Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

17 0 DEBT
Haitian zombie stories, all seem to play on this essential horror of slavery:
the fact that it's a kind of living death.
In a book called Slavery and Social Death-surely the most profound
comparative study of the institution yet written-Orlando Patterson
works out exactly what it has meant to be so completely and
absolutely ripped from one's contextY First of all, he emphasizes, slavery
is unlike any other form of human relation because it is not a
moral relation. Slave-owners might dress it up in all sorts of legalistic
or paternalistic language, but really this is just window-dressing and no
one really believes it; really, it is a relation based purely on violence;
a slave must obey because if he doesn't, he can be beaten, tortured, or
killed, and everyone is perfectly well aware of this. Second of all, being
socially dead means that a slave has no binding moral relations with
anyone else: he is alienated from his ancestors, community, family,
clan, city; he cannot make contracts or meaningful promises, except at
the whim of his master; even if he acquires a family, it can be broken
up at any time. The relation of pure force that attached him to his master
was hence the only human relationship that ultimately mattered. As
a result-and this is the third essential element-the slave's situation
was one of utter degradation. Hence the Mande warrior's slap: the
captive, having refused his one final chance to save his honor by killing
himself, must recognize that he will now be considered an entirely
contemptible being.12
Yet at the same time, this ability to strip others of their dignity
becomes, for the master, the foundation of his honor. As Patterson
notes, there have been places-the Islamic world affords numerous
examples-where slaves are not even put to work for profit; instead,
rich men make a point of surrounding themselves with battalions of
slave retainers simply for reasons of status, as tokens of their magnificence
and nothing else.
It seems to me that this is precisely what gives honor its notoriously
fragile quality. Men of honor tend to combine a sense of total
ease and self-assurance, which comes with the habit of command, with
a notorious jumpiness, a heightened sensitivity to slights and insults,
the feeling that a man (and it is almost always a man) is somehow
reduced, humiliated, if any "debt of honor" is allowed to go unpaid.
This is because honor is not the same as dignity. One might even say:
honor is surplus dignity. It is that heightened consciousness of power,
and its dangers, that comes from having stripped away the power and
dignity of others; or at the very least, from the knowledge that one
is capable of doing so. At its simplest, honor is that excess dignity
that must be defended with the knife or sword (violent men, as we