[QUOTE=Left Hand of Dorkness]
As others have said, no it wasn’t. There was no period where chattel slavery had near-universal acceptance. The only way you can reach that conclusion is to append “among those who weren’t victimized by it” to the statement. It drives me crazy when people assume that modification: in my opinion, it dehumanizes the slaves to exclude their opinions, continuing to treat them as objects rather than actors in the system.
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I have to take serious exception to this. In the overwhelming majority of cases of persons being enslaved in the past, they were indeed, people who supported the idea of chattel-slavery.
Most of the people whom the Romans conquered and enslaved were peoples who, guess what, had at one time or another conquered other peoples and enslaved them. That was what you did with a conquered people back then, or at least one of the things. It often involved mass murder of the able-bodied men and enslavement of the women and children.
It’s always been near-universal that on an individual basis, almost no one wants to be enslaved (I’m sure there are actually many exceptions to that.) But it’s also been near-universal for a huge portion of human history that it’s okay to enslave others, as long as the conditions are right.
IIRC the Romans typically enslaved two types of people. One was recently conquered persons, people who had fought against Rome in any capacity and et cetera. The other were people who owed debts that they simply couldn’t pay. In both cases, if a debtor or a conquered slave were ever given their freedom, if they ever acquired high enough station in Roman society it’d be nigh-certain they’d own slaves of their own.
The very fact that the Romans had no moral qualms about slavery is why it was very different from slavery in the American South. The Romans didn’t have to invent ideas about certain races needing to be naturally enslaved for “their own good” because the Romans had no reason to justify what they were doing morally. Morally, what was good was what made Rome stronger, and if that involved enslaving locals in an unruly population, well, that’s what they did.
To frame my response to this differently, if your statement is to be taken as arguing that “something which victimizes others can’t be said to be universal if you don’t consider the opinions of the victims” then how do you explain say, carpet bombing in World War II? Did the British want to be carpet bombed by German bombers? Of course not. So can we then say that the moral acceptance of carpet-bombing wasn’t universal? No, because the British turned right around and carpet bombed the hell out of Germany.
In short, I think many people ignore the plight of the victims throughout human history because the lessons of human history suggest that the victims would have been all too happy to trade roles, if a slave truly opposes slavery, he will never own a slave if he’s ever freed. It’s easy to say you oppose slavery if you are yourself enslaved and have no prospects of owning slaves.
Even in the American South there are incidents in which freed blacks, who were formerly slaves, went on to own slaves themselves. I don’t have a name handy, but one of the wealthiest Southern slaveholders in (I think) South Carolina was a former slave himself, who owned something like 1,000+ slaves.
Anyway, I think it’s easy to judge societies. I can honestly say I think societies which allow women to be stoned to death for revealing their faces in public are abhorrent. But, I don’t extend that to believing everyone in that society is evil.
Was Rome an abhorrent society? Sure. But that doesn’t mean Rome didn’t do a lot of good things for the world, even if it was just incidental. Nor does it mean every single person born in the Roman Empire was a “bad person.” I don’t view someone as being necessarily bad when they are simply “normal” within their society.
Basically, I think that society changes over time by building on the lessons of previous members of society and of previous societies, through this continual change over time, societies can improve. People, however, remain homo sapiens, and are no better or no worse than their ancestors. We’re simply better advantaged than our ancestors, thanks in large part to the cumulative contributions they have all made. I agree with whatever psychologist it was who said he could make any child a criminal or a respected businessman.
