Putting the reader in the master's perspective certainly is a choice.
It fails to investigate that almost anyone in its ostensible audience of corporate managers is both a "master" and "slave" (mangers have managers).
An incredibly grim takeaway as well. It acknowledges the exploitation in both systems, but doesn't ask you to do anything about it or interrogate it deeper. There's no way that you're being exploited, just the poor saps that work for you. It's not wrong to exploit, just honest.
You definitely have to be opened minded in order to read this.
I can see how this could be offensive or distasteful but from a purely academic point of view it's interesting to see that a master-slave relationship was more than a contractual relationship. Leadership was just as important in that relationship as it is in a manager-employee relationship. And although we have since abolished slavery, we will always need leadership skills.
If your mind is open and is able to understand nuance (able to keep similar concepts separate amid complexity) then you can learn from history and take lessons from the masters (bad joke).
Well, there was nothing contractual about this relationship: you have no contract with your property.
A related rant. Being a wage worker is historically strictly better than being a peasant, as you can go wherever and leave your employer whenever you want; being a peasant was also strictly better than being a slave, since you're not property, are tied to a place (and cannot be just moved wherever), have legal personhood and duties limited by public law. That people like to conflate all this muddles actual historical progress and also prevents people from real analysis and improvement of their situation. I don't think that the current situation of wage workers will be something accepted by people long term, assuming civilization progresses. But to deconstruct the bad parts of social machinery they need to understand it beyond slogans, otherwise they can be made content with different slogans. /rant
In a sense, the free person's (and therefore, often a master's) perspective is the only one relevant to the present inhabitants of First/Second World countries. You are emphatically not a slave, can have no remotely close experience and can only cultivate memories for ethical reasons. That being said, I don't think there is anything to "learn" from ancient managers of slaves either, because hopefully you can never be in that sort of situation. Romanticizing of slave and peasant relationships also exists, and is obviously BS, although not something that people are tending to push openly with the current swing of cultural pendulum.
> Being a wage worker is historically strictly better than being a peasant... being a peasant was also strictly better than being a slave
What's next? Shall we unite the concept of citizenship and the concept of economic freedom? Perhaps with something like a citizen's dividend? A freedom dividend you might say?
you actually have to be close-minded to read this favorably, an open-minded reading would be to consider the "slaves" as people whose rights are being violated
Close/open-mindedness isn't about being morally wrong/right. It's about holding a vile idea in your head long enough to see its various facets. To study it and understand it.
Openmindedness here means being able to understand that slavery is wrong at the same time you study what it reveals about the human condition. To be clear, no one in this thread has argued that slavery was good. If you think that, then maybe it's a sign that you're not separating subtle ideas well enough.
If you "[hold] a vile idea in your head" but only look at the aspects of the vile idea that would benefit you then you've chosen to ignore a pretty huge facet of the idea.
Yep. You got it. And I would go further - not just ignore but reject. That’s what is meant by separating ideas. You find what is orthogonal and keep what is useful.
All cultures have differing views on rights. So any culture will have elements that I see people whose rights are being violated. I guess I will have to avoid reading anything about them, unless the author takes an appropriately moralistic and judgmental tone, of course. I have to assume that I am right and everybody else is wrong. It's the only way to be open minded.
> you actually have to be close-minded to read this favorably, an open-minded reading would be to consider the "slaves" as people whose rights are being violated
People who agree with you are open-minded. People who don't agree with you are close-minded.
Think about the risks! Anything your slave does that damages other people's properties or causes them to lose life or limb is your responsibility.
Those poor masters.
Seriously, anything that attempts to be 'open minded' about slavery starts off on the wrong premise: that there are useful lessons to be learned there about human interaction. It's a well that is so thoroughly poisoned that it is probably better to stay away from it lest you be infected.
There is merely a step away from arguing for 'wrongthink' as a policy. Ideas should be examined, thoroughly and openly. Staying away does the opposite to the goal you may want to achieve.
Suggesting that ideas can corrupt is especially troubling on HN, which is supposed to be more focused on rational/logical discourse.
> Suggesting that ideas can corrupt is especially troubling on HN, which is supposed to be more focused on rational/logical discourse.
But they can.
Religion, racism, terrorism, fascism: they are all ideas that can corrupt, and some people are more susceptible to this than others. If you find that you are at the end of your wits and unable to find one more source for management advice to the point that you have to turn to the masters of slaves of a few thousand years ago I think you should simply stop looking because nothing good can come of that.
Ideas do not exist in a vacuum, they exist in a timeframe as well as what was considered locally acceptable and those conditions all but ensure that anything that you think you might learn is going to be very hard to apply.
We study history to avoid repetitions, not to see what particular item certain despicable people from the past had to say.
For an encore: Sex tips by rapists, explosive manufacture by suicide bombers, vegetarian cooking by A. Hitler, marketing tips from J. Goebbels and how to run a start-up by Elizabeth Holmes.
> If you find that you are at the end of your wits and unable to find one more source for management advice to the point that you have to turn to the masters of slaves of a few thousand years ago
I think you've interpreted the article as some kind of prescriptive document modeled on slavery.
This isn't Business Insider. It's Aeon.
If anything the article comes across as critical of modern management by way of being too similar to Roman slave management.
But it's more interesting than that. It's a look at how Roman slavery was a very complex system, much different from the way we popularly imagine "Slavery" (with a capital "S")--AKA American chattel slavery.
I think that your revulsion is coming from a very beautiful place, and that you're a bit out of step here. We can rightly revile chattel slavery, and despise the thought of ancient slavery, and also be curious about it.
"For an encore: Sex tips by rapists, explosive manufacture by suicide bombers, vegetarian cooking by A. Hitler, marketing tips from J. Goebbels and how to run a start-up by Elizabeth Holmes."
I understand that you wrote it in jest, but isn't Goebbels studied precisely due to the nature of marketing ( propaganda ) he employed? I personally find it interesting. Why does association work so well? Why does it automatically follow that if Hitler wrote an absolutely spectacular vegan recipe that basically cures cancer, it is automatically off limits to everyone?
Before you answer, note that Americans brought some actual Nazi scientists after WW2(operation paperclip). Should US have done without?
The US (and Russian, by the way) appropriation of German scientists and Nazi party members post WWII is certainly controversial and there are plenty of people who strongly believe that they should have stood trial in Nuremberg instead of being given a new job with plenty of perks.
As Tom Lehrer wrote:
"Don't say that he's hypocritical,
Say rather that he's apolitical.
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That's not my department, " says Wernher von Braun."
The sarcasm dripping of those words is hard to replicate without hearing it sung, I recommend the original:
In contrast to the satirical lyric by Tom Lehrer, here's an actual quote attributed to von Braun:
“The rocket worked perfectly, except for landing on the wrong planet.“ — Wernher von Braun remark to a colleague after the first V-2 rocket hit London (September 1944), as quoted in Apollo in Perspective: Spaceflight Then and Now (1999) by Jonathan Allday, p. 85
I think it is safe to assume that Von Braun was never under any illusions as to on what planet his rockets were going to come down and what was going to be the result of that.
So even if Tom Lehrer took some artistic license I think he's on the money.
But, in your opinion, was it the right thing for US to do? Say you are Truman. You are responsible for US and how it fares on the world stage. What would be the right thing to do? Show trials in Nuremberg will satisfy the public. Useful heads and knowledge at the very least would be prevented from going to Russia, where who knows what they would work on. If Braun was truly apolitical, history timeline could have easily changed.
Utilitarian arguments and ethics rarely go together well, hence 'realpolitik'.
What my opinion is on the matter is irrelevant, history has run its course and here we are.
We're well into 'old man lost his horse' territory now, of course you never know what the utility of a particular event is in the longer term. The doctor that saves the baby's life may well have caused a mass murderer to live a long and productive life.
We are just two random people on the internet discussing things passed.
One never really knows what the action is going to ultimately accomplish, but if the opinion on that particular matter is irrelevant, why is the following opinion relevant:
"Those are books I can do without."?
If the history has ran its course, does it matter?
Why didn't you read it as implicitly critical of modern managment? since slavery is almost universally agreed-upon to be wrong, any comparison of an institution to it is more likely to be a scathing criticism against the institution than a praise for slavery or any of its practitioners.
Edit : Considering that the author has written a book called "How To Manage Your Slaves" about Roman slave managment satirically in the style of modern self-help books, it's almost certain my interpretation above is a more correct lens to view his comparisons.
I think your take on the article is interesting to me because it shows how timely your apperceptions are. I take for granted that everyone has encountered the riposte that the Bible nowhere gainsays the institution of slavery, and that slavery in the U.S. was legitimized, in part, on repulsive pseudo-Darwinian grounds and further misses the way in which the article is blandly suggesting that the institution of slavery (extant at some time in every culture) has merely become sublimated in our own.
Two things are of interest to me about the institution of slavery in republican (or later) Rome: chiefly the lack of racial rationalization for the institution, and that the institution itself probably retarded the industrial and scientific revolutions[1].
In Rome, the most prized slaves were Greeks, for whom the Romans had both admiration and a cultural inferiority complex. As Horace wrote:
> Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artes intulit agresti Latio.
(Captured Greece captured her wild capturers and brought the arts to those agrarians Latins[1a].)
I mention this because I think it shows the opposite of U.S. rationalizations for slavery. Further, domestic slaves were called famulus -a; probably something on the order of "the lesser family" (more expendable were those working the fields or -- gods forefend -- the mines). Greeks enslaved Greeks, Latins enslaved Latins, Sumerians enslaved the nearby mountain-dwellers. As a species, we lack talons or fangs. Ours survival strategy depends upon cooperation. Cooperation can be willing, bargained, or forced.
I join company with the parent insofar as the choice of frame for this article is too untimely: perhaps better would have been Solzhenitsyn's chapter "The Trusty" from "The Gulag Archipelago". It provides a sort of fourth movement to a symphony of betrayal of serf to serf, peasant to peasant, Kulak to Kulak. Here, the damned betray the damned. But we must be upbeat! Life is getting better![2] Hence "la serva perdrona"!
[1] Hint: a Roman factory was merely a building filled with slaves "manufacturing" (making by hand) some good. See also the works of Vitruvius who describes (among other things) how an odometer should be made to accurately place mile-markers. They had the ingenuity and engineering capability, but not the economic incentives to birth both revolutions. The Romans were (like us) trapped in a local maximum.
[1a] a turn of phrase most worthy of his cultural ideal; not unlike (and also wildly dissimilar to) the way in which the only original American culture (pardon to those in the southern continent) is Black. One can't help but find patterns and anti-patterns.
>Rome: chiefly the lack of racial rationalization for the institution
Interesting thought indeed. If I were to settle into my historian armchair and speculate, I would say that it had to do with the following: In the Roman and many contemporary ethos, ruling based on strength was considered the natural order. Countries might war over competitive interests and by right of victory, gained the possessions of the conquered. Almost an ancient version of realpolitik. That is to say, human rights were not derived from an enlightenment idea of human quality. Roman's generally didn't need to resort to a racial justification because the power to do so was justification enough. That isn't to say Roman's weren't racist, they were. Interestingly, southern philosophy of slavery as a positive good was actually derived from Greek philosophy, and Aristotle specifically. However, Aristotle's argument that inferior humans benefit from slavery did not use race to define the inferior.
> ruling based on strength was considered the natural order.
Indeed. Athens vanquished Myteline in the Peloponnesian war and offered just this as justification. After Thuycidides, doubtless this was an increasingly bankrupt claim and so had to become more subtle.
> ... Roman's weren't racist, they were.
Were they? At base the poor modern idea of "race" is probably best rendered scientifically as "phenotype". In the classical world, new peoples could be still created (we call this ethnogenesis today -- we can read about it from classical sources). It was not larded with pseudo-Darwinistic conceits; some peoples spoke differently, appeared differently, had different customs, worshiped different gods (which Romans were keen to either adopt or accept as the same god by a different name, i.e. syncretism).
To your point, "might makes right" -- that's all there was too it to them. It is a little more complex though, in that the Romans felt themselves inferior to the Greeks culturally (probably also the Etruscans, who were in turn influenced by Greek colonists), and so had to contrive the idea of the genius of their ethnos being one of administration (probably the genesis of this article's conceit). I'd be much more interested in an article about how to be a better Greek in a Roman world, candidly.
> Almost an ancient version of realpolitik.
Well, exactly that, though it would have simply been regarded nakedly as Politik. I love the ancient world because they saw some things so much more clearly than we do (without the subtlety, probably because they still had to worry about the corn supply -- erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral). That we care not today for the ancient world serves us poorly, and only delivers us as prey to today's howlers.
> human rights were not derived from an enlightenment idea of human quality
In point of fact, the Enlightenment draws its origins to early humanists dredging up the wreckage of the ancient world. Timely controversies about whatever-the-fuck Joe Rogan said are drowned in a benighted sea of censorship lust, ignorant of the humanists' salvage and our universal birth-right. Give me your debunking of Voltaire or explain where Poggio went wrong, and I'll give you my earnest attention.
If you want to speak of Greek rationalizations for slavery, you may as well conduct a census of the Realpolitik of the region. A student of the hotchpotch of ancient tongues will be confronted with a hotchpotch of causes ranging from contesting neighbors to debt-bondage. Little different in Latium.
> However, Aristotle's argument that inferior humans benefit from slavery did not use race to define the inferior.
Right, and when you read the ethics and see what friendship is about -- you understand they saw relationships as being about mutual benefit between the superior and inferior. A couple millennia of Christianity haven't removed the question in the back of our minds, "but what's in it for me?" Again, they saw some things so much more clearly and without bullshit than we do today, and yet, yes, Aristotles' ideas about cuttlefish reproduction are sources of great mirth (and stuff like Plato's Timaeus great fodder for a thinking-man's Art Bell episode).
Again, at the risk of over-simplifying, slavery in the ancient world (and throughout history) was a quite different institution than what we think of today, thanks to the U.S.'s constitutional pusillanimity (wake me up when the U.K. abolishes the monarchy -- that's apparently harder to do than abolishing slavery; I guess it's easier to become a subject than a citizen under some empires).
> In the classical world, new peoples could be still created (we call this ethnogenesis today -- we can read about it from classical sources).
New peoples/ethnic groups basically sprung up from localized subcultures. But the whole process could easily take many generations. We read about it comfortably in the sources because oral history of that ethnogenesis ended up being recorded in myths, and we can factor out the commonalities. Really though, it was no quicker or easier back then than it would be today.
> was a quite different institution than what we think of today
I'm not sure I would agree about this. If you asked me about a significant difference, I would have to point to just how normalized it was within the ancient world. Pretty much every group practiced it. That's why the idea of a 'justification' of it from nature was probably not even taken all that seriously, even by those who thought about the issue. Ultimately, the Stoics were the most consistent in wanting to mitigate it, and their main concern was the slave's overall welfare within the arrangement, not necessarily some abstract idea of freedom. Naturally, increased freedom could be a side effect of such changes. (Of course, as is reasonably well known, there was no similar reforming impulse in the U.S. prior to abolition proper.)
> [the processes of ethnogenisis] could easily take many generations...
I grant you. In fact, it is the very subject of the Roman national epic. Oh, what a labor it was to found Rome, and all that. But we know that that peoples were never-the-less founded by virtue of the force of individuals. I don't think there were any rules about about how many saecula must be in favilla solvenda before you had a new nation, a new people.
> the idea of a 'justification' of it [slavery] from nature was probably not even taken all that seriously
We can say the same about atheism in the ancient world. Certainly by the time of Lucretius (if not much earlier), we can expect a world on the brink of de facto atheism, on the brink perhaps, of the scientific and industrial revolutions, but for the economic regime. First bread, then morality, then later aude sapere.
> Ultimately, the Stoics were the most consistent in wanting to mitigate it [slavery]
This, I think, is a misunderstanding, and why I mentioned the Bible had no reproach to slavery. Yes, the institution was mother's milk to everyone born of that time, but was much more a part of a client-patron relationship than ideas of racial superiority (which I have gone to pains to suggest are a fundamentally modern conception, stemming more from social contract theorists than pseudo-Darwinists, as I said earlier, beg my pardon -- in fact I think it comes even before that, as one can read in Montaigne's essay on cannibals). As I suggested earlier, our modern ideas about slavery are more informed by legitimization around savage and civilized which are merely sublimations about who can bring more power to bear and were lately made even more subtle with pseudo-Darwinist idea. All this is anachronism to the historical institution of slavery in the ancient world. That is the untimely and the timely at logger-heads.
When you speak of the stoics, you embrace both a crippled slave (later freed for his brilliance) and a staggeringly rich noble rhetorician. The fundamental dictum of stoicism (follow nature) suited Rome: accept your place in the nature of things. Epictetus addressed his students as "slave" and taught them to consider what is truly in their power and what isn't. Seneca wrote consolatory letters drawing on his struggles with asthma. The lessons were the same.
> was much more a part of a client-patron relationship
This is, AFAICT, taking a tiny minority of literate/skilled/highly trusted slaves and treating them as the norm. The slaves who were basically worked to death in the Roman mines were not meaningfully "clients" of their masters. They were very much seen as mere instruments, or chattels, even without a race-based justification. It's interesting that the most refined and perhaps benign forms of slavery could shade into patron/client (and the Romans would've known this - the freedman was literally a client of their former master) arrangements, but that was not the wnole institution.
>(Of course, as is reasonably well known, there was no similar reforming impulse in the U.S. prior to abolition proper.)
I think this is an overstatement. There was a reforming impulse within the US and within the south, it just didn't get much power by the time the issue came to war. Those invested in southern slavery were deathly afraid of the impulse spreading throughout the south, banning abolitionist literature and teaching. A number of noteworthy plantation owners who freed their slaves on ethical grounds.
I largely agree with most of what you said, and it sounds like you have a bigger historian armchair than I do, and thank you for your interesting insights about the ancient world.
>> ... Roman's weren't racist, they were.
>Were they?
My understanding is that they were, or at least would be considered so by modern definitions. Romans certainly held opinions that were biased, stereotyped, and judged others by their "phenotype" and cultural ancestry. That said, my impression was that Roman culture at large did not institutionalize racial opinion in the same way one might see in the antebellum south, or Indian caste system. A roman might despise and refuse to dine with a Gaul, but another might wed one.
>In point of fact, the Enlightenment draws its origins to early humanists dredging up the wreckage of the ancient world.
This is true, but they were also reinterpreted it through the lens of contemporary Christian philosophy and values. This certainly introduced a greater emphasis on fundamental human rights.
>I love the ancient world because they saw some things so much more clearly than we....That we care not today for the ancient world serves us poorly, and only delivers us as prey to today's howlers.
I think a lot of people long for the perceived simplicity of worlds closer to an animalistic natural order, with rules that from our perspective seem clear and internally consistent. The world we live in has complex challenges with ambiguous and continually changing rules and expectations. I think there is a big crossover the post-apocalyptical fantasy, where the burdens of society are lifted.
One of the challenges and intrigues of history, is trying to understand how much of that sentiment is accurate (if any). While the unintuitive complexity of modern life can be tiresome, it also enables social stability, freedoms, and collaboration impossible in the ancient world.
If I had any point, it was to suggest that our ideas of "race" are anachronistic to the ancient world (and not even really scientific today), being so burdened with post-enlightenment ideas of "savage" and cultured peoples (I've tried to keep religion out of this, but it is a critical through-line) and which later finds its most sublime form as pseudo-Darwinist notions about "race" which renders the U.S. institution of slavery (like our flavors of Christianity) quite something new and different.
> I think there is a big crossover the post-apocalyptical fantasy, where the burdens of society are lifted.
I agree with you on this. In fact, I've had a thesis (that is surely bogus and which no one believes) that the Godzilla movies are about the sublimated desire to see the whole facade held up against earthquake, tsunami, and atom bombs finally be done in by a monster who casually destroys Tokyo Tower. If you like coastlines, maybe that idea will give you a chuckle.
The value of the ancient world to me, however, is as a counter-balance to everything timely. Sometimes it shines a brilliant light on what is today obscured by our modern confusions, but more often a deep well of fascination over how we used to speak and what we used to think, however errant it was.
Putting the reader in the master's perspective certainly is a choice.
It fails to investigate that almost anyone in its ostensible audience of corporate managers is both a "master" and "slave" (mangers have managers).
An incredibly grim takeaway as well. It acknowledges the exploitation in both systems, but doesn't ask you to do anything about it or interrogate it deeper. There's no way that you're being exploited, just the poor saps that work for you. It's not wrong to exploit, just honest.