KEEPING VS. SHARING PT 3

 In my previous recent essays, I've been examining the way two ethical systems, the Ethos of Keeping and the Ethos of Sharing, have interpenetrated human history in the past and continue to do so. principally through their modern manifestations as "conservatism" and "liberalism." However, I added a couple of subdivisions to the mix. Keeping and Sharing can both manifest into extreme forms, both of which can be subsumed under "radicalism." The less extreme forms of both are best described as "meliorism"

Routine political discourse often distinguishes between radical and meliorist forms of liberalism. In the meliorist form, the ethic recommended to those that hold power can be summed up as "You Should Share" such things as rights and privileges with those that do not have (or do not think they have) said capacities. In the world of American civil rights, it's almost de rigeur to name Martin Luther King Jr as an exponent of persuading powerholders to cede power to the marginalized. In the radicalist form, the prevailing argument says, "You Must Share" and the best-known advocate from the same Civil Rights era, Malcolm X, favored the stick rather than the carrot.

Conservatism, though, displays the same two subdivisions. Liberals are usually only able to recognize the extreme form, so that everyone from the KKK to the guy running the Christian cake-shop are viewed as equals in tyranny. Naturally there are specific agents who want to Keep Power under all circumstances and cede nothing.  However, meliorist conservatives display the ethic that "You Should Share," albeit only under the right conditions. Franklin D. Roosevelt earned the reputation of a Liberal for measures like empowering the Fair Employment Practice Committee. Yet, the act of interning Japanese-Americans was fundamentally a conservative act, even if one takes the most charitable view of FDR's action.

And so I come to my first fictional example, that of the opposition between meliorism and radicalism seen in SPIDER-MAN #68-70 (dated January, February and March 1969). Yet to examine this scenario, a little grounding is necessary, since the conflict revolves around one of Spider-Man's support-cast, Joe Robertson. Though introduced in ASM #51, not until issue #55 does Stan Lee set up the newsman's role as a regular character, where he's a voice of reason as against the mule-headedness of publisher J. Jonah Jameson. He's also the epitome of a Liberal meliorist view: Joe Robertson ascends to his position of authority purely on the basis of merit. 

Jumping forward a year and some months, Joe's son Randy Robertson is briefly seen in ASM #67, but only in #68 do we see Randy's purpose: to show Stan Lee's negative view of radicalism. Thus, almost as soon as Peter Parker encounters Randy on the campus they both attend, up comes the shadow of Randy's friend Josh-- who, since he never has a last name, might as well be called Josh X.

Though Lee was often criticized for the piddly nature of the "campus protest" involved here, he shows considerable acumen in showing how militant Josh X is. There's no "hey, how they hangin,'" just, "are you joining the cause?" Lee obviously means readers to find Josh abrasive here and later, even though Peter Parker nominally approves of his cause. The campus protest will tie into Spider-Man's adventure with his frequent foe The Kingpin, but the cause is less important here than showing how Randy, the offspring of a meliorist parent, is being influenced by a radical who demands that the campus authorities "Must Share," while said authorities are taking the radical conservative posture, presumably currying favor with alumni to garner donations (though Lee does not say this).

Josh X is even less appealing in his second scene in the story. Though Randy is the first to invite Parker to help the students fight the good fight, Josh not only acts like Parker owes him allegiance, he addresses a near-stranger as "Whitey" as if he doesn't owe Parker the slightest courtesy. Stan Lee doesn't have Parker react to the racial slur, but rather to Josh's statement that the young militant doesn't think he has to listen to, or account for, the response of the authorities to the protesters' demands. On the next page, an unnamed Black protester casts aspersions on Randy for being "the son of an Uncle Tom," and Josh, for whatever reason, defends Randy as a "soul brother." But it's not hard to imagine Josh flinging the same insult if Randy failed to follow Josh's lead.

The battle between the spider and the gang-lord continues into ASM #69 and #70, but Stan Lee devotes just a handful of scenes to winding up his mini-debate about meliorism and radicalism. In the first of the two scenes above, Joe is aghast that a son of his was involved not just in protest, but in causing damage to personal property, which is something neither Randy nor Josh apologizes for. (In the next issue, Lee changes his mind and says no damage was caused by the protesters.) Randy, probably channeling whatever Sidney Poitier movies Stan had seen, complains that he has to be more "militant" because his meliorist father is part of "the White Man's establishment." Joe makes the more reasonable argument about proving oneself, though oddly, Josh gets the last word, claiming that "we" (meaning Black people) won't get anywhere unless they "kinda shake Whitey up a little." Given that Stan Lee was almost certainly a meliorist, it's fairly generous that he at least acknowledges the rationale of the radicalist in this issue. In #70 the voice of the "Must Keep" authority is at last heard, as the dean admits having failed to listen to the voices of his students, and that he was on their side but was busy fighting the real entrenched interests. the college's trustees. Josh admits the need to think about things a bit more, but no one's ever privy to his thoughts since I don't think he ever appears again.  

So in this late 1960s tale, some respect is accorded the "You Must Share" ethos even if the "You Should Share" is clearly the superior ethic. Yet what about one of the principal franchises of the era of identity politics?

The 2018 MCU film BLACK PANTHER presented audiences with a world where "You Must Share" is the only game in town. However, it's not a power structure based on the racial politics of America. Rather, Wakanda, an idealized African fantasyland, is called upon to pledge fealty to the radicalist ethos. In a loose way Wakanda is also governed by an Ethos of Keeping, though it's implied to be a world without the racial divisions found in the outside world, only a heritage of tribal quarrels that can be solved with rituals of combat. Wakanda keeps its miracle element vibranium out of the hands of the powerful and the powerless alike. However, their isolationism takes a major blow thanks to a poor relation of the realm's hereditary ruler, The Black Panther.   

Considering that T'Challa's uncle N'Jobu is critical to the end of Wakanda's isolationism, the character is barely more than a bare function of the plot. We are never told what radical influencer managed to persuade N'Jobu, brother of the reigning Wakandan king T'Chaka, to betray his country's policies and try to sell weapons to radicals in that hotbed of political activity, Oakland. Nor does the film tell us why T'Challa is so traumatized by the death of his traitorous uncle. N'Jobu's main purpose in the movie is to spawn Erik Killmonger, whom many critics described as the film's "real hero." Even though Killmonger takes over Wakanda with zero concern for its people and with the agenda of using their weapons for his network of blacktivist conspirators (also never defined), all that counts is forcing Wakanda to Share with the downtrodden, "By Any Means Necessary." Of course, Whitey is still the main villain even when no White person is directly involved in Killmonger's plans. Thus CIA agent Everett Ross is automatically a "colonizer" according to one of T'Challa's guardians. Yet none of the Wakandans uses that term for Killmonger, even though he's applying CIA tactics to ruin their country for his own agenda. Even though Killmonger dies, he succeeds in ending Wakanda's isolation. And the audience knows this must be a good thing because the nation starts donating money to American Blacks-- who I guess are supposed to be way worse off than all the impoverished tribes of real-world Africa.            

It's clear from BLACK PANTHER that without any sort of compensatory ethos, the radicalist ethos loses all control of whatever moral compass it might potentially possess. I would like to think that PANTHER's success at the box office was a short-lived anomaly, since most of the radicalist MCU movies since then have tanked. But as another famous Liberal-with-Conservative-tendencies observed, "the price of freedom is eternal vigilance."                 

   

KEEPING VS. SHARING PT 2

 In Part 1 of this essay-series, I offered a broad characterization of the two political philosophies, conservatism and liberalism, as overt manifestations of two deeper ethical systems, the Ethos of Keeping for the first and the Ethos of Sharing for the second. I also showed just a few historical examples of how the two systems interwove, but here I'll focus on how they played out in two historical periods, the 1960s "Civil Rights" era and the 21st-century "identity politics" era, and I'll use illustrations taken more from fiction than from history.

I commented in Part 1 that the pietistic religions strongly emphasized the Ethos of Sharing, but there were different degrees of emphasis. Early Christianity did not suggest that all slaveholders should free their slaves-- even though the Jewish custom of Jubilee at least indicated that this was a beneficial act-- but rather enjoined slaveholders to treat their slaves with charity and humanity. Thus the message to conservatives here was "You Should Share." At the same time, Christianity was founded upon the template of the Old Testament, which sometimes put forth the countervailing message, "You Must Share." One can see this illustrated by the Exodus story of Moses and the Pharaoh, in which Pharaoh's desire to "Keep" the Jews as slaves was finally overthrown by God's will that the Jews must be liberated. Pharaoh himself represents the extreme of conservatism, that of "You Must Keep" one's perceived property no matter what. Yet, going back to the slavery-rhetoric from early Christianity, some masters followed a milder version of Keeping, which I'll call the commandment "You Should Keep," unless one sees a good reason not to do so. Within this form of ethical compass, even if one decides to liberate this or that meritorious slave-- as Philemon releases Onesimus in the Epistle of Paul-- that does not mean that the slaveholder releases all his slaves, or renounces the belief that slavery is a perfectly normal societal practice.

Vaulting over centuries to the American Civil Rights era, it's possible to see these commandments on both sides of the liberal/conservatism spectrum manifesting in the political persuasions often called "meliorism" and "radicalism." The radical conservative swears by the commandment "You Must Keep," which resulted (for one example) in banning free Blacks from being educated in any way, for fear that they might have a better chance at escaping a second-class citizen status. The meliorist conservative, swearing by "You Should Keep," by contrast would be okay with allowing Black Americans to be educated in Black schools, but would still want Blacks to stay within certain boundaries. The meliorist and the radical attitudes with respect to liberals have received much more commentary. The meliorist liberal wants to work within the system, to prove that he deserves a seat at the table on the basis of merit-- again, telling conservatives "You Should Share." The radical liberal insists that, on the basis of past treatment, the whole table should be overturned so that only his people (and maybe some fellow travelers) can be seated, telling conservatives that "You Must Share," even to the extent of beggaring oneself.

I'd originally planned to address my fictional examples in this post but now it seems to me that the length of the post will become ungainly, so I'll hold the rest for a Part Three.           

      

KEEPING VS. SHARING

 It's now a week and a day since the assassination of Charlie Kirk. I'd heard his name off and on but only had become aware of him in the last month, thanks in large part to SOUTH PARK. I don't regularly watch the show but some podcast on YT featured Kirk reacting to a 2025 SP episode. From the clips shown, the show spoofed Kirk by having Cartman give extremely racist speeches, supposedly modeled on those of Kirk. The real Kirk was highly amused by SP's hyperbolic satire, and he stated something to the effect that he felt he'd "arrived" by getting lambasted by the famous teleseries.  

The SP episode may have been clever or stupid, but it falls within the realm of art, and so it can't be judged as pure political discourse. Not so, the dozens of contemptible reactions on the Left to the murder, in which people felt it more important to virtue signal about Kirk's alleged racism than to show common respect for a man shot down for his words. Even worse were the bottom-feeders who tried to make a hero of the left-leaning assassin, or to romanticize him, or to make him part of some convoluted conspiracy on the Right.

But this is a philosophy-blog, not a political rant blog, so I do have some thoughts about what I consider the "two ethical systems" that underlie all forms of political endeavor-- the Ethos of Keeping and the Ethos of Sharing. They are the two sides of human nature, which have taken many forms in history. In this century we know the Keeping-Ethos as "conservatism," which connotation is baked into the very word "to conserve." Now, the word from which "liberalism" descends means "to free," not "to share." But no actual liberal in modern times advocates simply "freeing" marginalized people without also letting those people "share" in whatever rights or privileges have supposedly been denied them-- ergo, liberalism is predicated on an Ethos of Sharing. The two words are even traced back to the same century, the 14th, while in another century, the 19th, they became rhetorically linked to the two dominant U.S. political parties.

Within the liberal view, conservatism is evil, the domain of money-hoarding tyrants, but this is false logic, and not only because there are a lot of rich liberals too. From the tribal level up, every organized society depends upon an Ethos of Keeping, particularly with respect to resources. If Tribe A has control of the headwaters of a river, then Tribe B will not be allowed to Share in this bounty, for that would mean less for every member of Tribe A. Tribe B can only access the river only through (1) reciprocal trade, which exchanges goods from B to A, which is still the opposite of Sharing since each party Keeps the fruits of the exchange, or (2) killing off Tribe A or somehow managing to merge with the other tribe consensually. Obviously small societies often merged to make larger ones, but often this strategy, like trade, was executed for mutual advantage, such as defense against a common enemy, Tribe C. The primary mode of non-reciprocal Sharing appears within families, where parents share with children and may get nothing out of the bargain except a sense of familial immortality. One may assume that some tribes extended familial charity to tribe-members who were injured or indigent, and that this eventually led to a sense of philanthropy toward the poor as tribes coalesced into city-states. But this still constitutes Sharing within a particular ingroup.         

The Ethos of Keeping also applies equally to the ethos behind slavery, which is in modern times supplies both sides of the political spectrum with a source of conflict. In archaic times no citizen would have thought that any society was obligated to free slaves. Slaves were often taken during wars with other nations, along with other plunder. The idea of simply letting enemy slaves go free would not have made any more sense than a request for the return of any other sort of plunder. Ancient citizens might have understood a slave wanting to be free, but that would not mean that the slaveholder had any moral duty to free him. The closest thing ancient societies had to the modern idea of liberation would be related to Nietzsche's concept of the largesse of the nobility. Nobles might choose to free slaves-- say, during the Hebrew festival of the Jubilee-- as a gesture of generosity. Something similar may inform the story of Cyrus the Great releasing Jewish slaves in Babylon from captivity once the Persian ruler took over the country. One does not need to believe the Old Testament's account of the event, and one may fairly speculate that Cyrus may have liberated the Jews with the notion of being able to garner a return favor from Israel down the line. But since the Jews did not to our knowledge render Cyrus any goods in exchange for freedom, his gesture is still defined as a gesture of magnanimity.    

Though one can find evidence of the Ethos of Sharing in early societies, its manifestation in the form of charity became arguably more cental to what some have called the "pietistic religions"-- Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism. With the rise of these beliefs, the Ethos of Sharing became a general commandment. It's also during this period that two of the greatest empires of the Old World, Imperial Rome and Imperial China, had their Keeping-systems of empire-building interfused with the Sharing-oriented systems of Christianity and Buddhism. Granted, Imperial Rome had to take a "fall" before it rose again in a more religiously oriented form, while Buddhism had to share China with Taoism and the secular "faith" of Confucianism. In both domains, strong limitations remained upon the Ethos of Sharing, for the institution of slavery continued in both empires. More egregiously, the later Empire of Islam turned the practice of slavery, which had most often been the consequence of warring tribes and nations, into a transnational moneymaking business.    

So when I write something about the American Confederacy and don't react with a knee-jerk excoriation of the evils of slavery, it's because I recognize that slaveholders in all of the twelve original slaveholding states were governed by the same Ethos of Keeping that applies to any other form of property. American slaveholders in the North and the South didn't bring Africans to the States for any other reason but to be slaves, the same way the captive Africans would have remained slaves had they been sold anywhere else, in Persia or Turkey or China. But in the United States, there had arisen a secular "ethic of emancipation" due to the American Revolution. This combined with the Sharing-ethos of mainstream Christianity-- as well as offshoots like Quakerism-- and so produced abolitionism. The abolitionists were far too few to have influenced the nation's course, but their aims happened to coincide with (1) Great Britain's early-19th century ban on slave-trading, and with (2) the desire of Northern politicians to nullify the congressional power of the Southern states. The "liberals" of this period were no less devoted to their Ethos of Keeping than were the "conservatives." Aside from real abolitionists, who often sacrificed life and property campaigning for slaves' rights, most Northerners had only one real goal: to bend the Southern states to their will. These early "liberals" sometimes wrapped their quest for power in an alleged Ethos of Sharing. But they often expected the South to do all the sharing of resources, by enforcing codes that kept even free Blacks from emigrating into certain states, such as Illinois.  

And now, about a hundred and fifty years after the close of the Civil War, modern liberals are still telling conservatives that they Must Share whatever liberals think ought to be shared. To that imperious command, conservatives reply that they Must Keep what they hold rather than becoming de facto slaves to the Left. While there are real racist movements within the Far Right, and while there are reactionary elements within the "Center-Right" that I don't always countenance, the anti-racist screed of modern Liberals has become removed from all practical considerations. Thus, they only command others to Share on their own terms-- yet they cannot share condemnation of the political murder of a man who only contended against them with words. Thus the Left's alleged narrative of Sharing becomes that of Keeping one's political stance in place, no matter what. I'll add that I imagine a lot of Righties want to keep the controversy boiling too. But the Left missed a real chance to participate in a Sharing that would have made them look a lot better than they do now.     

    

INDEPENDENCE DAZE

 Independence Day 2025 is long gone, but I found it still on the mind of one of my forum-opponents. Without bothering to lay out the general argument in which the Fourth came up, my opponent's attitude was definitely that of the "slavery is America's original sin" mindset, in that he expressed the view that modern Americans are being hypocritical to celebrate Independence Day, but things weren't so independent for slaves. 

I've already set forth some of my views on the phenomenon of slavery in a few posts here, such as the two-part SLAVE WAGES essay. But for amusement's sake, I decided to randomly flip through Frank Fukuyama's THE END OF HISTORY AND THE LAST MAN, which remains an important work in analyzing the role of the United States in creating what the author called "an ethic of emancipation." I came across the following paragraph in the chapter "The Universal and Homogenous State," and though I'm sure it won't have any impact on the stance of my opponent, I'll reprint the Fukuyama paragraph here as it may prove useful down the road.  

The second way in which economic development encourages 
liberal democracy is because it has a tremendous leveling effect 
through its need for universal education. Old class barriers are 
broken down in favor of a general condition of equality of op¬ 
portunity.

 While new classes arise based on economic status or education,  
there is an inherently greater mobility in society that 
promotes the spread of egalitarian ideas. The economy thus cre¬ 
ates a kind of de facto equality before such equality arises de jure.

PERSPECTIVISM PERMUTATIONS

 Once again, I'm structuring a post here so that I can also use it as a response on a forum-thread. All the readers of this blog need to know is that the forum-thread involves discourse on the subjects of atheism and agnosticism.  As I am an agnostic, I reject the certitudes of both theists and atheists as to whether gods do or don't exist, but one comment on the thread, with respect to Christian morals with respect to slavery, raised some interesting questions that bring me back to Nietzschean perspectivism.                                                                                                                                 _________________                                                                                                                                                                                           "Slavery would likely be inherently immoral from [Jesus'] point of view. Like thousands of isolated moral conundrums, there is no record of him responding to slavery one way or another. But he did have a take on how to love. Slavery would be in contrast to that principle."

                                                                                                                            I would tend to speak of things like "pro-slavery sentiments" and "anti-slavery sentiments" alike as being intersubjective rather than objective, but your argument as a Christian is far more interesting than the rote dogma of the atheists here, and so deserves a longer response.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         The dominant atheist response here to the question of morality has been to claim that it's purely determined by social factors. This claim is made according to atheist beliefs about the absence of any overriding human nature that simply takes different permutations in different societies. Now, though I have argued (and still argue) that atheists cannot be sure that nothing like gods or spirits existed for early man, I also have not dismissed the equal possibility that such gods and spirits did not exist except as poetic metaphors. But for this post, I will hew to the latter possibility: looking at the human custom of slavery as if its attendant morality was independent of any divine input. This is also possible to me because I am a perspectivist as well as an agnostic: I seek to understand how perspective affects morals.                                                                                                                      Jesus' most famous statement of "love" in relation to human bondage would be, to my mind, "Do as you would done by." This speaks to an innate human need: the need for cooperation in activities that are mutually beneficial to the parties involved: cooperation between families, tribe-members, nations. However, the human need for cooperation may be partly if not wholly predicated on competition as well: families gather together to keep away intruders, nations sign peace treaties to repel common enemies, and so on. There are legitimate areas of human endeavor to which the ethic of cooperation does not unilaterally apply. A merchant who never "bought cheap in order to sell dear" would embody the lovingkindness expected by Jesus's admonition. However, he might also find himself going out of business and being unable to feed his family. So in my terms both ethics, of cooperation and competition, are intersubjective in that they apply across the whole of human cultures, rather than each culture being determined by local standards.                                                                                                                                                                                                                From this formulation it follows that slavery, too, would be judged by these two competing ethics. Prior to the Old Testament, recorded history doesn't preserve a lot of moral commentary on slavery (though there's no reason to assume that there was none). We know from Exodus that Jews didn't like being slaves (even of the economic variety) in Egypt, because their slavery is depicted as being bad. Yet the Jews of the Nation of Israel kept slaves, as we know from Leviticus. How did those archaic Jews justify slavery? We don't know this in any precise sense. We do know that the custom of Jubilee encouraged slaveowners to emancipate slaves under just the right circumstances, though. This suggests that archaic Hebrews were aware that slaves of other nations didn't like being slaves in Israel any more than the Jews had liked it in Egypt. Leviticus 25:44 even seems to be justifying the taking of foreign-born slaves over the enslavement of one's fellow Jews, though we can't be certain what the actual practices were like in such a distant period.                                                                                                                                                          To wind up somewhat, if we could ask a tribesman of early humanity why his tribe took slaves, he would probably answer with some version of an ethic born out of competition: "They did it to us first," or "If we don't have some of their people held captive, the enemy tribe may try to wipe us out." At the same time, the ethic of cooperation would have co-existed. It was probably easier for two tribes, even if they disliked each other, to use tradecraft to facilitate exogamous unions rather than by going to war every time one's tribe had a bridal shortage. These contending aspects of human nature are reflected in the mythopoeic conceptions of the philosopher Empedocles, who wrote:                                                                                                                                                                                        "The force that unites the elements to become all things is Love, also called Aphrodite; Love brings together dissimilar elements into a unity, to become a composite thing. Love is the same force that human beings find at work in themselves whenever they feel joy, love and peace. Strife, on the other hand, is the force responsible for the dissolution of the one back into its many, the four elements of which it was composed."

Perhaps more pertinently, he also wrote: "Each man believes only his own experience."                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

THE ROAD NOT TAKEN

 Another politics post...

__________

While I won't criticize the South for doing what the North had been doing for the previous hundred years, I will criticize them on another line: they allowed themselves to be gulled by the Northern politicians into taking an absolutist, hard-line view on the slavery question.

​

Imagine what might have transpired if, a brilliant Southern statesman, of the capacity of John C Calhoun, had looked at the Tallmadge Amendment of 1819 (talk about an extra-legal, un-Constitutional stipulation) and realized, "Hey-- this is the wave of the future. These Northern dinks don't care anything about Black slaves, but they want to give the illusion that they do in order to gain Congressional superiority. And with all the new territories opening up-- there's no chance that we'll able to convert enough Western states to the slavery position to keep Congressional power."

The far-sighted solution to the Northern anti-slavery posture would have been to institute something similar to what the North was doing, in order to steal their thunder. Possibly there could have been an incentive plan for slaves to amass enough credit to buy their freedom, which also might have diverted a fair number of them from simply running away to the North and undercutting the bottom line of the planters. Instead, the planters dug in their heels, like many people who simply don't like being told what to do by those who aren't any more moral than they are. A far sighted person would have seen that the Missouri Compromise was just a bandaid, albeit one that lasted over thirty years, yet one that clearly did not prevent the North from continuing to inflict partisan tariffs on the South. For instance, the Nullification Crisis took place in the early 1830s, long before new states became a clear and present danger to Southern Congressional representation. Andrew Jackson backed down from his partisan tariff. Lincoln would not.

But we didn't get a far sighted politician. Calhoun, despite his brilliance, failed to see that his strategy, that of abiding by the letter of the Constitution regarding its protections of property, was going to be swept aside by the emotional appeal of liberation for an underclass. Legally, slaves were property, but emotionally, they were human beings capable of citizenship, and more often than not, emotion trumps legality. Northern soldiers didn't fight the South to free slaves, and most of them probably weren't even aware of the tariff issues. But they felt they'd been attacked, and they responded accordingly, even as the South did. But had the South liberalized its stance on slaves by 1860, those states would have been in a position to forge links with Western states on concerns other than slavery.

SLAVE WAGES PT. 2

So how did slavery evolve, and what does it mean in the history of human culture?

Going only by historical records, we know that slaves are mentioned in the Sumerian Code of Hammurabi, circa 1792 BCE. At least one online reference asserts that it's unlikely that hunter-gatherer tribes, for which we have no historical records, were unlikely to have practiced the custom, but I disagree. Many though not all Native American tribes conformed to the hunter-gatherer economy, and the current historical consensus is that at least some tribes maintained slavery customs prior to the incursion of Europeans. While I don't suggest a direct equivalence between Native American hunter-gatherers and those of prehistoric times, I find it a foregone conclusion that if the former could maintain slaves within a hunter-gatherer economy, then so could tribes in prehistoric times.

Going with the assumption that slavery did not just magically spring out of nothing in the kingdoms of Sumer, how might the practice have evolved at the tribal level?

Warfare has been repeatedly associated with the taking of slaves. One would not expect that at the tribal level, one tribe would take a huge quantity of prisoners from their opponents along the line of the storied Babylonian Captivity of 597 BC. But it would be easy enough for a small tribe of, say, forty-fifty people to keep a handful of slaves from another tribe in thrall.

Now, why would they do so? One theory of motivation might be called the "eff you" theory. This would suppose that after an armed conflict, one tribe takes prisoners and keeps them in bondage in order to say "eff you" to the free members of the competing tribe. This motivation is certainly consonant with the ornery aspects of human nature. However, after a while I theorize that the "eff you" appeal would wear off, and the slavekeepers, if motivated by nothing but acrimony, would simply kill off their captives. 

Another motivation could be that of ransom. The tribe that takes living prisoners can then demand recompense for the return of the prisoners. If the owning tribe doesn't get what they want, they keep the prisoners as slaves. However, this too would seem to be a self-defeating motivation, especially since the owning tribe has to keep feeding the slaves/prisoners.

The last feasible motivation is that of economic security. Once a tribe reaches a certain point of organization, every one understands the principle of societal exchange. Aside from the tribe's leaders, everyone else has to make one-on-one exchanges to get what they want. The tribesman who figures out how to make stone tools, for instance, has a skill which he can use to acquire goods through barter if not through standardized currency. Now, if a farmer wants to get free members of his tribe to plow his field for him, he has to pay these laborers, and he may not want to pay the price.

Slavery, at base, is a form of economic security. If you're rich enough to own a slave, then the slave has to perform the labor you require. The slave cannot negotiate; the slave can only accept your terms or try to escape bondage in some way. The efficiency of slavery may not extend to the culture as a whole. Jeffrey Rogers Hummel produced detailed statistics to show that the custom of slavery in the American South did not substantially enrich the Southern States as a whole, due in part to factors like the Fugitive Slave Laws. But the slaveowners profited, precisely because they could overwork their possessions if they so pleased, restrained only by the economic costs of purchasing a new slave if the old one died.

Now, for centuries, there seems to have been little or no animus toward the practice of slavery in most cultures. The Jews inveighed against their people having been kept in economic bondage by the Egyptians, but this did not prevent them from owning slaves, as we know from the custom of the Jubilee. Serious anti-slavery rhetoric does not seem to have proliferated until the 18th century, when Europeans and Americans began arguing about the concept of natural rights. If any comparable developments took place in China, India or the Muslim countries, I'd be happy to look at any evidence of same.

In conclusion, the prevalent idea that any slaveowners took slaves for any reasons supervening those of economy-- say, that of subordinating a given group of people just for the diabolical joy of making them into an inferior class-- logic does not support this sort of false reasoning.

SLAVE WAGES

 In April 2021 Louisiana state representative Ray Garofalo got in trouble because he made this obviously humorous remark in a debate over education:

“If you are having a discussion on whatever the case may be, on slavery, then you can talk about everything dealing with slavery: the good, the bad, the ugly,” Garofalo said.

The mere fact that he was quoting an old Sergio Leone film-title ought to have made clear that he wasn't making an in-depth judgment on the conditions of slavery in the United States. Nevertheless, righteous liberals descended like locusts, and Garofalo had to walk back his comments to some extent.  

Perhaps even more insidious are recent cancellations of actress Ellie Kemper and BACHELOR host Chris Harrison due to the appearance of giving props to the Confederacy in one way or another. As with the crusades against Confederate statues and flags, the Left has decided to play the part of the Inquisition in this game of race-shaming, and they're not likely to back off on what seems to have been a political success for them, at least for the present.

I'm going to avoid repeating the observations I made in THE CONFEDERACY AND THE DUNCES, but I wanted to address the specific idea that everything in a given hated culture must be abolished. The BACHELOR tsunami came about because Harrison dared to take lightly the stigmatization of a contestant who had attended a so-called "antebellum party." This sort of event probably has little or no political ramifications, being the equivalent of people dressing up for a Halloween event. But the Left must attack everything even tangentially connected with the Confederate States.

In this essay I wrote:

The pro-slavery proponents were, without doubt, greedy and venal people. But you know what? Every damn country has to make allowances for greedy, venal people in power. That’s the only way anyone ever manages to create a unified nation, and it’s only with a unified nation that wrongs can be redressed and slaves liberated.

The only addition I'll make to this is that every people who has exerted power over other persons has also produced a range of both great and banal art. Most of Western culture descends from the innovations of the Greeks, who did not for an instant question the propriety of keeping slaves to do the dirty work. I can't claim that the literature of the Southern American states before or immediately after the Civil War was as pivotal of that of the Greeks. Nevertheless, the ornate fashions and architecture of the Southern plantations still has the power to impress moderns on the aesthetic level, even if they may abominate the institution of slavery. Note as example the final episode of the 1980 teleseries DESIGNING WOMEN, which concluded with the female characters-- all of whom were liberal soapboxes for the show's liberal producer-- dreaming that they were wearing GONE WITH THE WIND outfits.

The wages of slavery, in the social sense, can only be trauma and turmoil. But every culture oppresses some underclass at one time or another, and at no time has that fact kept any such cultures from producing "good" things alongside the "bad" ones. Thus it's logically impossible to render such a judgment only against American Southern culture prior to the Civil War's conclusion.