Sessions 3 and 4 of the Aspen Institute Seminar Aboard Explorer

The third and fourth seminar sessions were lively—even heated—discussions about deeply troubling issues. In the third session, the group read selections from A Brief Account of the Devastation of the Indies by Las Casas and On the American Indians by Vitoria. Both readings present details of the near total devastation of the people and lands in the New World within forty years of the Spanish “discovery.” And both are appeals to the court and magistrates for the immediate termination (in the name of the King and Queen of Spain) of the human slaughter and destruction of property and fertile domain.

The discussion ranged over the possible motives that would prompt people, “Christians,” not only to conquer and subjugate but also to commit genocide, particularly among a people described as “most guileless and the most devoid of duplicity, the most obedient and faithful to their native master and to the Christians whom they serve” (Las Casas). The seminar participants considered how when one confronts something entirely new that it sometimes may seem so alien that massive destruction is the fastest way to transform it to something known. From their own extensive experience, people raised issues of genocide in Africa, the Baltics, as well as the holocaust, which led us to consider that these acts are all too present through human history.

As the Explorer sailed through The Middle Passage, this part of the trade triangle between Africa and the New World that transported enslaved humans, the two seminars read excerpts from The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano and Aristotle’s exposition on natural slavery and Melville’s Benito Cereno. The groups questioned whether the enslavement of others is a necessary element of human nature or rather a deliberate means by which humans capitalize on economic and social conditions at the expense of life.

As the sessions pursued these difficult issues, the participants thought that “slave” was not an entirely accurate rendering of what Aristotle meant or that the definition and reality of enslavement changed significantly through human history. The groups looked at the emergence of slavery as a racial and gender issue rather than one of conquest and subjugation or even “mutual benefit” such as Aristotle proposes between master and “slave,” in which the relationship is a natural outcome and friendship is possible. (Smartly, the moderator eliminated all of Aristotle’s “observations” on women, lest the group commit mutiny.) Some participants postulated that there are natural leaders and natural followers, while others thought that everyone has the capacity to lead.