Zimmerman, Robert.  Conscious Choice: The Origins of Slavery in America and Why it Matters Today and for Our Future in Outer Space.  Publisher:ebookIt.com

The story of America’s colonization is frequently cast as a morality tale, of good and evil. In the northern settlements and colonies, such as New England, settlers acted upon what we consider the good of America: an understanding and respect for individualism and individual rights. Settlers and colonists in the southern part of nascent America, on the other hand, chose the evil of America, creating societies that denied the inherent individual rights of humans, and treated large numbers of human beings (primarily Africans) as beasts of burden.

But morality tales take us only so far in understanding what happened. A morality tale supplies a spiritual understanding of what was done -- that evil behavior was often chosen over good behavior -- but it does not shed light on the why of such choices.

This is where Robert Zimmerman’s book Conscious Choice: The Origins of Slavery in America and Why it Matters Today and for Our Future in Outer Space makes a contribution, because Zimmerman looks beyond the spiritual and moralistic choices of the leading actors of the time to examine the outside forces: the powerful social incentive structures that propelled, constrained, and guided their conscious choices.

While Conscious Choice is social history of America’s past, Zimmerman’s overarching focus is on the Far Horizon: the human colonization of space. Zimmerman is concerned that humanity is starting off  with incentive frameworks for extraterrestrial development (the Outer Space Treaty,) that are likely to take our future space colonies down the path of evil, dehumanizing social forms (akin to what played out in colonial Virginia) rather than more individualistic and humanistic social forms that developed in New England.

So what were the incentives which led to what looks like the “conscious choice” to enslave one’s fellow man in the southern American colonies, and how do they compare to the incentive systems of the northern colonies?  

In the Southern colonies (mostly focused on Virginia), six major incentive structures led, somewhat obviously and inexorably in hindsight, to chattel slavery: continuance of the British royalist top-down caste system; a pre-existing system of indenture; a Crown-corporate economic model based on a single product (tobacco); Headright (Royal land-grants from the British Crown); Weak religious authorities and social organizations (Anglican); and weak to non-existent education of lower caste people.

Chief among these, the incentives of maintaining royalist caste structure, and particularly, the practice of sending lower-tier nobility off to seek fortune by having the King grant them land, in a distant place where land ownership and tobacco growing was the only path to prosperity, created an armored incentive pathway to chattel slavery. It’s a simple formula: to succeed in Virginia, you had to grow/sell tobacco on good land. As a distant connection to the Crown, you could get land grants for settling yourself, your wife, your family, and here’s the kicker, your servants and indentures. And there’s the ratchet toward chattel slavery.  One also notes that these incentives paved the way to the development of an administrative state, through the royalist practice of rule-by-taxes-and-regulation. Collecting those taxes and enforcing those regulations naturally created an entrenched class of corrupt, self-serving administrative elites: perhaps the origins of America’s appetite for the administrative state into which we have descended since the turn of the 20^th century.

Most Virginians lived in dispersed settlements, without towns, and totally dependent on farming tobacco. The Anglican church “barely functioned,” with most parishes lacking ministers. Schools were similarly neglected, and the colony, in 1643, had “no education to speak of.”

Similarly, in the Northern Colonies, six incentive structures paved a path away from chattel slavery towards greater individualism and individual rights: Antipathy toward rule-from-above, and preference for individual self-rule; greater individualism and liberty (fewer regulations/taxes); stronger, more local religious organizations; constrained capitalism in which pure pursuit of profits was suspect; A strong emphasis on education; and an economy based on diverse resource development. Developments of the North were driven less by one dynamic individual, and more by the leadership of various Christian sects.

Which brings us back to the utility of of Conscious Choice for our future space colonists, whoever you may be: Zimmerman’s work suggests you must make a “conscious choice” when designing your colonial incentive structures, or in science-fictional terms, your Social Operating Systems. This is also the place where I insert the obligatory slightly negative aspect of the review: Zimmerman could have made this thesis a bit more explicit, for my taste. But here it is: Do you go with a system akin to the Virginia Operating System of the early 1600s, or more with a system akin to that of New England’s Operating system of the same time? Because though it should be obvious that (we hope) future space colonists will be of good intentions, we need to understand that when push comes to shove, their choices will be based on the incentive structure -- the operating system -- in which they are embedded, and the rightness or wrongness of small choices may seem unclear (or irresistible) at the time.  

Zimmerman seems to be concerned that existing space law -- the Outer Space Treaty -- favors the path more toward Virginia.  By explicitly ruling out the idea of extraterrestrial sovereignty or property rights, the likely development of space, again, in Zimmerman’s view, would fall to resource production corporations: for-profit enterprises operating without legal systems guaranteeing protections for property or individual rights.  

Under the Outer Space Treaty, warns Zimmerman, “future space colonists will not have the same rights and freedoms of those who live in that free world on Earth.”  They will be “forced into military conflict should they want to establish their sovereignty to those settlements.”  This might make for good science fiction, but it sounds like it would make for dreadful science fact.

What makes Conscious Choice interesting is that it’s not just another social history of what happened, and who did what to whom in a horrible time of man’s inhumanity to man. It’s an effort to draw concrete knowledge from the past, for application to solving predictable problems in the not-too-distant, not altogether impossible future.

Conscious Choice reads easily, flows smoothly, is linguistically elegant, covers an extremely important topic, and asks important questions.  Conscious Choice is also well referenced, with two appendices of additional data and sourcing information for the deepest dive.  Conscious Choice is well worth reading simply to revel in the technical merits, which are far too rare these days.  It would also pair well with a rereading of Robert A. Heinlein’s classic The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, possibly while listening to Jason Aldean’s “Rich Men North of Richmond,” and sipping a few pints of good New England beer.  

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