Enlightenment Always Involves Tyranny

In The Enlightenment in the sixteenth century

the arts flowered, as we can still see today
but that was a small gain compared with loss
of reinventing slavery from it ancient world 
household origins  to it being remade
as a tyranny of hard labour for careless masters
in which those enslaved could never be freed, 
except through death, after which they were forgotten,

The Enlightenment was a blight
on the many sophisticated,
but primitive, societies
and it remains a stain on us.