And I'm saying that there's something wrong with explaining away the history of transportation by simply saying "people got from one place to another somehow. No use in understanding the social organization that informs how they got from one place to another."
The abstract model or organization that underlies actual practices is inextricable from the practices themselves, and if we want to understand the mindset and values that accompany said practices (whether it's transportation or slavery) then we need to understand the social form as much as we understand the physical movement of bodies (this will come back into play w/ re. to your comment below).
By way of analogy, it's true that you can't study ant behavior without individual ants; but you can't understand the full evolutionary structure of ant behavior by just looking at the experience of one ant.
I'm probably not clear enough in that I don't have a problem with understanding particulars, or aiming to explain away something, unless it is to explain that there's not a unique capacity in capitalism or in a particular race for slavery. On the contrary, it is only under capitalism and in western countries (or under their influence) that we've seen the abolition of slavery as a practice and a virtue. This is, in fact, unprecedented. Now, I know that the argument is that the practice has merely taken on new, more opaque and complex forms, but I think this rather makes the point about the universality of the practice in terms of human behavior. Capitalism commodities, and humans have proven to be very poor commodities, and so what explicit slavery we still see is at the margins of what has as of yet been resistant to complete commodification (sex). As this arena is more completely commodified, we should expect to see further reductions in slavery. Of course, other problems are and will likely arise, but the point being that capitalism and slavery hold only a historical link, not a necessary one. Which is not the sort of understanding one finds advanced by your average SJW, or by your hostel living barista communist.
This is a really good point and sets up an actual area of contention that we can discuss. Again I agree, the concept breaks down without individual actors. You can't have the formal structure without the physical components.
I think you're right that my comments and perspective intellectualize the bodies away; in fact, I think that's a really good way to put it, and helpful.
My approach to topics like this is always one of shifting scales. I would never want to discount the experience of inhumanity that lies at the individual level of something like slavery and other forms of oppression. Experiences matter, yes, and they're incredibly helpful for arriving at a set of ethical standards. Even if people disagree on what needs to be done, they can at least agree that something should be done.
This is a question of scale, and different scales offer limited amounts of information. I don't believe that individual experience can ever hope to accurately tell us about the real form and mechanics of systems like slavery, whether in ancient Rome or in the antebellum American South. In pure personal appearance/accounts they might look very similar, but the social forces behind them are very different and just as important for understanding the qualities of enslavement and other phenomena. We can't say that "slavery is slavery" or "oppression is oppression" just because the individual experiences are roughly the same. This premise elides crucial details for understanding how slavery is perpetuated, what values inform it, how those values intersect with other social spheres (religious, economic, political, etc.).
It's true that individual suffering maintains some general continuum of experience, whether at the hands of the Nazis or Hutus; but such experience tells us very little about the social form and institutionalization of oppression.
You've inferred some kind of difference in degree, but all BO is suggesting is a difference in kind. Just because techno-capitalist oppression is different than being hacked to death by Hutus doesn't make one worse than the other.
Well then we are in agreement that one isn't worse than the other. That's been my point - that
The
Holocaust or The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade have been imbued with additional significance, that they were somehow worse, either because of scale, or because of the support of racial ideologies, etc. I'm picking these two things not because they themselves bother me, but that they are the most salient examples. World War II gets far more attention than WWI, but WWI was arguably more significant in terms of revolutionizing everything about warfare.
Understanding in depth the way that all particular historical factors involved contributed to the atrocities of The Holocaust, or the TAST wind up being misinformative insofar as those factors are seen as purely particular and not outgrowths of longstanding facets of human behavior. This is the fundamental point of contention, I would say, between those which could be divided as "conservative" vs "progressive", or as Sowell labels it, the "Constrained" vs the "Unconstrained" world view. The conflicting visions often lead to differing interpretations of what amounts to a problem, but even when there is agreement on a problem, attempts to jointly approach it and/or prevent recurrence fail to launch.
As an example: I just finished White Trash the other day. After laying out the history of intransigence on all sides of the class divides, and the failure of both the New Deal and the Great Society to uplift the longstanding white poor/rural classes, the author closes the book with several pages of "this is why we need another New Deal", essentially. I saw every reason throughout the book why this is precisely the wrong takeaway.
There's a number of reasons why the Holocaust is bestowed such significance, and the mass influx of Jewish academics like your boy Mises into American universities in the 30s and 40s of course plays into this as well. In any case, it wasn't the first German perpetrated genocide of the 20th century to employ concentration camps and industrial technologies (although most victims of the genocide of the Herero were killed by forced exposure), and the genocide of the Armenians also incorporated mass transit in no small part influenced by the German experience in German Southwest Africa. What makes the Holocaust unique isn't its employment industrial technologies; rather that the Holocaust itself was its own industry with its own means of production, supply lines, and bureaucracy, and the accompanying governmental regulations thereof. It's not that it's more inhumane than others. It's the utter de-humanization/commodification of its victims that makes the Holocaust unique.
None of this is to say that the Holocaust is somehow more evil/bad/whatever than the genocide in Rwanda. It would be idiotic to host a dick measuring contest with genocide, and any academic worth their sticks knows better than that.
Well the Holocaust and the TAST obviously have some salience in the US because of the history and the asylum granted Jewish academics. Again, my point is precisely that while different, or even unique, it's not Different. It is not worse. But one wouldn't know that based on the amount of ink spilled on these vs other atrocities.
