Ideology and Hypocrisy Amid Slavery and Democracy - Strange Bedfellows from Time Immemorial

By Stephen Joseph Scott

The history of the existence of slavery as an institution in antiquity and beyond is one of the most common; and, at the same time, one of the most complex tales to be told. Virtually every society, touching almost all the continents of the world, has had its own form of enslavement. The implication being that, nearly, every group of humankind whether racially, ethnically, or culturally categorized as diverse, unattached, or essentially separate, has been marked by the legacy and tradition of human bondage geographically and/or ancestrally. This work will be focusing on the origins and culturally supportive underpinnings of ancient Greek identity, its philosophy, law, ideology, and ethnicity; and, those extant essentialist elements, such as class, that not only made slavery in the ancient Greek world possible but normalized its place within a societal hierarchy that helped define who and what an ancient Athenian was - pitched against a broader Mediterranean ethos. Beyond that, this work will address how ancient Greek thought, as to what essentially constituted a slave versus a free person, later ignites a heated counterpoint which asserts hypocrisy lies at the core of ancient Greek thinking when it comes to the fundamental differences: physical, psychological, and emotional, that inexorably lie between free-persons and human-beings in captivity – made evident by how that debate rages to this day in contemporary historiography….

It is best that we start at the beginning with Homer: ancient Greek storyteller and legendary poet, who lived as early as the 8th century BCE; and, is still considered one of the most celebrated and influential writers of antiquity - for good reason. Homer is brought to the fore because his illustration as evidenced below reveals the essential deleterious effect of human bondage, which, poignantly foreshadows the debate mentioned above by millennia, ‘For Zeus who views the wide world takes away half the manhood of a man, that day he goes into captivity and slavery’ (Homer, Odyssey 17.367-9). Homer is explicitly defining the enslavement of a man as the diminishment, in a purely ontological sense, of one’s inherent human dignity. Aristotle, on the other hand (ancient aristocratic Greek philosopher and polymath extraordinaire), who penned his work in the latter 4th century BCE, some four hundred years after Homer, sets a foundational opposition and enduring precedent of his very own when it comes to the quality, status, value, and condition of enslaved persons.

Aristotle, as is broadly known, defined an enslaved person (doulos), that is, a human-being held in bondage, as ‘a live article of property’ (Aristotle, Pol. 1253b33). The great thinker himself, speaking on behalf of his class interests, goes on to define the value he derived from such persons defined as property, ‘Of property, the first and most indispensable kind is that which is … most amenable to Housecraft; and this is the human chattel.’ He then goes on, with a decisively imperialist tone, ‘Our first step therefore must be to procure good slaves (doulous)’ (Arist. Oec. 1344a23-26). Aristotle makes clear his essentialist views which not only defined a slave as property, but goes further, stating that the value, status, utility, and material condition of persons classified as slaves is not only a useful one, but a natural one:

These considerations therefore make clear the nature of the slave and his essential quality; one who is a human being (anthrôpos) belonging by nature not to himself but to another is by nature a slave, and a human being belongs to another if, although a human being, he is a piece of property (ktêma) (Arist. Pol. 1254a14-18).

Aristotle’s proposition is an important one given this work’s purpose which is to bring forth these precise notions, or conflicting theories, that have significantly undergirded, influenced and/or reinforced conceptions of class, personhood, value, and status interwoven within western thought throughout the ages.

Which brings us inevitably to the longstanding property versus domination argument spearheaded, in modern scholarship, by Orlando Patterson in his 1982 book entitled Slavery and Social Death. Patterson delivers a scathing rebuke to Aristotle’s customary formulation of slavery in terms of property. He unequivocally argues that slavery, from his learned vantagepoint, is, in fact, ‘the permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons’[i]. Which poignantly parallels Homer’s description that human beings, held in captivity against their will, are not only persons dominated physically, but are individuals essentially diminished morally, emotionally, and psychologically. The conventional view, as presented by Aristotle, is unsound, according to Patterson based on two distinct factors. Firstly, Patterson argues, ‘to define slavery … as property fails as a definition, since it does not really specify any distinct category of persons.’ Because everyone, whether ‘beggar or king, can be the object of a property relation.’ One can only construe that what Patterson is saying, when it comes specifically to slavery, is that the term ‘property’ obscures, diminishes or diverts one’s attention away from the overt and brutal nature of an enslaved person’s everyday lived experience. Secondly, Patterson contends that the term property is inconsistent in substance when it comes to diversity of culture - meaning many societies, however archaic, lacked the very concept of ownership. Denoting that slavery has accompanied mankind through time immemorial, from primitive village societies to ancient Mesopotamia and beyond, where, he argues, the laws and social mores of any given society didn’t precisely match that of Aristotle’s definition of property – therefore it generally fails as a classification of slavery [ii].

David M. Lewis counters Patterson’s argument on the ‘property point’ as stated above by proclaiming that during the Neo-Babylonian and Persian periods, the evidence clearly demonstrates in abundant detail, that the circumstance between slave and master, in legal terms, was ‘a relationship based on the fact that the slave was the property of his or her owner’-exhibiting all the elementary features necessary, per legal theory, to reach the standard of ‘property’ [iii]. Lewis challenges Patterson’s stance further by stating:

[The popular] view that esteems private property rights to be an advanced development of Roman legal theory ignores the findings of almost a century of legal anthropology, which has observed private property systems in a variety of tribal social systems that were far less advanced in terms of technological and social complexity than even the society imagined in Homer’s epics [iv].

While Lewis’ examination proves ‘slavery as a form of property’ in a legal context, there is still validity in Patterson’s position given the fact that persons in bondage (from a humanist perspective) reduced to the level of property in a solely ‘legal sense’ nullifies their individual agency and all that essentially makes them human.

In fact, slavery, and democracy, in ancient Athens and beyond is a multidimensional and multifaceted story of innate human capacity and agency, dignity, adaptability, fortitude, and resistance. Meaning, ‘…slaves were not passive objects, whose identity and existence was completely dominated by their masters.’[v]  As described by Xenophon (Greek military leader and philosopher), there were without a doubt slaves forced into strenuous domestic work: ‘baking, cooking, spinning’ and scrubbing under their owner’s will (Xen. Oec. 9.9). That said, we are also told of others that gained valuable skill-sets outside the home, coinciding with their inherent intelligence and creativity, from potters to builders to bankers and shoemakers (Hyperides, 3.1-9; and Aeschines, 1.97)[vi]. These slaves participated in communal undertakings (such as workshops and spiritual associations) together with other free and enslaved persons. Even Aristotle, who had little love (agape) for the underclasses, had to acknowledge, albeit cautiously, the inherent democratic nature (and/or threat thereof) made evident by the sheer numbers of this uniquely collective phenomenon - what the great theorist himself branded as koinônia, simply defined as fellowship of the masses. But the politikê koinônia (he warns) was specifically formed for the benefit of its members (Arist. Eth. Nic. 1160a4-6). Influenced by his celebrated teacher, renowned philosopher Plato, who argued that the limits of citizenship and its influence correlate with ‘the precise form of constitution and law’ in place (Plato, Laws 714c) - Aristotle’s well-known anti-democratic discourse on ‘mob-rule’ and the necessity for the ‘rule of law’ as fundamental to ‘the natural order of things’ thus becomes most evident. While in agreement with Pericles’ famed proclamation on the importance of the ‘rule of law’ in the ancient Greek city-state; when it came to what Pericles professed as the virtues of democracy defined, the two-men parted ways in dramatic fashion. In what is considered the ideal of a democratic philosophical vision, Pericles outlines demokratia (in his famed funeral speech of 431 BCE), as follows:

Its administration favors the many instead of the few…equal justice to all…class considerations not being allowed to interfere with merit; nor again does poverty bar the way. The freedom which we enjoy in our government…[teaches] us to obey the magistrates and the laws, particularly as regard [to] the protection of the injured (Thucydides, 2.37).

On the contrary, Aristotle’s depiction of a ‘democratic regime’ and/or constitution is one with an inherent propensity toward ‘license and lawlessness.’ He defines, ‘radical democracy,’ in that of Athens for example, as having two critical flaws: firstly, the influence of the demos can potentially supersede the law (Arist. Pol. 1292a4ff.); and secondly, the demos hold the power to impeach magistrates for wrongdoing (such as malfeasance) which Aristotle intimates are both a step too far (Arist. Pol. 1292a30, and cf.1298a29-35). That said, as threatening as he might have interpreted it, the concept of koinônia permits us to observe enslaved persons actively utilizing their intrinsic agency within a broader collective milieu.

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Returning to the question as stated at the outset of this work, Lewis’ focus on the laws of ancient societies, in lieu of the contention outlined above, is immensely valuable when it comes to understanding the conventions per Athenian slave society and their ramifications. Broadly viewed as a protection mechanism for slaves, given a singular example, the Greek law on ‘hybris,’ in ancient Athens, expressly defined as the negation of the deliberate implementation of violence to humiliate, demean, or degrade - is not as straightforward as it might appear. Yet again, hypocrisy abounds as evidenced: to presume that the Athenian law pertained to an owner’s mis-conduct toward his ‘property’ obliges us to disregard the ‘abundant proof’ of regular and generally habitual violence toward slaves by their masters.[vii] Beyond that, it is difficult to correlate the law as ‘protectionary’ given this evocative assertion by Plato, ‘[a slave] when wronged or insulted, is unable to protect himself or anyone else for whom he cares’ (Plato, Gorg. 483b). The following statement is as definitive as it gets when revealing the underlying deceit interwoven within Athenian law itself when it came to enslaved persons and their standing, ‘[the] law included slaves [simply] because the lawgiver wished to curtail the spread of hubristic [or anti-social] behaviour among the citizens tout court … the hubris law was designed to engender respect and orderly conduct among citizens not to protect slaves’ [viii] [ix]. Meaning, that the Athenian lawgivers were not overly concerned with the physical wellbeing of persons classified as slaves, but perhaps were more intent on curtailing their judicial workload.

The reality was that the right of masters to physically abuse their slaves in ancient Athens was, if not absolute, certainly extensive. Xenophon affirms the practical necessity on behalf of owners to punish their slaves, but simply asks for them not to do so in a state of rage (Xen. Hell. 5.3.7; cf. Hdt. 1.137). Demonstrating that, violence toward persons in bondage in ancient Athens was perfectly acceptable if it was executed in a manner of equanimity. According to Xenophon, however, slaves should never resist. He goes on to say, that masters could, or should, ‘clap fetters on them so that they can’t run away’ (Xen. Mem. 2.1.16). Hence, so it is argued, in summary, that what helps clarify, or defend, Aristotle’s assertion that ‘the slave [is] an article of property imbued with a soul’ (Arist. Pol. 1253b32), is justified due to the fact that ‘this view of the slave as an article of property’ was a generally held belief of society at large when it came to the status of enslaved persons within the ancient Greek ethos [x].

That said, when it comes to hypocrisy, the law and excessive abuse – domination, as defined by Patterson permeates the historical record.  A poignant example of the common acceptance in ancient Athens of emotional and physical abuse (or the threat thereof) cast upon slaves, and the like, is provided by Lysias, where he describes in detail the testimony of a plaintiff in an Athenian court recounting the brutal (and pervasive) threat of torture (and even death) that hung over the heads of enslaved mill workers - commonly known ‘as mill-roaches’ (Lysias 1. 18-22). In addition, owners of enslaved persons were generally granted legal leeway, under the authority of judges, to sexually abuse their slaves.[xi] Signifying that when a slave was purchased, they were in fact the owners’ possession to do with as they desired - which helps lend even more credence to Patterson’s analyses of domination as described.

A question of further importance is what defined, or signified, a slave and their station in ancient Athens? Was it one of ideology or innate difference that helped delineate the distinction between a Greek and a non-Greek? As understood in the broadest sense of the term, barbarian is the word used to describe not only a non-Greek speaking immigrant, but in fact, a definitional term which explicitly portrayed an enslaved person of foreign origin, as, ‘non-Greeks imported from foreign lands via the slave trade’[xii]. An Athenian essentialist view, as noted, between native slave and foreign slave, (that is, between natural born Greeks and outsiders) is underscored by Aristotle’s description of an enslaved Greek as ‘an accident contrary to nature’ (Arist. Pol. 1255a1). These Greek essentialist views, of one people’s ethnic superiority over another, are noteworthy because they significantly impact western thought and societal conditions throughout the ages – emphasizing race and class as inherent points of difference develop into a clear normative of class hierarchy.

Fast forwarding to the 18th century Anglo-world for example, Francis Hutcheson (elite 18th century British moral philosopher) proclaimed that permanent enslavement should be ‘the ordinary punishment of … idle vagrants.’ ‘Idle vagrants,’ being defined as most anyone with what Hutcheson considered, ‘slave like attributes,’ from the idle poor and indigent to confiscated and subjugated human cargo - principally Africans [xiii]. Conversely, in something of a confessional, Thomas Jefferson (slave owner, philosopher, and 18th century American statesman) recognized and voiced the odious elements of the dominion argument, as defined, some two hundred years prior to Orlando Patterson, ‘[the] commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of … the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other.’ He then goes on in a revelatory tone, to inform just how these elite classes, throughout the millennia, bequeathed attitudes of dominion from one generation to the next. Stating that, the children of the elite were thus ‘nursed, educated and exercised in the daily art of tyranny.’ Virginia’s slave plantations as he describes, were by their very nature, ‘schools of iniquity and domination’[xiv]. Consequently, Aristotle’s, early, and pervasive, theory of the ‘natural order of things,’ when it comes to class and ethnicity, is made brazenly evident (Arist. Pol. 1252a-1253b).

Finally, how common place was slave society in the ancient Greek world and what was its magnitude? It is said that the importation of slaves was a lasting one, being that Greek slave society lasted enduringly throughout both the archaic and classical periods until its absorption by Rome in 146 BCE. Although the Roman slave trade surpassed that of the Greek numerically, given Rome’s imperial might over the Mediterranean world, it is said that ‘the Greek slave system was both the elder and the longer-lived.’ The Greeks had helped set a historic precedent by perfecting their own imperial prowess through the conquering of their neighbors [xv]. But, where in fact were these subjugated and enslaved persons extracted from and how common were they in ancient Greece? Ancient Greek inscriptions help make evident that enslaved peoples, represented a wide breadth of humanity throughout the known world at the time. These people included men, women, and children in a variety of hues, from such far-off places as Thrace, Phrygia, Syria, Caria in southwest Anatolia, Illyria on the western Balkan Isthmus, Scythians from eastern Iran; and, Colchians from the eastern Black Sea [xvi] - depicted by Herodotus, in the 5th century BCE, as a ‘dark-skinned and woolly haired’ people (Hdt. 2.104.2). What Herodotus’ quote helps to highlight for us is an ancient Athenian social construct. That being, the prevalent belief (when it came to the stature of imported slaves), of a clear and innate delineation based on race (and/or phenotype), accentuating a natural taxonomic classification or difference between indigenous Greeks and all others – especially slaves.

When it comes to how common slaves were, Josiah Ober estimates the slave population of fourth-century BCE Athens to be around 35 per cent of the total population of roughly 227,000 [xvii]. Which made slavery quite pervasive throughout ancient Athens and helps to explain the essentialist Greek/Other dichotomy as such. As Vincent Rosivach makes evident, ‘[When] Athenians thought about slaves, they habitually thought about barbaroi, and when they thought about barbaroi they habitually thought about slaves’[xviii]. Suggesting that this was commonplace in classical Athens - legislatively undergirded by the proposed law of Pericles of 451 BCE which confined citizenship solely to persons of Athenian birthparents on both sides. Ultimately defining in ethnocentric terms, an essentialist difference (between Greeks and others), based on birth lineage and cultural origin (Arist. Const. Ath. 26.3). In paralleling slave societies throughout the epochs, ‘the slave system of the fourth-century Greek world was of roughly the same numerical magnitude as that of the United States ca. 1800.’ By the early 19th century, in the South, ‘30-40 percent of the population’ was made up of chattel slavery under the brutal control of concentrated wealth and political power, land, and resources… [xix]. Both societies (separated by millennia) became indulgently rich and hegemonically powerful in their respective spheres of influence – primarily based on the wealth created by their slave societies thus implemented. As mentioned, due to the commonality of the everyday interaction between slave and non-slave, and its oblique dangers in ancient Athens, elite class interests reinforced ‘the construction of local and wider Hellenic ethnicities, as well as of non-Greek ethnicities, must have been fundamentally imbricated with the ideological needs of the slave trade…’[xx] [xxi]. The main point being that the possibility of a unifying or coming together of freeborn citizens, of lower-class status, and slaves, posed a direct structural (and numerical) threat to the established order of things. Ideology, woven within Greek identity, plays a key role in the hegemonic control of social norms, but not an absolute one.

The understanding by the masses (and a small number of elites alike) that extreme concentrations of wealth played a destabilizing role in the Athenian political and social realms, when it came to privilege, power and class, is made obvious by the following quote from Demosthenes, ‘for the demos to have nothing and for those who oppose the demos to have a superabundance of wealth is an amazing and terrifying (thaumaston kai phoberon) state of affairs’ (Ober, 1990, 214; Dem. Ex. 2.3). Which helps make evident an ancient Athens as not only the well-known paradigm of direct democracy (or rule by the many), but also its intrinsic contradictions (or threats thereof) when it came to status, class, and wealth – which has echoed, as argued, throughout the centuries. As presented, Lewis and Canevaro, bring to the fore, a carefully crafted top-down societal prejudice designed to sow division amongst the masses using class distinctions and/or differences as its exclusionary tool of choice:

Since it was in fact slaves who were more naturally associated with manual labor—they were the prototypical manual laborers— elitist writers and reformers found in this proximity a productive avenue for attacking their suitability for political participation—for having a voice. For elite Greeks and Romans this was a productive strategy for denigrating and dehumanizing ‘the poor’ in political as well as daily life [xxii].

Paradoxically, these notions of disdain toward the poor (or the slavish), defined (mostly) by the ancient Greek elite as, ‘anyone who had to work for living’ (Arist. Pol. 1277b5-7; 1255b23-38), were not limited to the Athenian upper classes. In fact, as Lucia Cecchet suggests, due to the sheer force of elite ideological thought and its pervasive influence (in the 4th and 5th centuries), even within the jury courts of democratic Athens, the repulsion of poverty (including slaves) became commonly offered as a widely conventional view, ‘a communis opinio that the rich and poor shared alike’ [xxiii]; attitudes that permeate western societies to this day, making evident, the powerful effects of elite capture through hegemonic cultural influence in ancient Athens and beyond.

In conclusion, throughout western history, ancient Athens has been viewed as the ultimate model of democracy in a political, ideological, philosophical, and ethical sense – as presented in this work. At the same time, hypocrisy, pertaining to these epitomes of democracy (demokratia – or rule by the many – as outlined by Pericles), adversely permeated its upper classes and beyond with lasting ramifications. Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle and Xenophon, for example, were all critical of democracy, focusing their ire upon the populous; the possibility of its bad decision making; and (what they believed to be), as ‘the [intrinsic] ignorance … of the demos, demagoguery and civil strife’ [xxiv]. Again, these great theorists thought of democracy not as the rule of the many (which was the general Athenian ideal of demokratia), but they portrayed it in a more threatening or hostile sense, such as, ‘the rule of the poor or the mob,’ which helps taint Athenian demokratia within recorded history with a prejudicial top-down class perspective throughout the millennia [xxv]. The proximity between, slave and poor within the democratic confines of ancient Athens, made them susceptible, in both high-level institutional deliberation and, sometimes, in daily collaborations, to manipulative stratagems which ‘aimed to denigrate and even disenfranchise them by stressing the “slavish” nature of their occupations, as incompatible with the virtue required for political participation’ [xxvi]. Furthermore, enslavement, as implemented in ancient Athens and across time, populations and locations could differ enormously or, in fact, possess significant similarities. As is inferred, by ancient Greek scholars throughout this work, the characteristics which helped mold Greek slave culture and its expansion comprised, but were in no way limited to, the amount of prosperity slavery added to the fundamental aspects of that society’s supposed wellbeing, especially its economic growth and military strength. In most instances, throughout the ancient world and beyond, the capturing and subjugation of persons classified as salves was meant to possess, chastise, and/or diminish an economic rival. Thus, as noted, chattel slavery was quite widespread throughout the ancient world and beyond. That said, the agency and humanity, as offered by Orlando Patterson, of subjugated persons, and their relentless struggle for freedom, permeates the historical record (from Athens to Virginia) - which cannot and should not be ignored. Enslaved human beings left behind a powerful legacy of opposition and struggle to free themselves and the family members they so loved. Through the common bond (of unrelenting misery) they forged powerful alliances of resistance and revolt, despite the cultural forces arrayed against them – their historical age or geographical setting.

Stephen Joseph Scott is an essayist associated with The University of Edinburgh, School of History; a singer/songwriter, humanist/activist – a self-taught musician, and performer. As a musician, he uses American Roots Music to illustrate the current American social and political landscape.

Notes

[i] Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Harvard University Press, 1982), 13.

[ii] Patterson, 20–21.

[iii] David M. Lewis, Greek Slave Systems in Their Eastern Mediterranean Context, c.800-146 BC, First edition. (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2018), 34.

[iv] Lewis, 39.

[v] Kostas Vlassopoulos, “Greek Slavery: From Domination to Property and Back Again,” The Journal of Hellenic Studies 131 (2011): 195.

[vi] Edward E. Cohen, Athenian Economy and Society: A Banking Perspective (Princeton University Press, 1992), 61–109.

[vii] Lewis, Greek Slave Systems in Their Eastern Mediterranean Context, c.800-146 BC, 43.

[viii] Mirko Canevaro, “The Public Charge for Hubris Against Slaves: The Honour of the Victim and the Honour of the Hubristēs,” The Journal of Hellenic Studies 138 (2018): 100–126.

[ix] Lewis, Greek Slave Systems in Their Eastern Mediterranean Context, c.800-146 BC, 42–43.

[x] Lewis, 54.

[xi] Lewis, 42.

[xii] David M. Lewis and Mirko Canevaro, “Poverty, Race, and Ethnicity,” in A Cultural History of Poverty in Antiquity (500 BCE – 800 AD), ed. Claire Taylor (Bloomsbury, 2022), 14.

[xiii] Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1995), 324.

[xiv] Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia: An Annotated Edition, Notes on the State of Virginia (Yale University Press, 2022), 249.

[xv] Lewis and Canevaro, “Poverty, Race, and Ethnicity,” 7.

[xvi] Lewis and Canevaro, 4.

[xvii] Josiah Ober, “Inequality in Late-Classical Democratic Athens: Evidence and Models,” in Democracy and an Open-Economy World Order, ed. George C. Bitros and Nicholas C. Kyriazis (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2017), 129–129.

[xviii] Vincent J. Rosivach, “Enslaving ‘Barbaroi’ and the Athenian Ideology of Slavery,” Historia: Zeitschrift Für Alte Geschichte 48, no. 2 (1999): 129.

[xix] Peter Kolchin, American Slavery, 1619-1877 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), 242.

[xx] Lewis and Canevaro, “Poverty, Race, and Ethnicity,” 15.

[xxi] Thomas Harrison, “Classical Greek Ethnography and the Slave Trade,” Classical Antiquity 38, no. 1 (2019): 36–57.

[xxii] Lewis and Canevaro, “Poverty, Race, and Ethnicity,” 29–30.

[xxiii] Lucia Cecchet, “Poverty as Argument in Athenian Forensic Speeches,” 2013, 61, https.

[xxiv] Ober quoted in Mirko Canevaro, “Democratic Deliberation in the Athenian Assembly: Procedures and Behaviours towards Legitimacy,” Annals HSS 73, 2019, 3.

[xxv] Mogens Herman Hansen, The Tradition of Ancient Greek Democracy and Its Importance for Modern Democracy, Historisk-Filosofiske Meddelelser 93 (Copenhagen: Det Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskab, 2005), 8.

[xxvi] Lewis and Canevaro, “Poverty, Race, and Ethnicity,” 29–30.

Bibliography 

Canevaro, Mirko. “Democratic Deliberation in the Athenian Assembly: Procedures and Behaviours towards Legitimacy.” Annals HSS 73, 2019.

———. “The Public Charge for Hubris Against Slaves: The Honour of the Victim and the Honour of the Hubristēs.” The Journal of Hellenic Studies 138 (2018): 100–126.

Cecchet, Lucia. “Poverty as Argument in Athenian Forensic Speeches,” 2013.

Cohen, Edward E. Athenian Economy and Society: A Banking Perspective. Princeton University Press, 1992.

Hansen, Mogens Herman. The Tradition of Ancient Greek Democracy and Its Importance for Modern Democracy. Historisk-Filosofiske Meddelelser 93. Copenhagen: Det Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskab, 2005.

Harrison, Thomas. “Classical Greek Ethnography and the Slave Trade.” Classical Antiquity 38, no. 1 (2019): 36–57.

Jefferson, Thomas. Notes on the State of Virginia: An Annotated Edition. Notes on the State of Virginia. Yale University Press, 2022.

Kolchin, Peter. American Slavery, 1619-1877. New York: Hill and Wang, 1993.

Lewis, David M. Greek Slave Systems in Their Eastern Mediterranean Context, c.800-146 BC. First edition. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2018.

Lewis, David M., and Mirko Canevaro. “Poverty, Race, and Ethnicity.” In A Cultural History of Poverty in Antiquity (500 BCE – 800 AD), edited by Claire Taylor. Bloomsbury, 2022.

Morgan, Edmund S. American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. New York: Norton, 1995.

Ober, Josiah. “Inequality in Late-Classical Democratic Athens: Evidence and Models.” In Democracy and an Open-Economy World Order, edited by George C. Bitros and Nicholas C. Kyriazis, 125–46. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2017.

———. Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens: Rhetoric, Ideology and the Power of the People. Second print., with Corrections. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1990.

Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Harvard University Press, 1982.

Rosivach, Vincent J. “Enslaving ‘Barbaroi’ and the Athenian Ideology of Slavery.” Historia: Zeitschrift Für Alte Geschichte 48, no. 2 (1999): 129–57.

Vlassopoulos, Kostas. “Greek Slavery: From Domination to Property and Back Again.” The Journal of Hellenic Studies 131 (2011): 115–30.

Elon Musk, Twitter, and the Power of Ownership

[Musk family wealth came from property ownership throughout Africa, including Apartheid South Africa and Zambia, where Errol Musk owned an emerald mine like the one pictured above]

By Carl Beijer

Republished from the author’s blog.

Last month, Elon Musk purchased Twitter and immediately disbanded its entire board of directors. This may have surprised you if you get your ideas about power from the populist right, who have been telling us that “power has passed from individual bourgeois business to a new ruling class” — the so-called “managerial elite.” Evidently, their “cultural power” with its full arsenal of “wokeness” and “cancel culture” couldn’t do a damn thing to save them in the end.

Even their enormous incomes couldn’t help them! These are no blue collar workers; these are multi-millionaires with astronomical salaries. “Heterodox economists” like Lévy and Duménil tell us that capitalism is over and we now live in the age of “managerialism”, in which “the main social split is nowadays between lower and higher wage earners, and increasingly so in conformity with the rise of managers”; but Musk had no problem whatsoever kicking some of the highest paid managers in the world to the curb.

Capitalist discourse loves to dismiss Marxist economics as a kind of obscurantist and contrarian analysis that no sensible person could possibly take seriously, but look at how everyone is talking about Musk right now and it’s obvious that we all know exactly what happened. He won because he took ownership of Twitter. That is what allowed him to crush the assembled power of the professional managerial class — Twitter’s corporate governance structure, the complex of NGO professionals and celebrities and academics who protested his takeover, all of it — on a whim. Taking ownership was his coronation, and the moment it happened everyone knew that his opponents would never prevail.

If you take one lesson from the Musk takeover, it should be this: capitalists can do this whenever they want. And even the highest-level managers and corporate executives know it, which means that they can only either defer to ownership or risk getting fired. This is a point I spelled out a few months ago when former WWE CEO Vince McMahon resigned:

Whether or not he has plans to exercise that power [majority ownership of the the WWE] is beside the point; at any given moment, shareholder Vince can decide to appoint a new board that will re-appoint him as CEO. And the very possibility that he could do this gives him the exact same power over management that shareholders have when Vince pleads that he only fired wrestlers because he’s a publicly traded company.

Private ownership confers a unique form of power unlike anything else in our politics. It matters more than professional titles, than academic degrees, than cultural norms and values, than the power of free speech and public reason. Even the state’s victory against it isn’t assured. And there is no form of power concentrated in fewer hands.

Nor is there any form of power that we meet with less skepticism. If you don’t believe me, just pay attention to how we talk about Musk’s power-play moving forward. You’re going to see a lot of talk about how Musk is a bad apple, one of those dreaded right-wing Silicon Valley billionaires. You’re going to hear about the rising tide of fascism, driven by vague hatreds of egalitarianism and freedom. You’re even going to hear some talk about “corporate” power, as if Twitter’s board would still be in control if it were structured slightly differently. But what you won’t hear is skepticism of the basic legal, political, and economic institution — private property — that actually keeps Musk in control.

The Bully's Pulpit: On the Elementary Structure of Domination

By David Graeber

In late February and early March 1991, during the first Gulf War, U.S. forces bombed, shelled, and otherwise set fire to thousands of young Iraqi men who were trying to flee Kuwait. There were a series of such incidents-the "Highway of Death," "Highway 8," the "Battle of Rumaila"-in which U.S. air power cut off columns of retreating Iraqis and engaged in what the military refers to as a "turkey shoot," where trapped soldiers are simply slaughtered in their vehicles. Images of charred bodies trying desperately to crawl from their trucks became iconic symbols of the war.

I have never understood why this mass slaughter of Iraqi men isn't considered a war crime. It's clear that, at the time, the U.S. command feared it might be. President George H.W. Bush quickly announced a temporary cessation of hostilities, and the military has deployed enormous efforts since then to minimize the casualty count, obscure the circumstances, defame the victims ("a bunch of rapists, murderers, and thugs," General Norman Schwarzkopf later insisted), and prevent the most graphic images from appearing on U.S. television. It's rumored that there are videos from cameras mounted on helicopter gunships of panicked Iraqis, which will never be released.

It makes sense that the elites were worried. These were, after all, mostly young men who'd been drafted and who, when thrown into combat, made precisely the decision one would wish all young men in such a situation would make: saying to hell with this, packing up their things, and going home. For this, they should be burned alive? When ISIS burned a Jordanian pilot alive last winter, it was universally denounced as unspeakably barbaric-which it was, of course. Still, ISIS at least could point out that the pilot had been dropping bombs on them. The retreating Iraqis on the "Highway of Death" and other main drags of American carnage were just kids who didn't want to fight.

But maybe it was this very refusal that's prevented the Iraqi soldiers from garnering more sympathy, not only in elite circles, where you wouldn't expect much, but also in the court of public opinion. On some level, let's face it: these men were cowards. They got what they deserved.

There seems, indeed, a decided lack of sympathy for noncombatant men in war zones. Even reports by international human rights organizations speak of massacres as being directed almost exclusively against women, children, and, perhaps, the elderly. The implication, almost never stated outright, is that adult males are either combatants or have something wrong with them. ("You mean to say there were people out there slaughtering women and children and you weren't out there defending them? What are you? Chicken?") Those who carry out massacres have been known to cynically manipulate this tacit conscription: most famously, the Bosnian Serb commanders who calculated they could avoid charges of genocide if, instead of exterminating the entire population of conquered towns and villages, they merely exterminated all males between ages fifteen and fifty-five.

But there is something more at work in circumscribing our empathy for the fleeing Iraqi massacre victims. U.S. news consumers were bombarded with accusations that they were actually a bunch of criminals who'd been personally raping and pillaging and tossing newborn babies out of incubators (unlike that Jordanian pilot, who'd merely been dropping bombs on cities full of women and children from a safe, or so he thought, altitude). We are all taught that bullies are really cowards, so we easily accept that the reverse must naturally be true as well. For most of us, the primordial experience of bullying and being bullied lurks in the background whenever crimes and atrocities are discussed. It shapes our sensibilities and our capacities for empathy in deep and pernicious ways.

Cowardice Is a Cause, Too

Most people dislike wars and feel the world would be a better place without them. Yet contempt for cowardice seems to move them on a far deeper level. After all, desertion-the tendency of conscripts called up for their first experience of military glory to duck out of the line of march and hide in the nearest forest, gulch, or empty farmhouse and then, when the column has safely passed, figure out a way to return home-is probably the greatest threat to wars of conquest. Napoleon's armies, for instance, lost far more troops to desertion than to combat. Conscript armies often have to deploy a significant percentage of their conscripts behind the lines with orders to shoot any of their fellow conscripts who try to run away. Yet even those who claim to hate war often feel uncomfortable celebrating desertion.

About the only real exception I know of is Germany, which has erected a series of monuments labeled "To the Unknown Deserter." The first and most famous, in Potsdam, is inscribed: "TO A MAN WHO REFUSED TO KILL HIS FELLOW MAN." Yet even here, when I tell friends about this monument, I often encounter a sort of instinctive wince. "I guess what people will ask is: Did they really desert because they didn't want to kill others, or because they didn't want to die themselves?" As if there's something wrong with that.

In militaristic societies like the United States, it is almost axiomatic that our enemies must be cowards-especially if the enemy can be labeled a "terrorist" (i.e., someone accused of wishing to create fear in us, to turn us, of all people, into cowards). It is then necessary to ritually turn matters around and insist that no, it is they who are actually fearful. All attacks on U.S. citizens are by definition "cowardly attacks." The second George Bush was referring to the 9/11 attacks as "cowardly acts" the very next morning. On the face of it, this is odd. After all, there's no lack of bad things one can find to say about Mohammed Atta and his confederates-take your pick, really-but surely "coward" isn't one of them. Blowing up a wedding party using an unmanned drone might be considered an act of cowardice. Personally flying an airplane into a skyscraper takes guts.

Nevertheless, the idea that one can be courageous in a bad cause seems to somehow fall outside the domain of acceptable public discourse, despite the fact that much of what passes for world history consists of endless accounts of courageous people doing awful things.

On Fundamental Flaws

Sooner or later, every project for human freedom will have to comprehend why we accept societies being ranked and ordered by violence and domination to begin with. And it strikes me that our visceral reaction to weakness and cowardice, our strange reluctance to identify with even the most justifiable forms of fear, might provide a clue.

The problem is that debate so far has been dominated by proponents of two equally absurd positions. On the one side, there are those who deny that it's possible to say anything about humans as a species; on the other, there are those who assume that the goal is to explain why it is that some humans seem to take pleasure in pushing other ones around. The latter camp almost invariably ends up spinning stories about baboons and chimps, usually to introduce the proposition that humans-or at least those of us with sufficient quantities of testosterone-inherit from our primate ancestors an inbuilt tendency toward self-aggrandizing aggression that manifests itself in war, which cannot be gotten rid of, but may be diverted into competitive market activity. On the basis of these assumptions, the cowards are those who lack a fundamental biological impulse, and it's hardly surprising that we would hold them in contempt.

There are a lot of problems with this story, but the most obvious is that it simply isn't true. The prospect of going to war does not automatically set off a biological trigger in the human male. Just consider what Andrew Bard Schmookler has referred to as "the parable of the tribes." Five societies share the same river valley. They can all live in peace only if every one of them remains peaceful. The moment one "bad apple" is introduced-say, the young men in one tribe decide that an appropriate way of handling the loss of a loved one is to go bring back some foreigner's head, or that their God has chosen them to be the scourge of unbelievers-well, the other tribes, if they don't want to be exterminated, have only three options: flee, submit, or reorganize their own societies around effectiveness in war. The logic seems hard to fault. Nevertheless, as anyone familiar with the history of, say, Oceania, Amazonia, or Africa would be aware, a great many societies simply refused to organize themselves on military lines. Again and again, we encounter descriptions of relatively peaceful communities who just accepted that every few years, they'd have to take to the hills as some raiding party of local bad boys arrived to torch their villages, rape, pillage, and carry off trophy parts from hapless stragglers. The vast majority of human males have refused to spend their time training for war, even when it was in their immediate practical interest to do so. To me, this is proof positive that human beings are not a particularly bellicose species. [1]

No one would deny, of course, that humans are flawed creatures. Just about every human language has some analogue of the English "humane" or expressions like "to treat someone like a human being," implying that simply recognizing another creature as a fellow human entails a responsibility to treat them with a certain minimum of kindness, consideration, and respect. It is obvious, however, that nowhere do humans consistently live up to that responsibility. And when we fail, we shrug and say we're "only human." To be human, then, is both to have idealsand to fail to live up to them.

If this is how humans tend to think of themselves, then it's hardly surprising that when we try to understand what makes structures of violent domination possible, we tend to look at the existence of antisocial impulses and ask: Why are some people cruel? Why do they desire to dominate others? These, however, are exactly the wrong questions to ask. Humans have an endless variety of urges. Usually, they're pulling us in any number of different directions at once. Their mere existence implies nothing.

The question we should be asking is not why people are sometimes cruel, or even why a few people are usually cruel (all evidence suggests true sadists are an extremely small proportion of the population overall), but how we have come to create institutions that encourage such behavior and that suggest cruel people are in some ways admirable-or at least as deserving of sympathy as those they push around.

Here I think it's important to look carefully at how institutions organize the reactions of the audience. Usually, when we try to imagine the primordial scene of domination, we see some kind of Hegelian master-slave dialectic in which two parties are vying for recognition from one another, leading to one being permanently trampled underfoot. We should imagine instead a three-way relation of aggressor, victim, and witness, one in which both contending parties are appealing for recognition (validation, sympathy, etc.) from someone else. The Hegelian battle for supremacy, after all, is just an abstraction. A just-so story. Few of us have witnessed two grown men duel to the death in order to get the other to recognize him as truly human. The three-way scenario, in which one party pummels another while both appeal to those around them to recognize their humanity, we've all witnessed and participated in, taking one role or the other, a thousand times since grade school.

Elementary (School) Structures of Domination

I am speaking, of course, about schoolyard bullying. Bullying, I propose, represents a kind of elementary structure of human domination. If we want to understand how everything goes wrong, this is where we should begin.

In this case too, provisos must be introduced. It would be very easy to slip back into crude evolutionary arguments. There is a tradition of thought-the Lord of the Flies tradition, we might call it-that interprets schoolyard bullies as a modern incarnation of the ancestral "killer ape," the primordial alpha male who instantly restores the law of the jungle once no longer restrained by rational adult male authority. But this is clearly false. In fact, books like Lord of the Flies are better read as meditations on the kind of calculated techniques of terror and intimidation that British public schools employed to shape upper-class children into officials capable of running an empire. These techniques did not emerge in the absence of authority; they were techniques designed to create a certain sort of cold-blooded, calculating adult male authority to begin with.

Today, most schools are not like the Eton and Harrow of William Golding's day, but even at those that boast of their elaborate anti-bullying programs, schoolyard bullying happens in a way that's in no sense at odds with or in spite of the school's institutional authority. Bullying is more like a refraction of its authority. To begin with an obvious point: children in school can't leave. Normally, a child's first instinct upon being tormented or humiliated by someone much larger is to go someplace else. Schoolchildren, however, don't have that option. If they try persistently to flee to safety, the authorities will bring them back. This is one reason, I suspect, for the stereotype of the bully as teacher's pet or hall monitor: even when it's not true, it draws on the tacit knowledge that the bully does depend on the authority of the institution in at least that one way-the school is, effectively, holding the victims in place while their tormentors hit them. This dependency on authority is also why the most extreme and elaborate forms of bullying take place in prisons, where dominant inmates and prison guards fall into alliances.

Even more, bullies are usually aware that the system is likely to punish any victim who strikes back more harshly. Just as a woman, confronted by an abusive man who may well be twice her size, cannot afford to engage in a "fair fight," but must seize the opportune moment to inflict as much as damage as possible on the man who's been abusing her-since she cannot leave him in a position to retaliate-so too must the schoolyard bullying victim respond with disproportionate force, not to disable the opponent, in this case, but to deliver a blow so decisive that it makes the antagonist hesitate to engage again.

I learned this lesson firsthand. I was scrawny in grade school, younger than my peers-I'd skipped a grade-and thus a prime target for some of the bigger kids who seemed to have developed a quasi-scientific technique of jabbing runts like me sharp, hard, and quick enough to avoid being accused of "fighting." Hardly a day went by that I was not attacked. Finally, I decided enough was enough, found my moment, and sent one particularly noxious galoot sprawling across the corridor with a well-placed blow to the head. I think I might have cracked his lip. In a way, it worked exactly as intended: for a month or two, bullies largely stayed away. But the immediate result was that we were both taken to the office for fighting, and the fact that he had struck first was determined to be irrelevant. I was found to be the guilty party and expelled from the school's advanced math and science club. (Since he was a C student, there was nothing, really, for him to be expelled from.)

"It doesn't matter who started it" are probably six of most insidious words in the English language. Of course it matters.

Crowdsourced Cruelty

Very little of this focus on the role of institutional authority is reflected in the psychological literature on bullying, which, being largely written for school authorities, assumes that their role is entirely benign. Still, recent research-of which there has been an outpouring since Columbine-has yielded, I think, a number of surprising revelations about the elementary forms of domination. Let's go deeper.

The first thing this research reveals is that the overwhelming majority of bullying incidents take place in front of an audience. Lonely, private persecution is relatively rare. Much of bullying is about humiliation, and the effects cannot really be produced without someone to witness them. Sometimes, onlookers actively abet the bully, laughing, goading, or joining in. More often, the audience is passively acquiescent. Only rarely does anyone step in to defend a classmate being threatened, mocked, or physically attacked.

When researchers question children on why they do not intervene, a minority say they felt the victim got what he or she deserved, but the majority say they didn't like what happened, and certainly didn't much like the bully, but decided that getting involved might mean ending up on the receiving end of the same treatment-and that would only make things worse. Interestingly, this is not true. Studies also show that in general, if one or two onlookers object, then bullies back off. Yet somehow most onlookers are convinced the opposite will happen. Why?

For one thing, because nearly every genre of popular fiction they are likely to be exposed to tells them it will. Comic book superheroes routinely step in to say, "Hey, stop beating on that kid"-and invariably the culprit does indeed turn his wrath on them, resulting in all sorts of mayhem. (If there is a covert message in such fiction, it is surely along the lines of: "You had better not get involved in such matters unless you are capable of taking on some monster from another dimension who can shoot lightning from its eyes.") The "hero," as deployed in the U.S. media, is largely an alibi for passivity. This first occurred to me when watching a small-town TV newscaster praising some teenager who'd jumped into a river to save a drowning child. "When I asked him why he did it," the newscaster remarked, "he said what true heroes always say, 'I just did what anyone would do under the circumstances.'" The audience is supposed to understand that, of course, this isn't true. Anyone would not do that. And that's okay. Heroes are extraordinary. It's perfectly acceptable under the same circumstances for you to just stand there and wait for a professional rescue team.

It's also possible that audiences of grade schoolers react passively to bullying because they have caught on to how adult authority operates and mistakenly assume the same logic applies to interactions with their peers. If it is, say, a police officer who is pushing around some hapless adult, then yes, it is absolutely true that intervening is likely to land you in serious trouble-quite possibly, at the wrong end of a club. And we all know what happens to "whistleblowers." (Remember Secretary of State John Kerry calling on Edward Snowden to "man up" and submit himself to a lifetime of sadistic bullying at the hands of the U.S. criminal justice system? What is an innocent child supposed to make of this?) The fates of the Mannings or Snowdens of the world are high-profile advertisements for a cardinal principle of American culture: while abusing authority may be bad, openly pointing out that someone is abusing authority is much worse-and merits the severest punishment.

A second surprising finding from recent research: bullies do not, in fact, suffer from low self-esteem. Psychologists had long assumed that mean kids were taking out their insecurities on others. No. It turns out that most bullies act like self-satisfied little pricks not because they are tortured by self-doubt, but because they actually are self-satisfied little pricks. Indeed, such is their self-assurance that they create a moral universe in which their swagger and violence becomes the standard by which all others are to be judged; weakness, clumsiness, absentmindedness, or self-righteous whining are not just sins, but provocations that would be wrong to leave unaddressed.

Here, too, I can offer personal testimony. I keenly remember a conversation with a jock I knew in high school. He was a lunk, but a good-natured one. I think we'd even gotten stoned together once or twice. One day, after rehearsing some costume drama, I thought it would be fun to walk into the dorm in Renaissance garb. As soon as he saw me, he pounced as if about to pulverize. I was so indignant I forgot to be terrified. "Matt! What the hell are you doing? Why would you want to attack me?" Matt seemed so taken aback that he forgot to continue menacing me. "But . . . you came into the dorm wearing tights!" he protested. "I mean, what did you expect?" Was Matt enacting deep-seated insecurities about his own sexuality? I don't know. Probably so. But the real question is, why do we assume his troubled mind is so important? What really matters was that he genuinely felt he was defending a social code.

In this instance, the adolescent bully was deploying violence to enforce a code of homophobic masculinity that underpins adult authority as well. But with smaller children, this is often not the case. Here we come to a third surprising finding of the psychological literature-maybe the most telling of all. At first, it's not actually the fat girl, or the boy with glasses, who is most likely to be targeted. That comes later, as bullies (ever cognizant of power relations) learn to choose their victims according to adult standards. At first, the principal criterion is how the victim reacts. The ideal victim is not absolutely passive. No, the ideal victim is one who fights back in some way but does so ineffectively, by flailing about, say, or screaming or crying, threatening to tell their mother, pretending they're going to fight and then trying to run away. Doing so is precisely what makes it possible to create a moral drama in which the audience can tell itself the bully must be, in some sense, in the right.

This triangular dynamic among bully, victim, and audience is what I mean by the deep structure of bullying. It deserves to be analyzed in the textbooks. Actually, it deserves to be set in giant neon letters everywhere: Bullying creates a moral drama in which the manner of the victim's reaction to an act of aggression can be used as retrospective justification for the original act of aggression itself.

Not only does this drama appear at the very origins of bullying in early childhood; it is precisely the aspect that endures in adult life. I call it the "you two cut it out" fallacy. Anyone who frequents social media forums will recognize the pattern. Aggressor attacks. Target tries to rise above and do nothing. No one intervenes. Aggressor ramps up attack. Target tries to rise above and do nothing. No one intervenes. Aggressor further ramps up attack.

This can happen a dozen, fifty times, until finally, the target answers back. Then, and only then, a dozen voices immediately sound, crying "Fight! Fight! Look at those two idiots going at it!" or "Can't you two just calm down and learn to see the other's point of view?" The clever bully knows that this will happen-and that he will forfeit no points for being the aggressor. He also knows that if he tempers his aggression to just the right pitch, the victim's response can itself be represented as the problem.

Nob : You're a decent chap, Jeeves, but I must say, you're a bit of an imbecile.

Jeeves : A bit of a . . . what?? What the hell do you mean by that?

Nob : See what I mean? Calm down! I said you were a decent chap. And such language! Don't you realize there are ladies present?

And what is true of social class is also true of any other form of structural inequality: hence epithets such as "shrill women," "angry black men," and an endless variety of similar terms of dismissive contempt. But the essential logic of bullying is prior to such inequalities. It is the ur-stuff of which they are made.

Stop Hitting Yourself

And this, I propose, is the critical human flaw. It's not that as a species we're particularly aggressive. It's that we tend to respond to aggression very poorly. Our first instinct when we observe unprovoked aggression is either to pretend it isn't happening or, if that becomes impossible, to equate attacker and victim, placing both under a kind of contagion, which, it is hoped, can be prevented from spreading to everybody else. (Hence, the psychologists' finding that bullies and victims tend to be about equally disliked.) The feeling of guilt caused by the suspicion that this is a fundamentally cowardly way to behave-since it is a fundamentally cowardly way to behave-opens up a complex play of projections, in which the bully is seen simultaneously as an unconquerable super-villain and a pitiable, insecure blowhard, while the victim becomes both an aggressor (a violator of whatever social conventions the bully has invoked or invented) and a pathetic coward unwilling to defend himself.

Obviously, I am offering only the most minimal sketch of complex psychodynamics. But even so, these insights may help us understand why we find it so difficult to extend our sympathies to, among others, fleeing Iraqi conscripts gunned down in "turkey shoots" by U.S. warriors. We apply the same logic we did when passively watching some childhood bully terrorizing his flailing victim: we equate aggressors and victims, insist that everyone is equally guilty (notice how, whenever one hears a report of an atrocity, some will immediately start insisting that the victims must have committed atrocities too), and just hope that by doing so, the contagion will not spread to us.

This is difficult stuff. I don't claim to understand it completely. But if we are ever going to move toward a genuinely free society, then we're going to have to recognize how the triangular and mutually constitutive relationship of bully, victim, and audience really works, and then develop ways to combat it. Remember, the situation isn't hopeless. If it were not possible to create structures-habits, sensibilities, forms of common wisdom-that do sometimes prevent the dynamic from clicking in, then egalitarian societies of any sort would never have been possible. Remember, too, how little courage is usually required to thwart bullies who are not backed up by any sort of institutional power. Most of all, remember that when the bullies really are backed up by such power, the heroes may be those who simply run away.

Notes

[1] Still, before we let adult males entirely off the hook, I should observe that the argument for military efficiency cuts two ways: even those societies whose men refuse to organize themselves effectively for war also do, in the overwhelming majority of cases, insist that women should not fight at all. This is hardly very efficient. Even if one were to concede that men are, generally speaking, better at fighting (and this is by no means clear; it depends on the type of fighting), and one were to simply choose the most able-bodied half of any given population, then some of them would be female. Anyway, in a truly desperate situation it can be suicidal not to employ every hand you've got. Nonetheless, again and again we find men-even those relatively nonbelligerent ones-deciding they would rather die than break the code saying women should never be allowed to handle weapons. No wonder we find it so difficult to sympathize with male atrocity victims: they are, to the degree that they segregate women from combat, complicit in the logic of male violence that destroyed them. But if we are trying to identify that key flaw or set of flaws in human nature that allows for that logic of male violence to exist to begin with, it leaves us with a confusing picture. We do not, perhaps, have some sort of inbuilt proclivity for violent domination. But we do have a tendency to treat those forms of violent domination that do exist-starting with that of men over women-as moral imperatives unto themselves.

This article was originally published at The Baffler