https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=GJSBdnRz2fw
Should we speak of colonialism and slavery in the same breath as if they were the same thing? Now, one of the weird tensions that emerges for me there, and I’ve tried to think this through clearly, I’m reading at the moment a multi-volume history of slavery put out, I think, by Cambridge University Press. And my sense, historically, and you can correct me if you think I’m wrong here, is that slavery is a ubiquitous feature of human societies. And the conscious realization that slavery itself is intrinsically wrong, even in the case, let’s say, of prisoners of war or debt or debtors, that notion emerged with great difficulty and it manifested itself most profoundly in the UK, probably in the person of Wilberforce and the Christian Protestant evangelists who made a very strong case that slavery itself was intrinsically immoral. And the consequence of that was eventually that the British Navy fought for about 175 years on the high seas to make slavery a counterproductive enterprise. And one of the things that sort of terrifies me about the radical leftist enterprise is that they really risk throwing the baby out with the bathwater because whatever it was that impelled Wilberforce and then the entire UK to stand against slavery is the only thing we know of in the entire history of the world that actually did stand against slavery with any degree of success. So what other cases do you think can be made that colonialism and slavery were not the same thing? And why do you think there is this insistence on the radical left side to deny the very process that actually did free slaves insofar as they’ve become free in recent times? So Jordan, I think the identification of colonialism with slavery is similar to the 1619 project in the United States, which identifies the foundations of the US with fundamentally racist and therefore fundamentally illegitimate. I think what’s happened is that probably through Black Lives Matter, the killing of George Floyd in 2020 in Minneapolis, Black Lives Matter movement came across the Atlantic with no change of clothes, landed in Britain. And our equivalent is to say contemporary Britain is systemically racist. And the reason we’re systemically racist is that we continue to revere our colonial past, let’s say, by having a statute of social roads. And as we all know, colonialism was essentially about slavery, which was based on a racist view of Africans as subhuman. So colonialism equals slavery equals racism. And that’s the foundations of Britain. And that’s why we have to repudiate our colonial past, pull down Cecil Rhodes, pull down John A. McDonald in Canada, and somehow therefore we liberate ourselves from systemic racism. And that’s the logic behind the colonialism and slavery mantra. So in this country, those two things are commonly talked about as if they were the same thing. And my very simple point in that second chapter is to say, wait a moment, as you’ve just said, Jordan, yes, for 150 years, some British people, by no means all, were involved in slave trading and profiting from slavery in the West Indies. But from 1807 onwards and then in 1833, first the slave trade, then slavery itself were abolished by the British. And for the rest of the empire’s existence for another 150 years, roughly, the British were involved in anti-slavery. So you cannot identify British colonialism with slavery because for the second half of its life, it was anti-slavery. And yes, slavery in one form or another, in some forms were more humane than others, has been around since virtually the dawn of time, practiced on every continent by black and brown and red-skinned and yellow-skinned people as well as white-skinned people. The Comanche nation in the southwest of the U.S. ran what one historian has called a vast slave economy in the 1700s. The Arabs were involved in slavery. Africans were selling African slaves to the Romans and Arabs before they ever sold them to Europeans. So we may be dismayed at the fact that so many Europeans and British people up until the late 1700s accepted this institution and the fact of slave trading. But we have to put it in context. Everyone did it, including slaves who escaped from the plantations in Jamaica into the forest of Interior, some of them kept slaves of their own, so common was the practice. So yes, what happened in the late 1700s was that for the first time in history, some nations, not just Britain, also Denmark and France, came to the view that owning other people as your property without them having any rights was morally abhorrent. And for the first time in history, these nations, eventually led by Britain, abolished the slave trade and slavery. And then Britain used its imperial power, its power for humanitarian purposes to abolish slavery from Brazil across the Atlantic, across Africa, India, to Malaysia. So power can be a good thing. And in that case, it was used for humanitarian purposes. There are any hearers, Jordan, as you suggested just before I started speaking, there are hearers in that case, the empire and those humanitarians who were lobbying for the imperial power to be used to suppress slavery, they were the progressive people of their day. I like knowing exactly where my meat comes from. And with Moink, I know it’s coming from small family farms all across the country. Moink delivers grass fed and grass finished beef and lamb, pastured, pork and chicken and sustainable wild caught Alaskan salmon straight to your door. Moink lets you choose the meat delivered in every box, select an existing box or create your own, set your delivery cadence and enjoy delicious meat. You can cancel any time, but you won’t want to. If you’re not sure where to start, check out their standard box. It comes with a little bit of everything, chicken, rib eye, burgers and steak. Moink is all about supporting the family farm. Think about it this way. 2% of Americans are farmers, but 100% of Americans eat. We need to show our support for the families that keep us well fed. After receiving my first Moink box, I was floored. The salmon and chicken are both fantastic and the steak might be the best I’ve ever had. And keep in mind, I cooked it myself with a freezer full of Moink products. I can without a doubt say it is a fantastic deal on a ton of delicious and well produced products. You won’t be disappointed and you can rest assured all of Moink’s meat comes from wholesome American farmers. So keep American farming going strong by signing up at MoinkBox.com. Right now and Dr. Peterson’s listeners can get free bacon in your first box. And let me say it’s the best bacon you’ll ever taste. I re-upped my subscription because I ran out too fast. MoinkBox.com. That’s MoinkBox.com. Well, it also seems to me, and you’re in a great position to comment on this, so first of all we have to accept to some degree that the willingness to use power and compulsion and to keep slaves is relatively ubiquitous across the entire human family, let’s say. And that opposition to that emerges with difficulty and rarely. And then you have to ask yourself what are the preconditions for that kind of opposition. And certainly the case with Wilberforce, as far as I can tell, that he was driven by the conviction that all men and women are made in the image of God and that it was a violation of a transcendent ideal, that slavery in and of itself was the violation of a transcendent ideal. And that is something that’s deeply rooted in the Christian tradition. And deeper than that, I mean, there’s certainly the dawning of objection to the notion of slavery and tyranny in the book of Exodus. And that’s much older than Christianity. But it’s still an idea that emerged with difficulty. And I have tried to think my way around this, right, because I don’t like to multiply unnecessary metaphysical presumptions. But I can’t see at all that opposition to slavery would have emerged the way it did in Britain if it wouldn’t have been able to draw on a well of metaphysical and religious presupposition that was predicated on the idea that each person has a soul and that that soul in some manner has a divine value. Yep. Yep. So you’re quite right. The main impulse for the abolition movement was Christian, evangelical Christian. And so John Wesley in 1774 published a treatise called Upon Thoughts of Slavery. And on the front page of the treatise is a quotation from the book of Genesis where, is it Cain says something like, I’m my brother’s keeper. God’s answer being, yes, you are. And the implication being that all human beings, regardless of race and cultural development, are equally children of the one God. And that was clearly the main conviction that drove evangelical Christians, nonconformist Christians initially to found. I didn’t know about that comment by Wesley. So that ties the story of Cain and Abel in with the opening chapters of the earlier parts of Genesis, the old verses of the earlier part of Genesis. Right. And so you have the proposition that human beings are made in the image of God. And you have the later proposition in the Cain and Abel story that that means that you have a divine obligation to act in relationship to others with that divine value in mind. That’s right. And so now we’re getting on to chapter three on race here, Jordan. So this Christian conviction of the fundamental basic equality of all human beings, regardless of race, that persists throughout the British Empire. There was in the second half of the 1800s the development of a contrary view, which you might call scientific or biological racism, which holds that you have a hierarchy of races and the white races are naturally biologically superior to non-white races. So you have a kind of permanent fixed racial hierarchy. But this notion of some people’s being naturally inferior, vied with the Christian notion, but never displaced it. So for example, I was reading, and I quote this in my book, an account of debates in the Parliament of Canada in the 1880s. And it’s reported by the historian that every time someone would stand up and say that the Native Americans are naturally inferior, others would stand up and other MPs would stand up and say, no, that’s not British, that is not Christian. Yeah.