By Sebastian Morello, European Conservative. (Photo: Stamatina Kiriazou/Unspalsh)
The UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is introducing a new form of slavery. Perhaps we ought not to be surprised. After all, in the Politics, Aristotle famously argued that whilst people differed on the details of what was permissible regarding the practice of slavery, it could not be held that slavery was not itself a part of nature. Whether slavery was perpetuated by necessity, or by a consequence of war, or because any given community would always have members who just couldn’t oversee their own affairs, slavery would always be a part of human life. It might be undetectable for a while, but slavery would always return to the surface of society sooner or later. According to Aristotle, it’s simply normal to see certain human beings in certain circumstances as “tools” or “instruments” of use, and for society and its leaders to see them as such.
Two millennia later, the counter-revolutionary thinker Joseph de Maistre agreed that slavery was—contra the progressives of his time—indeed natural to human societies. He held that slavery had largely been vanquished not because it was unnatural but because, with the permeation of nature by grace, human nature had been transformed. Slavery had ebbed, he thought, because Christ had changed our hearts. Thus, when Immanuel Kant claimed that the moral law required us to see others as ends and never as means only, he wasn’t really telling us what the moral law dictated at all, but articulating what grace had done to the societies it had touched. From a Maistrean perspective, Kant was, like so many Enlightenment enthusiasts, simply stealing the things of God and labelling them the things of man.
What’s important for our purposes is that, for Joseph de Maistre, with the secularisation of the West, a new form of slavery would return, one far more terrible than any hitherto known to history.