Civilization and Our Discontents

Freud’s last book, and probably his most famous, is Civilization and Its Discontents. In it he discusses the sacrifices of enjoyment that are required to participate in civilized life and the stress of having to behave ourselves. Both our violent and our sexual impulses have to be inhibited and reorganized. But I want to turn to another kind of discontent: the generations of forced labor over several thousand years, including today, that make civilizations possible.

The achievements of civilization are indeed remarkable, and they go back at least as far as  to ancient Mesopotamia, Persia, Egypt, China, Greece, Rome. There were, of course, magnificent civilizations in the Americas, but these were largely destroyed by European invaders before they were able to teach us much. But the others created and bequeathed to us developments in the arts – including architecture, painting, sculpture, and literature, as well as the foundations of the sciences, technology, philosophy, and religion, and of course, the languages we speak today, the number system that made possible modern mathematics, science and technology. Our modern world, with its comforts, the protection and insulation from heat and cold, our instantaneous and global access to information, entertainment, literature and the arts, food and drink from almost anywhere, and the ability to bring an infinite variety of consumer goods to our door steps merely by pressing a few buttons on a keyboard – all this is but the latest chapter in the story of civilization.

Let’s not forget, though, that what I have called “civilizations” are also empires – militarized power structures that gather the wealth from a large and expanding area and concentrate its control and enjoyment in the home land – in Athens, Rome, or London. Empires come by conquest, by the force of invading armies, followed by officials empowered to exact taxes and tribute from local populations.

But it was not just goods and raw materials that were expropriated from the lands and peoples of empire; it was also the people themselves, brought back to the center as slaves to do most of the unskilled, and some of the skilled, labor that constructed the magnificent edifices we can still visit today. Slaves labored in the fields and mines and workshops; domestic slaves prepared food, took care of children, cleaned floors and clothing and streets. The elites were thus free to organize military campaigns, participate in councils of government, manage religious practices, plan cities, design buildings, and to read, write, and discuss works of philosophy, political theory, science, and literature.

In the US, we are still living in the empire that began with Columbus and the English colonization of Virginia and New England. The Europeans who first arrived certainly could not create civilization or extract much wealth by their own labor alone, nor did they ever intend to. They were counting on the natives of the new land to join the civilized word and work for their white masters. Columbus sent four shiploads of native Carribeans back for sale in Mediterranean slave markets. The English in North America, finding natives difficult to enslave, imported poor English, Scots and Irish as indentured servants, but that servitude was temporary, and there were not enough of them to work the enormous land that was available as natives were displaced by war and disease. So they began importing enslaved people from the West Indies and Africa, thanks to the enterprising slave traders of Portugal and Spain. To make a long story short, over the next three centuries the number of enslaved black people who planted, cultivated, harvested, and processed tobacco, sugar, and cotton in the southern United States grew to four million, while the proceeds of those crops, exported to the North and to England, created and multiplied the wealth of European and American bankers and merchants as well as that of Southern plantation owners. That rapid accumulation of wealth, resulting from the brutally coerced labor of the enslaved, built the financial and industrial foundation of the American Empire that spanned the continent and was soon exploiting and expropriating the resources and labor of people in the Caribbean, Latin America, and the Pacific.

Just as the highly cultured lives of Greeks and Romans to whom our culture owes so much would not have been possible without their colonies and slaves, neither would the civilized lives told of in the novels of Jane Austen or in the TV series “Downton Abbey” have been conceivable without the British Empire and the fortunes made by British investors from slave-grown cotton. The money investors made from the businesses of slaves and cotton enabled the rapid industrialization of the US after the Civil War, and the rise of this country as a great power.

The amenities of modern life in the developed world continue to be produced by people who work barely to survive and who have little, if any, access to those amenities themselves. Our food is largely grown, harvested, packaged, and often prepared and served, by people, mostly people of color, in low wage insecure jobs. Our clothing, appliances, and electronic gear are assembled by workers in China and other places where workers are paid less than a dollar an hour to solder, assemble and package products for the world’s best-known brands. Our houses, and apartment and office buildings are mostly built and maintained by poorly paid immigrant workers. Our children are often cared for, and even educated by, people who must struggle every day to make their costs of living.

Civilization has produced wonderful things that could, if they were managed in the common interests of everyone, provide a good life for all of us. The history of empire, slavery, and capitalism is the story of a process that has coerced and conned the vast majority of humanity to labor to provide the fortunate, well-born few with the advantages of civilization. It’s time to turn the tables, to take control of the wealth we have created and put it and ourselves to work cooperatively to build the world that all that wealth can make possible.

Presented on the Old Mole Variety Hour, May 28, 2018