Slavery Part 3 - or is it development?

After months of sweating on this, I'm going to put a post up, mostly because I said I would, and it's stopping me from writing other things. But I don't think it is the whole picture and I don't necessarily think it is correct either. There is more terrain to cover.

After this I promise I will give slavery a rest...
...for a while.

Ready? Got your hiking boots, thinking cap, and a thermos of hot tea?
Let's go.

There are three main moral perspectives on slavery in literature, philosophy and politics.

Either: 

1) Slavery as a social structure is morally justified. 

Standard reasons include:

a) There is a natural human hierarchy where some are leaders and others followers, and down the continuum the of followers are the slaves. This structure is usually defined by those in power in order to keep the status-quo.
b) Slaves are specifically defective individuals from a weak genetic line. It is the moral responsibility of the (evidently superior) slave owner to prevent them from starving to death in abject poverty.
c) Slaves somehow deserve their fate, whether from being a bad person (convicted criminals used in road crews or handling heavy metals); or from evil in a previous life (hello to some 1 billion Hindus and 400 million Buddhists); or because it's just God's will that they should suffer (hi to 2 billion Muslims and up to another billion fundamentalist & sectarian Christians).

This moral argument is a dead end: a self-referential moral system that states"I'm the boss because I am better" - where 'better' is the construction of those who hold power. This has been the dominant position for the largest slabs of recorded human history. In fact, the core of the whole social structure is dominance & submission. The dominant enforce submission, to the extreme. There is no argument, no dissent - unless you wish to challenge the dominant population and thus steal their dominance - and their slaves. This is what got Abraham Lincoln into such hot water.  Morally... neurochemico-morally... slavery structures are built into the core of individuals and groups who operate in this dominance & submission mode, and they cannot conceive otherwise.

Or

2) Slavery is inherently wrong.  

If you read the BBC's helpfully extracted sections of the Declaration of Human Rights (1948), it tells you what is right. Slavery is not.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) states that "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights" (Article 1) and that "no one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms" (Article 4).

This argument is morally sound but pragmatically impossible, at least in the current world. The closest we have come is in long-contaminated indigeonous populations, to whom slavery simply would not have occurred. I believe Polynesians didn't go in for slavery very much. Nor did Innuit. It's a little harder to find internationally connected populations who didn't at least tolerate slavery or its continuum of appallingly-indebted-servitude. A belligerent population of Louisiana circa 1900 held it together for a while in solidarity against slavery. Scandinavia in the late 20th century also gave it a shot. And there are many others - often short-lived (less than a century) and engaged in a war (literal or trade) with slave-running neighbours.
The modern frustration with this argument is that it skates close to communism, which is still a bit on the nose after the Cold War

3) Slavery is not really morally justified on a case-by-case basis, but the overarching structure of human societal hierarchy more or less requires slavery. 

To eliminate it is
a) too hard;
b) would would result in the destruction of particular valuable industries (hi to the world's 50 most powerful corporations),
c) threaten the core structure of civil society and result in anarchy and chaos (hi to anyone I've forgotten in India or China); or
d) jeopardise the personal fortunes of the very wealthy and powerful in any particular environment who hold the status quo intact. (hi to anyone in power)

This is not a moral position, but a pragmatic one. Stick your fingers in your ears and say "Lalalalaaaaa" and maybe the problem of child shoemakers in Cambodia will go away.

Or - think about it for six months and then subject your blog readers to the first chapter of a thesis - like this!

Each of these views assume that there are degrees of freedom to human actions, which may not be there due to a particular type of framing.

I am particularly interested in the idea of distasteful but pragmatic slavery. 

In my last post, I skimmed over how slavery has had - and continues to have - untold economic and technological benefits over the last 500 years. It has been core to trade and development. Many brilliant economists have also noticed this. I will only touch on the work of two. Then I promise I will get to the point.

Economist 1: Michael Spence: Five Steps from Slavery to Corpulence

Michael Spence won the 2001 Nobel prize for economics for his theory about globalisation and manufacturing. One part of his proposal was that a nation's production profile identifies its place in a nice clear sequence of 'economic development'. In other words, the stuff a country makes can tell you its progress on the path from the Dark Ages to the Cyber Age. Here's a summary - assuming the absence of war and corrupt totalitarian regimes, of course.

1. Remote rural subsistence populations live in the most abject poverty of all. If for some reason, cholera and malaria start to recede and children start surviving, these areas become more and more populous.
2. Manual-labour-intensive global manufacturing companies set up factories (or opaquely-owned subsidiaries with factories) in places where people live in overpopulated abject poverty. People work in sweatshops for 18 hours a day, making shoes and soccer balls and clothes. Children are preferred workers because they do fine hand-work. This triggers the companies to build shipping and transport infrastructure, to get the goods out of the production zone.
3. Bit by bit, along with infrastructure growth, the production systems get more sophisticated. Light industry develops: toy manufacturing and plastics extrusion. Automotive manufacturing moves in at this stage. More jobs are available; prosperity increases; a local demand for some goods arises (people can finally buy themselves shoes!). Workers might unionise a bit. The garment companies are gradually pushed out.
4. Some time later, as local demand starts to gain momentum, and visitors start coming, the physical environment gets cleaned up. Sewerage and stormwater systems are built. Chidren can stop working and go to school instead. Service industries flourish (restaurants, nail parlours, tourism) and retail becomes a substantial segment of the economy.
5. Later again, technology and finance picks up. Bit by bit, all manual manufacturing gets pushed out. The area becomes a net consumer. We call it "Developed" or "First World". People get fat and aspire to be investment bankers.
    

 

 

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Spence's argument says that Europe and America accomplished this progression during the 400 years of Triangular Trade. Post WW2, Asian nations are being watched for how they develop. Nations which started early with garment manufacture (Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan) progressed to cars within 30 years, and after another 20 years are now technological and financial powerhouses. Vietnam started later. Now it is losing its garment industry but is established a tourist destination and a car manufacturing centre. Bangladesh, which was a warring mess until about the 1980's, now has a strong garment industry. Both are developing on a much faster timeline. They are 'converging' on the established Asian centres.

(I have to mention China but it doesn't really fit. It is a multispeed and non-transparent complex entity in its own right, with both cyber-age and dark-age sections present in a single city at any given time. Even so, there seems to be convergence: there are very poor communities progressing through the steps above faster than their 1990s predecessors did.)

Now that Vietnam is progressing towards labour laws, it's the Bangladeshi garment workers who live like slaves. When they eventually start to buy shoes and possibly unionise, presumably more sweatshops will move to Turkmenistan, Nepal, or any of the more politically stable and less corrupt nations in the bottom third of this list.

Here's the rub.

This story requires that the rejected industries go somewhere else to abuse human beings. 

(One perspective is that it's an improvement for poor people in the rural subsistence or immediately-post-violent-totalitarian-regime locations where these labour-intensive industrues go. A sweatshop job is a good one. The pay reliably prevents starvation. 
Sitting on my couch in my comfortable modern house, I am not in a position to comment.)

Economist 2: Piles of Money Just Want to Get Bigger

Earlier this year, a French economist called Thomas Pikkety published a book which has had the political-economic world shaking in its boots a little. He apparently started out looking for data from the 20th century to empirically support either communism or capitalist democracy - and found neither. What he found is that capital (ie a pile of money) would normally just accumulate (i.e. the rich just get richer, and the gap between rich and poor just gets bigger and bigger) unless disrupted by an external force. The two forces he found are arbitrary redistribution (e.g. World War 2) or rampant and largely chaotic economic growth, in which Old Money can fall, and New Money can grow to a noticeable size (e.g. 1975 - 2008). After thousands of pages, Pikkety very gently almost-proposes that the most fair, equitable, humane, reasonable thing to put into policy, for the sake of the 5 billion really poor people on this earth, is to globally, unilaterally, and very heavily, tax the outrageous wealth of the 2 to 20 million very rich and redistribute it to everyone else.

I have not read the book yet.

I have read some reviews of the book. It really peeved the hard-line capitalist folk at the Wall Street Journal. The Guardian has social welfare tendancies and liked it much more. Everyone says it is well written, and packed with analysis of lots of data before it starts discussing any theory or personal  ideology.

I - like probably every other curious and loosely political person in the English and French speaking worlds - am planning to read it sometime in order to be up-to-date. It has the same transformative vibe Das Kapital or Mao's Little Red Book.

Pikkerty's book was good timing for the quality of socio-political discussion, which had been deteriorating. He proposes that our close-held or much-reviled political ideologies are, and always has been, profoundly empirically wrong (in the style of "Hey, cutting off your earlobe might prevent insomnia").

What if something else is actually behind the emergence and persistence of global slavery?

Earlier in this post, you may have noticed the following fragments dropped and left behind. I will pick them up, and put this out there without any cross-references, and say my thought. (Someone else may have said this but I haven't found them.)

I propose that slavery is not an action, it's not a choice, it's not a degree of freedom for anyone participating. Slavery is a symptom of a flawed framing system.

 Slavery is an emergent property of the complex global socioeconomic systems which pre-eminate property, capital and power. 
Where you have 

• standard dominance-and-submission modes of human relationships, and 
• financial wealth is key to being dominant, 

then slavery or de-facto slavery will eventually emerge.

Earlier I said:

• "The core of the whole social structure [surrounding, permitting and proliferating slavery] is dominance & submission."
• "This argument [that slavery is fundamentally wrong] is morally sound but pragmatically impossible"
• "[Spence places slavery in]....a nice clear sequence of 'economic development'"
• "[Pikkety's model] really peeved the hard-line capitalist folk..." 

My last post proposed that income inequality is broadly equivalent to slavery, and that we (ie anyone who has time and resources to read this blog) are benefiting from the fruits of that long-distance slavery.
I pored over this and looked for examples and counter-examples at any scale. I picked one of each here. My referencing is weak again. Sorry.


Since the 1970s, anthropology has been describing some leftover indigenous cultures globally which have quite different framings for property and capital.

• An anthropologist-adventure writer went on an adventure horseride among Mongolian tribes, and described in detail the rules around property, and these rules keep propertly 'loose' rather than 'tight'. I wish i could find the name of the book but I can't.
• When you meet a stranger or a neighbour and they give you a gift, you need to return an equivalent gift, because being in debt to anyone is too heavy a burden to carry.
• If a stranger asks you for something that you have, you give it, because they would not ask if they didn't need it. Likewise if you see that somebody needs something (especially food, water, shelter, healthcare for them or their animals), you give freely without being asked. 
• There is no word for thankyou. If it was a trade, both sides are happy and nobody is in debt. If it was a gift, next winter you may be the one needing help.
• There's not much point in large amounts of property anyway, because the Mongolian tribespeople are almost all nomadic.
• One who takes too much - ie needs too much help - is feeble-minded and a bit pathetic. Townspeople, landowners, and people who cannot move because they have too much stuff, are more like plants than people.
• Anthropologists and Aboriginal elders have been trying to explain their framing of property and time for many decades. I love reading this stuff too. (Hey, I love reading most stuff.)
• People belong to land, not vice-versa. 
• Personal property is not a useful construct. If you need something, you take it and carry it until you don't need it, then you put it down. No point carrying extra weight when moving a nomadic camp.
• Tribal territory is marked by water catchment, and authority is shared between tribes the benefit of the land, not the convenience of the human beings. The waterway is the core of the land, not the boundary. Much to my delight,Victoria's contemporary waterway management is returning to this framework.
• Objects hold impermanent value. When people are hungry, food is extremely valuable, and trade habits reflect this
• Time is not necessarily chronological, but based around episodes, stories, and patterns of things which happened in what we think of as the past and may or may not be repeated in what we think of as the present. (l did tell you that you'd need hiking boots and a thermos and a thermos of tea!).
  In language, chronology is a bit silly because the story is the story. If you are living a story (eg. angry childhood, or excessive generosity to neighbours, or adultery, or war) then you know how it is going to end. Might not be you, might be your kin. Everyone knows the story. Dreamtime isn't ancient legends, or the equivalent of Christian parables, or fairytales, it's a roadmap through the present. And stories of greediness or running slaves do not normally have a good ending.

While English-speaking "society" seems very homogeneous when moral philosophers, marketers or talkback radio participants start talking, there is enormous diversity between human beings and between families of human beings. Family lines hold patterns about framing and human behaviour, and I've been fascinated with them for a little while. I can't reference this except what is already in the public domain because this is some reasonably distasteful stuff about actual human beings.

• At the small scale, there are some families where being rich is very important: part of their framing, part of their meaning. Within the family, wealth is your measure of success, and your place in the hierarchy.
  Surprisingly often in these families, there is one family member or branch which never 'made it', and sometimes that family member ends up on the slavery continuum, serving the others. She (because it's most often a wife or a daughter) might bring food around to the elderly parents-in-law every day, and she will be relentlessly criticized and humiliated every time. She may be made to do the cleaning where the paid cleaner failed, she may be a childcarer, she will almost certainly burn energy running errands. She may be physically abused, and will certainly be verbally and emotionally abused. The family keeps it all secret - except when, for example, the court case goes public, or a golf caddy dies  or a victim speaks out These families also employ paid workers: maids, nannies, drivers etc. The rich and dominant do not normally abuse their employees in anything like the same way.
  The slave's only way out is to become rich in her own right. This is rare. If she does get to be rich, she will dominate and abuse the next generation's 'failure'.
  Poor and middle-class families with dominance-and-submission frameworks of relationship may also hide a slave. They also do horrible things. These do not always make it to the papers.
  This problem is not found in families where relationships are based on frameworks other than dominance. (They have other patterns of problems.)

So, smartypants, what's the way out? How can we re-frame slavery out of the world?

 Here's my plan. I don't know if it will work. I don't think many people will follow me except those who are already doing this.

1) Don't pre-eminate wealth or property.
Find some other construct which is more important than wealth or property. Examples include:

• Aesthetics and refinement (art, design, music, food, sculpture, the breeding of koi or the discussion of lost time in six epic volumes.) Such people and families rarely go in for full-scale slavery.
• Honour and pride -> risky because pride is quite close to superiority, which is dominance's half-sibling.
• Duty, responsibility, your sacred task to another vulnerable entity.
• Virtue and goodness -> also risky, also close to superiority. Might need to temper virtue with modestly.
• A specific multi-generational task, such as holding onto ethnicity or religious identity. If belonging and being 'who you are' is a lot of effort, wealth can be important but this task is pre-eminent.  (hi to busy religions such as Mormons, observant Jews, anyone who's done a Hajj, and eco-warriors protecting forests and oceans and such. Good plan, by the way.)
• Something random, like dragging giant statues across an island to look out over the water. (I have been wanting to use Carl's experiment in a blog post for ages! This is my excuse!)

2) Don't get sucked into dominance and submission. Don't obsess with promotions. Don't go into competition with the Joneses next door. Don't strut past the homeless guy, feeling too important to look down at him. Spot the feelings of superiority and inferiority creeping into your brain, and step on them them with the hiking boots that you're probably still wearing.

You can take the boots off now, by the way. I'm done. Got nuthin' else. My writing-about-slavery tank is empty.

As I said at the start, I don't necessarily think I'm correct and I know this is not the whole picture. I hope it was a little food for thought, though.

Built on Bones - Don't Ever Forget Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Before the promised post on 'Slavery Part 3 - Morality is Complicated' I have a compelling thought and so will take you on a detour on the subject of building on top of bones.

I posted a little while ago a thought on cemetaries,; essentially that a cemetary is a good thing. It's a sign of a safe, well-resourced community where we have a dedicated place to celebrate the dead. Here is another story about a cemetary; symbolically far less safe but utterly dedicated.

Members of my family have just come back from Hiroshima, and they brought back stories.

It would give me great honour to take you on a virtual stroll through two particular cemetaries in Hiroshima.

On the 6th of August, 1945, a uranium bomb with a yield of 16 kilotons was dropped and detonated at an altitude of 600m, just to the east of the T-bridge in the central city.

Here is a blast map from 1945, sourced from here.

Here is a modern Google map of central Hiroshima.

There are green spaces in the middle of the modern city, marked Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park and Central Park. You might guess that this is because it was previously reduced to rubble. You would be wrong.

In the <1km range, rubble is not an accurate description. There was a melted-matter slurry, where wood and stone and ceramic was fused with human flesh and clothing and hair. In the Hiroshima Museum, there are pieces of this slurry.

There were some survivors - for a little while. Burns were horrific, skin peeled off in ribbons. Often their clothes and posessions were fused to their bodies, and their hair had melted. Some were caught in the wreckage. Fires took hold very quickly and everyone who could leave, did so.

In the first few weeks there were few photographers, and very few non-Japanese witnesses or aid workers in the first two weeks. Later, some drew pictures. I am not easily disturbed but this is distubring. I am holding my breath as I am typing this, having found and read the stories under these pictures. You will notice I haven't included the pictures here. You can decide to follow the link, or not, for yourself.

Makeshift hospitals were set up at various places in the city. American military doctors arrived with orders to take notes on the effect of radiation sickness for military research - because it was presumably interesting to the CIA, and there was not much else they could do for the victims. Shinto burial is traditionally done by cremation, but this quickly became impossible. Corpses were stacked in the area of the Peace Park, and at various places throughout the city - quantities of human bones and skulls are periodically found, even very recently. 

In the 2-5km range, most structures survived but city infrastructure (eg. sewage, food, fresh water, roads) collapsed. Systemic radiation illnesses abounded. Survivors suffered a high incidence of leukemia, thyroid illness (cancer and autoimmune), A-bomb cataracts, other cancers (breast, lungs, salivary glands), high incidence of infertility for pubescent girls at the time of the blast, high incidence of birth defects, including mental retardation, for women pregnant at the time of, or in the year following the blast, plus, of course, disfiguring keloid scars.

Total casualty estimates are hard to determine. The Peace Park lists 130,000 dead in the blast, or wounded to die during the following week, and 50,000 dead over time as a consequence of injuries or illness from the blast. This is not a clean number. Deaths from cancer, thyroid and autoimmune disease throughout the last 50 years are measured higher in the Hiroshima area - but bomb survivors sometimes live into their 80's and 90's. And how do you count the effect of trauma, depression and PTSD, in a culture in which honourable suicide is not traditionally a problem?

Neither Hiroshima nor Nagasaki has elevated background radiation. The blast was airborne, so most of the remaining radioactive isotopes dissipated into the fallout and the atmosphere quite quickly. and surface contamination turned out to be minor. Additionally, many of the residual radioactivse isotopes had very short half-lives, decaying quickly. Current Hiroshima and Nagasaki hospitals have the same levels of radiation-related illness as the rest of Japan, and most of the world.
Bomb survivors (called Hibakusha) still suffer discrimination because of their disfigurement, and cruel rumours of contagious illness or inherited mutations. Children of Hibakusha can also be victims of discrimination. The Hibakusha are much older now, but they still actively and vociferously campaign against nuclear proliferation, and for stronger anti-discrimination legislation. Every year on the anniversaries of the Bombs, those Hibakusha who died during the last year have their names added to the books of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki dead.

Hiroshima survivor Sumiteru Taniguchi in 2004

Memorial Spaces in the Central City

The Peace Park and the Central Park were created by bringing in large quantities of soil to bury the smelted remains of the city.

The dome was famously left standing because it was directly under the blast and missed the destructive horizontal shockwave - it has been conserved, but not restored. Mature trees were transplanted into the centre of the city during reconstruction, and this was pioneering horticulture at the time. The central city is now green and modern; people go to work and fret about romance and eat lunch and laugh about the latest internet meme the way we do in every other city - but with possibly a hundred thousand ghosts in the soil under their feet.


When Mother Teresa visited the Peace Park in 1984, apparently she took her shoes off on arrival and walked barefoot, explaining to her entourage that she was walking on holy ground.

There are shrines and sculptures and memorials right through the Peace Park. In the Peace Museum, you can read messages from people who survived the Bomb, and people who visited the memorial.

The iconic photographs are of the memorial dome, the singed but intact watch stopped at 8:15AM, the child's bicycle, and the poem about the dragonfly:


but this one also touched me: the shadow of a person on a step from near the blast. This person left no body - just a few million atoms pressure-sprayed into the rock, as the rest vaporised.

Green spaces outside the blast zone

So after the intense experience of the Peace Park and Museum, my family retreated to the serenity of the Shukki-En Garden. The pictures apparently don't capture the living energy of this place. They sat under a tree, breathed the clean air, and watched the koi.

The guide then explained that in the weeks after the bomb, 20,000 people - severe burn and radiation victims - had also retreated up here, carrying family members and the bodies of their children, or looking for their children - because clean water was still available up here and it was a serene place to die. Nobody removed the corpses. Their bones are still here, under the younger trees and the lawn.

Names are Often Recorded in the Cemetary.

There are books of names. 

On the day my family was there, a memorial ceremony was being conducted. One man and two women were kneeling on the step of one of the memorials, methodically and silently turning the pages of books in the measured graceful style of the Japanese. There were about 150 books, bound in patterned paper, of around 500 pages each. Each page was crowded with names written in Kanji. A bank of schoolchildren and a few bystanders were sitting and watching

The guide explained that this was the list of the known dead - those missing or dead in the blast, those dead from radiation sickness, and each year the long-tem survivors who died from any cause of death are added to the list too.  Each name sees the light and the air once a year. The names were not read aloud. Turning the pages takes three people most of the day.

Slavery Part 2: The 21st Century is Built on Bones

Slave (slerv) - n

1) A person legally owned by another and having no freedom of action or right to property
2) A person who is forced to work for another against his will
3) (fig) A person under the domination of another person or some habit or influence: a slave to television

4) A person who works in harsh conditions for low pay
5) a. A device that is controlled by or that duplicates the action of another similar device (the master device)
    b. (as modifier): slave cylinder

Origin: via Old French from Medieval Latin Sclavus  a Slav, one held in bondage (from the fact that Slavonic races were frequently conquered in the Middle Ages), from Late Greek Sklabos a Slav
In current Western philosophy and literature and popular commentary, any form of slavery is considered to be, and to have always been, a Very Bad Thing, and now, happily, it's been completely eradicated, thanks largely to the Americans following the Civil War. 

Both parts of this statement are untrue.

• Slavery comes in many forms, and while most of them are morally indigestible, slavery is generally pretty good for the slave owners (from whom most of us descend at some point), and not all types of slavery are bad for the slaves*. There is a 2001-Nobel-prize winning model of economic development which argues that more-or-less-slavery is more-or-less responsible for modern life. which I will get to in due course, possibly in the next post because this one has taken me so long.
• Slavery has not been eradicated. True slavery - being legally owned by another human being and forced to work for no pay - is a normal condition of marriage for many of the world's women due to tradition, religion, or circumstance; and is part of normal life for most children in the developing world, and much of the rural and urban poor globally. We - those with computers and the leisure time to sit and read blogs on the internet - know this but deliberately and carefully forget it. We also deliberately forget that we benefit quite nicely from this in our day-to-day life. Furthermore, by the loose definition - working in harsh conditions for low pay - many of us have access to slave-type labour for our own benefit.

*"WHAT!" I hear you say. "You're so wrong! Slavery is always bad for the slaves!" Now hangonatic. You've followed me through several counter-intuitive ideas over the last few years. Give this one a chance too.

Slavery and Exploration

My children love the TV cartoon series "Octonauts". They are a collection of ocean explorers/ adventure heroes who live on a submarine called the Octopod, and undertake missions generally involving one real marine/aquatic species at a time, and something to do with their Mission Statement: "Explore - Rescue - Protect".

It's nice - boppy music, nothing violent, and now my kids have a reasonably comprehensive knowledge and fired-up curiosity about cone snails, gulper eels, triggerfish, several species of whale and of shark, various crustaceans, the Amazon River, and deep-ocean topographic features like trenches, hydrothermal vents etc. It does make their teachers a little bit crazy with their level of smartypants marine science knowledge.

One thing about this TV show has made me very uneasy for some time. I suspect all the domestic work on the Octopod is done by slaves.

Octonauts as Slave Owners

• I put it to you that the Vegimals (see that little yellow-headed fellow to the bottom left of that first picture, just above the Octonauts logo?) are the quintissential slave race. As explained in the episode 'A Very Vegimal Christmas' (which you don't have to watch unless curious about brine lakes and marine mucelage):
•     The Vegimals were brought into the Octopod in infancy, separated from their previous environment, and taught to serve the Octonauts.
•     They perform menial and service jobs, and are not paid for their labour (well, to be fair, financial renumeration of any kind is never discussed)
•     They are all but invisible the bulk of the time, they are not acknowledged by any plot device in any episode until roughly the end of the 2nd season, and this episode at the end of the 3rd season is the very first one in which they feature significantly.
•     Their leader - Tunip - is almost afforded the lowest-raking crew position, but not quite. This is a classic slave control tactic. He is Malcolm X's House Negro
•     Many of them have no names. A Wiki I found has a list of 16 vegimals but only 8 are in the episode. Some - like Wallabaga, Charchard, and Salapeno have never ever been named or even seen on the series (and I have watched the whole series). They might be field negros.
•     And the Vegimals are critical to the success of the Octopod's missions. Without someone else performing all the daily thankless tasks, Captain Barnacles, Kwazii, Peso and the others wouldn't be able to go on all their fabulous missions. In the words of Octonaut Chief Scientist Shellington: "I don't know what we'd do without the Vegimals". 
•     They sing as they work.

  The Octonauts got me thinking...

Slavery and Exploration - are they a natural partnership?

Exploration - the act of going far outside your territory to simply see what is out there - requires a (relative) large amount of resources. Risks to the explorers are high - the new environment often pushes the limits of survival. Resources - food, equipment, fuel - are taken from the community to support the explorers, and everything must be taken into the unknown, because it may not be available when you get there. The probability of the mission returning anything useful to the community is small, but when exploration pays off, it pays off megaloads. And glory shall be bestowed on the magnificent and triumphant explorer, or at least whichever explorer got the credit to stick to him.

I shall explore this with examples and stop when my indignation gets too hot.

 Mount Chomolungma

I remember reading about Sir Edmund Hillary reaching the top of Everest. There was a photo. In class, I wondered how he got a tripod up to the summit. My fat-headed yr 9 history teacher said "Oh, he probably balanced the camera on a rock or something, and used the auto-timer."
It was some years before I found out that Tenzing Norgay was actually the one in the photo, and that Hillary was the cameraman.

 
What I failed to appreciate until relatively recently is that although they each carried their own loads up the mountain, Tenzing and the other sherpas spent - and their descendants continue to spend - vast energy and time in the preceeding weeks hauling equipment and supplies for "explorers" for very little financial reward (this page suggests $5000/climb) and virtually no recognition.



Sir Edmund Hillary did understand this massive inequity, and he devoted a large part of the rest of his life and fortune to the sherpa community. the Sir Edmund Hilary Foundation runs a hospital and secondary schools and supports reforestation and sustainable adventure sport in Nepal.

Polar Exploration

You might think that polar exploration didn't have the same shameless exploitation of the native population as Everest. This is indisputably true. But all the polar expeditions were resourced by, and built on, colonial imperialism, and economic growth.

I found this paper which talks about the funding of Arctic expeditions, eg looking for the North West Passage, and mentions the South Polar expeditions in passing. They were a mixture of publicly and privately funded, but aside from a few oddball explorers like Amusden, they were heavily nationalistic and driven by imperial expansion or competitive advantage in trade. Empires - whether national or corporate - are prepared to finance risky exploration on the possibility of a rare but massive payoff. Also see my future blog post on imperialism, slavery triangular trade, and economic growth.

At risk of setting my bra on fire and waving it about, I would love to mention in passing the misogyny of exploration - and polar exploration in particular. I heard a radio interview with Jesse Blackadder, author of a historical novel about the first women in Antarctica, and she was quite scathing about the ongoing attitude that Antarctica is no place for women, she even called it something like ' the last refuge of machismo'. The first women there - and many women since - have had to fight hard and pull sneaky tricks to make it there to visit, let alone winter. A relative of mine who wintered there in the 1960's described to me that women weren't allowed to winter over, notuntil the mid 1980's. The reunions have an extremely small number of women at them. I also found interviews with Sara Wheeler, author of an account of her own winter in Antarctica on the American base, who made reference to the ingrained sexism, for example that the survival manual suggests that if bare skin contacts cold metal and sticks to it, the best way to remove the skin is to urinate on it. And my final piece of evidence, while the ashes of my bra swirl away in the breeze, is the very educational "Culture" page of the US Antarctic Program, complete with Shakespearean cross-dressing in the theatrical productions.

Depending on where you go and who is in your team, the summer gender ratio varies from 2:1 to 5:1, and the winter ratio from 8:1 to 80:1.

Special thanks to Messrs Bellingshausen, Scott, Shackleton, Amusden, Shackleton again, Amusden again, Byrd, and Hillary & Fuchs for taking government money, never acknowledging their wives, peeing on their own skin, eating their dogs, and dying or not dying as the during polar exploration.

The Age of Sail

No. Don't even get me started on the crimes against humanity from the five hundred years of European ocean exploration and colonisation. I sometimes get vivid nightmares about the trails of scurvy corpses from abducted sailors that would be left behind those ships, the spread of smallpox and panic and violence across continent after continent, and the magnitude and horror of the enslavement of native populations. There's a whole indignant post coming on the Triangular Trade. It is still in draft because I get so very angry while writing it.

The Moon

The Space Race was driven by Cold War imperialism and military aggressiveness. Not strictly slavery - although some of the Russian engineers may have had cause to dispute the line between coercion and enslavement - but on balance, I think the lunar and space programs have been the best of our human exploration endeavours. 

My brother has an autograph from an Australian astronaut, Andy Thomas. We found it in a box of old papers the other day. It's awesome.

I am running out of juice, even though I would also like to talk about mineral resource exploration, the history of aviation, and modern ocean exploration (both surface and deep). 

So I will stop yakking and ask you guys - all three of my readers - 


What do you think? Is exploration inextricably tied to slavery?