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It’s worth noting that Native Americans, who were still mostly in the Stone Age phase of human development, were indeed “inhumane, barbarous, and savage.” This is true of all Stone Age people. They engaged in constant low-level warfare against their enemies and, lacking the resources to hold POWs, had two choices if they prevailed in those wars: They could either slaughter or enslave their enemies. (For more on this, I highly recommend Steven Pinker’s enjoyable The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.)

Of course, Bishop Berkeley, immured in his early-Enlightenment Ivory tower, was unaware that his forebearers were no better. Indeed, Europe was still in the very slow process of temporarily emerging from its own barbarism. (WWII plunged it right back in.) It just had a head start over the Native Americans, so Europeans could convince themselves that they were culturally superior.

But back to that point that we were all once Stone Age people. That means that no society was free of the stain of slavery and prejudice. Moreover, leftists would do well to understand that what ended slavery wasn’t just a giant leap in morality; it was fossil fuel, which meant that the physical labor of animals and humans was no longer an integral part of a society moving beyond subsistence level survival.

That is a most EXCELLENT post, S & F. Your connection to fossil fuels eliminating the need for slave labor is hardly ever made. I would add to that the great benefits of fossil fuels we have enjoyed would not have been possible without a thousand years of advancement in mathematics, science, physics, metallurgy, thermodynamics, and engineering. Most of these great achievements were made possible by Western thought and Christianity.

Living in North America in the 17th and 18th centuries, it was a logical conclusion by the immigrants and native colonists that the native were “inhumane, barbarous, and savage.” How could you conclude otherwise?

Thanks for the recommendation for Pinker’s book, too.