There’s a blight in our history which sullies our reputation as sentient, compassionate beings. No, I’m not talking about slavery (though that, too, qualifies). I’m talking about hunger. Just as slavery has been a near constant throughout history, being practiced in one society or another at one time or another, so has hunger. In its most extreme form–mass starvation—hunger can be said to be even more brutal than slavery, in that it kills, not just dehumanizes (What would you choose, if your choice was between starving to death or being enslaved?*).
One thing that distinguishes hunger from slavery is that no one condones hunger (except those hawking diet pills), while slavery has been sanctioned, in the sense of being tolerated, even by religion. When God, through Moses, issues his 10th Commandment, “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or male or female slave…” – Deuteronomy 20:17), he tacitly condones slavery. While Hebraic law softens the practice to be more like indentured servitude (“If you buy a Hebrew servant, he is to serve you for six years. But in the seventh year, he shall go free.” – Exodus 21), as with many of the Chosen People’s precepts, a distinction is made between intra-Jewish practices and Jews’ relations with Gentiles (“Israelites… must not be sold as slaves…. slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves.” – Leviticus 25). In the Koran, slavery is a similarly accepted practice. As with the Jews, Muslims have two sets of rules, in their case distinguishing between believers, who must not be enslaved, and non-believers, who could be (including those captured in war, which gives a surprising luster to slavery in that enslavement of POWs seems more benign than killing them).
What with slavery having acquired a bad reputation these days, apologists for equivocating holy writ have excused it on the grounds of practicality. As one Islamic scholar explains, “God did not wish to prohibit slavery with immediate effect as this would have caused grave social problems”, noting that one-third of the population in Arabia in Mohammed’s day were slaves. Thomas Jefferson apologized for his own slaveholding in a similar manner: “Slavery is an abomination and must be loudly proclaimed as such, but I own that I nor any other man has any immediate solution to the problem.”
It’s easy to castigate the much admired, much maligned philanderer for declaring “all men are created equal” while holding his black compeers in bondage or to mock Patrick Henry for boldly vowing “Give me liberty or give me death”, while not daring to repeat his rallying cry in front of his slaves. But before we get too self-righteous, let’s consider that other venerable social ill: hunger. Like slaves, the hungry have always been with us, but, unlike slavery, hunger has never received religious approbation. As we know from the biblical story of Ruth, it was the custom for the Israelites to leave the gleanings in their fields for the poor to harvest. Jesus praised those who fed the least of their brethren, as they had fed him, and condemned those who did not to “eternal punishment” (Mathew 25). Mohammed, vocalizing the words of God, praised those who feed the poor, despite being hungry themselves (Sura 76).
Yet hunger gnaws at the bellies of our fellow man still today. Millions starve to death every year and almost a billion suffer from undernourishment. Even In the land of “amber waves of grain” one-tenth of the population goes to bed hungry, while in the very capital of that bounteous land one in every three families experience food insecurity. How is this possible in the modern world when we have acquired such an impressive ability to produce food? When there are so many individuals and organizations dedicated to “ending world hunger”, why do we fail to do so?
Unlike with slavery, where the villains of the piece have names, it’s not so easy to assign blame for this sorry dietary state of affairs, even though it is manmade, not an act of God or Nature. You might blame it on greedy capitalists, hypocritical politicians, the complacent well-fed, but individual guilt is hard to pin down. Should we tear down statues of the corpulent as being guilty, by appearance alone, of stealing food out of the mouths of babes (starting with the statue of the hero of the Mexican-American War, General Winfield Scott, whose obese persona has been immortalized in bronze in the circle named after him in Washington, DC).
But, in the end, doesn’t the fault lie “not in our stars but in ourselves”? Aren’t we all in much the same situation as Jefferson, recognizing an injustice but feeling helpless to remedy it? We are all, are we not, subject to the spirit of our time, the zeitgeist, which constrains our capability—individually and collectively—to right an obvious wrong.
Last week I attended the launch of the Center for the Study of Slavery and Its Legacies at Georgetown University, an event emblematic of the attention being given the subject these days in academia.** Wouldn’t it be appropriate that hunger be given the same attention? As we chow down on the cornucopia before us this Thanksgiving, we all should feel a tinge of guilt and reflect, “with malice toward none, with charity for all”, that those who came before us were similarly guilty and equally constrained?
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* For the Irish, during the Potato Famine of the 1840s the choice was between starving to death or emigrating, with about a million suffering the first and another million choosing the second. Conditions on the cramped, unhealthy ships that transported the emigres across the Atlantic were so bad the Irish called them “coffin ships”. It’s estimated the mortality rate was around 30%, twice what it was on slave ships in the same period (first half of the 19th century), which is not surprising if the captains of the emigrant ships were paid up front and so had no interest in whether his passengers lived or died, while the captains of the slave ships were paid according to how many live bodies disembarked in the New World.
** The centerpiece of the launch was the performance of a music/spoken word piece, Requiem for the Enslaved, composed by a black professor at the school. I thought the musical portion gave new meaning to the word “cacophony”, while the spoken word portion—delivered in a subdued rap style—was so pedestrian as to be trite. Yet, the audience (a couple hundred, majority white of all ages), gave the performers a five-minute standing ovation. I remained seated and sat there wondering whether I was such a boor I couldn’t appreciate refined artistry or had I intruded on the conclave of a cult of wokeness.
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