Charles Johnson's novel Middle Passage won the 1990 National Book Award. It is the story of a man named Rutherford Calhoun who flees his debts in New Orleans and embarks on a slave ship.
Calhoun is under the employ of Captain Ebenezer Falcon, a white man who has been a temple-robber in Africa and Asia and is currently a slave trader, one who introduces himself to his new sailor by saying “I don’t like Negroes.” A physical description of Falcon:
“between this knot of monstrously developed deltoids and latissimus doors a long head rose with an explosion of hair so black his face seemed dead in contrast: eye sockets like anthracite furnaces, medieval lines more complex than tracery on his maps, a nose slightly to one side, and a great bulging forehead that looked harder than whalebone, but intelligent too — a thinker’s brow, it was, the kind fantasy writers put on spacemen far ahead of us in science and philosophy. His belly was unspeakable. His hands, like roots.”
In Chapter 4 ("Entry, the fourth: June 28, 1830"), they have this dialogue. In short, Falcon argues that human beings think in binaries and that (whether by definition or some other inevitability) each of us believes ourselves to be correct. There is no fact of the matter, or at least not one that is accessible to us. We win arguments by force. Power alone determines who is right. We will never unite socially because we will never unite philosophically. The human mind is limited this way. Calhoun understands that Falcon is arguing for racism, and unfortunately Calhoun is unprepared to respond.
“You recall each [Ancillon, de Maistre, Portalis] says war is divine, as much a child of the soul as music and poetry. For a self to act, it must have somethin’ to act on. A nonself — some call this Nature — that resists, thwarts the will, and vetoes the actor. May I proceed? Well, suppose that nonself is another self? What then? As long as each sees a situation differently there will be slaughter and slavery and the subordination of one to another ‘cause two notions of things never exist side by side as equals. Why not — I put it to you — if both are true? Books live together in the library, don’t they, Teresa of Avila beside Aristippus, Bacon beside Berkeley? The reason — the irrefragable truth is each person in his heart believes his beliefs is best. Fact is, down deep no man’s democratic. We’re closet anarchists, I’d wager. Ouk agathón polykoíranín eis koíranos éstos. We believe what we believe. And the final test of truth is war on foreign soil. War in your front yard. War in your bedroom. War in your own heart, if you listen too much to other people. And in each battle ’tis the winning belief what’s true and the conquerer whose vision is veritable.”
“No — nossir!” says I, louder than I intended. “By my heart, sir, if something is true, it can’t be suppressed, can it, regardless of whether all the armies of the world stand ready to silence it?”
“You’re a smart boy. What d’you think? Is truth floating’ round out there in space separate from persons? Now, be frank.”
“No, but—“
“Conflict,” says he, “is what it means to be conscious. Dualism is a bloody structure of the mind. Subject and object, perceiver and perceived, self and other — these ancient twins are built into mind like the stem-piece of a merchantman. We cannot think without them, sir. And what, pray, kin such a thing mean? Only this, Mr. Calhoun: They are the signs of a transcendental Fault, a deep crack in consciousness itself. Mind was made for murder. Slavery, if you think this through, forcing yourself not to flinch, is the social correlate of a deeper, ontic wound.”
Later, in Chapter 5 ("Entry, the fifth: June 30, 1830"), Falcon tells Calhoun about his interpretation of the religious beliefs of the Allmuseri, a fictional West African tribe.
"Being unphysical means there can only be one of each kind of god or angel — one Throne, one Principality, one Archangel, ‘cause there’s only a formal (not a material) difference amongst ‘em, so the one below is the only creature of its kind in the universe — is the universe, the Allmuseri say...Another thing ‘bout not been’ physical most of the time is that it can’t understand any of the sciences based on matter, like geometry.”
Such a god has limitations and contradictions. Falcon continues: “For example, a god can’t know its own nature. For itself, it can’t be an object of knowledge. D’you see the logic here? The Allmuseri god is everything, so the very knowing situation we mortals rely on — a separation between knower and known — never rises in its experience.” So, too: “Omnipotence means, ironically, that it can create a stone so heavy it cannot lift that same stone from the floor.”
In the story, Falcon does battle with the god of the Allmuseri in a literal, physical way, which is narratively surprising but philosophically unsurprising in retrospect.
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