Opium

Abstract Expressionism / Morris Louis/ Floral V

Been thinking about a conversation that has been bouncing back and forth in emails lately.  Seems to me that my associates in this conversation have been attempting the onerous task of figuring out how we got to this impasse.  Now I don’t have a problem with this, if one is going to extricate oneself from the pickle we are in, it is best to know how we got here.

It seems to me that the big problems right now are the joined-at-the-hip problems of immense inequality and immense wealth.  Now, in the conversations going on, these are discussed as if they were two separate phenomena and are profoundly morally wrong.  I can’t very well disagree with any of these issues.

But in my analysis the issue seems to be more complex and subtle than this.  I find that folks want to go back to the deep past to show just how long we have been assholes.  The latest discussion centers around the South Sea Bubble and the Royal Africa Company where the British Royalty got into the slaving business.  

Now, I am not really going to go into any defense of this, truth be told, this was pretty standard, but the little episode wasn’t really the best example of current practice.  Since we have moved along the progression (Slave-Serf-Prole-Outsource-Deplore) digging back that far into the past is a bit over the top.

Nope, I think that a much better example is the Opium Wars.  Closer in time, closer in culture, closer in technology and toward the end of the slavery issue.  The Emancipation Proclamation was signed in 1863, the Opium wars were right around that time.  The Royal Africa Company was 100 years before that.  

At that time the only folks in the “civilized” world who used large scale slavery were the rubes of the South.  It has been said that the advent of steam power coupled with the then rudimentary cotton gins had already begun the process of moving away from slavery, So there can be a argument made that the American Civil war was the South’s equivalent of Masada.

But back to the Opium wars.  That was the first serious effort to force trade and profit onto a population that you didn’t have to go to all the fuss and bother of actually ruling.  I argue that the Opium wars were the first (albeit premature) attempt at “Globalization” and a “Rules Based” world order.  Worked like a champ too!

Nope, The underclass is the crop that the oligarch’s harvest.  The oligarch’s and their near infinite greed and their all consuming desire to garner the most wealth with the least effort are the wellspring.  

Right now, the world we look out on is making a change.  The examples of other periods of change are useful, we should examine them all closely and establish what limited lessons that we can.