Are we Unwitting Slaver Owners?
We Canadians are a complacent lot – thinking that bad things like slavery only happen elsewhere. But here’s a thought to rock you out of your complacency– what if most of us are slave owners, yes, you and me, yes, right now, here in what was once rated the best country in the world, Canada. Now you may ask how did I get the idea to think of ourselves as slave owners? From teaching the History of the Industrial Revolution. I thought that it was more than coincidence that the country that started to invent and use machines in a big way [and pollute and displace large populations in a big way too] was the same country that stopped using slaves and banned slavery and worked to stop it around the world. I asked myself: “Given that human nature has not changed could it be that we have simply exchanged one form of slavery for another?”
Now of course I am not talking about the type of slavery of the American South. I am not even talking about modern slavery: the variation practiced in Asia/middle East where workers are so abused and paid so little that for all practical purposes they are slaves or even the abuse of illegal immigrants who are paid below minimum wage and if working on a farm suffer terribly from the pesticides and herbicides they spread. No, i am talking about a very modern, industrial form of slavery that you have never heard of – a kind of slavery that I think is mostly unrecognized as slavery. I call it machine-nature slavery.
First things first – we better define machine-nature slavery because it’s a term I just made up. I looked at the UN definition which more or less says “Slavery is a state when one persons exercises the power of ownership over another” and expanded it to this:
“Machine-Nature Slavery is a social institution which treats machines and the nature required to make and run those machines into an object, an “IT”, that only has value in that it serves the needs and desires of the human owner of the slave – with the net result that the slave has no independent will or power or value of its own.”
This definition was inspired by Martin Buber, who wrote one of the books that most changed my perspective on how to live well, in his book “I and Thou”, where he says:
“Through the Thou a person becomes an I.”
What he is saying is that when we choose to see any other being as having value and agency just as I see myself as having, then the “other” moves from being a “thing” to be manipulated for my own desires to being a “soul” who, like “I”, who deserves the same respect I expect for myself. What I am doing today is just expanding Buber’s views to include ALL created beings.
Now, of course, machines are are not beings and have no consciousness, but there are at least two ways in which they are a “Thou”. As we all know machines are made of and are given energy by resources from the Natural world. Thus when we rely on machines to do much of our work, especially drudgery work that we don’t want to do [which is the kind of work human slaves were employed for], and treat them like an “IT” we risk treating the resources from nature that made the machine possible the same way – we treat Nature like an “IT”. A great Canadian, Grey Owl, said as much back in the 1930s:
“We must remember that in the end nature does not belong to us, we belong to it.”
Now I am not saying that we should stop using machines, after all, I am an engineer. What I am saying is that our relationship with machines and the Nature required for them to exist, should be an I-Thou relationship instead of the current I-It relationship. [Buber’s terminology] The machine and the Nature embodied within it should not be something that works for us, but rather a somebody who works with us. Another way of saying this to image that instead of Machine-Nature being your slave that you take for granted and only see as existing for to meet your needs and desires, you instead see machine-Nature as a being like you – that has its own needs and deserves respect just like you.
When people exclude God’s creatures from God’s compassion you have people who will do likewise to their fellow people. – St.Francis
The second dimension to how we relate to machines, especially computers, and most especially AI, is that as we become more and more reliant upon the machines they have more and more power over us. In other words, the slave owner becomes a slave to his/her “slaves”. In a recent podcast I listened to on slavery in Haiti the notes of a Frenchman slave owner emphasized the fact that taking care and paying attention to the slaves was a 24/7 task that occupied his mind all day and night long. This problem of the “slave owner” become a “slave in turn” is examined in the book Slaves of the Machine by G.Rawlins [MIT press]. It tells the story of how we became slaves to our machines and how our machines may one day become slaves to us. In other words, while we think we stopped slavery over 100 years ago we are now on the path to creating new machine slaves. [By the way, it is reported in the Guardian that today 1 in 200 people are slaves, so slavery is alive and well and more profitable than ever]
Now that we’ve got the machine-Nature form of slavery straight I want to emphasize how this is part of ecological death we have unleashed upon the world. It turns out that linking slavery to environmental degradation is not a new idea. In fact, Henry David Thoreau argued that slavery laid waste to the American landscape. A research paper by James Finley, editor of the Thoreau Society Bulletin wrote a paper that explores Thoreau’s use of ecological protest to advance the anti-slavery cause. Thoreau argued that slave labor and plantation-based agriculture was destroying the fertility and productivity of the South’s natural resources. But he also argued that the North was not spared in that equation and provided an environmental justice lens through which to view that. He argues that the slave system pollutes everything, including agricultural land, wilderness, labor conditions, politics, and interpersonal relationships. In fact, the early environmental protection movement called the Free Soil Party coalesced with abolitionists to oppose slavery’s expansion. As white Northerners, many Free Soilers didn’t necessarily oppose slavery on the grounds that it was leading to massive oppression, torture, and killing of human beings, though. Rather, they fought slavery on the grounds that its expansion was a massive injustice imposed upon … well, the grounds. The concern was that more American soil, forests, and rivers would be destroyed by the metastasizing slavery problem.”
So what do you do to stop being a machine-Nature slave owner? Stop treating machines like things and imagine all of the Nature that is embodied in the machine that deserves respect and needs to be treated as a partner in the work you do. But there is more, because of the damage we have done since the Industrial revolution began, damage not only to Nature but to how we treat each other, we need to be healers. Not only is the Earth sick, but our human world is also sick. The addiction and divorce and polarization and anxiety/depression and isolation that we see all around us are part of the “othering”, the treating of people like an “It” instead of a “Thou” that began when we started to treat Nature and the machines that come from the resource extraction that destroys Nature like an “It”. So now, of necessity, we must heal the hundreds of years of damage that we have done.
The Karma of our mistakes means we must go back and repair the bonds that we have broken. Otherwise others will not be able to forgive us, will remain stuck, and we will both remain a wounded world. We usually need to make amends to forgive even ourselves. Edward Tick, in War and the Soul, illustrates that one of the most effective healings for some soldiers with post traumatic stress disorder was to go back to Vietnam and work for orphans and the handicapped. Otherwise they were never free. All healers are wounded healers – there is not other kind. Youi learn to slave the wounds of others by knowing and remembering how much it hurts to hurt. It is often painful to recall or admit, yet this is also the farce of lamenting and grieving over how we have hurt others. [Rohr]
And how do we become a healer? There are so many ways; simply find an activity that you enjoy and makes you smile and share it with another in a way that helps that other person or place or animal or plant or lake or forest. The classic choice is to garden, or to keep bees, or help serve in a soup kitchen, or build a home with Habitat for Humanity. There are as many ways to heal as there are people. You just have to decide a healing path, and do it!
References
Slavery: A World History by M.Meltzer
Breathing under water – R.Rohr pg.68
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/feb/25/modern-slavery-trafficking-persons-one-in-200 https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/feb/25/modern-slavery-trafficking-persons-one-in-200
Slaves of the Machine – https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262681025/slaves-of-the-machine/
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