Abolition as a Consequence of Consciousness
No Literacy, no Consciousness. No Consciousness, no Empathy, no Abolition.
Looking at the very specific definition of consciousness Julian Jaynes delivers in his famous book on its development, it fits in nicely with the evolution of our views on slavery.
(This is a long description of his views from his one and only book, The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.)
Everyone in modern Western societies agrees that slavery is wrong, but few of us can articulate why it is wrong. It’s just presumed. But that was not always the case. And I think this Jaynesian view of consciousness helps us understand the massive shift in mentality.
Now for Jaynes, he defines consciousness as the space between environmental stimulus and behavior that we today refer to as “I”. It’s the mental space we talk about as if there is an actual space in our brains that contains this sense of self capable of viewing and reviewing and planning our behaviors in reaction to the environment.
This sense of self, in his theory, doesn’t appear until as recently as 2,000 years ago. Evolution gave us the hardware and capacity for this…
