Richard Reeb has a
terrific post on Amazing Grace over at The Remedy. Thesis...
3,000 years of slavery cannot be abolished easily or quickly. But slavery, and particularly the horrors of the "middle passage," came to be seen as evil because of the convergence of two great influences on Western Civilization, namely, reason and revelation.
The heroes of Amazing Grace, he notes, were classically educated serious Christians:
The conviction that shackling, confining, whipping, starving, torturing, scalding and murdering one’s fellow creatures are offenses against God and man moved a multitude of Englishmen to provide information, brave public abuse, circulate and sign petitions and endure the scurrilous charge of sedition.
The Left, he notes, has no intellectual criteria with which to understand the overthrow of slavery:
Today’s colleges and universities, with extremely rare exceptions, cannot account for such brave behavior because their curriculum has reduced man to a mere product of his physical and historical environment, moved by passions but certainly not by pious commitment or noble aspiration.
In this age in which we are constantly told that Americans and Britons are racist, sexist and imperialistic, the successful end of the slave trade and ultimately of slavery in the Western world does not make sense.
Then he makes the interesting point that essential to overthrowing evil is documenting it --as Solzhenitsyn did the Gulag, and as the movie shows Wilberforce and others doing. The kicker:
Those who would extirpate any comparable evils in our own time must also document and demonstrate unwelcome facts. Just as comfortable people in England and America once indulged the fantasy that slave ships were like other vessels, so today many of them think that unborn children are merely blobs of tissue that are dispatched in "safe, legal and rare" abortions. Such reform is the work of genuine Christians and humanitarians, not trendy "intellectuals."
