Years ago, when I worked at a battered women’s shelter, Valentine’s Day was observed with a good deal of skepticism. Coming shortly after Superbowl Sunday – a day when shelters around the country brought in extra workers to handle the brutal aftermath of fan disappointment – Valentine’s Day seemed made for the batterer. The women, who had come to the shelter out of desperation, who had shared their stories with other football refugees, who were beginning to see that another life was possible, were at just that point in their recovery where they had healed enough to forget the pain of two weeks ago. And then came this revelry in romance, the ubiquitous rose and red satin and chocolates everywhere. Even with a restraining order, it was hard to resist the seduction of Valentine’s Day.
But Valentine’s Day or not, brutal relationships have their own form of seduction. The master says to the slave, “I own you,” and the slave finds a strange comfort in being owned. Aristotle pointed out years ago that there are some men, by nature, “who are capable of becoming the property of another.” European conquerors used his natural slave argument to enslave native peoples across the planet, but that’s not how I read this passage. The natural slave is someone who prefers to have someone else make his decisions; who, when given the choice of freedom, would rather be ruled. Unlike institutionalized slavery, which is what we would call the American practice of enslaving Africans and their descendants, natural slavery is an inside job. The habit of being ruled creates a disposition for servitude.
Where there is a natural slave there is also a natural master, a person who gets his needs met by ruling another person. Put them together and the natural master and the natural slave have a symbiotic relationship. The slave does as the master directs, thus avoiding the difficulty of having to think through things on his own. The master gets to rule without acknowledging that he can’t meet his own needs; he has the slave to do that for him. Aristotle scorned both the master and the slave for taking up roles that limited their capacity to grow. Each member of a political community, he wrote over two thousand years ago, must take turns ruling and being ruled. A democracy cannot work, he told us, when peopled by masters and slaves.
It’s not just abusive relationships that seduce us away from life in a political community. Our relationship to the earth is marked with all the indignities of the master/slave relationship. We are a race of masters who believe we know what is best for the animals, plants, and soil. We cut off her mountains and ejaculate chemicals into natural gas reserves. Like all masters, we dismiss our needs and focus on our magnificent will. We will have her. We will bend her to our desires, which, after all is why she is there in the first place.
Historically, slaves have had an easier time making the shift to political life than their tyrannical masters. Once slaves start to organize, they start ruling themselves. They make decisions, they consider other options, they come up with strategies, and, voilà! – they no longer act as slaves. Having spent much of their life being ruled, however, they don’t give up on that part of the equation. They just ask that when they are ruled, they be ruled well.
Masters, on the other hand, have difficulty organizing because they are accustomed to getting their way. Their knees are stiff and not accustomed to bend. They don’t know how to compromise. Tyranny has also distracted them from their terrible feelings of insecurity; masters keep slaves around in order to mask their terrifying dependency. For all these reasons, masters have a hard time seeing the benefits of living in a political community. They are too scared to risk being ruled.
As if the earth itself was conspiring to ease us out of the master/slave relationship, the world’s chocolate supply is at great risk. Brazil, which during the eighties was supposed to be the world’s greatest producer of chocolate, lost its dominant market share almost overnight because of disease. In West Africa, where most of the world’s chocolate is currently produced, thirty to forty percent of the harvest is lost to disease. Add climate change and poor farming practices to the mix and suddenly the endless supply of chocolate seems less secure.
But maybe a chocolate scarcity will free us from the seductions of the master/slave relationship. “I’ll never do it again,” is less convincing without chocolate. “I can give you whatever you want,” is less palatable without the magic of the cocoa bean. Without the crutch of chocolate, the master/slave dichotomy may give way to a political community where people, the remaining cocoa plants, and the mastectomied mountains all take turns ruling and being ruled.
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