I get constant attempts to salvage something, some desperate crumb of Western moral decency or innovation, that can be credited to Christianity. They always end up mythical, or too trivial to impress. As I explain in No, Tom Holland, It Wasn’t Christian Values That Saved the West (and the many articles linked to from there), every single thing you might have heard the Christians gave us, they didn’t. Everything was invented by pagans before them. That includes science, education, democracy, charity, and morality. Upon hearing this, desperation kicks in. Christians cannot bear the possibility that Western values don’t come from the Bible (in fact most are shat upon in the Bible, or astonishingly neglected altogether). So they try really hard to find something. Something.
“Aha! Christians invented polyphonic music!” No. They did not. Even insofar as we define “polyphonic” so hyper-minutely as to make this claim true, the claim is then thoroughly unimpressive. Rather like claiming Christians invented plastic guitar picks. “So much better than bone!” In fact multiple instruments producing a harmony of sounds each playing their own sequence predates Christianity and isn’t uniquely Western. We have artwork from Rome depicting small orchestras (including the organ, which was playable by two hands simultaneously, and thus not monophonic; likewise the harp); Roman and Greek art depicts various combinations of horns, strings, and percussion (even multiple different wind, string, and percussion instruments playing together). So, no. Sorry. “But what about some more hyper-specific musical thing only Christians did, like contrapuntal music?” Every culture has some unique musical thing they do. That doesn’t make Christianity special. Nor, obviously, is there anything in the Bible or Christian ideology that is responsible for that innovation anyway.
You might think this is pretty pathetic. When they are scraping the bottom of the “the Bible gave us orchestras” barrel, they’ve kind of conceded the point already. They already lost the hospitals argument. Everything we mean by a hospital today was invented by the pagan Romans. Yes, they limited who had access to them; but so did the medieval Christians: most Christian healthcare was of the hospice variety. Just like most pagan healthcare. There is no functional difference between a Temple to Asclepius (or Serapis or any of a dozen other gods of healing) and any hospice property of a Church—just another temple to yet another god. The ancients even subsidized the poor’s access to scientific healthcare, with public salaries for physicians and means-adjusted fees. But at least trying to steal the pagans’ glory over hospitals makes more sense than trying to rob them of their musical innovations.
A different tack is to claim some form of moral superiority, like “Christians got rid of gladiatorial contests,” but since they replaced those with horrific and abundant public executions, sorry, that’s a wash.
And so on.
So I was not surprised to be posed with yet another desperate attempt at this kind of argument: “What about orphans!?” The claim is usually that Christians invented orphanages; and that, therefore, before that, unwanted kids were just left to starve. I knew the actual score on exposure of infants (more on that shortly), but I actually hadn’t run into the question of “orphans” before. Sure, after a dozen of these kinds of arguments, I was skeptical. But hey, you know, maybe? Since checking things like this is literally what my PhD trained me for, I deep-dived the subject to find out.
The Problem with Orphanages
It is true that Christians invented the orphanage. But this is not something to be proud of. The resort to (much less need of) orphanages actually represents a failure-mode of the social system, not a value addition—even apart from the fact that, as we well know, orphanages tended to become horror houses of sexual, physical, and emotional abuse, or even workhouses little different from the actual slave shops that preceded them. The worst thing you can do with unwanted children is stuff them into hives tended by unchecked overseers. But to understand this, you have to understand what preceded the concept—and what modern society is trying to get back to, now recognizing that orphanages have always been the worst idea, not a good one.
First, babies.
Set aside the question of abortion. Yes, surgical abortion, even chemical birth control, existed in antiquity, and pagans waffled a lot on whether to legalize it, but Christians outlawing it was not a boon but a net bane to society, as we well know (it was also contrary to the Bible).
So let’s stick with babies. Contrary to lore, the ancients did not just chuck unwanted infants into the wilderness to starve. While “exposure” as this was called was legal until Christians got sterner about it (though even then Christians waffled a lot on whether or how severely to even enforce such laws), it wasn’t that commonly practiced in fact, and was always morally condemned. Indeed, almost all the pagan texts we have telling us about the practice are attacking or criticizing it, not endorsing it (or else are excluding it from being justified: see, for example, Three Representative Examples of Roman Attitudes Toward Infanticide). It was no different under Medieval Christianity, where plenty of babies surely got abandoned or smothered, for want of food or means to raise them, all while moral authorities went on condemning this from the pulpit, and futilely trying to police it with paltry legal resources or even will. What a society’s morality was does not always describe that society’s behavior. And that disconnect was no doubt the same before as after Christianity took the reigns.
But more importantly, that’s not where most orphans came from.
A third of all babies—and mounting up to 60% of all children before their second year (and 80% by the age of 15)—died naturally. Christians made no impact on this statistic. Only modern scientific medicine and socialist civil engineering ever changed it. For the rest, wherever they had the means and political will, pagans instituted charities to keep up the income of the poor so they could raise children. The famed Imperial Alimenta was not the only one. For example, William Byrnes (“Ancient Roman Munificence: The Development of the Practice and Law of Charity,” Rutgers Law Review 57.3 (2004-2005), pp. 1043–1110) discusses a second-century inscription praising Menodora Megakleous, from a town in what is now Turkey. As a priestess of Augustus, she donated over her lifetime “300,000 drachmas to aid orphans and children,” the equivalent of between twenty-four and fifty-eight million American dollars today (if we match dollars to minimum wages across regimes). This entails many more private charitable ventures of like direction will have existed, as only the minutest fraction of records like this will have survived. Yet we have many other examples (Lewis & Reinhold, Roman Civilization, vol. 2, pp. 255–59).
Over half of all kids died anyway. But given that the average life expectancy for parents was around 48, it wasn’t uncommon for kids of all ages to suddenly find themselves without a parent. This was especially the case for war orphans, whose fathers were killed on the battlefield (and whose mothers were lost to other causes), or parents slain in whatever looting operation. This may have been the most common category of orphan across ancient society. Next after that would be kids orphaned by famine, plague, fire, flood, or other disaster. And then all the kids orphaned by Acts of God upon their parents far more common and pernicious: the ordinary ailments and accidents of life now dubbed “dying of natural causes” (or by crime or misadventure, wherever any blame may be).
Needless to say, most actual orphans, being older than infants, were placed with families (as often also were infants—the ancient wetnurse trade existed in part for this reason, although for other reasons as well). Orphans could thus be fostered or even legally adopted. Already, ancient households often operated on an extended family model, so entire families, not just a specific mother and father, cared for kids, making orphans in the sense of “unhoused children” even harder to come by. The redundancies of ancient society thus buffered many losses. But even when this didn’t exist as a safety net, in many societies (from Athens to Rome) there were actual magistrates charged with the duty of placing abandoned children with families. For example, we have inscriptions attesting to the office of orphanistai (and other like terms)—plural, indicating several magistrates, per city, tasked with seeing to the welfare of orphans—as far away as Hellenistic Crimea across the Black Sea (see Vladimir Stolba, “Two Hellenistic Defixiones from West Crimea,” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 56 (2016), pp. 263–92). Roman law assigned the same role to various magistrates, such as praetors and their deputies (and by the time of Marcus Aurelius, a specific magistracy was created for the purpose: the praetor tutelarius). This was, basically, the primary ancient solution for orphans: give them a family. Which was a far better outcome than being imprisoned in an inhuman workhouse or abuse-farm called an orphanage.
Indeed in some places, like Athens, war orphans were also given a pension by the state; and Roman-era alimenta, which applied to all children (or those covered by a private endowment, such as the children of a particular town), may have operated similarly, with orphans receiving their per-child pension directly, or through foster parents as a profiting proxy. This was certainly the case in pagan Crete (see Anna Strataridaki, “Orphans at Cretan Syssitia,” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 49.3 (2009), pp. 335–42). Similar arrangements no doubt existed in other cities and cultures; we just can’t tell because most records are lost, particularly as discussed marginalized groups. But since any parents could expect eighty percent of their own kids to die of natural causes—and kids were a vital resource in rural and even urban economies (an asset rather than a liability)—many families would be eager to receive fosters even without a proxied pension. “Hey, you just lost your kid to cholera; here’s a replacement” made orphancy, essentially, a self-solving problem.
Something similar could happen in the rarer and more specific case of exposed infants—truly abandoned babies, where there was no family to take them, or you had to hide them for fear of laws against illicit sex, always punishing the woman and rarely the man (an example of false-moral laws causing real-moral problems). In these cases it was more or less an open secret where to leave such infants—for slavers to reave them. This was the ancient world’s secondary solution. Hence the fate of abandoned infants was probably far more often slavery than death, being raised by slave families for future training and sale.
That was morally barbaric—just as much as pre-modern war’s propensity for putting civilian populations to the sword in the first place, or punishing women for having sex, or torture, and all the other horrors Christians continued without any shame—like, ahem, slavery. But it is difficult to measure how workhouse orphanages were an improvement (or even monasteries, church schools, or any other place orphans could get stuffed into). Just because you didn’t get assigned the label “slave” did not mean your fate was going to be measurably different. Medieval serfdom, or indeed even monkery, was slavery in all but name anyway; and wage-slavery was hardly much better. All children were put to work. Many were used as servants. And sexual abuse in orphanages (or abandonment to prostitution once finishing tenure) was also as much a danger as any slave faced (we know even today how vulnerable children could get treated in Christian institutions). Sex slavery was, after all, replaced by Christians with illicit sex “wage slavery,” rather than the sexual labor market being treated with the same humanitarian respect as any other. But even orphans who made it into some other occupation, like housemaid, were effectively free for the abusing as well. So, what improved?
It’s also not true, despite often being claimed, that there was any great disparity between the numbers of adult women and men in antiquity, a claim often made to bolster the conclusion that female infants were being killed in vast numbers. The actual data do not support this, particularly but not only when accounting for the slave market. There just isn’t reliable evidence to support any great disparity, and what little there was could easily have been for more pathetic reasons: boys would be fed and treated better growing up, resulting in more girls dying in childhood from such “natural” causes as disease, while teenaged girls would get disproportionately killed by childbirth (the most common acceptable age of marriage and thus first legitimate pregnancy was between the ages of 14 to 16—a fact Christians did not change—and maternal mortality rates before modern medicine were high). Sexism kills. And that hasn’t really changed much. Particularly in backwards countries more similar to pre-modern eras.
But on top of all that, orphanages were rare anyway. Most Christian care for orphans simply replicated the ancient pagan model. And where there were orphanages, we can imagine that at first—until they became overwhelmed and turned into workhouses to get the destitute out of sight—they might have been kept as show-pieces, a form of conspicuous consumption demonstrating the capitalist tycoons of the region were so very magnanimous that the poor shouldn’t be complaining about their low wages, desperate conditions, and abusive treatment. Much like Christian claims of charity today: materially insignificant relative to the actual need, and thus essentially just empty virtue signaling; like the way Hamas runs the occasional charity to pretend it’s not evil.
And finally: there were few child labor laws in antiquity (or, for that matter, the Christian Middle Ages). Orphans often just…took care of themselves. Regardless of whether they were orphaned or not, until shockingly recently, in all Christian eras, “virtually all urban children worked in some capacity as soon as they were physically able,” which meant about 7 or 8 years old; and in the case of orphans, if their deceased parents left anything to them (that wasn’t stolen by predatory guardians), they earned a keep from that as well (David Nicholas, “Child and Adolescent Labour in the Late Medieval City,” The English Historical Review 110.439 (November 1995), pp. 1103-1131; see also Mary Lewis, “Work and the Adolescent in Medieval England ad 900–1550: The Osteological Evidence,” Medieval Archaeology 60.1 (2016), pp. 138-171).
The ancient evidence matches the same observation. For example, one of the jobs of ancient orphanistai was assigning guardians to manage the estates orphans inherited; and work was always available to anyone who could do it, regardless of age. Indeed teens, in both eras, could support themselves as apprentices to any master of a trade. And all the same was the case, ancient and Medieval, for rural children.
Conclusion
We can criticize almost every aspect of these societies in respect to the fate of orphans within them. But one thing we can’t do is claim any functional difference between these societies. The ways Christian societies dealt with orphans were, at best, functionally identical to how pagan societies did, and at worst, worse, owing to the fact that hoarding them into orphanages, a uniquely Christian idea, is never an improvement in the fate of orphans, but really a failure to do right by them. The closest match we can find in antiquity would be the slavery workhouses that most truly-abandoned infants would get sorted into. And there isn’t any good evidence to conclude that was all that much worse. And regardless, the evidence of a charitable and even government concern for the welfare of orphans long predates Christianity. It was already a staple of pagan morality and law.
If you want to read up on the corresponding history of orphans, these are the best starting points:
- Geoffrey Nathan, “Orphanages,” and Olympia Bobou, “Orphans,” in The Encyclopedia of Ancient History (Wiley 2013), pp. 4942-45.
- Judith Evans Grubbs, “Infant Exposure and Infanticide,” The Oxford Handbook of Childhood and Education in the Classical World (Oxford University 2013), pp. 83–107.
- Sabine Heubner, “Adoption and Fosterage in the Ancient Eastern Mediterranean,” The Oxford Handbook of Childhood and Education in the Classical World (Oxford University 2013), pp. 510–31 (see also index, “orphans”).
- Thomas McGinn, Widows and Patriarchy: Ancient and Modern (Bristol Classical Press 2008).
- Timothy Miller, The Orphans of Byzantium: Child Welfare in the Christian Empire (2003).
- Catherine Hezser, “The Exposure and Sale of Infants in Rabbinic and Roman Law,” Jewish Studies Between the Disciplines (Brill 2003), pp. 3–28.
- Richard Cudjoe, The Social and Legal Position of Widows and Orphans in Classical Athens (Panteion University 2000).
- Jens-Uwe Krause, Witwen und Waisen im Romischen Reich, 3 vols. (Franz Steiner Verlag 1994).
- W. den Boer, Private Morality in Greece and Rome: Some Historical Aspects (Brill 1979), pp. 37–61.
Another source I learned of after composing this article, which addresses the abuse problem regarding orphans raised in monasteries with some frankness and evidence, is Caroline Schroeder’s Children and Family in Late Antique Egyptian Monasticism (Cambridge University Press, 2022).
I will admit that I find these post more interesting then ones about Jesus Historicity these days. Especially since it seems that the conversation on Historicity hasn’t changed much IMO. Learning about political and sociological status of the Roman empire seems to never be a boring topic for me. I do hope that you can write more about these types of topics in the future.
Ah, yeah, this article does, I think, represent an important part of the kinds of questions that need to be asked in this exciting new field of research I’ve been talking about! 😉
Thanks for doing the work on this. It was tedious to you, but the skills of research and statistics are not that common. I usually don’t get people to even cite their claims, so I wouldn’t have a starting point. They just repeat these memes that get passed along.
Thank you. I actually enjoyed the research. I expanded my knowledge of the ancient and modern world. And debunked yet another apologetical propaganda tune.
A slave may have been compelled by force to labor. In a way so were serfs and perhaps monks (not all Christian orders, as I recall, and also I think some ancient Egyptian and Buddhist orders as well.) And “wage-slaves” are compelled by economic necessity to labor under supervision as well. In all cases, their labors were often insufficient, and all their labors led to a life of material deprivation entirely unnecessary save the benefit of their social betters. In that sense, yes, you can claim they are all “slavery.”
Yet I think this is still wrong, despite the partial argument. Unlike slaves, serfs had access to resources they could use to feed themselves. Much of the time they worked free from supervision. They had customary rights, that is, quasi-legal rights in a system lacking modern states and state laws, far in excess of even the rights of the more moderate ancient forms of slavery.
There’s a reason I think that “feudalism” was marked by a rise in population, the beginnings of a economic ascent, even a territorial expansion into hitherto dark forests, defeating the pastoralist people who had held the upper hand. I suggest this greater productivity was due to the greater freedom—sharply limited as it was, notable in comparison to the past however indiscernible compared to the future (i.e., now)—of the mass of people. Crudely put in modern businessman’s terms, they worked harder because they were working more for themselves.
As for “wage-slavery?” The children are not born slaves. Period. Any argument that wants to pretend nothing has changed fails miserably in my judgment. Even modern forced labor, a horribly widespread abuse, is not as bad as the real thing, because the children aren’t born slaves. Indeed, even when local law enforcement is part of the apparatus, even then there is the possibility that higher law enforcement can end the atrocity. In the real slavery, the highest authorities are the enforcers and the only escape is just that, escape to a different state.
Legal status matters. That’s why lawyers get the big bucks.
A few other oddities: It’s not at all clear that ancient and medieval and early modern maternal mortality are sexism, which in this context means intentional, rather than primitive technology.
Nor is it clear that the worst thing about orphanages was sexual abuse, which sounds like moral panic. It seems to me early orphanages are much more open to criticism as disguised infanticide, first essays in extermination camps for the unwanted. (Something by the way true I think of the Black prison labor after the Civil War. Calling that the return of slavery strikes me as letting the villains off lightly.)
The otherwise irrelevant attack on “Hamas” is at this moment tacitly endorsing Israel’s God-given claim to the Holy Land. I disagree. Perhaps as a specialist in ancient history you are rather Ciceronian in your morals? At any rate, given that government is how you really get the job done, all forms of private charity, not just Hamas’, are therefore performative. The implicit premise underlying this, that government is always incompetent, is purely reactionary drivel.
Actually there is hardly a difference here.
Slaves had the same kinds of access (e.g. they could glean as they worked; pagan slaves had a right to a savings; etc.), while serfs the same kinds of limitations (e.g. if their lords took all their food in tribute). It’s hard to find a difference.
Remember, “serf” meant someone legally bound to the land, so they (and their labor, in terms of a percentage of expected yield and military service when called upon) could be bought and sold, they could never leave (they’d be hunted down and punished or imprisoned as a criminal if they did), nor could they choose or change occupations without a lord’s leave (as that was fixed by their landhold; so sons of carpenters had to be carpenters, etc.).
The concept of a serf was created by the Christian Constantine in an Orwellian declaration of ensuring free farmers’ freedom (see the links; they cover the story and even quote Constantine’s decree that functionally enslaved millions of free renters).
Note also slavery under the Christians was also much worse than under the pagans. The pagan system actually helped ensure slaves had too much value not to feed (for example, because it had a self-sustaining system of rotational manumission, whereby a slave could eventually buy their freedom, and thus fund their master’s purchase of a “newer model,” and slaves were thus incentivized to do well), whereas in the Christian system they were disposable, uniformly controlled by terrorism and abuse, and literally ideologically dehumanized. Slavery was still bad under the pagans; plenty of abuses. But the Christians somehow managed to make that already-immoral institution substantially worse.
This was also true in pagan slavery. Due to the system of incentives the Romans in particular built, slaves rarely had to be supervised, except in the most brutal cases (e.g. chain gangs on corporate farms or mining operations; disobedient slaves being punished; etc.). But this was also true of serfs, whose activities were also monitored and “kept in line,” precisely for fear of peasant revolts or shirking of production duties, and to keep them from running away (and to hunt them down if they did).
It’s hard to find a truly functional difference. Remember, what laws say, and how people actually behave, rarely coincide, particularly in tyrannies (like feudal Europe). Regardless of what existed on paper (which actually wasn’t much), serfdom was functionally as brutal as slavery, with just as much disregard of peasant rights as slave rights.
Conversely, slaves in the Roman system also had rights, and were placed in greater positions of trust, and actually had opportunities—often more than free men had (e.g. more slaves were educated than free men, because educated slaves were worth more, operationally and financially; the manumission system, based on the Roman client system, kept slaves and masters positively incentivized to get the most out of slaves by steering them toward occupations they showed the most promise at; etc.). Consequently, in the Roman system, the largest pool of economy-driving entrepreneurs and small business owners were manumitted slaves.
Not relative to antiquity.
Besides… “we can make a brutal slave system work economically” is not a sound basis for endorsing it.
Eeesh. You don’t know your history. It was only the breaking of the serf system that led to modern prosperous economies: both by its ability to be enforced breaking down (serfs fled to cities where they could hide, stoking urban economies with the entrepreneurship and industry of literal criminals; and the Plague dealt a catastrophic blow to the sustainability of serf economies, causing a shift to chattel colonial slave economics, which resulted in the most horrific global slave system in human history, the near-last vestiges of which were ended only by the American Civil War).
This does not matter if the social system leaves you no options.
Take, for example, the fate of many orphaned women to end up abused as prostitutes: once they come of age, if they hadn’t secured an occupation or a husband, they were kicked out, often with no jobs to get; many resorted to prostitution for want of any other means of a wage, and rather than legalizing and regulating and protecting the profession like any other artisanship, Christians outlawed it, leaving prostitutes at the mercy of victimization by both their clients and the organized crime operations they had to contract with for their own protection, because the police would not protect a criminal enterprise like prostitution, leaving no way to ensure any justice at all than to submit to the abuses of mafias.
And take, for another example, the fate of factory workers and other industrial operators: they get locked in to a low wage occupation with outrageous hours required, and in result they have no time or means to change occupations or challenge the horrible conditions of their employment. They become literally, functionally, enslaved to the wage. This is probably one of the worst inevitable outcome-states of capitalism as an institution. We did not do much about it until the late 19th and early 20th century. And even then we haven’t really eliminated wage slavery.
That is most definitely a moral failure of Christendom, as bad as any other. And there are a lot of moral failures it can claim.
I don’t see what functional difference that makes. Millions of children are also born into wage slavery and serfdom. You can’t escape (not legally; and until the collapse of the system, not with any decent chance of positive outcome). That’s what makes it functionally equivalent to slavery. Except in the Roman slave system, you often could escape: the peculium-manumission system not only was mainstream, but it was incentivized (masters benefited and thus encouraged it). There were brutal exceptions (e.g. convicts sold into slavery; a good chunk of mining and industrial agriculture). But the same amount of that existed in Christendom (whether “fig leafed” as serfdom or not); and that was often worse, and never better.
Like, when? Can you point to a medieval example, on any meaningful scale?
Same as for serfs.
Um. You think serfs had access to lawyers?
You are way outside of reality here.
Sexism does not have to be intentional. There is cognitive and noncognitive sexism (just like racism). “We want a son more than a daughter, so we will give more food to our son and less to our daughter” is intentional sexism. “Women are just supposed to have as many kids as possible and not complain (doesn’t notice this attitude kills countless women in childbirth or complications in pregnancy)” is unintentional (the people doing it are not making the logical connection between their attitude and the outcome) but it’s still sexism. The mindset is sexist. And it has sexist outcomes, as in, outcomes that differ by sex.
This is also what killed more babies under Christendom: the severe penalties for sex out of wedlock forced women to hide babies; a less sexist culture does not create that incentive, but rather, it helps single mothers rather than terrorizes them into killing their own children in self-defense.
Follow the links.
The abuses are well documented, globally pervasive, and horrific. And trend more so the less civilized (a.k.a. modern) the society. Which means we can expect Medieval orphanages to have been the worst.
I don’t follow your logic. Unless you mean to say terrorism, torture, mass murder, rape, and kidnapping are all suddenly “morally okay” as long as you don’t like who is targeted by it.
I can coherently agree the government of Israel is evil and Hamas is evil. Those two things do not contradict each other. Just as I can agree both Stalin and Hitler were evil and yet at the same time support Stalin’s defense of Russia against Hitler’s invasion of it. Even evil people get to defend themselves from terrorism, torture, mass murder, rape, and kidnapping. That’s how human rights work.
I agree with you. You must not have read my political articles here. Or my moral ones. I have entire articles on each sentence you just wrote, defending what you are implying to be your position in each case.
But that doesn’t mean the church down my street is evil because it engages in performatively trivial charity. Hamas uses performative charity to “saint-wash” its public image and claim to be good, when in fact it is a savage cabal of rapists, terrorists, kidnappers, and murderers. Unlike the church down my street.
Doubling down? To me it doesn’t seem like it would be a personal humiliation to clarify that slavery=serfdom=modern free labor is too categorical, that in context it’s more about the relative similarity of material welfare in the daily lives of the lower orders. Or something along that line. To me it seems the implicit self-congratulation on our advanced moral sensibilities, that justifies the blanket dismissal of all manner of changes in societies though history, is above all about the implicit claim, do it my way and it’ll all be different because I’m superior. That’s why that kind of rhetoric seems to me undesirable and why I troubled to cavil at “slavery in all but name…”
My brief objections I thought ran too long. In truth, a simple snort should have sufficed, or maybe”Dude, you wrote this too hastily!” Unfortunately, not.
The second sentence of the rebuttal is: “Slaves had the same kinds of access (e.g. they could glean as they worked; pagan slaves had a right to a savings; etc.), while serfs the same kinds of limitations (e.g. if their lords took all their food in tribute).” As I recall, serfs had collective property in the commons, which slaves did not. And while the lords may have violated custom or even law in taking all the harvest, the principle was that they were supposed to take some brutal percentage, like a half or a third. They could have illegally demanded labor service beyond the three days or whatever but the freedom to do what work they wanted in their own housing (however miserable,) was something the slaves couldn’t do. The thing there is, comparing the illegal exactions in serfdom/feudalism to the legal exactions in slavery is tendentious. Feudal lords did not have the legal right to rape their serfs ad lib. Maybe it’s just me, but I think it’s a difference.
To repeat, though, even pretending such things are trivial, I don’t think it is true even on the material level.
Moving on, in response to the observation that serfdom—which by the way, I mean not just France, not just early manors but what is generally called feudalism—was a system that could support restoration/growth of total population, there’s a link to a post on…the Dark Ages? Serfdom didn’t legally end till 1867! Under a serf/feudal system, which in practice was always “contaminated” by some free holds (quite extensively in Byzantine Anatolia if I understand it correctly) just as there were usually some slaves—populations in the old western empire did in fact substantially recover and grew much larger in vast areas of Germany, Poland, the Russias, etc. the old slave system could never master.
“Besides… ‘we can make a brutal slave system work economically’ is not a sound basis for endorsing it.” It is not at all clear to me why you think I’m endorsing it. And it’s even less clear to me why you ignore that one reason I see serfdom/feudalism, then wage-slavery as relative improvements is the greater freedom, not just the increases in economic productivity! Here you’re the one who puts no value at all on such things. I think material progress is one prerequisite for moral progress, yes, but I don’t think that’s as outrageous a claim as you seem to believe, sorry.
Then there’s this: “Eeesh. You don’t know your history. It was only the breaking of the serf system that led to modern prosperous economies: both by its ability to be enforced breaking down (serfs fled to cities where they could hide, stoking urban economies with the entrepreneurship and industry of literal criminals; and the Plague dealt a catastrophic blow to the sustainability of serf economies, causing a shift to chattel colonial slave economics, which resulted in the most horrific global slave system in human history, the near-last vestiges of which were ended only by the American Civil War).”
The point that the real life practices don’t coincide with the official morality made earlier tells against this. “Stadt luft macht frei” was part of the serfdom/feudal system! The Black Death (which arose because population densities under serfdom/feudalism had risen enough to support mass epidemics,) really did weaken serfdom/feudalism in western Europe. Serfdom got much worse in the east but it certainly kept on, unbroken, leaving your claim doubly uncertain. The role of colonial conquest in the rise of “modern prosperous economies” is a complex subject, not the least of which is clarifying whether you admit there is such a thing as capitalism. This is getting so confused I’m not even sure you aren’t claiming that feudal remnants—feudalism was into conquests, see la Reconquista, the Crusades, the Teutonic Knights, the lives of the Tsars—-and depending on how Eurocentric you are the Byzantine, Arab/Persian, Seljuk and Ottoman species! —aren’t somehow the causes of American slavery?
Then there is a segment of your response that hinges on reading my comment out of context, which I hope was unintentional. After reiterating my conviction that not being born a slave is a real difference, a functional one too incidentally, I argue a fortiori about modern forced labor. Every comment thereafter about the middle ages or serfs is irrelevant. Modern victims of forced labor most certainly can have access to lawyers in principle and thankfully even sometimes in practice.
Most of my comment was devoted to the equation of slavery, serfdom and “wage-slavery” which in some places seems to mean to you, sweatshops. But you even argue the oddities I note. Overall, I’m not sure the word “functionally” is being used by you as carefully as might be desired.
I wrote a sentence about maternal mortality and you comment about sexism leading to differential mortality for girl children, who are by definition not maternal! And then you follow up with another odd claim that people were claiming women should just breed like sows, except I don’t know this is a real thing.
Moving on, my thought that orphanages were de facto infanticide mills is ignored. (It’s not original to me, by the way.) My point that killing the babies is even worse than sexual abuse is implicitly denied, meaning the sexual purity of children is deemed more important than their lives. Well, you will hold your own personal values, regardless.
As to your out of the blue attack on Hamas, which justifies the assault on the Palestinians in Gaza, nobody said the church down the street was evil because its charity is functionally performative. But it is, and that’s why pointing out Hamas’ functional performativity is entirely irrelevant. It’s just a malicious aside. You profess bewilderment at the claim that the Zionists have the right to ethnically cleanse (or eventually exterminate?) Palestinians because God gave them the land. I’m afraid I’m rather certain you are familiar with the concept but 1)would rather not criticize it and 2)would prefer not to give your personal reasons. Well, you’ve made it quite clear whose side you are on. I suspect this is the point which make you too indignant to replay with the customary acuity. I would try to explain but in truth words fail me.
The last recourse of the apologist is to try resorting to “massive word walls” as a means of argument.
Alas, nothing you just wrote addresses anything I just said.
So, nice try. But no one here falls for these kinds of rhetorical tactics.
We all can tell here that what you said was already refuted by what I already wrote.
Your ridiculous claim that slaves and serfs had the same access to resources was decisively refuted by the fact the existence of the medieval commons, whose expropriation in “early modern” times was so important. Your claim that I didn’t address anything you wrote is false.
It is you who has refused to correctly address anything I’ve written, not even the simple and correct observation that abstinence in marriage has been vehemently preached.
Even worse, the implicit claim I am an apologist for anything is entirely wrong, a false reading indulged for. I criticized Christian orphanages as de facto infanticide! If anyone here is an apologist it is you, as proven by your preposterous notions of progress against wage-slavery.
If anything, the real issue is the bad rhetoric of identifying wage labor with slavery, not the absurd claim that “we” (the tiny clique here stands in for all acceptable forms of humanity?) It is not, not, not the insistence that nothing ever changed until humanity was blessed with “us,” the gloriously morally superior form of society. But again, as I said, one form of apologetics for now is to pretend nothing ever was decent or even improved before us. It’s one of the lowest forms of apologetics I think.
All false.
Steven: Why are you stanning Hamas? “Israel is a brutal apartheid state” is not contradicted by “Hamas are thugs who Israel helped bring about by destroying secular, sane alternatives to negotiate with them (and then the few remnants of those alternatives discredited themselves by being incompetent conservative nationalists”. This is a position fucking Noam Chomsky can hold.
And it really is just a total violation of intellectual charity to react this way to his point. “Empty virtue signaling” is all he says. Yes, Richard calls them “evil”… which they are. Just like how the Azov Nazis are evil and yet they are on the right side against Russia because nations have the right to resist against invasion and annexation. This isn’t that hard. I’m getting flashbacks to the trolley problem discussion.
In any case, you accuse Richard of not responding, but Richard repeatedly argued a fortiori, such as saying that even if serfdom was better than slavery it wasn’t so much so as to turn Christians into abolitionists. (A fact we know because they also had slaves!) Which you materially didn’t engage with.
To the Fred B-C comment which begins with the rhetorical question about why I’m stanning Hamas…
Let me begin by quoting myself, “…Under a serf/feudal system, which in practice was always ‘contaminated’ by some free holds (quite extensively in Byzantine Anatolia if I understand it correctly) just as there were usually some slaves…”
Then, Fred, “In any case, you accuse Richard of not responding, but Richard repeatedly argued a fortiori, such as saying that even if serfdom was better than slavery it wasn’t so much so as to turn Christians into abolitionists. (A fact we know because they also had slaves!) Which you materially didn’t engage with.” The agreement with me that Christians had slaves is italicized, presumably to imply I didn’t know something I had already said yet my non-existent ignorance somehow refutes me.
As for the sentence fragment? I didn’t argue Christians were abolitionists, not of slavery nor anything else. I objected to the bizarre and ultimately reactionary claim that nothing really changed over centuries and slavery/Roman empire; serfdom/feudalism; wage-slavery/modern(ish) times….that all were “functionally” the same. That doesn’t absolve Christianity of anything. In regards to orphanages, the ostensible topic, I accused medieval and early modern orphanages of being de facto infanticide mills. Again, that is not defending Christianity and it is exceedingly uncharitable to misread this way.
Similarly, I did not and do not “stan” Hamas. The Palestinian people have the right, no, a kind of duty, to fight against their oppressors. It is exactly the same argument you use to “stan” Nazis, with one terrible difference: Your argument to defend Nazis is false. The war in Ukraine did not begin with the invasion of Ukraine, it began with a fascist coup. For years the fascists randomly bombed ethnic Russian/Russian speaking lands. The right of self-determination belongs to the ethnic Russians/Russian language speakers, not their fascist enemies. Shame on you.
To add onto Richard’s response…
Regarding sexism: Even the seemingly unintentional sexism, the “Women should have a ton of babies and not complain about it”, is ultimately rooted in intentional ideological sexism, which is why it isn’t identified as a problem or corrected and part of why even elite women spent a lot of history not challenging it (not even really for themselves even though many found ways of functionally escaping the worst of it but certainly not for others). Why, after all, is it accepted that women should just pump out babies? If women were supposed to be truly autonomous legal and economic actors, wouldn’t that be a problem? Ah, but they weren’t, so it wasn’t. So the philosophers and intellectual elites wrote cringy, laughable sexist mythologies, whether based on primitive biotruth claims or religion or their pseudoscience. The only question is how active and conscious versus simply accepted it is.
Moreover, sexism, like any other non-class oppression, can coexist with class oppression, and buttress and augment it. So take war orphans and the decimations caused by wars and famines. Even in antiquity, how often was that a result of literal, strict necessity and natural happenstance, versus kings and elites wanting more territory or engaging in greed and mismanagement?
Similarly, can we really separate out their poverty from their inefficiencies at deploying half of their entire possible workforce? This isn’t in very serious dispute in the modern era, after all. Economists routinely find that all sorts of irrational biases cost the economy untold billions in lost productivity. (Notice how that’s true both under market orthodoxy, where entrenched racism and sexism acts as something that creates an artificial break from what would be a natural productive labor-wage equilibrium, and actual reality). While the fact that women had to have so many children in the past (though mostly thanks to problems inherent in agrarian society that needed so much manpower as compared to the relatively easy lives of hunter-gatherer societies) definitely would have repressed their productive ability compared to the modern era, it’s not like women who had multiple healthy children or who were infertile suddenly entered the workforce and politics as full equals.
Generally speaking, one can have general poverty, and also economic exploitation by elites, and also the role of sexism. Not, critically, just as Richard identifies (“We’ll distribute the little food we do have to the boy instead of the girl”), which is empirically known to cause intergenerational problems (and eventually worsen poverty since that girl you’re underfeeding also is going to bear your grandchildren and be less better able to do so) and that even relatively poor societies can rectify. (Part of why even very poor African societies have very tall women is that they’re not as sexist internally compared to, say, Latin America). But also in terms of denying women educational and economic opportunities, making it so that aid to women and children tends to operate off of an infantilizing charity model rather than a model that would allow them autonomous control of their resources, etc.
And, as Richard identifies, sexist laws and restrictions as well as biases against them can also make it harder for poor people on top of their struggles. Just like how today sexism makes single mothers’ lives harder in a lot of ways, even though it’s definitely not easy being a single working or middle class parent of any gender. Just think how much easier it would have been in antiquity for a poor family where the wife died than where the husband died.
As for things improving: Richard has positively cited Pinker’s general thesis. I do too, though I think Richard and I both agree that Pinker misidentifies many causes of improvements, sweeps many serious problems under the rug for ideological reasons, and ignores that we could continue to improve yet further by not being slaves to neo-liberal economic orthodoxy. I think Richard has been pretty clear that his position is not that things haven’t generally gotten better, say, at least in the 20th century. What he’s arguing is that Christianity per se did not improve many things. The Dark Ages were real, and it took a long time for society to get back to the point that it could replicate and then finally build on the stability, research and insights of antiquity. (Notice that this thesis remains true even given that the Dark and then Middle Ages, even outside of Islamic and Byzantine circles, didn’t see any development or ideas – people are always innovating even in horrible environments. But the pace of that innovation, its ability to actually promulgate and be usefully available, etc. was totally stymied by brutal violence, cruel and self-serving regimes, and so forth, such that new ideas and improvements coexisted with utter barbarity for a very long time until the Renaissance finally allowed for what ideas and concepts worth salvaging over the last thousand years to be placed into a relatively useful framework both socioeconomically/geopolitically and philosophically.
In any case, even if you think serfdom is clearly better than slavery, the point is that “Christianity invented serfdom which actually newly nearly-enslaved people for a millennium and helped turn the Roman Empire into feudal Europe” isn’t a ringing endorsement. The broad point in general about Christian thought not being anywhere near as positive as it likes to sell and the narrow point about orphanages is that what Christianity comes up with is, at best, a slight improvement exactly indistinguishable from milquetoast social reformers doing the art of the possible. No one converts to Islam because Mohammed had some social reforms that were probably improvements over utterly awful preceding systems and some good ideas (such as early just war concepts). It just means he was a moderate social reformer as well as a brutal militarist leader. What we would expect from a true religion would be moral insight and politics far beyond
What I find generally very funny about the entire discussion is that Christians want credit for ideas they loudly wagged their finger about but didn’t really introduce. This goes beyond the orphanage issue, but the general claim goes, “Christianity originated a concern for universality, human rights, freedom [which is laughable on its face but whatever], charity and compassion”. And then people point to things like the role the Catholic Church played in reducing the violence of the feudal lords. Great, but at the same time, an entire continent of self-professed Christians were engaging in genocidal acts, forced conversions, torture, brutality, war, etc. So the entire exercise is based on horrific cherry-picking, all in order to get around the really obvious conclusion: It was only when the power of the church diminished (thanks to the rise of secular power, Protestantism, the Crusades costing church resources, the emergence of secular ideologies, etc. etc.) that the outcomes that they want to claim as good, the rise of science and freedom and democracy, happened. And every time the church’s role has increased, those trends have reversed in exact lockstep.
“As for things improving: Richard has positively cited Pinker’s general thesis. ”
In the post, he wrote “Medieval serfdom, or indeed even monkery, was slavery in all but name anyway; and wage-slavery was hardly much better.” Taken at face value, this contradicts the notion of progress. Most of my comment was a short sketch of arguments criticizing this. I don’t see how I endorsed any claims about moral progress via Christianity, though. I do not believe this point is refuted, though I must vehemently insist I hold no truck with Pinker’s version.
As to sexism? “Why, after all, is it accepted that women should just pump out babies?” Because as humanity goes extinct the people left will perish sooner after impoverished lives. The material production even of food requires a continuous resupply of human labor. But that may not be the question you meant to ask? So far as I know no significant figures have ever pronounced in favor of mass breeding. In fact, as I recall some have advocated abstinence between married couples. But that doesn’t seem to be relevant to the point, which may be, sexual intercourse that results in pregnancy, is in itself sexual abuse by the man of the woman.
My point in my first comment about orphanages as infanticide as I remember came from Marvin Harris (perhaps his book Our Kind.) Not being a professional I don’t keep notes and bibliography at hand.
Fabricating false consequences we never stated, and fake arguments we never made, is not going to work here, Steve.
Constantine enslaving free farmers as serfs was not progress. It was just another version of slavery.
Progress was ending slavery.
Likewise with wage slavery. Progress is represented by our efforts to reduce and eliminate it (OSHA, labor laws, minimum wages, unions, unemployment insurance). Not by efforts to produce and sustain it.
The imaginary sexism where men have been ordering women to crank out babies is the only example of a fake argument. The false consequence of maternal mortality for primarily that reason is indeed the only example of a fabricated consequence.
Aside from the fact that stating the obvious, that medieval feudalism was in many respects a material improvement on the late Roman empire, including greater personal free—nothing you value, shocking as that is!—Constantine’s whole Christian empire was part of the decay of antiquity, therefore part of the slow emergence of the medieval, feudal world. I don’t know why you imply a depopulation of the eastern Roman empire as in the west would have been a better thing. Further, only a fool would think Constantine reinstituting slavery (as if he could have!) wouldn’t have been worse. The fact you refuse to acknowledge the implications of your own argument is mere rhetoric, in the pejorative sense of the word.
Slavery worse than serfdom/feudalism. Wage-slavery in the long run better than serfdom/feudalism too. Your position, they’re all the same is nonsense, always was, which was why I objected to it. Calling you on BS is not apologetics for anything.
Abolishing unemployment, however, is real progress, not unemployment insurance,
It takes more words to explain errors than it does to make them. Deal with it.
All false.
Steven: Google “quiverful”. Then please explain what you think “imaginary” means.
Seriously, why die on this hill? This is really beneath you. I’m not saying every society or every religion or every ideology in the past was as extreme as to reduce women to purely baby factories. But many were. And most of the others that weren’t still had very overt sexist mythology. Christians have almost never meaningfully challenged any of that. Because they’ve inherited ancient Jewish sexism
As far as greater personal freedom: You say “late Roman Empire”. Even if you’re right about that (and I defer to Richard on this one but it’s fairly clear you are not), why pick that? Why not compare it with the Roman Empire or the Republic when they weren’t in a period of extended decay? Richard has been really clear about this. He doesn’t say Christians single-handedly ruined Rome. He argues that Christians inherited an already-terrible situation and then implemented policies, effectively Christian fascism, such as serfdom that guaranteed that it would only get worse. Again, maladaptive responses to a bad situation, motivated by an ideology with harmful components, particularly an opposition to the idea of progress, empiricism, and discovery.
The fact is that for the vast majority of Rome huge swaths of the populace had levels of personal freedom that, while laughable to our modern eyes, were nothing like anything but the most powerful nobility in the Dark Ages.
The late Roman Empire was the aftermath of a vast systemic collapse (the fifty year civil war and resulting collapse of the fiduciary economy in the 3rd century), which led to a massive increase in fascism (the death penalty expanded astronomically; state control of society ramped up extremely, e.g. draconian price controls began and the free market was eliminated; and the use of force to effect political will became normed rather than identified as corrupt) and a measurable decline in societal knowledge (philosophy, literature, the humanities and sciences, and art all declined in quality and scale) and a substantial increase in income disparity (the poor got poorer, and more numerous; the rich got fewer and more rich, concentrating power—at least until barbarian armies trashed things). It was the brink of the Dark Ages for a reason. And it is characterized by exactly such reversals of progress as Constantine’s enslaving of millions of free farmers with his Orwellian invention of serfdom, and the universal elimination of the freedom of religion and speech under Theodosius.
Advocating abstinence in marriage is rejecting the baby mill sexism and that really was a Christian thing too. Why die on the hill where you simply pretend the Quiverfull types are somehow typical, either now or then. They aren’t and you know it. And that sort of nonsense claim is exactly why I was prompted to use the word “imaginary.”
As to the rhetorical question about why I don’t compare slave societies of the Republic or the so-called golden age of the Empire, given that my objection is that in very many way, serfdom/feudalism was overall an improvement for humanity in Europe and the Mediterranean littoral, and equating them is false and misleading and ultimately reactionary politics, the question is, how is that relevant? I never implied that even for some of the common people the Republic or the Empire was not a cartoon hell of whip-wielding, rags and crusts of bread, daily rape of women. At least, not on any charitable reading! Once again, if I accuse Christian orphanages of wide-spread infanticide, I am not arguing for Christianity improving things. Every argument against a false position I don’t hold is a genuine example of the cheap rhetorical trick called, the straw man.
Lastly, “He argues that Christians inherited an already-terrible situation and then implemented policies, effectively Christian fascism, such as serfdom that guaranteed that it would only get worse. Again, maladaptive responses to a bad situation, motivated by an ideology with harmful components, particularly an opposition to the idea of progress, empiricism, and discovery.” Fascism is a twentieth century phenomenon (I do think it has deep roots in the nineteenth in the US both antebellum and in Redemption/Jim Crow, as well as Tsarist Russia,) and it is cheap rhetoric to try to inflame.
Much worse is the general error of thinking ideology drives history in general, ludicrously so in the case of long-term structural change like the emergence of serfdom/feudalism. The ideology changed but the supposed expression didn’t. The Church was merely one of the feudal lords, always secondary to the lay nobility and the feudal monarchs. The history of Christian monasticism is not the history of the medieval period, nor even the history of the papacy. The popes were not everything even in Rome itself.
Ideology rationalizes and only takes an transformative role when a mass movement transforms ideas from excuses for what is into plans for what might be.
You do know ideology means “belief system,” right?
Or do you somehow not know that policies come from ideas, and ideas come from belief systems—and are justified and defended by belief systems?
That is literally what makes the difference in history between human beings and, say, rock formations.
So, really, Steven, you’ve just spun right off the cliff of making any sense here. This is how far you have had to retreat to dodge being exposed making vacuous points and then doubling down on them.
It has really been quite amusing to watch, frankly.
Steven: I was very specific. I think if you read what I said again you’ll see that I made a very specific claim. That is, Richard has endorsed Pinker’s claim that there’s been a general trend toward upward improvement… after the Enlightenment . (Which is also generally Pinker’s thesis: He doesn’t argue that things just generally get better, he argues that science, reason, and Enlightenment values can make things better. I personally think he’s reductive in a lot of ways, but I do think he’s right just like Dr. King was that the arc of history generally does bend toward justice). That isn’t a contradiction with saying that the Dark Ages were a bad period. Pinker himself concedes that bad periods happen. The general trend is the point.
So, yeah, Richard is arguing that, in a lot of ways, progress stopped or even reversed in the Dark Ages. And he’s cited data, from indications of mortality to indications of economic and industrial density, that show this really starkly. It really was a sharp fall off a cliff that took a long time to recover from.
As for women pumping out babies: Steven, I really think you’re being intentionally dense here. For one, today, we definitely don’t need to increase our population, and yet the idea that women should be domestic baby factories sticks around, especially among religious extremists. So it clearly never was never some rational response, but rather an attempt to control women. But even in ancient societies… why does the fact that women need to be pregnant a lot of the time mean they should only be in the home? Not all societies were equally bad in this regard. There were female guilds at certain parts of medieval Europe. Certain Greek women had immense control over their household operations. Edward Cohen argues, “Many Athenian women participated in the cash economy of Classical Athens, sometimes working at mundane tasks for limited compensation, sometimes exercising control over sizeable assets, sometimes engaging in commercial transactions of significance. Some women soared financially, and their accomplishments (and their names) tend to be memorialized in our sources. The toil of anonymous female slaves, however, almost invariably underlay this success, for Athens was a ‘slave society'”.
https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/pdf/doi/10.4324/9781315621425.ch50
Did those societies with relatively egalitarian conditions for women experience immediate economic collapse? No.
See, what I originally asked wasn’t “Why should people in certain circumstances have larger families?” I used the word “just”. As in, why should women be reduced to merely wombs?
And so my point was that ancient societies did have overt sexism, in exactly the way you are suggesting people today don’t tend to advocate. (Which is false, by the way, but you’re right that the extreme sexism of the past is today viewed as extreme and thus fringe). That was in addition to covert sexism and to economic needs. This is why I went on at some length as to why ancient sexism actually had pretty serious economic costs. One can argue that it was a maladaptive response to their condition, which is still false (we can see clearly how much of ancient sexism was pretty clearly a response from men to need to be able to control access to sex and know they weren’t being cuckolded even as they themselves happily cuckolded other men), but it was at least clearly maladaptive.
First, re Pinker, it is hard to see how Pinker discerning a slow trend toward better is okay while if I see a slow trend towards better over a span of centuries it is not. For the record, I am a lot more ambiguous on Pinker’s notions of “better.” Even more, I reject Pinker’s notions that ideas and “values” of the Enlightenment drove that improvement. And I heartily detest Pinker for the probability he means by “Enlightenment, ” white European. Ideas and “values” (professed morality, which should never be taken at face value, by the way,) come from experience, life. Not so by the way, Pinkter’s graphs I find especially dubious. They are, given the nature of Better Angels huge topic, philosophical arguments. Accepting Pinker, even as merely reductive I think, is thus I think bad philosophy.
As for the modern extremist sexism being the norm in the past, which is the only rational meaning I can find, once again….I am not sure that kind of baby mill sexism where women were anticipations of the fiction of Margaret Atwood was really a thing. And yet again, praise for abstinent women was simply not the same kind of sexism carelessly imputed as the norm. Augustus’ pro-natalist legislation was very notable as being both unusual and a failure. Also, it was in no way inspired by “Christian fascism” which still isn’t a thing, except in the rhetoric here.
“One can argue that it was a maladaptive response to their condition, which is still false (we can see clearly how much of ancient sexism was pretty clearly a response from men to need to be able to control access to sex and know they weren’t being cuckolded even as they themselves happily cuckolded other men), but it was at least clearly maladaptive.”
If there is population pressure, sexism that result in fewer girl babies, will “help” reduce that pressure by limiting breeding in the most effective way possible, attacking the choke point so to speak. So I’m not sure it was maladaptive, which I suspect depended very much on the geographical and historical situation of any given time and place.
As for the reading the collective mind of dead men? I don’t believe in telepathy at all, nor collective minds nor in the power of intuition to know the past. Most men in the past so far as I can tell didn’t have the material resources to control access to sex for more than one partner. Indeed, throughout many of these centuries I suspect the need for women’s labor to survive at all, which gave them a de facto leverage in the household no matter what the official ideology decreed. And for that matter, many women wanted more children so that some would survive to help them, personally, when the surviving children got old enough. It is even possible that some women, particularly physically strong ones who coped well with pregnancy, even enjoyed conjugal relations, as unacceptable a thought as that might be today.
As I said, the defense of the assault on the Palestinians arbitrarily dragged in appalled me I can’t see any reason for believing the Zionist enterprise has the right to drive Palestinians from their homes, when not simply killing them. (Mass population transfers tend to be mass deaths of course.) The Christian Zionist position that God gave the Chosen People the Holy Land is at least comprehensible in the sense of following from principles. The problem is, the principles are false. What other principles justify slow motion genocide are left unstated, probably from embarrassment.
But my words fail, so here are the words of others.
17 “Whoever takes a human life shall surely be put to death. 18 Whoever takes an animal’s life shall make it good, life for life. 19 If anyone injures his neighbor, as he has done it shall be done to him, 20 fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth; whatever injury he has given a person shall be given to him. 21 Whoever kills an animal shall make it good, and whoever kills a person shall be put to death. 22 You shall have the same rule for the sojourner and for the native, for I am the Lord your God.”
A life for a life implies one life for one life. The insistence that more people have to die for the deaths of Israelis is deeply racist. What is the acceptable ratio, five dead Palestinians to one, or is it ten? More?
Palestinians of course are losers. One of the great figures of liberal thought through centuries said, regarding losers so vile as to resort to arms in desperation.
“So, then, Catilina, if you cannot die with a good grace, you ought at the very least to take yourself off with great alacrity to some other land, and having thus saved your life from a host of just and amply merited penalties, resign it to a future of exile and solitude.”
It is poetic that Catiline and Palestine can be rhymed.
“If they cannot keep themselves going, the best thing would be for them to collapse as promptly as possible, and with so little noise that the incident is kept quite private from their fellow-citizens and even from their nearest neighbours. For I cannot see why, if they are unable to live decently, they should also have this passion for a shameful death. Why should they think it less painful to die in a large company than by themselves?”
This is still I think an authentic expression of the liberal spirit.
“THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.”
The Zionist colonial assault is the equivalent of the Ancien Regime. It does not deny the individual horrors of those who fight against tyranny but a false equivalence is defense of that tyranny.
“But war, in a good cause, is not the greatest evil which a nation can suffer. War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse. When a people are used as mere human instruments for firing cannon or thrusting bayonets, in the service and for the selfish purposes of a master, such war degrades a people. A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their free choice—is often the means of their regeneration. A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature, who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. As long as justice and injustice have not terminated their ever renewing fight for ascendancy in the affairs of mankind, human beings must be willing, when need is, to do battle for the one against the other.”
And that is why the Palestinians must make war, as horrible as it always is. As I say, my feeble words fail. But let us consider the actions of one man? The rebels under Nat Turner slaughtered women and children, including at least one baby in the crib, even going back to kill the previously overlooked child. Yet, among the white citizens fleeing for their lives, was one George H. Thomas, a boy about fifteen years old. His actions as one of the great Union generals spoke his judgment as to how unforgivable slave rebellion was.
I think the umbrage was always about my objecting to the gratuitous endorsement of Zionist outrages. That’s addressed, with a little help from other writers, and I’m done.
Steven, I think you might have overstayed your welcome here. It is rather unnerving seeing someone seriously defending the mass rape and murder of human beings while criticizing someone denouncing the mass rape and murder of human beings—and then claiming to be holding the moral high ground. I honestly don’t know what to make of this. Unless there is literally a Nazi flag hanging on the wall behind you.