59-trillion reasons for a let-them-work ethic

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The trouble with celebrations of historical anniversaries is that other, less noble, dates are implied. Indeed, to insist that a particular day is a day of honour and remembrance is to suggest that the days on either side of it are monuments only to banality and lint, yet once one has started down that road, it seems logical to start worrying that the rest of the calendar is infested with days, perhaps weeks, of infamy, rottenness and spite.

For instance, if China decides to celebrate 5 000 Years of Inscrutability in the next few years (which it probably won’t, being inscrutable), there must be the very real possibility that those festivities will coincide with, and be cut short by, another anniversary, perhaps Ten Years of Corruption in the construction of the massive Three Gorges Dam. How awful to see five millennia of mystery disappear as Five Years of Substandard Cement gives way, and the whole thing leads to Fifteen Minutes of Screaming, Three Days of Wetness, and One Hundred Years of Silence.

Perhaps it is this tenuous balance between joy and shame that accounts for the strangely muted response in the Western media this month about the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery by Bri-tain. Since 1945 the English and the Americans have enjoyed joint celebrations — VE and VJ Days, Harry Potter premieres, and so on — but this year, Britain stands alone. The rubber bracelets are cooling in the moulds, changed from black to purple so as not to offend; Geldof has been woken up, plugged in, briefed, and paid; but, across the Atlantic, all is quiet. For the 200 Years of Emancipation, banners will only unfurl in the New World in 2065, and by then Americans will have other, more pressing concerns; for example, coping with that same Atlantic sloshing deep into the Midwest, and Canadian boatpeople choking the harbours of Iowa.

But cultural lag aside, the debate around slavery has, like a dubious anniversary, been remarkable for its invisibility in mainstream media. Does it suggest that American interests, and therefore the interests of white Texans and New Englanders, dictate newsworthiness? Perhaps. Have white Britons opted for sentiment and neat anniversaries in lieu of any real understanding of how and why they are so rich, and Africa is so poor? Probably. But one suspects that there is something more to this. This is not about ignorance or denial. This is about believing in fairytales.

In an art-icle extolling the political, social and economic virtues of “Anglo” nations, author Lawrence Mead asked in The National Interest in 2005 just why it was that these nations — the US, Britain and Australia — were so wealthy. His answer was priceless. They are loaded, Mead said, “because they are comfortable with capitalism”.

Gather round, children, and listen to the fairytale. Once upon a time there were plucky little white men, who believed in God and hard work, and thanks to God and hard work, they saved their pennies and invented the Industrial Revolution, which they made out of Meccano sets given to them by a passing fairy, and they saved more pennies, and built a semi in Vegas and a beach-house in Ibiza. The end.

The English like to deride the sentimental naivety of the American Dream, but it would seem that where their wealth is concerned, the Anglos so admired by Mr Mead share a common delusion: that everything they own today was earned, the result of hard work, a pioneering spirit and the belief that the individual can shape his own destiny. Their talismanic phrase — the Free Market — is clutched to their bosoms, its composite words stripped of their older, viler echoes by materialistic amnesia.

This is a drum that has been beaten far more often and far louder than one can do here, but let us play a game with the Anglo Fantasy of Endeavour. Let us ignore England, and the Arabian fiefdoms that stole 10-million Africans to be castrated or bent to the service of desert hedonists, or even the white South Africans who crap on about level playing fields. Let us play only with the United States, the land of the free, and consider that perhaps six million slaves lived and died there until 1865.

Let us imagine that those slaves started work as 10-year-olds, and stopped — or fell over — at 50. Let us also imagine that they worked eight hours a day, for five days a week. Let us imagine these things, and not insist on them, for the real conditions were almost certainly much less charitable.

And what do we get, if we imagine all these things? Simple. We get six million slaves working 499-billion hours in their miserable lives, building the American Dream. And now let us pretend that each of those slaves was paid today’s minimum wage of $7 an hour, and let us pretend that the last generation of slaves had been allowed to bank their ancestors’ meagre earnings at a desperately low rate of 2% a year.

Let us consider, then, that the total funds owed to the descendants of slaves in 2007 would total roughly $59-trillion.

History and economics are fickle beasts, but one would propose that any nation, handed $59-trillion in labour, gratis, would have to consist entirely of bone-idle meatheads not to make something of itself.

Millions of white Anglo capitalists have sweated and been heroic for what they have, but in this year, 200 after 1807 and 58 before 2065, one somehow finds it distasteful to hear the old myths of the white Western work ethic: cracking the whip, indeed.


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