Steyn on Wilberforce
Mark Steyn does not generally write about matters of concern here at Secondhand Smoke, but today he focused on the legacy of William Wilberforce, the great British abolitionist. I truly believe in the power of committed individuals to improve the human condition. Wilberforce proved the point. Indeed, he was one of the first in modern times to do so. Here is the heart of Steyn's fine column:
As [Wilberforce biographer, Eric] Metaxas puts it, "Slavery was as accepted as birth and marriage and death, was so woven into the tapestry of human history that you could barely see its threads, much less pull them out. Everywhere on the globe, for 5,000 years, the idea of human civilization without slavery was unimaginable...What Wilberforce vanquished was something even worse than slavery,'' says Metaxas, "something that was much more fundamental and can hardly be seen from where we stand today: He vanquished the very mind-set that made slavery acceptable and allowed it to survive and thrive for millennia. He destroyed an entire way of seeing the world, one that had held sway from the beginning of history, and he replaced it with another way of seeing the world."
...But the life of William Wilberforce and the bicentennial of his extraordinary achievement remind us that great men don't shirk things because the focus-group numbers look unpromising. What we think of as "the Victorian era" was, in large part, an invention of Wilberforce that he succeeded in selling to his compatriots. We children of the 20th century mock our 19th century forebears as uptight prudes, moralists and do-gooders. If they were, it's because of Wilberforce. His legacy includes the very notion of a "social conscience": In the 1790s a good man could stroll past an 11-year-old prostitute on a London street without feeling a twinge of disgust or outrage; he accepted her as merely a feature of the landscape, like an ugly hill. By the 1890s, there were still child prostitutes, but there were also charities and improvement societies and orphanages.
Of course, Wilberforce stood for the intrinsic value of all human life. So did another of my heroes, William Lloyd Garrison. So did Susan B. Anthony. So did Gandhi. So did Martin Luther King. So did all the truly greats of the modern era. Which raises an important question: Why are assertions for the intrinsic moral worth of human life so controversial today?
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 9:43 PM
14 Comments
14 Comments:
In my estimation, appeals to absolutes (a form of which is the appeal to intrinsics) have become controversial because they have been used, historically, to oppress communities according to the will of a few, perceived as being endowed with the authority of the absolute. Rather than appeals to absolutes, appeals to a firm and confident faith, while admitting fallibility and affirming a desire for greater knowledge, feels more trustworthy to our contemporary sensibilities.
Perhaps, but it seems a stretch to find intrinsic human value controversial because of fears over oppression. Accepting intrinsic value is the first step to oppossing oppression.
I see it differently. I see it as a manifistation of an "I" mentality. Much of the dehumanization about which I write comes from the desire to use the weak and vulnerable in instrumental ways. Hence, the denial of intrinsic worth, or a narrowing of humans who qualify as truly human.
Thanks, Lincoln.
A bias is revealed in the phrasing of the alternative, "feels" "trustworthy".Is trust, especially in eternal things, a matter of feelings or of knowledge? Is God or his precepts knowable?
The few and powerful, if given free reign, will ALWAYS claim the precedence of their beliefs over others.
The only question is whether the appeal is to man's strength and wisdom or an appeal to something or someone beyond ourselves.
If it is the latter, then we can measure king and pauper, transhuman and disabled, free and enslaved by the same yardstick.
Quick correction: His last name is spelled "Steyn".
I don't think human exceptionalism is controversial at all. I think the easiest proof of this is the almost universal prohibition against canibalism. In essence, we see humans as unique.
What is controversial is where and how it measures up with other priorities - economics, personal liberty, religious viewpoints, and so forth.
In my mind, all these discussions are where to draw the line between competing priorities.
Royale: That, too. But I must disagree. Human exceptionalism and human instrinsic moral value is very controversial today, particularly among transhumanists, many bioethicists, the animal rights/liberation movement, deep ecology and radical environmentalism, biotechnology, and philisophical Darwinism (as opposed to the science of natural selection).
OK then, you're on. For future posts, highlight areas where you think human exceptionalism is not adopted.
I don't mean merely that human excpetionalism is marginalized because on balance it loses to something else, but where there is absolutely no recognition of it whatsoever.
Whoa, Royale. I said it is controversial. I said it is disfavored by many. I have said it is under assault, all of which is undeniable. I didn't say there was "absolutely no recognition of it whatsoever."
What is going on is a struggle to determine the value system that will predominate. We are not all one or the other at the present time.
I would say New Jersey's law that would permit human cloning (SCNT) does not prevent implantation, and permits gestation of the cloned fetus up to the very moment of birth, requiring only that the cloned fetus not be allowed to be born, is a public policy in which the intrinsic value of human life has been not adopted.
I think that the Dutch permission of infanticide, and its growing normalization in the USA and elsewhere, is another example.
I think the drive in bioethics to permit organ harvesting from patients diagnosed with PVS, is a third.
Then, are you saying that the controversy is how it is balanced against other values and interests?
If so, then that's what I'm saying.
I guess I am saying that intrinsic value should be the fundamental principle to which we adhere in creating public policy and when conducting our private behavior. Many reject the value altogether or believe it should merely be one among many values.
I view this as relativism because often what happens is we decide what we want to do and then find the ethical principle to apply.
Ah, so you take an absolutist point of view. That's fine.
Personally, I think human exceptionalism is fine, but like ALL fundamental rights (speech, property, religion, political participation, civil liberty), it is not absolute, nor can it be.
Nor do I think that's relavistic. Rather, realistic.
I don't think people generally reject the value altogether.
Royale: Human intrinsic value is the first principle. If that is absolutism, it is absolutism. If you don't have that, then who matters and who doesn't becomes a matter of politics and power. We have that, of course, because we live in an imperfect world. But we should be striving toward the goal. Or to put it another way, our reach should exceed our grasp. Indeed, I believe this approach is why we came so far in the last 200 years.
I appreciate the idealismt, but think it doesn't go far enough. In fact, those very words would support that life, ALL life, is sacred. Call it Deep Ecology, Buddhism, some Christian variant, or whatever, but I think that's a much better place.
Apropos of the Steyn article: It's very good. My only quarrel with it is with the inaccurate implication of the statement that slavery persists only in "pockets" around the world. Would that it were so! To know that it isn't, one has merely to follow the links from the Telegraph article Wesley links in the post just below this one--all about all the women trafficked from Eastern Europe, hidden in cellars in Albania (which has become a major trans-shipment point), and then sent on to Germany and, of all places, London, where Albanian gangs now control the sex industry. It's truly astonishing. Steyn is right in a way that slavery is not "acceptable" in the Western world at least. I think it _is_ acceptable in much of the Middle East, though. And I fear that it is becoming more acceptable in the West as well. So Wilberforce's work may be to do over again. And that agrees, actually, with the main point of Steyn's article.
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