455. And now there are a couple of things to say about that. Number one, it became international law because the Spanish kingdom, sorry, the Portuguese Kingdom lived in a competitive area of the world and it became international law. And as a side note, you can understand Henry VIII when he destabilizes or disestablishes the Catholic Church in the UK. This frees him from the international law imposed on Spain and the other Catholic powers in respect of Portugal. That’s something to bear in mind and that’s important to bear in mind because of the relationship between Elizabeth I and her pirateers who end up fighting Spain on open waters and capturing slaves to bring them to the United States. But before we get there, Romanus Pontifex happens and this produces essentially a free for all.

 

And as you said, I just want to make sure we close that point, and that is do not, if you’re thinking Africans sold their brothers for slavery, if you happen to be black and you think that this is the wrong idea. They didn’t know each other in the way that we talk about if you’re from the Caribbean, if you’re from wherever it is that you’re brothers, or if you have a white friend who’s close to you and you two share, you say, “That’s my brother.” That didn’t exist in that way. They didn’t know each other. They never referred to each other as Africans. You referred to yourself within the context of your particular tribe, the mobility of which unlike the Sand People who had been part of the great migration 1500 years ago from near Mali and Morocco, all the way down to a corner of Africa.

 

Most of the tribes were not peripatetic. You had the Benin’s and the Boers and so on up in the north. But for the most part in the sub-Sahara, they were not peripatetic. They were gathered around watering holes largely or the ocean. And that’s where people lived and so on. And Africa’s vast so they lived hundreds of miles from one another. And if you look at the footprint of where slavery, where the slaves came from, you are looking at places that are now between Guinea-Bissau, Senegal, that area, all the way down to Angola. This is a very small foot-printed area. And the Arab trade enslaved was many times larger, many, many times larger. The difference here was you were being enslaved outside of a historical context with a new set of people under a chattel framework that didn’t allow, strange as it may sound, people who were enslaved in that Arab logistical corridor in West Africa was sometimes sold to other Africans in the north, but still in Africa. Egypt, Tunisia, these sorts of places, Morocco and so on. There was a chance that they could return to their home. You could trek where you were going to, as people would’ve seen from the Amistad, is a wonderful scene in the film where when the enslaved ask, “Where are you from?” And the gentleman steps back a little bit, he steps back all the way into the shadows until he disappears and he says, “This is where I’m from.”

 

And I thought that was an interesting way to depict the psychological impact of someone now inferring the newness of the place that they have now encountered by force. That’s an important thing to note. The other thing to note is that once Romanus Pontifex has taking place, what we usually call the slave trade, we have to change, really change our reference point to that. This was a guns for slaves for commodities trade. You bring the guns, small tribal kingdoms, you meet the first tribal kingdom. Of course, I’m just giving a scenario here, that tribal leader says, “No, I don’t want your weapons, I don’t want to kill people. I don’t really want to do that. You go to the next one.” You say, “Listen, he bought a lot of guns from me, so he’s going to attack you. You’d better buy guns from me to protect yourself.” First it becomes a protection thing. You have this multipolar trap that you find yourself caught in which you, Daniel… Yes. Go on.

Daniel Schmachtenberger:

This is important to just underscore. As we’re going, as the gunpowder revolution is advancing and it’s advancing disproportionately more in Europe than it is in Africa.

Professor Gilbert Morris:

Absolutely.

Daniel Schmachtenberger:

From this 1300 to 1600 time period, the asymmetry in weaponry is becoming much more significant. Where the Spaniards or the Portuguese might have taken a long time to make a certain degree of progress, once the British really got involved coming in and they were coming with lots of effective ballistics.

Professor Gilbert Morris:

That’s right.

Daniel Schmachtenberger:

Changed everything completely.

Professor Gilbert Morris:

Yes.

Daniel Schmachtenberger:

And then it’s really a racket that they’re doing because they’re like, “We sell guns to one side of a rival tribe, and then go to the other one…”

 

We sell guns to one side of a rival tribe and then go to the other ones and say, “You have to have them to protect yourselves.”

Professor Gilbert Morris:

Right.

Daniel Schmachtenberger:

But it’s basically a protection racket that we drove by introducing asymmetric weapons, and so they have to [inaudible] weapons, and then they trade us these slaves for the weapons. Obviously [inaudible] what the rest of it is, but that’s another thing where it’s like they didn’t really have a choice, because at the moment that we introduced that degree of asymmetric weaponry between tribes that might war with each other but have a certain binding on the ethics of their war with each other based on long historical context, we break their whole historical context and force them into our terms.

Professor Gilbert Morris:

That’s right, and so now, they can’t survive without these weapons, so it moves from a protection thing to an ambition, to a status-making proposition. So it’s no longer about protection. Now, rival tribes want the guns, because they want to be larger. So they don’t want it for protection anymore. It’s now part of an ambition. [inaudible]

Daniel Schmachtenberger:

It would seem like there is this throughline from protection and necessity into ambition, because the ambition is to get ahead of the race, the arms race, but if you weren’t trying to get ahead of it, you could forecast you would definitely lose at it, because the other guy’s trying to get ahead.

Professor Gilbert Morris:

Yes, absolutely. No, the multiple [inaudible] trap remains as an animating force in all the relationships at that point. And so this begins the other thing that the viewers might wish to think about, and you mentioned Betty Wood, who wrote a wonderful book which neither of us can remember the name of, but we love it so much, a very small book, maybe 120 pages on slavery and colonial America. It’s a beautiful book, and this is one of the things she points out. She’s a careful enough scholar to think about the change to the anthropology, sociology, and psychology of the people from the African continent when they are put into this mix. So-

Daniel Schmachtenberger:

The Origins of American Slavery.

Professor Gilbert Morris:

Yes, absolutely. So if we’re speaking at the moment about people on the continent, and we’re accusing them… And some countries, Angola has apologized to… In 2016. Africa has five regions, north, south, east, west, central, and 54 countries. Well, by resolution, the African Union, in 2016, created a sixth region and a 55th country, called the country of the diaspora. Now, there’s an argument there that every human being is a member of this diaspora, right? Because you can’t… And this is some of the conflict we have when people make these arguments. On the one hand, you say everyone is from Africa, but when we say the diaspora, we’re speaking in national terms, which were invented by the colonialists, right? Denying Mother Africa, so to speak, her full panoply of humanity, which should be assigned to her.

 

So in anyway, that was done, and the idea there… During that period, Angola and about four other countries apologized to the diaspora for selling them… But they used the language of brotherhood, and they didn’t seem to recognize or didn’t seem to argue… And this gets… The reason, now some people will say, “Well, I think that’s nice,” or, “I think that’s gracious,” or whatever have you. Yes, but we should always try to get history in its proper context, because the narrative that we use at that end is going to bleed through when it’s come time for the solutions, and then we’ll have a very difficult time sort of crafting the solutions if we’re depending on a narrative which while it feels good, is actually inaccurate, you know? So this is profoundly important.

 

So you have that situation. Now you have the rival risk situations of kingdom against kingdom and so on, and you now have the slave trade. Everybody knows about the slave trade, but now we know about the guns for commodities, for slaves as commodities and so on, in a triangle that moved people, 12-and-a-half million people to what was then America. But it moved close to four or five times that to places like Brazil. The starting point was actually… One of the main starting points was Nevis, where Alexander Hamilton was born, and then Barbados, which was a very significant plantation. And then Jamaica. And these were largely…

 

So, human beings arrived in these places as cargo. Sugar was the main thing that left, right? Sugar was the main thing, and the United States was cotton and then tobacco, right? So these were the commodities that were the most important. So it then cycled to Jamaica, and then of course, Nassau was impossible to either maintain slavery, or maintain plantations, or maintain anything, since it’s mostly limestone and very shallow, the because it’s very shallow and very low to the sea level, you don’t have very good soil for any kind of growing. So it became a pastoral colony, and as people have seen, I’ll reference the film again just in case people haven’t read the books, but Pirates of the Caribbean, you see that the fight for Nassau is mostly piracy, because of the archipelago that those islands are.

 

And then Haiti, Saint-Domingue, was the big… had 36,000 plantations, Haiti did, and this was run by the French. And so you see, The Caribbean was split into these various areas as well, and all the European powers had their little dominions. Constant fights between the French and the Spanish, even though in the 1490s, a treaty was made called the Pope’s Line, Pope’s Line. In the Pope’s Line, because the Spanish had said to the pope, “We are members of the church as well. How can you give all this dominion to Portugal and leave us out of the equation?” They then divided up things between themselves, and what is now North America was Spanish at first, North America, and then South America was Portuguese, at least Brazil was. And then smatterings, the British were sort of picking off small places around The Caribbean, and this is how the structure was developed.

 

The salient period, or the salient moment, was the arrival of some people in 1619, into the American setting. Now, there have been lots of discussions about that, about whether or not this was the first landing of slaves. This is actually quite a complex situation, and I mentioned all the stuff about the Europeans, and what’s going on in Kitts and Nevis, what’s going on in Barbados, Jamaica, right? The United States, or America at the time. Because, there’s a unique legal situation going on.

 

I wrote an essay about the reception of English common law into the 13 colonies, and it was one of the most complex jurisprudential documents to put together, because for instance, while it was a British… America was British, the difficulty was that British law was made and basically imposed in the colonies by the lord proprietors who were given grants by the king. So, America was not seen as part of the jurisprudence of Britain, going up to their Privy Council, which is part of the House of Lords, and so going up to their high courts and so on. This is very, very important.

 

So in 1619, you have a ship… Sorry, you have at the time, a governor called Governor… I think it’s Argall, who was the governor of Jamestown. But there are two fiends. One is a cousin to the palace. His name is Hawkins, and the other one is Warwick. They are pirateers who conspire, and they say, “Wait, the situation is anomalous.” So there’s a war going on. You’ve got the Spanish using Dutch ships, but the British are at war against Spain, largely because Spain’s dominion given to them by the pope does not apply to Britain. And then we are British North America, so what we can do is we can raid Spanish ships and appear to be fighting Spain, which means that our British king will not find us offensive. And then, whatever happens with the cargo, we get paid, because nobody’s going to argue if we bring cargo of value into this new American setting.

 

So this is how these 20+-odd, as it was described in a letter, persons arrived, black persons from the continent of Africa, arrived. Now, here’s the thing. They were not slaves in the legal sense. They couldn’t be, because they were baptized, and under English law, no Christian could be enslaved. You had a similar thing in France with the Code Noir, which created all the problems in Haiti, because it wasn’t Christian, though. The French were a little bit more personal about it. If you were French, you could not be enslaved. So each country, as I say, had these little niches of legal and jurisprudential limitations that could be exploited. And so, these people were landed. They were indentured servants, but for all intents and purposes, they were enslaved, because they couldn’t go anywhere. They couldn’t buy their passages away. They couldn’t escape. They couldn’t none of that.

 

And so there they were on this landscape now, in this new setting, and many of them negotiated indentured contracts and things of that sort. And they were accommodated, because nobody intended at the time that they should be slaves in perpetuity. There were already growing free blacks in America at the time, and one free black became very, very important to this story.

 

Now, as I said, for those of the listeners who are thinking to themselves, “But surely, they felt they must have…” Those 20+-odd blacks must have felt like slaves, right? Wherever they came from, they were either sold as slaves or stolen, right? Kidnapped. So that’s one. They didn’t look on Hawkins or Warwick and say to themselves, “Oh my god, rescue,” when they were taken to America. But they would have found that it was kind of benign non-agency that they experienced there. But they could negotiate terms of their labor. They had times to work and all that kind of thing on the regular indentured contract.

 

Now, there are some things to note. The indentured service program had occurred about 16 to 18 years before. In England, in 1601, they had passed what are called the Poor Laws. The Poor Laws were kind of an apprenticeship law, and this shows you how the anomalous nature of the application of law at the time, to get people off the streets and get them into productive labor. The routine was that someone could… They had to volunteer to become an apprentice. If they didn’t volunteer, if you were a prisoner, you were just made an apprentice to make yourself productive in society, right? If they didn’t send you to Australia first, right?

 

And what eventually happened was people were just being kidnapped off the street and made… And then we’re talking about Europeans, you know? Were kidnapped off the street and put in… Because the profiteers and privateers, they could argue that they were following the poor laws. So the indentured program was itself, if you like, problematic from the very beginning. So it was not a safe position to be in, and therefore changes to that position were not difficult to contemplate.

 

And in the 17th century in the United States, from about 1639 to 1690, the life of blacks in America changed completely, absolutely and completely. And this began… There were little skirmishes here and there, but the real situation was Anthony Johnson, a… Well, you had John Punch, and John Punch was an indentured servant, and he ran away, along with two Europeans, and when they were caught, the Europeans were punished by having their indenture extended, and he was made to serve indefinitely. That’s the key thing, indefinitely. In 1655, a black man named Anthony Johnson had a white and a black indenture, and they left to begin another service, and Johnson was saying, “No, I have the right to their service.” And the courts ruled that in the case of the one John Casor, C-A-S-O-R, that Anthony Johnson had the right to his service for life.

 

Between that period and 1690, you had a transition. Rights of blacks, or privileges if you want to call them that, were being taken away. They couldn’t own property, so that changed. The status of the mother became the status of the child, and that locked in lifetime servitude for children. And the reason for that was because… I actually refer to it as the free rape strategy, because if you raped a woman before, then the children were yours as per the French situation, but this was the opposite of the Code Noir, because it said that the status of the child passed through the mother. This meant that if the mother was enslaved, that the child was enslaved, but then if the mother was a white indentured, then the child was indentured as well. So there was no escape, and so the shackles, the anti-freedom, the loss of liberty was growing by a progression, what financial people call stacking. There was a stacking going on.

Daniel Schmachtenberger:

So, just to recap a couple things, with regard to this question of multiracial kids, if a white man and a black woman had a baby, versus if a black man and a white woman had a baby, how do you deal with it. When that law got formalized that it’s the status of the mother, there was now a situation where if there was a black female slave, all of her children, including by rape, including by whether from black men or white men, would all be owned by whoever owned her.

Professor Gilbert Morris:

Absolutely.

Daniel Schmachtenberger:

Now incentivizing the maximum amount of rape was highly profitable, because you could either use those slaves or sell them.

Professor Gilbert Morris:

Absolutely.

Daniel Schmachtenberger:

And to just get a sense of how mind-blowingly gruesome that is, and then to go back and say you’re making a case that exactly the opposite of the Hobbesian case, and exactly the opposite of the kind of Pinker way of thinking about things, which is that history got progressively better, that it’s always been nasty, and yes, there were nasty things in the past, but like, I think a lot of people who don’t have a deep study of history, who grew up in the United States, think before the Emancipation Proclamation just seems like ancient history, like some… Before 1776, why would anyone even go back that far, and that there was probably worse slavery. They jump straight to Genghis Khan type examples, and assume that it was bad, but it’s been getting progressively better.

 

And you’re actually painting an opposite story, in which case the slavery was way less bad and got progressively worse, and there was a process of codifying slavery in America, and then in the Americas, The Caribbean and the Americas, and then specifically, slavery in the United States, and then specifically black slavery, as opposed to other forms of nonracial slavery in the United States, that became discontinuous with the way that most slavery practices historically had been.

Professor Gilbert Morris:

Right.

Daniel Schmachtenberger:

And much worse, where it did reify, because it needed some continuity, it reified a version of Aristotle and a version of [inaudible] but like the worst ones with the worst motivated reasoning, that now had nothing to do with the captures of war, and had nothing to do with the debt, and had everything to do with a permanent breeding labor class for economic competition.

Professor Gilbert Morris:

Right.

Daniel Schmachtenberger:

And that’s the point that I think is really critical that you’re constructing, and if anyone is just getting lost in the fact that it’s a lot of details, and obviously for every detail that Gilb