---Economy---
---Tcakqaal’s perspective---
“Why wouldn’t I…?!” asks the pale skinned Human with black sclera, yellow irides and a long, sleek black horn on the left side of her forehead, a corresponding broken stump on the right, her voice high and coarse “…why wouldn’t I want to worship creation’s first freedomfighter? History’s first equal rights activist?… The first being ever to look tyranny in the face and say ‘I refuse’…!?”
“Calming Lilith…” requests Pluto, the feline animal currently using her lap as a bed, via his translator.
As a subsapient, he is quite unusual for the use of his mistress’s name, as opposed to something getting loosely translated to ‘Mummy’ or similar.
“But…” enquires the azure wooled theologist, intrigued “…isn’t this being, supposedly, the source and personification of all evil? The torturer of all those damned to his domain?”
“So they say!!!” declares the woman, not heeding her pet’s request for calmness “But why would I listen to the propaganda spewed by the followers of history’s first despot about the motivations and actions of the first political prisoner?… What all Abrahamic dogmas are very clear on is that Hell is Lucifer’s prison… not his domain, not his kingdom… Why would a prisoner see to the torture of his fellow inmates?… Why should I listen to people with a, millennia long, history of religiously motivated war, persecution, oppression, hatred, slavery, torture, witch hunting and book burning behind them, about what ‘good’ and ‘evil’ look like, anyway!?”
The Aarba man muses on that for some moments.
Eventually, he answers “This truly is one of the most fascinating theologies I’ve ever encountered… Terran religions are far from unique in the galaxy for having a ‘villainous’ deity to juxtapose the righteous one… but this Satanism is unique, as far as I’m aware, for being a religion of those rejecting the morality of its predecessors but, rather than losing their faith, having retained the previous cosmology and, simply, switched the object of their worship to the previous antagonist!?… I don’t suppose there are any Abrahamics in the room who wish to answer Dr Morningstar’s (not exactly flattering) assessment of your family of faiths?”
Ziva shrugs “I’ve not been to Temple since I told the Rabbi in my refugee camp that I didn’t want a bat mitsvah… Leon’s the same, though with Catholicism… Not us… What about you, Yasmin?”
“Don’t just tell people that, Ziva!” objects the blond New Coloradoan with a sigh.
Yasmin smiles from the couch adjacent to the corner of the Commonroom where Victor has moved my perch, to mitigate the risk of it being knocked over and me being trampled with the room being so crowded.
“I am a Muslim… but I’m not brave enough to touch theological debate with a barge pole… not I.”
The theologist looks crestfallen.
“I…” starts Tuun, raising her upper left hand which bares a white gold ring with a deep blue sapphire set into it, flanked by two, smaller, white diamonds, silver hammer pendant resting against her clavicle “…I’m not… a Christian… but my Mum is… One of them anyway… When I was growing up, she was one of not many in a social network of, mostly, Pantheonists… I heard her defend her faith a lot… I could tell you what she’d say?”
Excitedly, the ovine man gestures for her to go ahead.
“Well… first, she would freely admit that historical Christians weren’t always paragons of virtue, that belief in her god is neither necessary nor sufficient to make a person good and that a lot of harm has been done by those with god’s name on their lips… but, she would insist, the god she worships is not a tyrant. He’s more like a father… the same way parents often have to do what’s best for their children, even when the child thinks it’s the height of injustice, her god sometimes has to do that for us… And the same way parents sometimes have to let children make their own mistakes her god has to do that too… She would say that her god’s love isn’t conditional on obedience to him, knowledge of him or love of him… that her god loves all his children and simply wants what’s best for us… Ideally, that would include a relationship with him but he accepts those who don’t want that, the same as those that do… She doesn’t believe her god tortures people or damns anyone, though she does believe that there is some kind of… afterlife therapy programme, for those souls who die not ready for paradise…(!) As for all the war, oppression, torture, slavery etc., she’d say that those were people doing what they would have done anyway and just using god as their justification… And, I have to admit, it’s hard not to think she has a point… War is at least as old as written records and isn’t really wholly absent from any culture, deathworld or gardenworld… Likewise, without heavy intervention against them, oppression and persecution seem to arise as natural byproducts of society… Slavery, I’m certain, must be at least as old as the Stone Age…”
“False.” states the Nova Britannian economist, flatly.
Every eye turns to him quizzically, waiting for him to elaborate on his blunt statement.
“What do you mean, Dr Hardwick?” smiles Yeshe, the Human ambassador, charmingly.
“What she said… It’s false… slavery was not viable in the Palaeolithic… on Earth at least.” he answers, simply.
“Could you elaborate on that, Sir?… How could slavery ever be inviable? Surely, if people are able to sacrifice their morals, holding slaves would always be an asset to them… wouldn’t it?” I ask, curiously.
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He shakes his head “I believe morals have very little to do with it. If the economic incentives are present, morality will contort to fit around them. I’m not saying they were too good and pure to own slaves, their minds uncorrupted by greed… I’m saying the economic incentives were not present.”
“Surely, work you don’t have to pay for is always an economic incentive!” declares Jennie, her eyebrow cocked.
“But you do have to pay for it… you just don’t have to pay the slave. All actions balance expected income against expected cost. If the latter is greater, you can consider it a loss… if the former, you profit.”
“But Stone Age folk didn’t have money… They wouldn’t have thought like that!” points out Krish.
“They had no standardised currency that we know of but that’s not to say they had no economy. They would and did think like this… They must have to have survived.” pronounces the economist.
“Why don’t you explain to us exactly why you’re so confident that slavery would always have netted a loss for Palaeolithic peoples?” asks Emiko, her eyes narrow, her mouth in a curious smile.
Beside her, freshly bald scalp covered by a cloth wrap, Hunter’s normally inexpressive face looks equally intrigued!
“Simple…” states the brown eyed, brunet man “…the Palaeolithic had no specialised professions but had…” he raises four of the fingers of his right hand “…four distinct, economically productive, activities that one might engage in; Hunting, gathering, crafting and childcare… Given that hunting involves allowing an individual to run around, at liberty, with a weapon, it isn’t a task advisable to assign to a forced labourer. Gathering is better, since, depending on what they are being forced to gather, the slave may not need a tool to do so. Crafting and childcare are the most plausible occupations yet, since they may not require the slave to leave the camp, but none of these tasks bear the potential to offset the greatest overhead involved in slave labour… the supervision… Send three voluntary labourers to gather nuts and the minimum amount they must gather to render a profit equals one calorie more than that that they spent on the walk and the work… Send three slaves and, suddenly, the profit floor is raised to compensate for the armed overseer you have to send with them… A voluntary craftsman or woman only has to produce items of enough value to offset the value of the calories they spent on the effort… The calculus changes when you factor in the person assigned to watch them… A slave childminder, who must themself be minded by an overseer, is of negative value to the community. Factor in the opportunity cost of the overseers being unable to do anything else while they’re minding the slaves, the enemies that tribes would necessarily make by slave raiding and the fact that, unlike in later periods, where there were metal chains, manacles and cages for securing a slave, when they’re not working, and state institutions to track down runaways and punish them harshly, in the Palaeolithic, a slave must be watched constantly or they would simply slip their bonds and be far enough over the horizon, by the time their absence is noticed, that it would be unlikely that they could be practically found and returned, and I can be quite confident that slavery was never practiced until the Neolithic, at the absolute earliest… Likely closer to the Bronze Age.”
“So…?” starts Hunter, tentatively “…no Neanderthal ever had a slave?”
Turning to face her with his passive (yet somehow intense) expression, the man answers “I didn’t say that… I can’t say whether any Resurrectees may have kidnapped people and kept them secretly chained up in their cellars or similar, over the past six centuries… What I can say with reasonable confidence is that, no Neanderthal language existing prior to their initial extinction will have had a word for ‘slave’…”
“You think so?” asks Yasmin, sitting forward with interest.
“They will certainly have had words for ‘captive’… They won’t have understood captivity as something that could happen to a person permanently. To them, a ‘captive’ would be what you were, for the matter of hours to days, between when you were captured and when you were either killed or released.”
“So… what changed?” asks Victor, with a cock of his head “What suddenly made it profitable for Humans to have slaves?”
“Agriculture…” answers Hardwick, immediately “…a hunter-gatherer will, on average, produce exactly as much food as is required to feed one person over the course of their life…”
“Exactly as much?!” I ask, sceptically “Surely not… if it were exactly as much, there could be no tribal dependents. No elderly, past the point of productivity. No infirm who, by injury or congenital condition, are unable to contribute… And, crucially, there would be no resources to spare on rearing the next generation!… No offspring means no future!”
The man concedes “You are correct, but note the phrase ‘on average’… Yes, an adult in their prime might be able to produce more than they themself need to survive at the time, but they’re extremely unlikely to significantly exceed the amount that they themself need, over the course of their life… Agriculture changes that equation. Suddenly, you have a means of calorie acquisition that allows those engaging in it to produce a significant surplus to what they themselves need… This frees a portion of the population, for the first time in history, to engage in primary occupations other than the acquisition of calories. Smiths, masons, soldiers, carpenters, politicians, scholars, scribes… all of them are only able to exist with a base of farmers to support them… That creates an incentive to engage in the practice of slavery…”
Victor gives a wry puff “‘All these fields waiting to be tilled and planted and so few willin’ hands… pity that tribe in the next valley don’t wanna come work for us, ain’t it(!)’”
“Precisely.” states the man with the same unwavering, matter-of-fact confidence he’s had through the entire explanation.
“Forgive me if I’m overstepping here…” begins the woolly, Aarba theologist “…but the way you talk about supply and demand, cost-benefit analysis, overheads and profits… would it be fair to conclude that you view economics… spiritually?”
The man doesn’t speak for [6 seconds].
I infer him to be considering the question and the answer he’s willing to give, though there’s no change evident in his bodylanguage or facial expression.
“That’s… not inaccurate…” he answers, finally.
“Fascinating, fascinating…” says the Aarba, gleefully clacking the keratinised caps of his fingers together.
“There’s… something else… you’ve not mentioned…” says Tuun, hesitantly “…another use hunter-gatherers might have had… for slaves…”
“And that is?” asks the economist, turning his head to her, his tone level.
“You… you didn’t mention… sexu… erm… you didn’t mention concubinage…” she says, her cheeks blushing dark blue!
“Ah, I didn’t forget that. I simply didn’t judge it necessary to the discussion. You’re right that there is a (potentially incalculable) value to a tribe's ability to produce a subsequent generation but the same principles as…”
Here, I notice Twila’s face contort from attentive to distracted and shaken.
She does not immediately ask for everyone’s attention, instead, leaning in to Jennie’s ear and having a brief exchange with her.
Jennie stands up, carrying the holopad projecting Twila’s form, and walks to where the ambassadors, Yeshe and Ong, sit.
I overhear Twila, addressing the pair “Excuse me, Ambassadors… we’ve just passed through a signal patch long enough for me to receive some… quite distressing news from Citadel… would you mind taking me into the hall, so I can break it to you two first?” she gestures to the device Jennie holds out to them.