I don’t suppose fires will be set yet again in the hallways of Academia, or Leeds University anyway, over the speech crime of Classics professor, Malcolm Heath.  But you never know.

Poor Prof Heath appears to have miscalculated somewhat in seeking to explain away Aristotle’s wonderfully offensive thoughts on slaves.  It isn’t an easy job.  This, in part, is what the old boy said (in Poetics, Book 1, chapters 3 and 7):-

But is there any one thus intended by nature to be a slave, and for whom such a condition is expedient and right, or rather is not all slavery a violation of nature?

There is no difficulty in answering this question, on grounds both of reason and of fact. For that some should rule and others be ruled is a thing not only necessary, but expedient; from the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule.

... But among barbarians [that’s us - Ed] no distinction is made between women and slaves, because there is no natural ruler among them: they are a community of slaves, male and female. Wherefore the poets say, “It is meet that Hellenes should rule over barbarians” as if they thought that the barbarian and the slave were by nature one.

Now, some may give Aristotle the benefit of the doubt on racial supremacism and accuse him merely of being the worst kind of snob, if not a tad sexist.  But Prof Heath appears to have grasped the Nazi nettle eagerly and with both hands:-

In a counterintuitive paper, Malcolm Heath, of Leeds University, defended Aristotle’s politically incorrect view that some people are natural born slaves.

Aristotle argued that the majority of human beings could and should be enslaved because they are naturally slaves.

Aristotelians usually cough nervously and move on past such passages.

Professor Heath argues that Aristotle was not saying that natural slaves lack the distinctive human capacity for reason. They are not subhuman. Natural slaves may be extremely creative and intelligent. But they simply have a defect that prevents them recognising the way to live a good life.

Northern Europeans are natural slaves because our climate is too cold.

Asiatics and Africans are natural slaves because the climate is too hot.

Western society today values economic prosperity and the quest for eternal youth, rather than our intrinsic goodness or happiness.

We would be better off if we natural slaves put our lives under the control of the natural, rational slave masters — the Greeks, of course.

So much for the sovereign individual, then.

Well, there isn’t much in this report to indicate how the Professor arrived at such an entertaining conclusion.  Philosophers do often have something of the Knight Errant about them - no more so, let it be said, than when they are tempted into generalisations about the human worth of certain groups.  In Genealogy of Morals, one of his four main published works, Nietzsche developed the idea of master and slave morality. The slave resists the ideas and values of the master, and thus places himself beyond the realm of power.  Perfectly reasonably, Nietzsche saw that the meek do not, in fact, inherit the Earth and so saw Christianity as slave morality.

Aristotle would not have concurred.  He judged men according to whether they were possessed of souls or merely bodies.  To men of ideas, of intellect, of leadership or at least some sort of interior substance he ascribed the status of natural freeman and, indeed, slavemaster.  The rest, he didn’t (nor to any woman, which must have gone down well with Mrs Aristotle).

Well, anyone can play this game.  Modern liberals are playing it now.  They are steadily redeveloping the West as a post-national egalitarian-capitalist world in which a scarcely-elected elite directs benefits to a mendicant class, through whom a slave society of the productive is governed and controlled.  A life of work really is what the slave class has to anticipate. Millions in Britain will die in the saddle, without ever reaching the rising pensionable age.  Homo Economicus, the payer of taxes, has truly arrived.  Meanwhile, the inflation-proofed, index-linked, thoroughly guaranteed mendicant beneficiaries of our labour are doing nicely, thank you, and constantly growing in number and power.  As a proportion of working Britons, those dependent on government for its wage reached 20% as long ago as 1993.

At first glance there doesn’t seem to me to be much Aristotelian slavery in our situation.  Are we not only mere bodies, but also men of ideas and intellect?  According to Aristotle, then, we should not be in this pass - save that we may be ruled wisely by Greeks, and our governments are neither wise nor Greek!  Nietzsche’s analysis, on the other hand, seems entirely pertinent.  We have been passive like good Christians, and have failed to take an interest in power.  The penalty for taking no interest is to be enslaved.

But actually I think both are correct.  We have not paid sufficient attention - certainly in the Thatcher-Reagan years - to the New Politics.  When we had the chance we did not crush those who control us now.  And that is the point: they used their sudden ascendency over us to change the political culture, the rules of power, totally.  They spat upon, delegitimised and criminalised our words and ideas.  They marginalised us in public debate, the current symbol of which is the suspended Dr Ellis.

Thus, what began as Nietzsche’s disinclination to power, the slave morality, has developed rapidly into a new, Aristotelian unsuitability for the narrow ideological realm of the modern freeman.  Bereft of any entrée to that, we are indeed mere soulless bodies, or may as well be.