A Book Explores the Evil of New World Slavery

What was distinctive about the evil of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and New World slavery? In what ways can the present seek to rectify such historical wrongs, even while recognizing that they lie beyond repair? Irreparable Evil: An Essay in Moral and Reparatory History by David Scott, Ruth and William Lubic Professor in the Department of Anthropology, explores the legacy of slavery and its moral and political implications, offering a nuanced intervention into debates over reparations.

Scott reconsiders the story of New World slavery in a series of interconnected essays that focus on Jamaica and the Anglophone Caribbean. Slavery, he emphasizes, involved not only brutality on a mass scale, but also the irreversible devastation of the ways of life and cultural worlds from which enslaved people were uprooted. Colonial extraction shaped modern capitalism; plantation slavery enriched colonial metropoles, and simultaneously impoverished their peripheries. To account for this atrocity, Scott examines moral and reparatory modes of history and criticism, probing different conceptions of evil. He reflects on the paradoxes of seeking redress for the specific moral evil of slavery, criticizing the limitations of liberal rights-based arguments for reparations that pursue reconciliation with the past. Instead, this book argues, in making the demand for reparations, we must acknowledge the fundamental irreparability of a wrong of such magnitude.

Scott discusses the book with Columbia News, as well as what he’s read recently and what he plans to read, and who he would like to invite to his next dinner party.

How did this book come about?

This is not an easy question to answer. There were a number of motivations that bent me toward what eventually became Irreparable Evil. In truth, it was not an easy book to write because, as primarily a work of historical and moral criticism, it demanded an engagement with diverse assumptions that seemed to me problematic. Moreover, the book did not exist all at once as a fully formed idea in my head before I started writing. It evolved slowly with each essay, and as I tried to integrate the parts into an interconnected assembly, if not a seamless whole.

The book grew out of a worry about some of the ways in which the question of New World slavery was being discussed in contemporary literature. New World slavery is the historical atrocity that founds Black life in the Americas, including the Caribbean, the geopolitical field that is the background of my investigations. The concern I knew I wanted to engage is embodied in the questions: What today is the problem about New World slavery? How—conceptually, morally, and politically—should we approach the past of New World slavery for the present? As is evident from these formulations, I assume that New World slavery is not a stable object of inquiry, and that there is no single interpretive story that has timeless critical purchase. So in this sense, I argue that the old modernist narrative of revolution into which the story of slave emancipation was inscribed (as in C.L.R. James’s classic The Black Jacobins, my eternal point of reference) had broken down, and was no longer an effective strategy of critical inquiry. This has been my starting point for a number of years, over a number of books, and it is my point of departure in Irreparable Evil.

At the same time, the emergence in the past two decades or so of an assertive discourse on reparations for the slave past (in the U.S. and in the Caribbean) has helped to revive a concern to reckon morally and politically with the present of the past of slavery—and, consequently, with the question of the possible alternative futures of peoples of African descent in the diverse Americas. This contemporary discourse of reparation emerged as part of what we might call the post-Cold War Age of Human Rights, itself a paradoxical and contradictory discursive formation. On the one hand, what has been fascinating to me is that it has considerably reanimated a concern with moral harms—with the idea of large-scale historical atrocity, in particular, and how to address these. On the other hand, the basically liberal assumptions that drive contemporary reparations discourse constrain it as largely a matter of “reconciliation” between conflicting parties, a strategy of “repair” that leaves the settled status quo of inherited benefits and enrichment undisturbed. To my mind, what was needed was a deeper, more far-reaching conception of the atrocity of New World slavery.

In this respect, the idea of evil seemed to me appropriate for thinking about the gravity of the historical wrong of New World slavery. Atrocities, like New World slavery, are moral evils. Contemporary (philosophical) discussions of evil, however, have overwhelmingly taken the Holocaust as their paradigmatic instance. The Holocaust is treated as a meta-evil, the evil that defines the discursive space of evil as such. Other evils, when recognized as evils, are merely empirical. They fill out the list of “examples.” The upshot of this is that where not rendered invisible, New World slavery is simply assimilated into the hegemonic model of the Holocaust in which evil turns centrally on the elimination of its victims. Drawing on the work of the moral philosopher, Laurence Mordekhai Thomas, I wanted to suggest that slavery was an atrocity whose evil did not inhere in its eliminationist purpose. There were numberless murders committed against enslaved people who were treated as disposable, and this was unquestionably evil. But the central evil of New World slavery turned less on the physical death it perpetrated than on the kind of lifeworld it imposed on the enslaved, and the nature of the subordination, submission, and acculturation that slavery coercively enforced as the matrix of the form of life of the slave plantation. This evil of the domination of the slave plantation—evil extraction of value from the bodies of the enslaved—has enriched the advanced capitalist world and impoverished the Caribbean.

In the book, you argue that seeking reparations for slavery has inherent limitations since slavery is, in effect, irreparable. Is there any sort of compensation then that works, or is effective, while acknowledging that truth?

New World slavery is an irreparable evil. This to me is a fundamental moral and material fact—which is not to say that there is nothing to be done by way of practices of repair. Although I have—as I articulate in Irreparable Evil—serious misgivings about Hannah Arendt’s ideas about slavery in relation to the Holocaust (the invidious comparison she formulates in The Origins of Totalitarianism), I agree with her formulation in The Human Condition: That there are types of historical outrage, atrocities, radical evils, as she would call them, that admit of neither punishment nor forgiveness. These evils live on like a permanent indictment and a permanent wound. New World slavery is, to my mind, an atrocity of this kind. The moral and material debt that is owed in consequence of it is incalculable—the more so because New World slavery lives in the present in so deeply entrenched disavowal by the powers that bear the principal historical responsibility for its perpetration or that are its principal beneficiaries.

Still, there is a politics and ethics of reparations to engage. The radical evil of New World slavery is not unidimensional, but has to be understood (as I suggested above) along at least two axes simultaneously. On the one hand, the evil powers of slavery were directed less at the physical elimination of the enslaved than at the permanent removal of people from their original forms of familial and cultural life, and their coercive insertion into new, racially subordinate forms of life and labor. The target of the tyranny of slave plantation power was the lifeworld of the enslaved—not simply over a handful of years, but over multiple generations and hundreds of years.

On the other hand, New World slavery (again, I am principally thinking through the Caribbean) was a system of extraction of fungible value—not only of the theft of discrete, isolable commodities—that systemically enriched not only identifiable individuals, but also, broadly, the infrastructural world of the slaving powers. Slavery was a formative part of the making of the modern capitalist world as such. Therefore, serious talk of material and moral reparation (and these are really sides of the same coin) has to be more than talk about scholarships, monuments, and holidays, or even increased economic aid, mere tokens to salve the conscience of the former slaving powers, and an insult to the persistent racialized poverty of the descendants of the enslaved. Serious talk of reparations has to be talk about the transformation of the political organization of the world as we know it in such a way as answers more meaningfully the demands of redistributive justice—and this, of course, not simply in terms of the transformation of the neoliberal political orders and the orders of value of the former slaving powers, but of those of the neocolonial worlds as well. 

What books have you read lately that you would recommend, and why?

I have recently read and reflected on some of the work of the Ghanaian political philosopher, Ato Sekyi-Otu, in particular, Left Universalism: Africacentric Essays and Homestead, Homeland, Home. I read these books while I’ve been in Paris on my sabbatical, and then had the privilege of talking to Sekyi-Otu about them when I was in Ghana in early March. Now retired, he is a restlessly innovative thinker with intertwined literary, philosophical, and political resonances and a pronounced sense of the critical work of indignation.

What's next on your reading list?

I am continuing to think about and think through the English moral philosopher and novelist, Iris Murdoch, whose work has engaged me for a while (including in Irreparable Evil). There are many novels of hers that I’ve not yet read, as well as many of her books of philosophy, such as The Sovereignty of the Good, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, and Existentialists and Mystics, that I want to read or, in some cases, reread.

Murdoch is one of the most under-appreciated thinkers of the 20th century. What I think was important to her (and to me) is the idea of the intractable character of certain moral conundrums—and thus the significance to her of the tragic and evil—and the feebleness of our moral language in addressing the fragility and vulnerability of the human condition.

What are you teaching now?

In the fall, when I return from sabbatical, I will teach two courses. My graduate seminar, The Idea of a Black Radical Tradition, will be organized around the trajectory of the work of two contrasting Caribbean intellectuals—the Guyanese radical historian and political revolutionary, Walter Rodney, and the Jamaican literary-cultural critic, Sylvia Wynter. We will be concerned with the generational contrasts, as well as with the convergences and divergences, in the cultural and political character of their work.

My undergraduate seminar, Anticolonialism, will be organized around a reading of five classic texts in the formative period of decolonization: Mohandas Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj, C.L.R. James’s The Black Jacobins, Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism, Albert Memmi’s The Colonizer and the Colonized, and Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. The principal question I ask is: How did each of these singular texts formulate the problem of colonialism?

Which three scholars/academics, dead or alive, would you invite to a dinner party, and why?

I would invite Frantz Fanon (1925-1961), Walter Rodney (1942-1980), and Sylvia Wynter (born in 1928) to a small dinner party. All three are innovative Caribbean thinkers from different parts of the Caribbean, and I would be keen to hear what they would say to each other. Fanon and Rodney defined successive Caribbean generations whose political imaginaries were shaped by—and, in turn, helped to shape—the modern idea of Third World revolution: the one in relation to the anticolonial generation of the 1950s and early 1960s; the other in relation to the anti-neocolonial generation of the late 1960s and 1970s. Both died young, but both were Caribbean intellectuals who devoted a considerable part of their lives to the African revolution.

Wynter, though closer to Fanon in age, and though skeptical of the 1970s revolutionary upsurge in the Caribbean associated with Rodney, has emerged more recently as a formidable critic of the European humanisms of the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Against them, she has offered a counter-discourse that aims to reimagine an inclusive and emancipatory prospect for the idea of the Human. It is not clear to me that their encounter around my dining table would be harmonious, but the agonistic exchanges would, I am sure, enrich and clarify my own thinking about Caribbean generations and the prospects for radical social change in our lifetime.