Muggles and Natural Slavery

In the Corner over at National Review Online, John Derbyshire writes a throwaway line that happens to capture much that I hate about the Harry Potter series of books:

That profound imaginative connection with the great void is one of the things that separates science fiction writers and fans from the unimaginative plodding mass of humanity — the Muggles.

Now Derbyshire would probably say I am reading too much into this one sentence, but our fundamental ideas are often most truly revealed in minor asides rather than grand disquisitions. The division of humanity into an elite minority of Wizards who "get it" and a mass majority of clods who "don't get it" is central to the Harry Potter universe; it is also the biggest reason I find the series repulsive and dangerous.

One of the benefits of reading Aristotle is that you learn what a truly "natural" view of the world is; and by natural, I mean a view of the world that comes to us purely from experience of the world unleavened by revelation (and in particular, the revelation of Christ.) Aristotle was a profound and insightful philosopher but one who had not heard the Christian Gospel - for the good reason that he was born before the birth of Christ. Aristotle gives us a picture of what the world most reasonably looks like without Christ.

One of the things that seemed obvious to Aristotle, as I have written about here and here, was that the world is divided into natural slaves and natural masters. There is the "unimaginative plodding mass" of humanity fit only to be slaves, and the minority of human beings born with uncommon talent who deserve, by right, to be masters. Aristotle is quite innocent and unembarrassed when he writes about natural slavery. In that sense, Aristotle is far more "natural" than the back-to-nature philosophers of today, who prefer to view nature through a sentimental mist rather than how it truly is. Why do we think there is something wrong with natural slavery? Not because secular philosophers, independently of exposure to the Christian Gospel, reflected on nature and read nature in a radically different manner than Aristotle. No philosopher outside the Western tradition or, in that tradition, prior to the revelation of Jesus Christ, drew the conclusion that slavery was itself against the natural law. No, slavery came to be seen to be wrong only in light of the "transvaluation of values" that happened in Jesus Christ, Who revealed that the poor, unimaginative and untalented man, the man "poor in spirit", is precisely the one most loved by God and most likely to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Jesus Christ subverted the order of values we naturally read from nature; He did not deny that the mass of humanity is unimaginative and plodding, but he raised mass man out of his obscurity as someone particularly beloved of God. It is the humble, unimaginative yet faithful old lady who patiently cleans the altar every Sunday who is really onto the secret of the Universe, rather than the brilliant science fiction writer or swashbuckling doer of great deeds.

As we move into our post-Christian future and the Gospel of Jesus Christ no longer informs our imaginations in a fundamental way, the old natural way of looking at the universe reasserts itself and reforms our imaginations. We go back to seeing the division between slaves and masters as natural and good, although we don't use the words "slaves" and "masters." Instead we use words like "Muggles" and "Wizards." Of course we object that Muggles are not slaves because they are not subject to Wizards or abused by them (at least by the good Wizards), as in the chattel slavery of the Old South. This is a reflection of our superficial understanding of slavery and the natural form of slavery as understood by Aristotle. The key distinction between the natural master and the natural slave is that the natural master lives in a world that takes very little notice of the natural slave. Aristotle doesn't have much to say about slaves other than what their place is in the well-run state. Life isn't about the insignificant lives of the multitude of slaves but the significant lives of masters; just as the Harry Potter world is about the significant lives of Wizards and only incidentally about the insignificant lives of the many more numerous Muggles. Muggles, like natural slaves, should be occasionally seen but never heard. Of course good Wizards do not abuse Muggles, as Aristotle would find it the height of vulgarity for a gentleman to abuse slaves. The good Wizard, like Aristotle's gentleman, has better things to do than waste his time on Muggles.

And Muggles certainly do serve Wizards in the manner of natural slaves. They run the humdrum, boring, mundane world that serves as a foundation on which the select, exciting world of Hogwarts is superimposed. They run the trains and sweep out the subway stations that Wizards use to travel to their secret world. Just as slaves raised the children of citizens in ancient Greece, so Muggles raise Wizards until they are of age, when they are summarily called by the Hogwarts authorities, who brook no dissent from Muggles anymore than an ancient Athenian would from a slave. Hermione Granger's parents are the ideal type of natural slaves. They raise their daughter on their own resources, then in complacent docility turn her over to a boarding school of which they are required to remain ignorant. They aren't even allowed to know how she gets to the boarding school. Like good natural slaves, they are just grateful that their daughter has been allowed to enter the elite world of the masters even if it means an unbridgeable gulf between them. The Dursleys, on the other hand, are the archetype of bad natural slaves. They fit the stereotype of the natural slave defined by Aristotle; they are ignorant, vulgar, and dominated by their lower appetites. Most unbecoming for natural slaves, they do not know their place with respect to masters. After raising Harry Potter from an infant, Vernon Dursley has the gall to think that he has a right to a say in Potter's future. Hagrid, the "gentle" gardener from Hogwarts, explodes in anger at his impertinence and puts him in his place with a firm dose of magic. Afterwards Hagrid expresses the regret of the natural master, ruing not the fact that he violently attacked a Muggle (and a small boy at that), but that he allowed himself to be so upset by, of all things, a Muggle.

The Potter books are propaganda for a post-Christian imagination. If you wish to raise Christian children, then raise them with Christian imaginations, the best explanation of which can be found in Chesterton's Orthodoxy (see, in particular the chapter The Ethics of Elfland.)

Natural Slavery II

The issue of natural slavery came to mind while I was reading The End of Faith by Sam Harris. In Ch. 1, Harris proposes a thought experiment in which we imagine that we are suddenly totally ignorant:

What if all our knowledge about the world were suddenly to disappear? Imagine that six billion of us wake up tomorrow morning in a state of utter ignorance and confusion. Our books and computers are still here, but we can't make heads or tails of their contents. We have even forgotten how to driver our cars and brush our teeth. What knowledge would we want to reclaim first? Well, there's that business about growing food and building shelter that we would want to get reacquainted with. We would want to relearn how to use and repair many of our machines. Learning to understand spoken and written language would also be a top priority, given that these skills are necessary for acquiring most others. When in this process of reclaiming our humanity will it be important to know that Jesus was born of a virgin? Or that he was resurrected?

The last two questions are rhetorical, of course, because Harris takes the answers to be obvious: Never in this process will it seem important to us to know that Jesus was born of a virgin or resurrected. Harris is right - but not for the reasons he thinks, and the implications of the negative answer are not what he thinks they are. Harris takes it for granted that a negative answer means that the Gospel is unnecessary and may be safely forgotten. To the contrary, the negative answer implies that the Gospel is absolutely necessary and is only forgotten at our peril.

Harris has not thought deeply enough about the meaning of thorough-going ignorance. We learn from Socrates that ignorance, in its deepest aspect, is ignorant of itself. When we are ignorant, we not only don't know something, we also don't know that we don't know it. Harris asks the question "What knowledge would we want to reclaim first," but his question implies that we already are knowledgeable. It implies that his state of "utter ignorance" isn't really utterly ignorant, for in it we are not only aware that we are ignorant, but we are aware of precisely in what our ignorance consists. He imagines us reacquiring knowledge as though we were browsing a supermarket, picking and choosing the items we wish to know. But on what basis does the ignorant man decide what is important to know and what is not important to know?

Necessity will certainly teach him the importance of knowing certain things, like acquiring food and shelter. Man naturally knows the objects of certain desires, like hunger, thirst and the desire for shelter. He doesn't have to be taught to eat or drink. But what about those machines, like automobiles and computers, which are not the direct objects of natural desire and are utterly baffling to the ignorant man? Harris simply says that "We would want to relearn how to use and repair many of our machines", but this only follows on the assumption that we not only know what the machines are for, but that we know that the ends for which they can be used are valuable. But the ignorant man doesn't know such things. Even something as simple as a toothbrush; how will we know what it is for and that it is important to brush our teeth? We will be as ignorant of dental hygiene as anything else.

Necessity drives the quest for knowledge only so far. The necessities of life can be met without knowing most of what modern man knows, as demonstrated by civilizations throughout history. Most civilizations reach a certain level of knowledge and then stay there indefinitely, as Chinese civilization had not significantly changed for thousands of years prior to its encounter with the Western world in early modernity. The civilizations of Polynesia and Africa similarly puttered along serenely for thousands of years at the same level of knowledge and technology, and probably would have continued doing so had they not met Western man and his startling technology.

No, Harris does not have it quite right. In the utterly ignorant state he supposes, we would see no need to learn that Jesus was born of a virgin or was resurrected. But neither would we see a need to learn how to use computers, or to learn the scientific method, or to learn much more than is necessary to maintain a basic level of civilization that allows us to survive. That is the general lesson of history. Even the civilization of Socrates and Aristotle that became aware of its own ignorance (but not exactly what it was ignorant of), never really took off. Philosophers felt the hunger for knowledge, but their hunger was always viewed as eccentric and never qualified the civilization as a whole.

In only one civilization, at one moment in history, was this pattern broken and man came to know things far beyond the necessities of survival. That civilization, as it happens, is also the civilization that was founded on the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It is not unreasonable for us to suspect that there is a connection between these two facts. Perhaps it is only because we knew that Jesus was born of a virgin and was resurrected that we later came to know things like automobiles and dental hygiene.

The Church was commanded by Jesus Christ to teach the Gospel throughout the world, that the "repentance and remission of sins should be preached in his name to all the nations..." Now you can preach the Gospel to all nations only if you, in fact, know all nations and are able to get to them. The Christian Gospel in its origin involves a divine summons to know and explore the world. Tradition holds that many of the Apostles died in foreign lands (e.g. St. Thomas in India, I believe). It isn't long after his conversion that Paul, the first great missionary, sets out from the Palestine he had known his whole life to tramp to the ends of the Roman Empire. The Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles are basically a travelogue of Paul's journeys around the Empire.

The outward-looking and exploratory character of Western civilization owes its origin to Jesus Christ. Western man did not develop the science and technology necessary to understand the world simply as an end in itself; he developed it as a means to achieving the religious mission to which he had been set by God. You can preach to the ends of the Earth only if you have the ships and navigational technique to get there.

But there is something more than this. Jesus Christ is the Word made Flesh. He is Knowledge Itself made flesh. So to know Jesus Christ, we must know the Flesh of which He is made. It follows that knowing the world is also a way of knowing God. More than this, we can't know God unless we truly know the world. Throughout Christian history, there has always been this dual aspect to the quest for knowledge: Knowing the world is not only good for its own sake, but we know and glorify God in coming to know the world He has made. Christian man cannot rest in knowing enough to know how to survive; he has been given a divine summons to explore the world and know it so that he not only can preach the Gospel, but also that he may know God more fully.

What about the natural slavery I mentioned at the beginning of this essay? Sam Harris mentions some things to which "we could never return with a clear conscience." Among them he mentions the caste system and slavery. As I remarked in that earlier post, it is only Christian-inspired Western civilization that has actively abolished slavery. All other civilizations, illuminated only by the light of natural knowledge, never saw anything wrong with slavery per se. So in Harris's hypothesized state of utter ignorance, we would be utterly ignorant of the immorality of slavery. And given that non-Christian civilizations never arrive at the conclusion that slavery in and of itself is wrong, we can safely suppose that neither in Harris's hypothesis would we ever conclude that slavery is wrong, no matter how much science and technology we relearned. We might return to slavery but we would do it with a clear conscience, for our conscience would be ignorant.

Natural slavery

We are all familiar with the fact that Aristotle thought that some people are natural slaves. But I don’t think we always think through the full implications of what Aristotle was saying.

For Aristotle, nature is the active, vital principle in something that makes it what it is. It is the fundamental driving force that directs an organism’s development in one direction rather than another. To say that someone is a natural slave, then, means that his nature tends toward slavery. In a real but perhaps unconscious manner, he desires to be a slave. Just as a ball will naturally roll down a hill unless something prevents it from doing so, so the natural slave will gravitate toward slavery unless something prevents him from doing so.

Now it was self-evident for Aristotle that nature should be fulfilled rather than thwarted. If some people are natural slaves, then it is right and good that their natures should be fulfilled in slavery. Before we leap up in outrage, we should understand that Aristotle means by “slavery” something a bit different than what we normally understand by it. When we think of “slavery”, we think of the modern institution of pure exploitation. We think of the Spanish capturing Africans and dragging them to the New World to work on plantations until they dropped. The Spanish, as well as the later English, Dutch and American slave traders, were not motivated by an Aristotelian understanding of slavery. They were motivated by the lure of pure profit and the slaves were entirely expendable in pursuit of that profit.

Aristotle’s understanding of slavery is not that of an institution of simple exploitation. It is something that should work for the benefit of both master and slave. It is an example of the “ruler/ruled” relationship that Aristotle finds everywhere in life; he sees the master/slave relationship as analogous with the father/son relationship. If we must find a modern image of Aristotelian slavery, then probably the best is the “noble obligation” that British colonialists felt in their rule over India. The British thought that their superiority of culture gave them the right to conquer and rule over India, but also that it carried with it the obligation to rule for the benefit of the Indians as well as themselves; a very Aristotelian view of things.

My point in the present essay is not to argue whether the Aristotelian institution of slavery is just, or whether the British rule of India was ultimately good or bad for that subcontinent. It is to ask the question: Was Aristotle right that some people are natural slaves?

I have argued in an earlier post that most people want to be told what to do. That is an admission, I suppose, that I believe Aristotle was right that there are such things as natural slaves; even that most people are by nature slaves. But that doesn’t mean that I am any less dedicated to the proposition that all men should be free. It does mean that I think that making men free, and keeping them that way, is a lot harder than we suppose it to be. We are running against the grain of their natures.

If some men are by nature slaves, and nature should be fulfilled rather than thwarted, then how do we avoid Aristotle’s conclusion that slavery is just or, at least, that it is inevitable? There is one possibility: Men must be given a new nature, a nature that is naturally free rather than inclined to slavery. This is the nature that Jesus Christ offers us through being re-born in Him. It is in this way that the Gospel is the true foundation of every kind of freedom in the world, including political freedom. It is also the reason that, as Christianity declines in the Western world, political freedom declines with it. Western man is returning to his old nature of a natural slave. In his depths he no longer desires to be free, but only that someone will tell him what to do and relieve him of the burdens of freedom.

It is often remarked that nowhere in the New Testament is there an explicit condemnation of the institutions of slavery. This is because Jesus Christ was after a much deeper target; he was after the natural slavery that is in the heart of every man. An attack on the public institutions of slavery is meaningless without a change in the natural inclination man has toward slavery; a new institution of slavery would soon be built on the rubble of the last. Once man’s original slave-nature is re-born in the free-nature found in Jesus Christ, conventional slavery will eventually disappear as a matter of course; for it will no longer be based on nature. Western history bears this out. The Western world once took slavery for granted, as every civilization has, but the Western world is the only one that eventually actively abolished it; and that for the reason that it had become unnatural.

We see the beginnings of true freedom in the Book of Exodus. Moses leads the Hebrews out of slavery in Egypt, but it is by way of summons and command. Many times they demand that Moses turn back; they want to go back to slavery in Egypt. They are still natural slaves. But God forces them out of slavery and into freedom; a feat of such irony that only God could pull it off. God’s Law is a law of freedom but it is not perceived as such. One day in seven must be set aside from the demands of the world and be a day of rest. It is, in fact, a day of true freedom, a day of freedom for slaves as well as masters.

The Old Testament is a preparation for the true freedom that is found in Jesus Christ, the true freedom that can only be found by being re-born in a new nature. The nature of this new freedom is wonderfully expressed in St. Paul’s letter to Philemon. Paul does not demand that Philemon free Onesimus. He does not attack the institution of slavery directly. But he asks Philemon to reconsider the meaning of slavery in light of the new life into which he, Paul and Onesimus have been born.

For perhaps he was therefore parted from thee for a season, that thou shouldest have him for ever; no longer as a servant, but more than a servant, a brother beloved, specially to me, but how much rather to thee, both in the flesh and in the Lord.

Onesimus was once just “a servant”, a natural slave. Now he is “more than a servant”, a man born into a new freedom in Jesus Christ, and Paul asks Philemon to respect that freedom. What meaning can conventional slavery have when its foundation in natural slavery has been overthrown by Christ? Paul is not asking Philemon to go against the grain of nature. He is asking Philemon to fulfill what has now become natural for Paul, Philemon and Onesimus: To be free.