SLAVE WAGES PT. 3

 I found myself revisiting this two-part essay, particularly the second part, after reading these two sentences from Dinesh D'Souza's AMERICA-- IMAGINE A WORLD WITHOUT HER:

The impulse to conquest comes from what Augustine termed the libido dominandi, the lust for power. This powerful passion included not merely the desire for goods but also for slaves and concubines.

The D'Souza book does not explore in depth the nature of any "lust for power," Augustinian or otherwise, but aligns any desires for dominion with what he terms "the ethic of conquest," which depends on the use of non-consensual force. This ethic is contrasted with the ethic D'Souza champions, which might be termed an "ethic of commerce," in that D'Souza argues for commerce as the exercise of consensual interactions between assorted parties. And I may explore this thesis further in another essay, but here I want to contrast this one Augustinian assertion with what I wrote in the 2021 essay.

To sum up, I considered various reasons as to the etiology of slavery in antiquity. Reasons included the "eff you rationale" (where the people you're "effing" are rival tribes, by subjugating captives of those tribes), the potential for ransom, and the motive of economic security.

Now, however, I think I oversimplified. I do believe that most if not all cultures regarded the keeping of slaves as a form of personal wealth. And not all slaves are necessarily of enemy tribes or of different races, given that Leviticus mentions that ancient Jews kept other Jews as slaves. Slavery may have evolved as a retaliatory practice during tribal conflicts, but plainly once the practice got going, tribe-members were as vulnerable as outsiders to becoming enslaved, whether for economic or other reasons.

While my "eff you rationale" was conceived purely in terms of Tribe X wanting to enjoy the upper hand over Tribe Y, the rationale may apply in the more general sense of Human X wanting the upper hand over Human Y, irrespective of tribal allegiances. Though I have not read, nor am likely to read, any Augustine, his idea of the *libido dominandi* might be consonant with what I mean by "upper hand"-- though even that may not speak to the full nature of homo sapiens. From some quickie readings online, I see that Augustine's solution for man's domineering nature is "love of God," and that's not precisely a solution for me. In a future essay I may explore this line of thought in concert with earlier posts on the writings of Fukuyama. But with respect only to the etiology of slavery, it's feasible to see both "an ethic of conquest" and an "ethic of commerce" playing equal roles.                 

THE READING RHEUM: AMERICA-- IMAGINE A WORLD WITHOUT HER (2014)

 

I've had only a nodding acquaintance with the life and works of Dinesh D'Souza. I knew that after he wrote a negative book about on Barack Obama, New York prosecutors, possibly doing the will of the Obama administration, charged D'Souza with illegal campaign contributions. The eight months D'Souza spent in a low-security prison may have been good for his career in that both his books and documentary films have become popular with right-leaning audiences. Over the years, I read a few D'Souza essays and liked some ideas but thought he sometimes resorted to sophisms (like the well-worn "the Democrats were the party of slavery," which is broadly true but misleading).

AMERICA-- IMAGINE A WORLD WITHOUT HER contains a few sophisms, but its theme statement provides a solid philosophical response to the Left's condemnation of the United States as irretrievably evil and imperialist. D'Souza marshals an impressive roster of intellectuals and academics-- including Marx, DeToqueville, James Madison, Adam Smith, and many of the 20th-century radicals, whose justifications of their hatred of America lay bare their dubious motivations, as well as their insidious influence upon Leftist politics. From these diverse voices D'Souza articulates his thesis: that America was unique in championing entrepreneurship as no country had before or has since. 

Further, D'Souza connects good entrepreneurship with the quality Adam Smith, conceiver of the market's "invisible hand," called "empathy:"

...entrepreneurs created demand by introducing a product that no one asked for, but millions of people wanted once it was available. I call this "extreme empathy" because it's a case of entrepreneurs providing for the wants of consumers before consumers even know what they want. -- Chapter 10.

Now neither Smith nor D'Souza denied that the entrepreneur is motivated by what Smith termed "self-interest." But D'Souza asserts that such self-interest manifests in the maintenance of commerce, and because commerce is generally consensual, it stands in marked contrast to the ethic of conquest that dominated all older cultures:

The impulse to conquest comes from what Augustine termed the libido dominandi, the lust for power. This powerful passion included not merely the desire for goods but also for slaves and concubines.

To buttress this argument, D'Souza even quotes the 12th-century Muslim scholar Ibn Khaldun (albeit in paraphrase), to the effect in his time violent conquest was deemed more honorable than the tradecraft of merchants, because conquest was more overt in its purpose to exploit others. But D'Souza's thesis persuasively argues that the ethic of conquest has been transcended by the actions of the colonists of early America, made up largely of either merchants or immigrants who aspired to be merchants.

I won't cover in detail the ways in which D'Souza exposes the grievance-based methods by which Leftist radicals have sought to tar the United States with the sins of the past. But he throws considerable doubt upon the motives of politicians like Obama and Hilary Clinton, and even if all of D'Souza's charges don't stick, it's a relief to find some of these sacred cows gored (so to speak).

One last comment: this 2014 book mentioned the fact that Obama was going to pass the Presidential torch to Hilary, which was correct. D'Souza thus makes no mention of the Presidential gamechanger Donald Trump, who announced his candidacy in June 2015. But it's fitting that Trump, whatever his faults, should arise to oppose the shame-dependent Left, not least because Trump is also-- an entrepreneur.         

    

    

          

CURIOSITIES: A CHILDISH PUN

 At maybe age 9 or 10 I came with the same lame pun seen in this late forties funny-animal comic, EGBERT, which was presumably written by a grown person.

 

MYTHCOMICS: ["A BRILLIANT CAREER"] DICK TRACY (1945-46)

 

In the 1960s, a familiar support-character in the DICK TRACY strip was Diet Smith, whose wealth and resources shepherded Tracy and his police department into Chester Gould's thoroughly bizarre vision of the Space Age-- a period that many TRACY fans might prefer to forget. But in the late 1940s, the year Smith was introduced, the millionaire magnate was best known for bestowing on Tracy his best-known technological gizmo: the 2-way wrist radio.

Now even in 1945 Gould could have easily made Smith both a captain of industry and a genius inventor, like the later Tony Stark, so that any device he gave to Tracy was his own creation. Or Gould might have modeled Smith after Harold Gray's Daddy Warbucks, whose plants could turn out war-weapons with no reference to the R&D process. Instead, though, the arc I've titled A BRILLIANT CAREER focuses upon the true creator of the wrist-radio, the blind genius named Brilliant, whose short and tumultuous career owed much to Diet Smith, though one of the two never knows their true connection.              

As it happens, the storyline for Smith also re-introduced a character whom Gould seemed to have consigned to a grisly death in October 1945: language-mangling comical hillbilly B.O. Plenty. Gould brought Plenty back into the strip and put him to work on Diet Smith's estate, and though the wild-bearded farmer doesn't play a big dramatic role in CAREER, he would go to become much more of a regular fixture in the 1950s than his employer.

In any case, Smith, whose nickname clearly refers to the mild food he eats, due to ulcers brought on by his hard-driving work-schedule, contacts Tracy. Smith's long-time business partner, whom Smith regarded as a brother (though the dead man never gets a proper name), has perished in an isolated room, strangled to death by an unknown assailant. However, Plenty stumbles across a clue: an experimental wristwatch-radio apparently dropped by the murderer. Smith relates that the dead partner was in charge of the division working on the secret project. Tracy interviews the radio division's research team, and the employee "Miss Irma" claims, perhaps imprudently, to have invented the watch. Tracy suggests her involvement in the crime, prompting this exchange:

SMITH: "Why, Irma's devoted to our company. She's been legally compensated for all discoveries while in our employ. She's quite happy."

TRACY: "Are you SURE she's happy?"

This is the closest that Gould-- who was himself a toiler in the fields owned by a great syndicate-- comes to admitting that such a laborer might feel himself (or herself) short-changed. And Tracy's instincts are correct in that Irma did feel short-changed, which presumably led her to murder Smith's partner for vague reasons. Apparently Irma believed she could remain Smith's employee and brazen things out, but when Tracy implicates her, she gets her husband Herman to spring her free using another of her inventions, "the atom light."

Except Irma and Herman are far bigger thieves than even a robber-baron like Smith. Irma's teenaged son Brilliant-- whom she accidentally blinded in a sort of reverse-Oedipal motif-- created both the atom light and the wrist-radio. (Though Brilliant has no idea that his mother's using one of his inventions for crime, it's somewhat appropriate that even a saintly kid like Brilliant might want to deprive others of sight. if only on a subconscious level.) Irma and Herman, now on the run, then get the not-so-brilliant idea to mass-produce the atom light for sale to foreign powers. Brilliant informs his adoptive father that they can only make more devices with a supply of lithium. Herman, knowing that Smith's factory has such a supply, uses the atom light to try ripping off the shipment. However, Smith's guards kill Herman.

Irma, never a master planner, then goes off the deep end. She infiltrates Smith's estate, and in a scene perhaps more indebted to Agamemnon than to Oedipus, she shoots Smith in his bath and then kills herself.

   

The Oedipal pattern does come forth, though, for even after Brilliant has been told how his parents used him, he like his mother decides that Smith is responsible for all his sufferings. At the hospital where Smith is recovering from his wounds, Brilliant invades what he thinks is the industrialist's room and attempts to kill his parents' murderer. However, hardboiled Tracy has read Brilliant like a book, and he plays a game of "blind man's bluff," allowing Brilliant to fire into an empty bed. Once Brilliant has purged his demons, he expresses contrition. He accepts Smith's offer to be the chief of research at Smith's facility. In private, the industrialist says that he wants Brilliant to become "my boy," though in this story we don't see the formation of filial bonds. But readers almost surely accepted that Smith could only be an improvement over Irma and her husband with the sound-alike name.

Gould could have left things that way for the run of the strip. For roughly the next two years, Smith and Brilliant presented other inventions to the city police, though none became as iconic as the wrist-radio. However, in 1948 Brilliant incorporated his "atom light" into "a television burglar alarm," and this was deemed such a threat to organized crime that a racketeer, Big Frost, tried to kill Diet Smith and did murder Brilliant.    

And it's at the point where Tracy ramps up the search for Brilliant's killer that Diet Smith drops the Oedipal bomb. Brilliant was his natural son by Irma, to whom Smith was married for a time. Thus the Oedipal slaying of the true father in defense of the false one was averted, though Smith's secretiveness may have cost him some points with readers. Yet even after Brilliant became the epitome of the loyal son, it seems Gould wanted the dramatic payoff, but without any complications to the strip's status quo. So Brilliant becomes one of the TRACY strip's many casualties, and in future I suspect nothing more is said about the creative personnel behind Diet Smith Industries.    
           
      

MYTHCOMICS: THE INCAL (1980-88)

 

“What piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving, how express and admirable in action, how like an angel in apprehension, how like a god! The beauty of the world. The paragon of animals. And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?” -- HAMLET, Act 2, Scene 2.

"So much beauty in the center of a world full of garbage."-- Deepo, THE INCAL, Book 3.

THE INCAL, written by Alejandro Jodorowsky and rendered by Jean "Moebius" Giraud, was serialized from 1980 to 1988 in METAL HURLANT magazine, and to date it remains both a popular and critically-celebrated franchise. Yet, for all the phantasmagorical content put forth by Jodorowsky and Moebius, the six volumes present a knotty problem. The rambling storyline is replete with all sorts of symbolism involving the Tarot, the four elements, and a dichotomous object that seems to be the son of the creator-god. Yet Jodorowsky seems inordinately preoccupied with the narrative role occupied by viewpoint character John DiFool, who's as far as one can get from god or angel, but seems to fit the status of "quintessence of dust" pretty well. Thus, with apologies to Milton, I boil down the master trope of THE INCAL to Jodorowsky "justifying the ways of dust to gods and angels."

  Jodorowsky introduced John DiFool, resident of your basic space-opera Earth, the way many PIs are introduced in 20th-century detective fiction. The hero starts out pursuing some mundane or even sordid job and rapidly gets mixed up in matters far beyond his usual experience. A crucial difference, though, is that though a Philip Marlowe usually proves equal to any task that challenges him, John DiFool mostly survives by dumb luck. And where Marlowe possesses a charm for the fair sex, DiFool is purposely given a homely face, so that any women who cross his path are drawn less to his looks than to things like money or power.

  As DiFool narrates to an attentive prostitute, he acquired a strange glowing triangle-- later dubbed "The Luminous Incal"-- from an alien, and no sooner does he return to his apartment than other ferocious beings come looking for his prize. (His pet bird Deepo is probably a callback to the white winged mount who appeared in Moebius' ARZACH stories.) DiFool conceals the Incal by swallowing it, though in the beginning he's motivated only the possibility of profit. 

  

Soon DiFool learns he's out of his league when he's taken prisoner by Earth's utterly corrupt Prezident, but the power of the Incal saves him, as well as conferring the power of speech upon Deepo. On the downside, The Incal starts talking as well, and it drafts the unwilling detective into a quest to find its other half, The Black Incal, in the forbidden realm of Technocity. There it just so happens that the Techno Priest cult has tapped the negative energies of the Black Incal to create a universe-ending threat, "Shadow Eggs," which will unleash a "Great Darkness" that Jodorowsky never explains.

Meanwhile, a professional assassin, the Metabaron, is forced to track down DiFool and his metaphysical companion by Tanatah, who kidnaps the Metabaron's adopted son Solune (Sol + Lune) in order to force the assassin to do her will. It's no coincidence that the tough-as-nails Metabaron fits the standard hero-archetype far more than does John DiFool.

DiFool does acquire the Black Incal, but he gives it away to a beautiful woman riding a giant rat after she kills a Technopriest menacing the detective. Calling herself Animah, she leaves DiFool behind, so that he and Deepo are taken prisoner by the Metabaron. The assassin tries to get back his son from Tanatah, but she takes the Luminous Incal from DiFool and prepares to kill all her prisoners. However, the forces of the Prezident attack Tanatah's stronghold. She makes common cause with her enemies and they hightail it.

Tanatah reveals that she and Animah are both sisters and former guardians of the two Incals, but Tanatah gave the Black Incal to the Technopriests for some vague reason. Since Animah has the Luminous Incal now, Tanatah decides they must all joorney to the center of the planet, an immense garbage dump where Animah and her giant rats live. (Incidentally, Animah is Solune's mother but hls father's identity will be revealed later.) One of the Prezident's murder-machines follows the fugitives to the garbage-world but DiFool and Animah unite the power of the two Incals and destroy the craft.

  

The seven companions journey to the plane of some metaphysical guardians called "Arhats" (a Buddhist term for a seeker who has achieved nirvana). The Arhats in turn convey the travelers to "the heart of the interior sun," where all seven are transfigured, and Solune in particular assumes a half-light, half-dark ritual. It's during this ritual, designed to unite the two Incals, that Animah drops a bomb: that she masqueraded as a prostitute to gather DiFool's seed. because his genetic material was the only one that could birth a unique child such as Solune-- who, BTW, becomes a disembodied intelligence. However, now that the Incals have merged, DiFool becomes peevish at having been used as everyone's pawn.

Now, at this point a lot of space-opera writers would concentrate on the surviving menace of the Shadow Eggs and the Great Darkness they represent. Suffice to say that Jodorowsky and Moebius go off on a lot of tangents not germane to the main plot (particularly various "bread and circuses" satires that become tiresome after a while). The next *consequential* subplot involves DiFool having to spread his unique genetic material into an alien queen, Barbariah. who makes herself look like Animah. The upshot of this subplot is that the detective sires a planet of people who look like him.

Skipping over lots of beautifully rendered filler material, Solune finally confronts the Darkness, whatever it is, and destroys its medium, though not its power. Solune determines that the Darkness can be banished if all humans in the universe participate in a shared "theta dream," which among other things forces DiFool to seek out the world of humanoids he sired on Barbariah. Once all the humans are dreaming in concert, the seven companions must channel the theta energy against the Darkness-- and their efforts cause all but DiFool to sacrifice their lives.      

      

After all these wonder-working tropes, almost the only thing Jodorowsky didn't do was to have his reluctant hero meet God-- so he does. Creator-god Orh informs DiFool that he uses his only begotten son, The Incal, to bring forth "the seed of the new creation." As for DiFool, he's not yet elevated enough to join any new orders, so back he goes to the point where his story began-- taking a big fall that may lead to death, or to enlightenment.

But even if one could not read of DiFool's fate in the sequel FINAL INCAL, most readers would find it unlikely that the recalcitrant reprobate would ever sing any cosmic kumbayas. Clearly Jodorowsky wanted DiFool to represent the unrefined nature of humankind-- though he's certainly far from the only inhabitant of his far-future world who's moved only by egotism and concupiscence. Yet Jodorowsky also imbues the detective with some strange genetic vigor, making him, the arrant fool, the only person who can give birth to Solune, who's something of a humanized Incal, making the Fool the father of the Savior. Despite the suggestions of the her's special destiny, overall there's a strain of Hamlet-esque pessimism in THE INCAL. Jodorowsky may have meant to suggest that for all the metaphysical beauties human beings can conjure forth, they remain composed of dust, and all their infinite faculties will not keep them from returning to dust.          

  

ACTIVITY AND RESONANCE, MEET POWER AND POTENCY

 The dichotomy known as "power and potency" has been hanging around this blog since 2014's POWER AND POTENCY, the first essay being a response to this observation from G. Wilson Knight:

[Hamlet] is a superman among men. And he is a superman because he has walked and held converse with death... Thus Hamlet is an element of evil in the state of Denmark. The poison of his mental essence spreads outwards among things of flesh and blood, like acid eating into metal. They are helpless before his very inactivity and fall one after the other, like victims of an infectious disease.-- G. Wilson Knight, THE WHEEL OF FIRE, 1930.

From Knight's idea of an "infectious inactivity," I extrapolated the idea of "potency," a "power that was not power," and which I applied to such examples as (1) the Sherlock Holmes story "The Speckled Band," (2) Moby Dick, (3) Tarzan, (4) Norman Bates, (5) time-travelers empowered only by their knowledge of past or future, like the Connecticut Yankee, the Time Tunnel guys, or The Outlaws (from the obscure 1980s TV show), (6) The Phone Freak from EYES OF A STRANGER, (7) Jed Eckert of RED DAWN, (8) undead but non-powered characters like Major Victory and the four protagonists of PURGATORY, and (9) the Chinese acupuncturist from THE LEGEND OF FRENCHIE KING. 

By comparison, "activity and resonance" are the new kids on the block. I first conjured them forth in the essay ACTIVITY REPORT in January 2026, though I extrapolated these formulations partly in response to a remark by Whitehead and partly to one of my own relatively casual intuitions from 2022's I THINK ICON, I THINK ICON:

The base rule for an icon to be "strongly definable" is that the icon must either be given a name in the story or must have some characteristic or perform some action for which the icon can be named.

In the two-part ACTIVITY REPORT essay, I refined this intuition into the formal proposition that literary icons were defined by activity, resonance, and a combination of the two, and that eminent icons were defined as the sources of whatever activity or resonance is most important to the narrative. "Activity" subsists in characters DOING certain things; "resonance" subsists in characters BEING certain things-- not least incarnating a power that is not a power, like Hamlet's "infectious inactivity." 

The new kid "activity," then, aligns with old kid "power," since even literary characters must possess some degree of power to "do things." "Resonance," is free just to be, like Melville's Bartleby, who eventually wastes away from a "non-infectious inactivity," but who still represents the resonance of inertia. Therefore my examples of "potency" are also examples of iconic resonance.

It's worth emphasizing that although the first POWER AND POTENCY started out by discussing only examples of uncanny phenomenality, by the third part of the essay-series, I realized that potency could play important roles in works of marvelous phenomenality. A future essay will explore the possible linkages between the concepts of "power" and of the marvelous phenomenality.    

THE NON-READING RHEUM: KRAKEN (2010)

 

I'm in a reading-group that reads a fair amount of 21st-century fantasy and SF, and this means I end up skipping a fair number of readings because I don't like much 21st-century metaphenomenal fiction.  I had read two China Mieville books before and didn't like either. The premise of KRAKEN sounded a little more promising than the other two books, involving a preserved kraken specimen stolen from a museum by a kraken-worshipping cult, resulting in an innocent museum curator getting pulled into shenanigans. It sounded a bit like a comedic version of Umberto Eco's FOUCAULT'S PENDULUM, which involved an ordinary schmuck having a rare MS translated, only to find himself targeted by occult groups who want the translation's secrets.

Well, KRAKEN was indeed intended to be comedic, but I found it less amusing than a bad Terry Pratchett book. I didn't mind that the protagonist was an ordinary schmuck; that's often typical for POV characters. But Billy Schmuck had three characters who functioned as "initiators"-- that is, they're all agents of some group that monitors occult organizations-- and THEY should have offered comedic eccentricity. Instead, Mieville's writing often suffered from what I call "archness support"-- that is, the tendency of many British humorists to think that if a character says something in an arch manner, that tone automatically makes the line funny.

Rather than just not read this 500-page waste of time, I skimmed it so that I would at least be able to follow what others in the group said about the reading. I learned that London (where the whole novel takes place) is chockful of ancient, unworshipped deities. Sounds a little like Neil Gaiman's 2001 AMERICAN GODS, right?-- except that very few gods participate in the action. Mostly it's Billy Schmuck, his allies and some other support-characters running around interacting with the occult groups. Possibly to avoid the usual Gothic trappings of magic-makers, Mieville specifies that most of these occultists are fans not of horror but of science-fiction. Why? I think just because the author thought it was funny to imagine occultists as SF-fans. I'm surprised he left the comics-fans alone: the only mention of comics was a reference to Doctor Octopus.

Maybe other readers would find some of the erratic ideas here beguiling if those readers liked the characters I found tedious. Someone must have liked KRAKEN, since it won a Locus Award. But all the book called forth in me was comparisons to the lesser works not only of Terry Pratchett but also Robert Anton Wilson, Clive Barker and a bunch of other authors who seem to get lost in their own perceived brilliance.