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Embedded Suffering: The Long Arc of American Exploitation from Columbus to Bezos
The world as we know it is on the brink of collapse. The indications of this — massive species extinction, climate disaster, epidemic mental illness, spiralling political and economic instability — are hardly subtle. The causes of this “polycrisis”, as it has come to be termed, are multiple and complex, but ultimately can be traced back to centuries of exploitation of the natural and human worlds. Exploitation — the act of using someone or something unfairly or harmfully for one’s own benefit — is the defining characteristic of our civilization. It is inescapable and ubiquitous, so normalised as to be invisible. To take a trivial, random example, yesterday, for the grand sum of $30, I bought a small wicker table for my balcony. The box stated that the wicker was hand woven. I was struck by this. Given transport costs, retail markup, and the profit made by the manufacturer, I wondered, what could the workers who wove the wicker for that table possibly have been paid? What was the embedded suffering of my new acquisition?
The fact is I am addicted to products built on the suffering of others and the destruction of the natural world. My affluent western lifestyle depends on it, as does yours, dear reader. Slavery — that most egregious and obviously exploitative of American institutions — may have been outlawed in the nineteenth century, but the cultural mode of exploitation of which it was a part has not been banished, and the karmic costs of that are just now starting to hit.
Human beings in many cultures have exploited other humans and animals throughout recorded history and beyond. The indigenous tribes of North America may have been excellent stewards of the natural world, but they also routinely made slaves of those they vanquished in war. The wealth of the Ancient Greek city states was likewise founded on the labour of captured slaves, and there is depressingly little (read, no) evidence of anyone questioning the morality of this arrangement, for all the Athenian philosophers’ talk of virtue.
Yet if we wanted to trace the origins of the epidemic of exploitation that has brought nature to its knees and now threatens to engulf us all in catastrophe, it would be hard to find a more pivotal moment than the year 1492, when Columbus tried to…
