Slavery as an institution is pretty far removed from the minds of most of us residing here in 21st century America. Slavery sits back plenty far enough in the faded, yellowed and brittle pages of history to create a more than comfortable chasm between us and itself. We view that chasm of time and social development and modernism as broad enough to keep slavery from leaping from the past across the chasm of time into the present. The idea of slavery seems to evoke dusty black and white tin-type images of...
Slavery as an institution is pretty far removed from the minds of most of us residing here in 21st century America. Slavery sits back plenty far enough in the faded, yellowed and brittle pages of history to create a more than comfortable chasm between us and itself. We view that chasm of time and social development and modernism as broad enough to keep slavery from leaping from the past across the chasm of time into the present. The idea of slavery seems to evoke dusty black and white tin-type images of the Civil War, the expansive plantations of the Deep South, bloodied chains, inhuman whippings, lynching’s, and wild-eyed slaves fleeing through swamps, thick underbrush and the wilderness of their own fear.
Those kinds of pictures have become our definition of slavery; the visual that creates a picture of what slavery is. Slavery is seen as a physical captivity that coerces a forced service to an enslaving master. That’s how we view it. That definition is nearly exclusive, making our definition of slavery so incredibly tight that we can’t see any other kind of slavery at all. And if we don’t see slavery of this type, we assume freedom. That assumption in and of itself can be enslaving.
Slavery to Ignorance
Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote, “Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.” Ignorance is being oblivious, to one degree or another, to the obvious. Confucius said that “ignorance is the night of the mind, but a night without moon and star.” Ignorance is walking around in the dark without realizing what ‘dark’ is, and having no understanding of light.
It’s not seeing what actually ‘is,’ to the point that whatever it ‘is’ that ‘is,’ isn’t . . . at all. It’s having no recognition of something that exists despite how very real and very powerful that thing might be. Ignorance is naiveté multiplied to blindness. It seems that living in blindness can be freeing in some cases, and horrifically dangerous in others.
The old adage that “ignorance is bliss” is blissfully ignorant of how much damage we can experience walking in that kind dark darkness. Despite all of that, the worst kind of ignorance is when we’re ignorant that we’re ignorant. It’s one thing to intentionally ignore something and turn a blind eye. It’s quite another thing to be so ignorant that we don’t even know that anything’s there to turn a blind eye to. Ignorance at its fullest is fully convincing. It sells us wholesale on the hypnotically appealing belief that there’s nothing to be ignorant about because there’s nothing out there to be ignorant about. We buy the whole sales job lock, stock and barrel because it’s what we want to believe regardless of whether it’s really believable or not. At that point slavery leaps out of tin-types and right into our worlds.
Ignorance can open the doors to a lot of things and give a whole lot of space for a whole lot of things to exist in our lives. Yet I think that ignorance of our enslavement is one of the worst types of all of the kinds of slavery that we can be shackled to. To be ignorant and to be enslaved at the same time seems to be the absolute worst kind of slavery since we don’t even know that we’re enslaved. We become ignorant to slavery and slaves to ignorance.
What Enslaves Us?
How many things enslave us? We tend to see that things demands things of us, that we struggle with certain behaviors or attitudes, that we have our holes to dig ourselves out of, and our mountains to climb over. We look at our lives and see what we need to change, what should be altered, where we need the proverbial “nip n’ tuck,” a bit of “cut and paste,” or maybe a little bit of Botox for the personality. We likewise see the pieces of ourselves that need to be entirely eliminated in some sort of wholesale, demolition-like fashion.
We see our foibles, the fallacies of false fronts, our warts and things that warrant our attention. We know that we’re not where we should be and that where we should be isn’t anywhere along the road of where we’ve been going. We know at times that our values have been compromised, our integrity has been marred, and that far too often our morality has had the air completely sucked out of it. We realize that we’ve crafted career strategies that have outright killed our marriages, and that we’ve sacrificed families to seize six figure incomes. We know that we haven’t been accountable when we should have been, we haven’t apologized when we should have, and that we’ve never restored even half of what we’ve stolen along the road of our lives. We know.
Ignorance in Action
Yet, we tuck these things in the deep file of ignorance and then we file it away in the filing cabinet of forgetfulness. Once we do that, we make every effort never to pull the file ever again. Yet, nothing is filed and no filing cabinet exists despite the ingeniously creative wealth of our imaginations to believe it to be so. In reality we walk with all of this stuff hanging on with claws embedded in our hearts, and roots thickly entwining our souls. Yet we ignore this. We skip and cavort through life to some sort of fabricated tune whose velvety verses sooth us with lyrics that all is good and our lives are squeaky clean and polished to a mirrored surface.
Or we manipulate ourselves into believing that whatever good that we have is good enough. That life is more about the business of survival which doesn’t afford us the larger luxury of introspection, personal evaluation and the sweaty rigor of change. We don’t see anyone else focusing on all that negative stuff and so we assume that it must not be all that bad or everyone else would be focusing on it . . . wouldn’t they? We find some comfort in the belief that overall we’re good people and at least we try to do the good thing even if we don’t end up doing the good thing.
We create expansive and ornate rationalizations to justify ignorance, and we do a bang up job of creating them. Once we create them we nail them to the walls of our conscience so that we have them for ready reference during the times when guilt handily rankles our souls. We lull ourselves into belief that in the end, all of that stuff really doesn’t matter all that much anyway and that it will sort of eventually fall off behind us and kind of blow off the road of our lives, somehow getting lost somewhere in the wilderness of our journey . . . so we think. Therefore, we settle in ignorance and let ignorance give all of these things space to enslave us.
Our Enslavement
We are a peculiar people indeed. We tend to focus on the tasks that will either achieve our goals or keep our heads above water, whatever our situation might be. We’re notorious for feeding, watering and carefully attending to all the superficial stuff, but we put the real stuff out of sight behind the impermeable veil of ignorance. And we live as slaves to that stuff.
We work to tactfully or not so tactfully counter the real stuff and we futilely attempt to offset it by managing and manipulating the superficial things and focusing on the things that don’t hit us too hard or upset us all too much. Yet all of our efforts to offset all of the things stored deep in catacombs of ignorance are wholly insufficient. We live trying to change things by ignoring them. We attempt to resolve them by countering them with something else that isn’t as difficult or problematic to deal with. Or we justify them with conveniently trite sayings or offbeat philosophies that act like cooling waters on the searing hot coals of our conscience. In all of this maneuvering, we try to cheat ourselves to health and wholeness.
The end result is slavery to those things we’re chosen to ignore. They drive us to futility attempting to compensate for them by ignoring them. They pound and thunder and bend us from behind the veil of ignorance. They dog our steps and flog our minds. They draw us down and drag us out. They impale us as they impact us. In short, we become subject to them whether we wish to acknowledge its happening or not. We become so enslaved by our own foolish and short-sighted vision that we become ignorant to that which enslaves us. When that happens, we become slaves in the most awful manner possible.
Refute and Refuse Ignorance
We refute and refuse ignorance by being honest about our weaknesses and failures. We need to cast off justification and we to torch rationalization. We need to frankly acknowledge and bring to the forefront all of those things in our lives that we’ve chosen to ignore. Once we do that, we work to work through them with diligence and beat them by resolving them. In that way our enslavement can truly end because that which enslaved us is that which we’ve enslaved through its elimination.
