The Pyramid that the Slaves Built: A Response to John Lachs

John Lachs argues that the human race has experienced both material and moral progress over the course of history, and that the correlation between material and moral progress is not an accident. Material progress contributes towards the advance of our general morals. He points out that material wealth eases suffering and therefore augments our well-being. He suggests as well that modern commerce and communication extend social bonds across national borders, expanding our individual capacity to care.

Behind Lachs's observations is the crucial insight that we flourish as human beings as we flourish in the flesh, and with one another. We are better able to develop our moral virtues when we have sufficient food to eat, clean water to drink, good air to breathe, homes that open outward towards centers of community life, and the time to do what we know we ought to do. We are not only embodied but we are also social creatures. Our soul diminishes in an unfriendly or impoverished social milieu. Lachs is very right, I think, to question pious beliefs in the redemptive value of human suffering. He is also right to challenge isolationalist tendencies among individuals, families, and nation-states. As technological accomplishments, such as the telephone and the automobiles, grow, so might our moral capacities to engage with one another.

Lachs not only praises our technological achievements; he also claims that the material and moral advances represented by the telephone and automobile tell us more about the twentieth century than its record of terror tells us. Among the terrible events of the twentieth century, he mentions the two world wars and the Holocaust, but we might also include the ongoing problem of neocolonialism. It is this judgment regarding the importance of technology in the face of massive terror that makes me question his fundamental thesis. Should the replacement of the hand-cranked automobile with the solenoid engine really count for more in the moral measure of the human race than the systematic extermination of millions of lives? Should the occasional phone call back home of the cross-continental traveler mean more for our moral health than the systematic plundering of one continent by another continent?

Whether or not our material prosperity improves our moral character depends much upon how we have acquired our wealth. A thief is not morally better off than a poor and honest person. Lachs rightly teaches us to be skeptical toward those prosperous city-states or empires of ancient and medieval times built on the backs of slaves. The prosperous citizens of these bygone eras have acquired their wealth, much as thieves have, through the appropriation of wealth that belongs to others. While an oppressive elite may enjoy the benefits of their prosperity, the average person in traditional societies was likely to have suffered from brutal conditions of menial labor. As Lachs writes: "To learn what life was like in prior centuries, we need to read about the travail of ordinary persons, not the exploits of the high and mighty. The little people who built the pyramids of Egypt and cathedrals of medieval Europe were infested with parasites and found themselves at the mercy of tyrannical rulers and a poorly understood, terrorizing world." Lachs does not directly address the moral character of those political, religious, and military elites who enjoyed the benefits of the slave economy. No doubt the elites in traditional societies have enjoyed extraordinary riches, participated in high culture, and flourished as a class. But Lachs's emphasis on the development of moral character would guide us to critique these elites for not promoting the social conditions of mutual flourishing. If the wealthy middle classes of the industrially advanced countries are morally better today, it is because we do not amass our fortune on the backs of slaves. We do not build pyramids to commemorate ourselves, or cathedrals to some poorly understood abstraction...