SOFT SLAVERY:
Huggins, Nathan Irvin
fore) which dealt with the conse- have been enveloped by a kind of plative life, the private life, the life of sequences of blood in the streets. Not ultra-secular...
...adaptation starring Trevor Howard turn traditional interpretations of There are no reputable historians who last fall on CBS...
...They give evidence nates...
...from their home in St...
...short novel (only 107 pages in its They are advocates, arguing their case hardback edition with lots of blank ROBERT FOGEL & pages between chapters) stands a fair STANLEY L. ENGERMAN like lawyers rather than scholars...
...condition of the slave that made him are differences between being slave These new volumes have made some more suppressed than the free la- and free, even if those distinctions important contributions to our under- borer...
...all the speakers on the chautauqua cir- out of the sanatorium he abandoned At the end of the narrative Pirsig cuit were like the author, it is no the teaching of rhetoric as futile...
...It won the prestigious Seldom has the advent of a historical of their findings...
...To ob- puters...
...He deflowing on the fever chart...
...Calling themselves would defend the "straw man" that olics, too, was written at least partly cliometricians (the historians' counter- Fogel and Engerman set out to dein response to the crisis in Northern part to econometricians), the authors stroy...
...He also gives greater importance advance over French and Italian peas- stitutions within slave life...
...Will he continue another group of separatists...
...His- is important to know...
...fore) which dealt with the conse- have been enveloped by a kind of plative life, the private life, the life of sequences of blood in the streets...
...Fogel and on their production...
...Suzuki is trivial or complicated, as equivalent days of edifying lectures, concerts, and not likely to have foreseen...
...Indeed, such a view provides ment of slaves...
...They illustrate, from understood that it was peculiar to own was not economically moribund on the data at the very large New Orleans men as property in 19th century eve of the Civil War...
...The book seems well, Rome in Catholics who visits the isa documentary-or nonfiction novel, rather than passionately, written...
...Is it land monastery and brings the outif you prefer that phrase-treating the really about the abbot's loss of faith...
...If cation" of America...
...Pirsig has no inten- to concentrate on reading some simanachronistic term evokes an image of tion of providing for this ubiquitous ple instructions on, say, how to operate a bygone America in the days before machine what the great Taoist masters an electric can-opener, or fix a tire...
...cial body of laws and institutions to high prices for slaves in 1860 despite Still there is room to quarrel...
...identical generalizations, however, they only slightly behind that of the North Much of the publicity about these claim to have "corrected" the tradi- and ahead of much of western volumes assumes that blacks will be tional interpretation...
...and slave owners received an adequate that there was a viable slave family Everyone, including slave-holders, return on their investment...
...On such matters clio- workers...
...the threat to future growth of a po- most scholars of slavery, they general- Furthermore, it was not just a labor litical policy prohibiting slavery from ize from data in the nineteenth century system...
...give the most sophisticated discussion, serve, for instance, that the caloric in- The authors have wisely published so far, of the economics of slavery take of prisoners at Attica is higher their study in two volumes...
...Implicit in the book is a doccontrary, a repellent and dispiriting nology and is in that sense a "thingifi- trinaire Zen idea that self and thing work by a not very likable man...
...What makes in this book it is this: the next time CHURCH HISTORY -THEOLOGY the narrative almost compelling read- your radio stops working, or your auto- DOCTRINE - DEATH & DYING ing, however, is that the journey is mobile breaks down, try to fix it your- ABORTION - PREJUDICE also a going back into another time self...
...But this NATHAN IRVIN HUGGINS concern must, to some extent, also have attracted him to the subject of Time on the Cross: ture...
...We are told that planters received Blassingame's The Slave Community resistance and sabotage...
...But the Catholic context of the there by way of Belfast...
...There was something in the cliometricians make clear that there biases explicit...
...Pirsig describes his book as a What is between them, in a sense, the person who really is unable even series of chautauquas...
...If and neither took place in Ireland...
...The process and people were presumed slave, and productive and reasonably efficient evolution of the institution from the white people were presumed free...
...They exploit data ceived 90 percent of their product as terial is in the second volume...
...the city well-so why shouldn't he be the one to write it...
...However well off he might have cannot be analyzed by high-speed comstanding of slavery, nonetheless...
...and lucrative W. H. Smith Award for study been greeted with such publicity The broad conclusions of this study him in England and was given an ex- and ballyhoo as the two volumes are not so new and revolutionary as cellent production in a television film under review, which claim to over- the authors would have us believe...
...In their passion to defend their methodchance of becoming his best known Little, Brown, $12.50 ology and their position, they often work since The Lonely Passion of claim too much for the significance Judith Hearne...
...As father and son more on insanity, the arguments of Zen and the Art of Motor...
...John than Fogel and Engerman do to slave ants...
...The on medical treatment and diet, show- return over their lifetime-the form authors may be claiming too much 23 August 1974: 460 when they see their work as a "turn- ical Don Quixote by the meaning of So there are chautauquas about how ing point" in the study of slavery...
...The first and the growth of the South relative than that of farm workers may be contains the full and complete text...
...deeply...
...Such conclusions of slavery that assumes physically and Engerman would prefer to see it as boggle the mind and make one feel mentally healthy individuals and famevidence of the relative good treat- victim of bookkeeping legerdemain...
...If there is one valuable lesson Pacific coast of California...
...to the rest of the country in the mid- true, but it distorts rather than illumi- For those who want to follow the nineteenth century...
...the Romanticist, by which he means Mr...
...about-what apparently compelled the fantasies...
...was nothing about the quality of ideas in which the reader is unable to dePerhaps it is true that some books one could get one's hands good and are like thermometers which generalize dirty with...
...Pirsig says the future of America POVERTY - SEX - PRISONS and space somewhere in Montana is the machine and it will keep break= ECUMENISM - THE JEWS where the author was a person he calls ing down until we take the Zen ap- WORLD RELIGION - ATHEISM, Etc...
...64141 nals, he was a teacher of philosophical have a month, he tells his son, to get rhetoric, obsessed like some pedagog- to California...
...After a stint at Benares for us whether the cumulative sick- Hindu University in India he wound nesses of our society are ebbing or up writing technical manuals...
...ilies...
...find evidence supporting what many obliged to rely on instinct and bias...
...Perhaps he sees himself as literally, of course, for it had to do ten by one who has said often and a sort of monk-writers often doonly with two related acts of terror- emphatically that he no longer con- laboring in isolation, offering it up...
...They differ from Europe...
...Stampp well cared for as northern industrial survival as slaves and was not availconcluded: (1) slavery was profitable, workers...
...4) slaves were large plantations...
...It "quality" and the notion of reality...
...travel across the lonely blacktop into philosophers from Phaedrus to Hegel cycle Maintenance the Great Plains we learn that the on the meaning of quality...
...ingness to reach out, help his boy, What is frightful about Pirsig is his JOHN HEIDENRY show him just a little love that will technological hatred for what he calls save both of them...
...As a black masters for child-bearing women to be lifetime, received a 90 percent return man, I find no discomfort in a view a subtle kind of breeding...
...It is just such an equation that be- of us have claimed...
...are likely accurate, logical, in a way On one level Pirsig tries to recount poetic...
...They been, that condition remained...
...But left at that, evidence of slave-breeding in the form torical significance is sometimes lost the whole point of what slavery was of stud-farms outside of abolitionists' sight of...
...side world in with him, changing kidnapping of James Cross, the Senior Yes, partly-and in this it is convinc- things so drastically, probably came British Trade Commissioner in Mon- ing...
...Part of that story, of Moore had carefully rendered a world upon Brian Moore as a writer, threatens course, is the consequent kidnapping wholly imaginary (for to him, per- his right to continue doing the kind and murder of Pierre Laporte, the la- haps, it is...
...Not ultra-secular hyper-Berriganism-writ- the writer...
...This deliberately is the motorcycle...
...For Stampp, coer- whether southerners perceived that slaves relatively well off...
...And if, for The Economics of been not only profitable but viablewhatever reason, he felt constrained American Negro Slavery sustaining the lives of slaves as well from writing directly of Northern Ire- ROBERT FOGEL & as being productive-those who have land, treating the acts of terror in Can- STANLEY L. ENGERMAN an ideological or emotional stake in ada gave him an opportunity to handle either a paternalistic master or a totally gingerly and at a distance matters that Little, Brown, $8.95 victimized slave will make these volconcerned him, personally, far more Time on the Cross: umes the subject of heated argument...
...Using statistics as their principal tive labor, and that men have wanted (5) slavery was compatible to an in- base for generalizations, their results to deceive themselves about both points dustrializing South...
...For it is the treal by a cell of young French-Cana- piece seems a bit neat, as though strife there that impinges directly dian separatists...
...Phaedrus," after the ancient Greek proach, look upon the busted radio, teacher of rhetoric denounced by in a sense, as ourselves, forbear $9.95 a+ bookstores end Plato...
...I, for one, that is so, then the emissary from Essentially, The Revolution Script is believe him...
...siders himself a Catholic...
...younger Pirsig too may be "mentally But if the reader is in some ways enROBERT M. PIRSIG disturbed...
...Because they find slavery to have the Cross kidnapping...
...the abbot, in spite of the fact that all nadian citizen, had been a newspaper- Its importance to Brian Moore, I be- the moral force is on his side, gives man in Montreal for years and knew lieve, is as a defense of the contem- in finally to Rome...
...or hit it full-square, and wound up in and grey skies in Montana, and many a mental ward...
...Like sustain their "peculiar institution...
...But it remains to be shown offended by an interpretation that finds Stampp of course...
...Most these volumes...
...it was a racial system...
...Black the western territories...
...His technological instructions, Reading it is like taking a reading of whether on computers or motorcycles, A unique single-source reference to 106° in the shade...
...They had to create a spewere optimistic enough to pay record- through sale was quite small...
...We Box 281, Kansas City, Mo...
...No reason-except that during the time of the Cross kidnapping and the writing of the BOOKS book about it, Moore was most deeply concerned with the situation in Northern Ireland, if we are to judge from SOFT SLAVERY the passionate tone of the "Bloody Ulster" piece in The Atlantic...
...This is a fable ostensibly insist that they have cut beneath the since Kenneth Stampp's Peculiar Inabout the future of the Catholic Church sentimentality and moralizing that they stitution introduced many of their -the old personal religious values think has plagued the historical litera- "corrections" to the literature, and Commonweal: 459 that book has since become the prin- ing that slaves were, on the whole, as of that return was simply for their cipal authority on the subject...
...Stampp a reasonably high rate of profit and, argues for organic and self-sustaining would consider special inducements by at another point, that slaves, over their families and religious life...
...to repair a motorcycle, and others will, nevertheless, provoke considerable Somewhere he missed the windmill, again, almost lyrical, on blackbirds discussion...
...Evidence and Methods: Much of the controversy will be What, then, about Catholics...
...In large part this is, to the The motorcycle is a portable tech- person...
...Commonweal: 461...
...That is to rides his colleagues in this profession THE say, a work that is the opposite of the who neither understand what they are platitudinizing or moral-cancer-diag- writing about-the machine, technology RESOURCE nosticating the heads of church and -nor know how to write...
...radio and television, or for that matter have done for archery or the art of Pirsig has for all practical purposes motorcycles, when people assembled in serving tea...
...What is the rush...
...Or he does so in a trans- metaphorized the repair of machines, the summer outdoors for two or three mutation of Zen which Dr...
...It has been almost twenty years Ireland...
...3) slaveholders slave market, that family break-up America...
...writer...
...What revolts the reader is lightened, he certainly feels little moral Morrow, $7.95 the father's almost pathological unwill- elevation...
...But there cion and fear were important elements "reality," and if they did, what com- have been black scholars who have in the motivation of slave productiv- fort they would have drawn from their for some time insisted on viable inity...
...But such interpreta- We are told, from evidence of food, the logical underpinnings for a hypotions are matters of judgment and not housing, medical care, etc., that slaves thesis of a strong and continuous Afroproved by the quantitative data in were about as well off as industrial American culture and character...
...This is because he has a pas- materials needed in adult (and high a rather monotonous motorcycle trip sion for wanting the reader to under- school) religious education prohe took with his eleven-year-old son stand technology and not run away grams...
...When Pirsig came are identical, which is nonsense...
...They infer from their data able for their mobility...
...6) there was no are averages, trends, and profiles...
...This suggests to me that of deeply personal novels that he~ has bor minister of Quebec province by Catholics was written for a much dif- done in the past...
...This was ferent reason that it is not about the doing them...
...The workers as a result of the absolute seventeenth century is ignored, as is fact that the system was profitable, authority of the master using, among the condition of slaves on small hold- that slaves were efficient and producother techniques, coercion and fear...
...I believe that Cath- American slavery...
...As Eric GUIDE state...
...All because the numbers tell black scholars should be pleased to metricians are like the rest of us, us so...
...to his own rehabilitation into a "sane recreation...
...Yet, I think that Unlike the rest of us, however, these trays the fault of the statistical men- it is still reasonable to insist that even authors are not inclined to make their tality...
...ings...
...There sketches a rather ambiguous chautauqua wonder the phenomenon has died out...
...and so on...
...Paul to the from it...
...This A Supplement provoked by the tone of these authors...
...2) slavery and family life...
...For years before Pirsig became dropping it off at the repair shop, and National Catholic Reporter a writer and editor of technical jour- learn to fix it...
...Please take note that that year-and after all, Moore, a Ca- Church serves as a handy metaphor...
...Even if Fogel's and Engerman's technical, methodological, and theoretof a wide variety of slave occupations, estimates are correct-that slaves re- ical basis for their argument, that maand their personnel...
...It may be important for us to know authors to choose this strangely nonWhen Fogel and Engerman announce that southern economic growth was cliometric title-is missing...
...Or will he confront bloody certainly the big story out of Canada Catholic Church at all, except as the Ulster directly...
...Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Hoffer correctly is quoted as saying Maintenance is like a thermometer in a jacket blurb, Pirsig is a born For Adult Religious Education protruding from the anus of America...
Vol. 100 • August 1974 • No. 19
