A good class tonight in Western Civ. (Of course aceing my exam helped!) But after working last week on Voltaire’s Candide, and looking into the purpose of man, his nature–good or evil, and whether it can be overcome by free will, tonight’s lecture brought up the serfdom of the Russian 18th century and I couldn’t help but question if there truly is a human capacity for evil.
Easily compared in many ways to the slavery of the New World, it was pointed out that the main difference was racial. The practice in both America and Russia was to treat slaves/serfs as possessions, and I questioned the ethnicity of the serfs, thinking perhaps that they were in fact vanquished peoples, but they were pretty much as Russian as their boyar owners. Shall we look then at the Russian boyars as worse to treat their own in such a manner? No, people are people. I suggest that there is a possibility that what happened in North America may not necessarily be a racial issue. What if the people in Africa were not in fact dark-skinned–would it have made a difference?
Is it not possible that it is more a case of the strong overtaking the weak, the more "civilized" progressive, supposedly "advanced" society looking upon a less structured and more primitive society as inferior? The simpler people live (though I certainly would not say it is a worse way to live) in a closeness with nature, still have the ties to the earth. This, by those more educated in the times, may have been looked upon as being "uncivilized" and look no further at their culture other than to remark it as backward. Even today, we have a tendency to look down our noses at those who may not be as eloquent, or masterful of our own language. We call people rednecks or ignorant, when it merely means they live diffently and have different values than those in control. This, combined with the need for labor in the fields in two countries where land was plentiful (you can’t have twenty slaves in a townhouse), may be more the thinking behind slavery and serfdom. May indeed be man’s own nature to use and manipulate those he feels are beneath him, not judged by color necessarily, but by thinking that if you cook over a rock pit you’re not as civilized as those who cook on a stove.
Whatever, it’s just a line of thinking to try to comprehend what could possibly drive man to mistreat his brother so. Another thought wanders in–the Europeans coming to America and finding the native Indians. What uncivilized savages they must have seemed! Though I clearly might prefer that long lost lifestyle to what we deal with today. But the Indians fared much worse; they weren’t even considered as slaves. They were merely slaughtered.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology