The Gray Zone: A Secret of Life
Everything exists in a gray zone.
Humans cannot help themselves. They strive for things to be cut and dried. Black and white. Right and wrong. But nothing really is. Things are only absolute from a certain point of view. In some cases, we opt to agree as a society on the limits. We can mostly agree that it is fair to make a law against something that deprives a person of life, liberty, or property. But, that is still in a gray zone. We, as a society, as the construct of the very laws that we made, deprive people of liberty when they have violated those laws. We send them to prison. We deprive an armed gunman of life before he can deprive another. There are a number of circumstances under which a government can and will take take property. So, yes we agree it is wrong to do these things, but not under certain circumstances.
Before I get too deep into this, I would like to address what is sure to come up about the word "gray." There is a gray vs. grey argument with most people coming down on the side of grey. There was a time when rules of grammar existed and were not shat upon quite as regularly as they are now. Why? The Gray Zone. If one was to look it up, he or she would find that the rule is that in American English it is to be spelled gray and in British English (or is that English English?) it is to be spelled grey. I think that convention has been abandoned for the most part and most everyone is using grey these days. I'm just stubborn. But, I can be, because it's in a gray zone. Hell, there are even color charts that have grey and gray as separate colors. It's madness I tell you. So, I'm using gray for The Gray Zone™ because I want to.
In my studies of the past through History, Archaeology, and Anthropology, The Gray Zone is where I find my truths. I addressed truths briefly in the introductory blog post, but I'll go a little deeper here. Absolute truth does not exist. It's also part of The Gray Zone. There are some things that one may accept as truth that they might have to go to the ends of the earth (This is not literal. The earth does not have ends. Or, does it?) to find someone who says you are wrong, but I assure you, there is someone out there who has a different truth than yours. The internet has given us a sort of express lane to those individuals.
You may say that we can use science to test ideas and see which ones hold up, but alas that is every bit as controversial as anything else. Even scientific fact is in The Gray Zone.
You may say that the word of God is absolute truth. Again, there is controversy. They will ask you which god and they will ask for some kind of proof. "The proof is in the sun, and love, and miracles all around us," you may say. I am sorry to say, but your proof is smack in the middle of The Gray Zone.
So, back to my studies of the past. History is the product of a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking. For those that are unfamiliar, this term refers to American football and tells of a person who is good at knowing what the team should have done to avoid mistakes, now that he has hindsight. The fact is, there are multiple sides and factors to every story. I'll go ahead out of the gate with an example that is sure to make you all angry, slavery.
Today, in this year of our current lord era, most of us humans would say that slavery is wrong. I wish I could say all, but I have heard slavery endorsed by people with my own handsome ears. In fact, while I don't recall a particular instance, knowing where, when, and by whom I was raised, I suspect that I probably endorsed it sometime between birth and adulthood. Thank goodness for growing up and getting out into the real world. For the sake of argument, though, we are going to say that polite society rejects slavery in all its forms.
That's today. It was not always that way. In fact, until the Age of Enlightenment, approximately the time of the American and French Revolutions, slavery had no moral stigma. As far back as civilization and perhaps before, conquered peoples were enslaved. It was mostly unquestioned. So, in the time of Columbus, there was absolutely no question that he would enslave any conquerable people. Had he landed in the Caribbean and not had that attitude, he would have been considered mad and would likely have been imprisoned. So, was slavery wrong in the time of Columbus? Yes, of course it was, but no not really. It was a collision of cultures with different moral standings. It was The Gray Zone. Columbus and those who came after were not pure evil. They were acting as they thought the should by what they knew. We can see how horrible it all turned out. We can see the suffering and pain it brought. We can see how tragic that story is. But they could not. And in a matter of around a hundred years, a relatively short time for a global change in attitude, state supported slavery was abolished.
If you would like to see what happens when an explorer, a party of a conquistador, rejects conquest and slavery, you need go no further than the story of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca of the Narvaez expedition. The Narvaez expedition was to occupy land of what is now the Southeast US, a task later handed off to Hernan DeSoto. Through monumental mistakes and bad luck with the weather, what started as a simple trip to land in Florida ended up with the party shipwrecked and starving on rafts in the Gulf of Mexico. Most were swept out to sea, but a few survivors landed on a barrier island off the modern-day Texas coast. The men were starved and many died or came out on the wrong end of conflict with the Karankawa. In the end there were four of the party that survived and were enslaved by the Karankawa. Cabeza DeVaca held the highest rank as treasurer of the Narvaez expedition. There were two other Spanish men and an African slave by the name of Estebanico.
Cabeza De Vaca and crew managed to escape their captivity and encountered another band that believed they were healers. They went along with the charade and the person that was ill improved. They continued to tour through northern Mexico healing the sick with cleansing rituals that must have worked. The men became renown among the indigenous people and had an entourage wherever they went.
After eight years of moving among various tribes as they made their way in a direction they hoped was back to their own civilization, they were met by Spanish soldiers in Western Mexico. He had grown to identify and respect the native people and when the soldiers began capturing the Indios and even Estebanico, he pleaded with them to stop. He was taken to Mexico City and he plead his case there. He tried to get his own governance of that land so he could try to build a cooperative state. He was ignored an even imprisoned temporarily. He was considered dangerous for his aversion to slavery.
In the end, he was released and even given a governance in South America, but it failed for various reasons.
The bottom line is, there are varying degrees of right and wrong even in the horrible practice of slavery depending on the time and the teller of the story.
I can't speak for the rest of the world, but in the US, slavery other than what was in the American South is ignored. Slavery is a worldwide phenomenon throughout history. I think United States slavery gets more attention because it held onto it a little longer than others and it ended in war. So, was the U.S. South just more evil than other places in the world. No, but yes. It is in The Gray Zone.
See, slavery eventually failed to be economically viable in most places. That combined with the Enlightenment led to abandonment of slavery by the major nations of the world. The framers of the Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation, and the U.S. Constitution flirted with abolition of slavery, but the colonies and new nation were not ready. Cohesion was considered more important than moral standing on an idea that was not going to take. Was this the wrong decision by these leaders? Well, if all colonies and states were not on board, the whole thing fell apart. Reversion to British rule would not have freed the slaves. They moved on and lived to fight another day. Hell, James Monroe actually had freed slaves taken back to Africa. That still, two hundred years later, is still not going well. Ignoring slavery when you know it is wrong is wrong, but it also wasn't the wrong decision, but it might have been. Guess where we are. We're in the Gray Zone.
Something happened in the South, though. The boll weevil. There were two types of cotton. One was full of seeds and not economically viable while the other was not and was very profitable. The boll weevil, however, attacked the profitable cotton and slavery just almost came to an end without a fight and without bloodshed.
But.
An inventor by the name of Eli Whitney invented a machine called the cotton gin. This fine machine could pull the seeds right out of that cotton and the plantations were back in business. Only now they had a cotton that was easier to grow in more places. So an even greater cotton boom came about. The South doubled down on slavery and the abolition movement revved up.
Eli Whitney revived slavery!
Was that his intention? I seriously doubt it. I've never seen a history book that accused him of such nefarious schemes. So, was he bad or good? Yes and no. Did he do something good or bad? Yes and no. The Gray Zone.
I'm starting to feel like this guy.
I have, thus far, more or less stayed away from the racial aspect of slavery. The people of African descent came about about by chance. Because of knowledge of the land and support of their own people, the indigenous Americans did not ever allow themselves to be enslaved. When the colonists needed slaves, they looked elsewhere and Africa was who was selling. The Spanish established the black as the prototypical American slave before the English even landed on American shores. But, even in the early days of the English colonies there were occasions of a black land-owner having white slaves.
Now, there was a big difference between the English/U.S. slave and the Spanish slave. (I'm really going to get into trouble here, but I'm coming from a place of objectivity, I hope you'll give me the benefit of the doubt.) The Spanish bought the biggest and strongest male slaves they could and worked them to death in the fields. The English slave was given a place to live and allowed to interact with males an females. I understand that this idea of family seldom had a happy ending, I understand that the antebellum South was a brutal place for the African slave. But, the brutality was not anywhere near the brutality of the Spanish. How does someone quantify that? Can you say it was better to be a slave in the U.S. than it was in Spanish colonies? It was, in a way, most of the time. But, in our modern understanding of slavery, we can't in good conscience talk about better and worse slavery. That's way too far into The Gray Zone. Furthermore, being a rice-farming slave was far better than being a cotton or tobacco slave. Also, slavery became more brutal over times. The stronger the abolition movement became, the more slaves were treated as misbehaving prisoners. Paranoia of runaways and revolt increased the brutality.
Okay, okay. You get the idea. This same kind of analysis can be applied to anything. And most issues are more divisive than slavery. Most people would agree slavery is wrong. So, we get even further into The Gray Zone with issues like gun ownership, religious warfare, or capitalism for example.
That's all for now.
