Ellendra wrote:
cyberscan wrote:
One thing that people need to be aware of is that slavery is not just in Africa or the Middle East. It is also right here in the United States of America. Human trafficking is almost as big as trafficking in drugs. Most of the people enslaved here in the United States are forced to work as prostitutes, domestic servants, field hands, and other jobs where they can be hidden from the public. Slavery exists right under our noses, and most people are completely unaware.
Many of these people are kept in slavery because they don't know our language, because they are told they will be jailed for life, and because of threats against their families in their native countries.
The idea that slavery is bad is also a relatively recent developement in human history. For thousands of years, owning a slave was as acceptable as owning a computer. In some cultures it was even viewed as an honorable alternative to poverty, sometimes people would voluntarily offer themselves as slaves rather than starve. I have often wondered if, 200 years from now, we will be judged harshly for the way we treat our computers as slaves?
(I should probably add, the above is in NO WAY to be taken as support for slavery. It is an evil practice and should be abolished.)
Historically incorrect. Slavery was never consistently or universally opposed in pre-modern times but it was opposed by some at almost every point in recorded history - and it was almost universally seen as unnatural. The Romans, for example, believed slavery violated natural law, but, that the laws of states took precedence and slavery was a necessary evil (
quod ad ius naturale attinet, omnes homines aequales sunt, with regard to the natural law, all men are equal).
In medieval times, slavery largely disappeared in Western Europe; feudalism economically rendered it an obsolete institution. It still existed, but it took a limited form. Christians were banned under threat of excommunication from owning Christian slaves, and the practice of owning foreign slaves happened but only rarely because it, too, was frowned upon. Eventually there were moves in the late middle ages to abolish slavery completely; Poland, for instance, outlawed all slavery in the 15th century and the papal bull Sublimus Dei, in 1537, banned all slavery on threat of excommunication:
We define and declare by these Our letters, or by any translation thereof signed by any notary public and sealed with the seal of any ecclesiastical dignitary, to which the same credit shall be given as to the originals, that, notwithstanding whatever may have been or may be said to the contrary, the said Indians and all other people who may later be discovered by Christians, are by no means to be deprived of their liberty or the possession of their property, even though they be outside the faith of Jesus Christ; and that they may and should, freely and legitimately, enjoy their liberty and the possession of their property; nor should they be in any way enslaved; should the contrary happen, it shall be null and have no effect.
Nevertheless the Church itself continued to own slaves after passage of Sublimus Dei and just a few years later, annuled Sublimus. Less than a decade later, 1545, the same Pope affirms the right of people in the city of Rome to own slaves, and in 1547 sanctions the enslavement of King Henry VIII, and a year later, purchases some Muslim slaves. Basically it was regarded as wrong but they did it anyway, and as a consequence there was political support both for and against. Looking at something like Sublimus Dei you are looking at the Church navigating the politics of the situation - they publish Sublimus to appease a powerful movement against slavery (being led mainly by King Charles V and the bishop Bartolome de las Casas), but later switch tack according to political expedience.
Indeed, although slavery did exist for thousands of years, for tens of thousands before that, it was unknown. Hunter-gatherer societies never developed slavery; it seems to have been a novel institution, introduced at some point after more complex societies began to develop.
18 Mar 2012, 11:47 pm
