Slavery and human short term memory

More on how to use faith and reasoning, and discernment, in order to be scholarly about difficult and complex topics. Here is an analogy to use as a tool before further discussion.

I mentioned how slavery was a human developed economic tool and also, in a perverse way, a form of mercy where humans would not kill each and every member of a conquered people but would keep some, if not all, as slaves. That does not make it "OK," and certainly not in God's eyes. But you cannot discuss something if you do not understand the rudimentary facts about life during the times under discussion.

Humans have very short term memory and therefore lack full understanding and context of events that take place even a decade earlier. Obvious examples are kids who do not know what society without computers is like, adults who do not remember World War I or increasingly, as they die off, World War II. That's fine and normal, because how can adults or children understand times they did not live within? But what is not right is to claim that you have special understanding of those times when you cannot and you do not. Humans, both scholars and "the man and woman in the street" have lost their humility about finding out what life was like "back then," before opening their mouths and forming an opinion. Here is a simple analogy and example.

For decades now if people need butter or margarine they buy it in the store. But for thousands of years that was not the way it was, even though butter was an essential part of human diet and survival. Wow, what did they do without the local grocery store?

They used a device called a "butter churn." Each farm or family household had one. It's like a narrow barrel with a grooved rod that reaches into it through the lid on top. Milk would be poured into the barrel. The human would then force the rod up and down for hours on end into the milk in the barrel. Think of it like a piston in a car, except it had to be moved up and down by hand and it was tedious and laborious work. It took days to produce butter. (The way it works is that the movement of the rod agitates the milk so that air bubbles and excess water are driven out of the milk. What is left gradually shrinks and thickens until it is butter). So it would take hours of laborious work over a period of days just to produce one batch of butter, and each household was responsible for producing its own.

I give this as just one example of a huge labor that every household (slave or free) had to do for centuries of human existence to produce one basic food (and I'm not even mentioning all the labor required for the keeping of the milk producing animals in the first place). I want you to just think about this one common food because then you can imagine how all foods and all the substances of life (clothes and shelter) required the same amount of back breaking labor over a period of days.

When I was growing up the use of butter churns, just for this one example, was well within a family's memory. Everyone had a grandmother who remembered back breaking work she did either as a child or adult as her share of producing a basic food. So I mention this because as humans have "progressed," they actually have lost much understanding of how life without "modern conveniences" really is in truth. And yet they are encouraged in schools and by squishy thinking liberals to be judgmental of how humans lived in prior eras without doing any understanding of the basics. Again, this is not an excuse. But when so much labor is required to produce even food basics for every family, slave or free, people had a vastly different mindset about who would do what work. Slaves in good households were able to take a share of what they produced back to their own families. I am giving this just as an example of how young people today need to understand how people all had a "do what is needed to be done" attitude. So if a people were conquered, and instead of being slain, they were made slaves and sent to the fields to grow food, people had a different attitude about their fate than they would today.

For example, look back to the Bible. How did some of the children of Abraham end up as slaves in Egypt? They went there willingly to save their lives as refugees from famine. Joseph had stockpiled food in Egypt and while he himself was sold into slavery by his own brothers, when famine gripped the Middle East regions, he allowed his family (hence the future Israelites), to come to Egypt and live on the food of Egypt. They would have died without going to Egypt. And so as they remained in Egypt they became slaves over the years. People willingly went into a slavery situation (having sold their own brother as a slave in the years before) in order to survive a seven year famine.

So I thought this would be helpful for people today who try to understand their ancestors in ancient times, especially very troubling activities such as slavery, to remember that humans throughout history have had to constantly work in order to even eat, have water and survive. Social systems, like it or not, evolved out of that reality. It's the same as thinking about child labor of several hundred years ago. Trust me, as soon as a child was strong enough they were working the family butter churn. This is just one example of a very complex evolution in human society and development, but I thought it would be helpful to young people who read my blog, and who realize that they have been detached from much of the day to day common sense understanding of how human life was over the past several thousand years until very recently. And now you can understand how questionable modern day "slavery" is, when it exploits poverty or vulnerability for the entertainment industy, rather than being a societal shared value (like it or not) for basic economic survival.

I hope you find this helpful.