Dear Carson,

I would like to rephrase your question. Although slavery must be absolutely condemned, there is nothing inherently wrong with different political and moral beliefs. That’s just who we are, and differences can be helpful and healthful if we listen to one another. The real question then becomes: how does it happen that we allow differences to distort our humanity such that we find it acceptable to enslave others and to denigrate others to the point where we willingly treat them as less than human?

There are many reasons of circumstance why we are willing participants in the destruction of our fellow human beings. We are brought up in hateful environments wherein learned behavior is carried forward in our own lives. As we develop, our brains become wired in hateful contortions. Perhaps the greatest motivator in such twisted development is economic motivation. We develop financial incentives in oppressing others and soon come to believe that we enjoy divine favor in our enterprise, illustrated in the sad truth that the early success of America as a country was founded on African slave labor.

But, the root cause of our perversion lies deeper than the negative effects of environmental and economic advantage. Every single one of us comes into this life bombarded by stimuli from the senses that our developing brain works very hard to assimilate and organize. Neural connections between these stimuli are created, and soon perception develops conception, and, voila, we develop a world that makes sense, one we can navigate. Problems, however, infect the process, and inevitably we begin to anticipate and prejudge how a stimulus will fit into the picture, and we often anticipate wrongly. Rather than allowing the world to teach us more, we fabricate our own world to the detriment of both ourselves and others. 

Such a result is not foreordained. In fact, it would seem logical that as we develop, we would recognize that our individual perception is extremely limited, that others have different perspectives founded on different experiences, and that we could all learn a lot if we were open to one another to learn, appreciate, and expand our own horizon. It does seem so logical and even expected. Unfortunately, the opposite happens. We absolutize our own perception, believing others should believe as we do, and if they don’t, there must be something wrong with them. The difference becomes division, and division becomes the dehumanizing of the “other.” Hate this other, oppress them, enslave them, in war kill them. They are not human like me.

It need not be so. In fact, defending an egocentric faux world of your own creation seems so much more difficult and so much less fulfilling than saying something as simple as: here’s what I think? What do you think? It is a puzzle to me why we pursue the more difficult path. Not everyone, to be sure, but most, it seems. It is at this point that Jesus, along with others, stands before us as a mirror in which we are afforded an alternative perspective on who we really are and are called to be. We need only look up.

~ Carl Krieg, Ph.D.