So the big public debate at the moment is over the bicentenary of the abolition of slavery. Or more precisely, whether European leaders should a) apologise for slavery and b) pay reparations. Now there is a lot being said on this….so I thought I might as well wade in.
To begin, who exactly is apologising? The British Labour Government? Corporations who are founded upon corporations that used slaves? The mayors/councils of cities that grew out of slavery (e.g. Liverpool)? Now my problem is that none of these groups kept slaves, condoned slavery, or benefited directly from slavery. They are all in fact completely opposed to slavery - as any decent, normal, right-minded 21st Century human being should be.
I guess my major problems are therefore as follows. Firstly, how can they possibly apologise? They didn’t do anything to promote slavery. Now you may rightly point out that they have all benefited from a slave-owning past. That is clearly something not to be proud of. And so it would make sense for them to say - as i think they should and do say – that they are truly, deeply sorry slavery every occurred and was facilitated by their own ancestors. But how can they appologise for it? They (or perhaps more precisely, we) didn’t do it. So if they do apologise, it’s a completely hollow apology; it can by definition mean nothing, because they are apologising for something they did not do.
The counter-move to this line is to point out that apologising – even if hollow – can help heal divisions and mend old wounds. But i don’t think that argument is going to go through. If the descendants of slaves want an apology simply to heal the wounds of history, then why ask for a direct apology which entails assignable guilt? If all that is needed is a show of remorse from the ’side of the slave owners’, then surely that is provided by expressing a deep and sincere sorrow for the fact that slavery ever occurred, and also a sorrow that the wealth of the west is (in large parts) built upon the legacy of slavery? What can a direct apology, of the form “we the government of Great Britain apologise for keeping your ancestors as slaves” possibly achieve that the expression of deep-felt, sincere remorse cannot? When you factor into this the fact that any apology would be necessity by hollow on the part of the apology-makers it all becomes ever more implausible.
This leads me to a second point. If the Government (or whoever) did apologise, then who would they be apologising to? The great-great-grandchildren of slaves? How on earth can any apology regarding the slave trade possibly be made to them? They are not themselves slaves, nor ever have been. Now i have no problem what-so-ever with the Government (or whoever) sincerely saying that they are sorry that slavery ever happened and that the descendants of slaves have to live with that historical and psychological burden to this day. But apologising to modern day descendants for crimes committed over 200 years ago, by people who are not us, and are long since dead, just increases the charge of hollowness over again.
At this point I must make a digression in order to fend off an apparent incoherence in my position. Underlying the above argument is essentially a sentiment that runs; “it was just too long ago for apologising to make any sense”. But someone could object and say “surely you think that Japan was right to apologise for the ill-treatment of PoWs in WWII? But at the time of apologising, many of the Japanese who were responsible were dead, as nearly 60 years had passed?”. And i would have to agree that i do think Japan was right to apologise. So what i need to try and show is that there is an asymmetry between Japan and Slavery. The way to do this, i think, is to allege that the length of time involved does make a difference. That is not to make a crass assertion that after 200 years too much time has passed, but after 60 years not enough, and those are the delineating parameters. Rather, it is to say something like the following. As regards Japan, the government of the late 20th Century was relatively directly connected to that of the 1940s (although those who wish to argue with me can start by pointing out that 1940s Japan was effectively ruled by a Military junta, early 21st Century Japan is democratic). But more importantly, there were still Japanese and American/British men (and women) alive who had directly contributed to or experienced the horrendous treatment of PoWs. To acknowledge that what was done to those young men, and the impacts it had upon their immediate families, went a long way to healing and reconciliation, and the closing of one particularly unpleasant chapter of 20th Century history. But with slavery, the time elapsed just seems too much; no slaves still live, nor do any of their immediate families. No slave-owners still live, nor do any of their immediate families. This is, I think, significant. What i am trying to get at is the intuitive thought that time matters. We may not be able to say exactly when apologies are or are not appropriate (there is certainly no hard-and-fact cut off point like a number of years passed, or a condition, e.g. ‘no remaining immediate relatives’), but we can, i think, at least try and distinguish cases when they arise. However, to illustrate how hard this is going to be, consider whether the British Government should apologise to the families of men who were shot for desertion in WWI, even though many of them were probably suffering from shell-shock. It’s been 90 years. How much does that matter? I can’t decide.
Anyway, returning to the main argument. My third point is regarding reparations payments, and flows naturally from the points made above. Firstly, who is to pay them? The Governments of nations that abolished slavery two centuries ago? Exactly how would these reparations be determined? According to the value slavery is estimated to have contributed to the British economy adjusted for 200 years of inflation? Or according to how much the descendants (all of them?) say is enough? And how should these reparations be funded? By taxing the citizens of western democracies whose personal ancestors never owned slaves, and who benefited from the slave trade only incidentally? If you wish to turn to people with a more direct link to slavery – the descendants of slave owners – how exactly do you go about it? Do you simply say that because their great-great-grandfathers owned slaves, vast chuncks of their wealth/property should be taken away? What about those descendants who got unlucky and have ended up as impoverished white trash living in trailer parks? And if you are going to justify redistribution based on past wrongs committed by ancestors, then does this mean we can hunt down Britain’s landed Aristocracy and take what they have? After all, historically the rich are essentially those who have been best (or friends with those who were best) at exploiting others through the use of violence, guile and coercion. The reparations question is something of a quagmire, to say the least.
And, of course, secondly; who are we going to pay reparations to? Presumably the descendants of slaves. Well, in the 1990 US census, there were 30Million respondants who described themselves as Afro-American. That’s 12% of the population. A good chunk of those will be descended from slaves. Are we to give them all reparations? What about those who have managed (against the odds) to do well for themselves, say becoming lawyers or doctors? Do they get the same level of reparations as poor impoverished unemployed black single mothers in Harlem? Who is going to regulate these reparations payments? But more importantly, how can they be justified? I, as a middle-class white male in the UK, am not going to dismiss the psychological and historical impact of slavery – the fact is i cannot understand such a thing and how it must affect many black people. But what i can say is that i do not understand how the descendants of slaves can themselves be either entitled to reparations from the descendants of slave owners, nor how those reparations could meaningfully heal the psychological wounds of slave history. Surely mere money cannot make something like the horrendous psychological legacy of slavery simply disappear? If the answer comes back that it can, then I have two responses. The first is one i don’t like, and wish to avoid taking; it is the charge that if the psychological wounds of slavery can be healed by mere cash, then they aren’t as deep as they’ve been presented to be. I don’t like that line, for obvious reasons (but not least that it makes me look like an insensitive, presumptuous bastard). One i like a little better is this; that really the calls for reparations are not about healing deep psychological wounds at all. They’re about greed. To this, we shall return.
My fourth and most controversial point is this. I think the above arguments on their own should stand up to scrutiny to show that the arguments for apology and reparations are unsustainable. But now factor this into the equation: slavery was not a European invention nor monopoly. Slavery existed in Africa long before the Europeans arrived. The European slave trade was greatly facilitated by African slavers and the slave-trade they had already established. African slavery continued well after 1807 – indeed according to the UN it is still going on today. The fact of the matter is that European slavery – while horrendous and unforgivable – was not alone. But of course, there’s no demand for the nations of Africa to pay reparations to the descendants of African slaves? Why?
Well one answer might be that they are not of moral equivalence. This argument to me seems odd. After all, slavery is surely abominable and unjustified not ceteris paribus, but simpliciter. So the argument that European and African slavery are not morally equivalent must have some special grounding. Usually the claim is that European nations made so much money from slavery, that individuals and governments built vast fortunes from it, and that it helped facilitate the wealth of the West while impoverishing Africa. Now this is true - but i’m i’m not seeing how the difference in wealth acquired from slavery carries any moral weight. After all, slavery is wrong because of what it does to individual people. If i take Stephen as a slave, deny him all rights, force him to work, beat him, rape him and then sell him on, how can it possibly make any difference if i make or lose £1000 from doing so? The moral abhorrence of slavery lies in the violence (on so many levels) done to the individual agent. Money can’t make it better or worse.
But if the objector wants to say that the difference is that African countries are too poor to pay reparations, or the African slavers have no links to the modern governments, then i have this to say. Firstly, I do not see how modern European governments can be more justifiably linked to slavers who operated over 200 years ago, save by the fact Europe has been fortunate enough to enjoy stable and continuing nation-states for the last 200 years (at least, for the most part. And i admit we did a lot to prevent such peace and prosperity as go with this from obtaining in Africa). But further, how can the fact European nations are richer be any kind of justification? If two men commit the same parking offence, we do not generally say the millionaire must pay his parking fine, but that the man who earns minimum wage need not (or though perhaps we should…rendering this perhaps a bad annalogy; Discuss [20]).
And this final point leads into my conclusion. Firstly, talk of direct apologies is nonsensical and by necessity hollow. The people doing the apologising were not slavers, and the people who are being apologised to are not slaves. The assignable guilt of slavery is now too distant to pin on any particular individuals, groups, nations or governments. For those whom slavery still affects through a psychological history a direct apology could not really mean anything; it would be hollow and dishonest. So any continued calls for direct-apologies-cum-admissions-of-guilt - usually leading to calls for reparations - cannot be, it seems to me, honestly motivated.
Rather they are motivated by greed; by an attempt to get money from rich European nations who can more easily afford to pay it. If this were not the case, a) why not demand reparations from African nations, however poor they are? and b) why ask for reparations at all? As i said above, how can reparations honestly do anything for the deep psychological harm i am sure slavery has done and continues to do for the descendants of African slaves?
The sad conclusion I find myself drawing is that the issue of slavery is being manipulated by a greedy few, who twist the issue away from examining our (often shameful) pasts and coming to terms with them, into a grab for money from the most likely to pay it. I think if there were any sincerity in the calls for reparations, then they would be pushing for all nations (perhaps especially those who benefited from slavery - European, African and American) to contribute and help the UN drive to rescue the estimated 8.5 million slaves in the world today, rather than trying to divert money to individuals who are not themselves now slaves.
To spell out the obvious: I am not a racist, and nor do I support slavery. Nor do i seek to be an apologist for European exploitation of other nations, upon which so much of our wealth is based. What i do support is honesty, clear-headed debate, and the looking to the future rather than the past, while never forgetting that we must of course remember our past to make a better future.
Incest and the Law Wednesday, Mar 7 2007
Europe and Sagar's Social Commentaries Paul Sagar 9:32 am
Interesting case currently being played out in Germany regarding incest laws.
It seems to me that in principle the state has no right to tell adult couples they cannot have sex with each other, regardless of whether they are brother and sister (or brother and brother, sister and sister for that matter).
So in that respect, the German law seems to me indefensible. Yet that is not the whole story, and the question of children of course arises. I am tempted to say that incest should be legal, but it should be illegal for siblings to have children. This seems justified because 50% of children born to parents who are siblings have disabilities – in the German case, the BBC article states that 2 out of 4 of those children have disabilities.
But it’s never going to be that simple. What if an incestual sister accidentally becomes pregnant? Does the state then have to insist upon an abortion? If she refuses the abortion, then must she go to prison and the child be placed in care? And how do you prove that it was accidental, by imposing mandatory birth control? Enforced vasectomy for the man, compulsory artificial birth control for the woman in the form of perhaps the pill? That raises some enormous civil rights violation issues, which i don’t think can be justified. There is nothing clean cut about this question.
It becomes even more difficult when we consider that there is no law against those with hereditary diseases (cystic fibrosis, Huntington’s disease etc) having children and gambling on their futures. Likewise women over 40 have a much higher chance of giving birth to disabled children, as are (in some cases) parents who are themselves disabled, but these groups are not prevented from having children.
So i am in something of a dilemma. On the one hand, i am tempted to say that we should prevent incestuous couples from having children, but on the other, i don’t see how such laws could be enforced consistently and fairly.
I suspect something like an answer lies in recognising that incest is not something that can be effectively regulated by law anyway. A couple committing incest will not stop or continue their activities because of what the law says they can do. Human emotions simply do not work like that – whatever certain people on the right will try and tell you, the law can only do so much to shape human beings. So rather than being geared to punish and criminalise such people, I suspect the law should be more directed towards helping, supporting and understanding this difficult, difficult issue.
But how the law should go about doing that, well i really don’t know.
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