We are, as a society, grossly ignorant of history. Perhaps more now than before. Worse, we are taught to respond, reflexively, that those who disagree with us must certainly be grossly ignorant of history.

This is not a good situation for civilization, since it's continuance is dependent upon learning actual lessons from history.

But, instead we're taught a sort of false, PC-version of history. One which confirms pop, secular, and liberal biases. This is bad not because I disagree, philosophically, with this worldview, but because building a model on bad data generally delivers bad results.

As an illustration, consider this comment on the Dred Scott decision on La Shawn Barber's blog. In part:

Brazil got rid of slavery in 1886 without a civl war; the British stopped ocean going slave trade much sooner than the US civil war. Morality was evolving to understand that slavery, a practice accepted in the Bible, was immoral.

What can we learn of this fellow's worldview? For one, we can "learn" that "morality" is "evolving". That is, that mankind, left to our own devices, will naturally get more and more moral. Certainly we must then be more moral as a species than we were several thousand years ago, right?

Moral Evolution?

I suspect people believe such things because they haven't read much history. Read the Oddessy. Read the Illiad. Read the Old Testament, for heaven's sake. People in these books are no different than we are today. Though culture and customs vary, there is nothing to suggest these people had any different innate moral facilities that our contemporaries.

Nor do the hundreds of millions killed during the twentieth century suggest we are at a very high level of morality currently. If anything, this evidence suggests, at least in carrying out our less ethical desires, that may even be getting morally worse.

So belief in "moral evolution" is largely a dogmatic article of faith, in conflict with all the available evidence.

My theory is that people believe this, in part, because we experience technological evolution: Sticks and rocks are replaced by spears, arrows, knives, swords, cannons, Uzis, and Tomahawk missles. Since we can see this technological progress, and dub it (incorrectly) "evolution", we must certainly also have moral evolution, no?

But look at how technological "evolution" happens:

First, it's worth noting that it's not "evolution" at all, in the sense that we work very hard to make it happen, by anything but random chance. And that it does not happen gradually, but radically, with periods of a decade or so producing tremendous, unheard-of levels of change.

But, ignoring that quibble: People remember each discovery and use it to build on others. Glass-making helps create the lens, which helps create the microscope, which eventually leads to the nano-fibre, etc.

This is a mechanical process, and not one which improves us as individuals or as a species. The technology, in a sense, builds upon itself: the book stores information about how to print and bind books, and helps distribute it so that others can benefit from it rather than re-invent it. The Internet does this faster. Each new piece contributes to the others: Medicines allow certain scientists to live longer and make addition discoveries. Those additional discoveries may lead to better medicines, etc...

Were modern man placed on a new continent or world, cut off from existing learning and memories, we would be back to a technological stone age. All of our "smartness" resides in our collected memories on books, or web pages, and in the very cool range of tools we have availble to start new investigations.

This "evolution" is not inherant to the individual organism, nor the species, nor our genetic code. And even if it were, technology is not morality, any more than intelligence is the same as wisdom.

So humans, as a creature, are essentially unchanged, as far as I can determine, throughout recorded history. We have certainly not become better, kinder, more wise and humble individuals.

Yet, in our vanity, we somehow forget we can see so far because we are simply standing on the shoulders of giants who did all the heavy lifting. Without those shoulders, as most of us (I, certainly) tend towards moral dwarfism, and wouldn't be able to see very far at all.

"Evolving" away from the Bible

Returning to the comment:

Brazil got rid of slavery in 1886 without a civl war; the British stopped ocean going slave trade much sooner than the US civil war. Morality was evolving to understand that slavery, a practice accepted in the Bible, was immoral.

The second thing we can "learn" here about this alleged moral evolution (e.g. improvement), as marked here by the end of the British slave trade, is that such improvements are allegedly steps away from morality we'd find in the bible. Succinctly: Less bible, more moral.

Sadly, this is, I believe, both a mistake about history and a mistake about the bible, and a common one in our society.

First, does the bible allow slavery? If, by "slavery" you mean a system in which a person who had gotten deeply into debt could serve as an indentured servant for a period of seven years, after which he was to receive a reasonable stipend and resume his life, then yes, that kind of "slavery" is not only allowed, but is recommended as a solution to debt relief.

When you contrast it with the European method of dealing with debt (which came later, by the way) -- of putting a man in jail until, by some unspecified miraculous means he is to pay off the debt -- it is a downright humane, enlightened, and sane solution.

This system bore no resemblance to the lifelong, race-based slavery practiced by the British, the Americans, and Muslims, in which people were abducted for no reason, frequently treated with unspeakable cruelty, and held for generations with no possibility of freedom.

Indeed, far from "evolving" morally, it would seem instead we took two major steps backwards, both in dealing with debt and conscripted labor over those several thousand years.

So what about the kind of slave trade practiced under pagan societies such as Rome? Was that "allowed" by the bible, as the commentor insists? Certainly the first Christian believers included slaves, who were told to be obedient as a form of witness (Peter 2:18), but they were also instructed to obtain their freedom if at all possible (1 Cor 7:21).

Futher, the apostle Paul clearly condemned the slave business itself:

We also know that law is made not for the righteous but for lawbreakers and rebels, the ungodly and sinful, the unholy and irreligious; for those who kill their fathers or mothers, for murderers, for adulterers and perverts, for slave traders and liars and perjurers--and for whatever else is contrary to the sound doctrine (1 Timothy 1:9-10)

Hmmm... according to the bible, the "slave trade" is "ungodly" and "sinful", and practitioners of such were lumped in with "murderers" and "those who kill their fathers", and told it is "contrary to sound doctrine." Quite a hearty endorsement!

Banning the Slave Trade

Finally, the argument disintegrates completely when you examine the actual circumstances of the banning of slavery in England, the first nation to ban the trade in history, who set a precedent for others. How did that happen? Did the English finally get "secular" enough to throw away their bibles, in disgust, and reject all that (allegedly) slavery-approving biblical morality?

That's probably close to the modern, revisionist version of history.

My understanding of the matter begins with a slave trader named John Newton. In 1748, before the US was even founded, Newton was the captain of a slave ship, a man so vile that his crew regarded him as "little more than an animal." During a storm, he turned to God and pled for his life, and somehow came to believe what he was doing was wrong and became a vocal opponent of slavery.

He also wrote a song which about this, one you might have heard of. A tune called Amazing Grace.

In England, Newton joined forces with others such as Thomas Clarkson, an anti-slavery activist who wrote a prize-winning essay (in Latin) called "Is it right to make slaves of others against their will?"

Where did Clarkson find inspiration to fight against the system of slavery which was present throughout the whole world at that time? On what moral basis did he argue for the "wrongness" of slavery? Were his arguments based in a rejection of Christian morality?

Uh, no...

But then there was his Christian faith, which was totally integrated with his passion. He argued that slavery was incompatible with Christianity, a proposition advanced by numerous others before him, among them Gregory of Nyssa, in the 4th century, Pope Leo x, in the sixteenth century and by the extraordinary Anglican Bishop Warburton in the eighteenth, but not necessarily proof against sophisticated and self-interested qualification. Clarkson excused earlier Christians from advocating the abolition of slavery on the grounds that it would have destroyed society, so all-pervasive it was. His main argument was based on the premise that there were no economic benefits to urge in its favour; and that nothing stood in the way of identifying it as contrary to the universal brotherhood of all mankind, and to the moral accountability of all to their creator. This is, he claims, ‘the most important doctrine’. If slaves are under the necessity of engaging in any activity, including crimes, ordered by their purchasers, then they cannot be held to be responsible for their actions and Christian eschatology is fundamentally undermined.

In other words, he argued that the bible teaches a slave is fundamentally equal to a free person (Gal 3:28) and that God created all people to have free will and moral accountability, and thus that the institution slavery is contrary to God's design for humanity.

Besides merely writing, Clarkson put his faith into practice in this way, among many others:

The abolitionist Thomas Clarkson embarked on gathering evidence to support these claims. His investigations took him to slaving ports such as Liverpool and Bristol. When he boarded the slave ship Fly, he recorded that 'The sight of the rooms below and of the gratings above filled me both with melancholy and horror. I found soon afterwards a fire of indignation kindling within me…' To ensure that the lawmakers gained a strong and lasting impression of what he had experienced, Clarkson produced exact drawings and dimensions of the ship Brookes, prepared by Captain Parrey of the Royal Navy. The drawings showed men, women and children crammed together in chains below deck.

Another friend of Newton's was William Wilberforce. Wilberforce was born wealthy and, like all of us, had personal ambitions. But his life was radically changed, somehow, from it's original course...

The following winter of 1784-5, during a journey to the south of France and back, Wilberforce underwent a long, drawn out, but very deep conversion to Christ through discussions with Isaac Milner, his former schoolmaster. Inner conflict between ambition and the claims of Christ sent him nearly out of his mind until he sought John Newton again and received counsel. Newton also urged him to stay in politics, believing that God might have raised him up for a purpose. At that time there were only two other fervent Christians in the House of Commons.

And so Wilberforce worked vigorously in Parliament to change the law.

This flies in the face of the "moral evolution" theory espoused above: The rest of Parliament, being decidely more secular than Wilberforce, should have been the driving force behind banning the slave trade; Wilberforce, the devout "fundamentalist" Christian, should have been the holdout, supposedly justifying slavery from the bible.

Instead, the historical truth couldn't be more the opposite: We have Wilberforce, the preacher and politician, condemning slavery, appealing to biblical principles for moral force in doing so, and the more secular Parliament resisting at every step, in every way possible, for years on end:

At first the Abolitionists attacked the slave trade rather than slavery itself. William Wilberforce led the campaign in the House of Commons and was backed by Pitt, the Prime Minister. Despite raising the issue of abolition every year Wilberforce was voted against by other MPs year after year. Finally, in 1807, the trade was abolished by Parliament.

What the account omits is the way Wilberforce convince Pariliament to do so: I understand he finally had them tour a slave ship.

These men were far from perfect, nor was the resulting ban perfectly effective, and there were many others involved whose contributions I don't mean to minimize here.

But all this serves to illustrate an important point:

Slavery had existed since the dawn of recorded history and throughout the world; it was as much a part of the world's social fabric [interesting link] as, say, disease remains today. As natural as it may seem to us today, living in a post-slavery world, the idea of banning it entirely would probably have been nearly quite as unthinkable to these people as the idea of a disease-free world is today.

When we examine how it was that something as pervasive as slavery ceased, instead of finding secular humanists naturally, gradually eschewing religious morality, we find instead powerful, prime movers whose lives would have taken radically different courses if they were not abruptly changed by "born-again" -like conversions -- interventions, they undoubtedly felt, from above -- who felt they were fulfilling God's purpose for them in their time; who derived their relatively "higher" morals, compared to their culture, from the bible; and who hammed ceaselessly on the issue and were opposed on all sides by their more secular peers.

These are the moral "giants" on whose shoulders we stand, smug in our complacency that certainly we oppose slavery, because we happen to have been fortunate enough to be born in a time where it is banned. And is interesting that these giants themselves credit another for their stance.

How sad, and unwise, that we feel the need to recast them as bible-shunning secular humanists, something they would certainly have abhorred, and the results of their struggle as natural or inevitable, when it was nothing but a difficult, uphill battle all the way.