In The Wisdom of a Moral Panic, Ross Douthat responds to one example of the moral innovator’s typical claim that people once rejected with vivid slippery-slope arguments something we all now take for granted, meaning that we shouldn’t worry about falling down such slopes with present innovations. Those people were just panicking when had they only stayed calm and let things work themselves out they would have seen it was all for the best.
He is responding to The Atlantic‘s Megan Garber’s application of this argument to in vitro fertilization, which has now achieved “cultural normalization.” True, it has, but Douthat notes:
in the absence of any meaningful regulations and restrictions, IVF has also brought with it precisely the kind of consequences that many people caught up in the so-called “panic” worried about two generations ago. True, we don’t “decant” our babies in the laboratory, à la Huxley’s “Brave New World,” but between the embryos we keep on ice and the ones we create and destroy for scientific research, the normalization of paid surrogacy and the freewheeling marketplace in eggs and sperm, we live in a society that has commodified both reproduction and human life itself in ways that would have seemed dystopian, not only to the social conservatives of an earlier era, but to many of its liberals as well.
Gargan herself mentions “advances in stem cell research” as an “achievement” of IVF and therefore an argument against its first critics and their present day successors (like us), which is revealing, given that those advances involve the destruction of human lives and promote the results of the commodification Douthat notes. And he goes on to observe that there are advantages to not having experienced the innovation, in being “naive.”
The naive culture hasn’t yet implicated itself in the practice it’s trying to assess. Sometimes it’s easier to recognize the costs of a revolution when you haven’t yet tasted its benefits. And the hardest evils to acknowledge and combat are often the ones whose advantages we can’t imagine living without.
That people find they’re okay with an innovation their parents or grandparents rejected doesn’t mean they’re right. It may mean they haven’t noticed what happened. Not everyone who slides down a slippery slope realizes he’s sliding downhill or minds living among the rubble and trash at the bottom.
June 29th, 2012 | 1:48 am
When British colonists first settled the New World, they did not bring with them a long tradition of slavery, in which the enslaved had absolutely no rights. It was instead an innovation which was adopted out of a perceived economic need. Yet those who entered into that practice began to defend it as not only moral but mandated by the Bible.
June 29th, 2012 | 6:21 am
It surprises me that, in the United States, opposition to surrogacy and to the trafficking in human gametes has so often been represented as religious in its inspiration.
In a country so wedded to the principle of laïcité as France, such developments were seen to be at odds with the ethical principles enshrined in the laws of France, particularly the prohibition against making children the subject and source of a transaction and the provision that the human body, its elements and its products may not form the subject of a patrimonial right.
June 29th, 2012 | 9:12 am
A curious argument from Swenson given that slavery long predated the modern world. The old way of war among some Greek city-states involved killing all military aged males and enslaving the women, children, and old men.
To be sure, some found moral support for slavery in the Bible. We humans have always been good at rationalization. On the other hand, it is also the Bible, right back to Paul’s exhortation to Philemon to accept his runaway slave Onesimus back as his brother, that motivated those who immediately forced the end of legalized Western slavery.
In the end, I have no idea how to interpret Swenson’s careful selection and casting of historical facts, other than as agreement with Ross Douthat’s premise.
June 29th, 2012 | 3:39 pm
particularly the prohibition against making children the subject and source of a transaction and the provision that the human body, its elements and its products may not form the subject of a patrimonial right.
It bothers me a great deal that such a concept is totally alien here.
June 29th, 2012 | 5:34 pm
A curious argument from Swenson given that slavery long predated the modern world.
Mike Melendez,
RTS does not deny the existence of slavery prior to the discovery of the Americas. He says, “When British colonists first settled the New World, they did not bring with them a long tradition of slavery, in which the enslaved had absolutely no rights.” That is historically correct. Chattel slavery in Britain had disappeared long before colonists came to the Americas. Slave traders and slave owners in the colonies were not carrying on a British tradition.
June 30th, 2012 | 5:44 am
Blake
It is interesting that the two leading cases on surrogacy to come before the French courts both involved California, where such so-called contracts are legally enforceable. Apparently, human genetic material can also be bought and sold there. One trusts that the Procureur de la République was exaggerating when he said that there was a brisk market in babies there, bespoke or prêt à porter (ready to go).
The French approach is based on Article 1128, found in the original Code of 1804 (Code Napoléon) « Il n’y a que les choses qui sont dans le commerce qui puissent être l’objet des conventions. » [Only things in trade can be the subject of an agreement], which derives from the Roman concept of “res extra commercium.”
June 30th, 2012 | 6:51 am
Like I said, David, careful selection of historical facts. I selected a few more. One of the motivators for the Southern British colonies adopting slavery was insufficient volunteers for indentured servitude. The progression of history is not monotonic.
June 30th, 2012 | 11:59 am
Mike Melendez,
Raymond Takashi Swenson specified slavery “in which the enslaved had absolutely no rights.” That does not describe indentured servitude. He is absolutely correct. The British colonists did not arrive in America with a tradition of chattel slavery.
July 1st, 2012 | 1:34 am
David Nickol writes:
“That does not describe indentured servitude. He is absolutely correct. The British colonists did not arrive in America with a tradition of chattel slavery.”
You’re quibbling. British colonists were aware of traditions of chattel slavery through their familiarity with the Holy Bible and with Latin and Greek literature. That there had existed traditions of chattel slavery was not a novelty to them on the level of ideas. They brought these ideas with them in their heads and in their books.
Second, Britain never existed in a vacuum in relation to other “European” nations where traditions of chattel slavery never died out — especially in regards to the very profitable slave trade. Portugal, Spain, France, and (earlier on) Italian city-states such as Genoa and Venice would have provided “exemplary” traditions that men of letters amongst the British colonists would hardly have been unaware of.
Once again, traditions of chattel slavery — embedded in a social context where other forms of involuntary servitude had a very strong presence — arrived with the British colonists. To put them into practice merely required the combination of moral depravity, economic necessity, and the availability of suitable candidates for chattel slavery who were not Englishmen — i.e., Africans and American Indians.
July 2nd, 2012 | 6:16 am
Benighted Savage
It is certainly not true that chattel slavery, as a living institution existed in Britain, since the end of the 12th century at the latest. There is no mention of it in Bracton’s reports and he lived from about 1210 to 1268. In France, it disappeared around the time of Charles the Bald’s Edict of Pistes [L'Édit de Pîtres] in 864. Everywhere, the “adscriptus glebae” or unfree tenantis treated as a new thing, quite separate from slavery, both in theory and practice.
In fact, it is remarkable how little the slave codes of the European colonial powers drew on the Corpus Juris, even though, except for England, the Civil Law formed the basis of their jurisprudence.
July 2nd, 2012 | 10:26 am
No one is arguing that Britain had chattel slavery at, say, the founding of Boston. On the other hand, they certainly adopted it in their Southern colonies. Why? Because they established an economy that was more labor intensive than the Northern colonies. Indentured servitude was sufficient in the North but not in the South. There, they reached South of the British colonies and joined the already established South American slave trade that originated with the Portuguese establishment of African outposts. Uniquely English was the broad unwillingness to intermarry with slaves. So the United States wound up with a black/white split that differed markedly from the mestizo and mulatto cultures of Central and South American, not to mention the Arcadians. But all this does is add more context.
Having established slavery, some of those who owned slaves managed to see God’s blessing in it, which agrees with Douthat’s thesis.
The difficulty with Swenson’s brief statement was its limited selection of facts (note facts) and the ambiguity that could be read into it. Hence, we wind up with non-arguments and people defending statements that were never challenged. Though one wonders why they resist broader context, i.e. more facts.
Does Swenson intend to suggest that Southern British colonists were more religious than Northern British colonists? I don’t know.
Does Swenson intend to suggest that Southern slavery originated in the stated interpretation of the Bible? I don’t know.
Did Swenson intend his choices to be a tu quoque? I don’t know.
Do those broadening the context suggest that the South had no other choices? I know I do not. Now if those defending Swenson’s unchallenged facts would stop “reading” our minds and start reading our words, we might make some progress. Even better, perhaps they could tell us what is on their minds that differs from the expanded context. That would further the conversation. Who knows, perhaps Swenson might expand on what he was trying to say, though with all this strum und drang I wouldn’t be surprised if he chose discretion.
July 2nd, 2012 | 1:13 pm
Michael PS,
Please re-read my original post. Nowhere did I claim that there existed a living tradition of chattel slavery in England at the time of the British colonization of the Americas. My understanding is that such slavery began to disappear in England at the the time of the Norman Conquest. Nor did I discuss legal codes, which are often written long after the fact of the appeaance — or reappearance — of some social phenomenon. Who were you attempting to rebut?
What I did and do claim is that British colonists were aware of traditions of chattel slavery through their familiarity with Holy Scripture, Classical literature, and the history of chattel and other forms of involuntray servitude (Mediterranean galley slavery, for example) as traditions (living or moribund) in Portugal, Spain, France and elsewhere.
At the time our Pilgrim Fathers found their way to Plymouth Rock, Spain and Portugal (in particular) were quite adept at the enslavement, use and selling of Moors, Guinea-coast Africans, Asians and Native Americans… and had been for centuries. British colonists who wanted to re-establish slave economies in the Caribbean and on the North American continent had no dearth of examples to choose from. They also had home-grown models to help add to their slave-driver’s “tool-kit”: indentured servitude, prison labor, the apprentice system. Nor, unfortunately, did they lack accesss to persons they could enslave and purchase as slaves: non-Englishmen such as Native Americans and Africans.
July 3rd, 2012 | 12:49 pm
Benighted Savage — I don’t think anyone was claiming that the British were cognitively ignorant of the existence of chattel slavery, or entirely unfamiliar with the practices of those around them, and as babes in the woods concerning the possibilities of enslaving or otherwise strongly exploiting other people. I think your assertion is confusing because it is a strong assertion in refutation of no claim that has been made in this context.
July 4th, 2012 | 1:47 am
Pentamom,
The problem lies with Mr Swenson’s ambiguous use of the word “tradition” in his first sentence coupled with his later use of the word “innovation”:
“When British colonists first settled the New World, they did not bring with them a long tradition of slavery, in which the enslaved had absolutely no rights. It was instead an innovation which was adopted out of a perceived economic need. ”
This statement might be true only if we accept an absurdly limited concept of tradition, as I tried to point out in response to David Nickol’s blunt criticism of Mike Melendez. When, for example, the first African slaves arrived in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1638 — only eight years after the founding of Boston — their social status as slaves was not an “innovation.” Nor were the contemporaneous British colonists who owned or traded in slaves participants in a “naive” culture. Contrast this with a real innovation, like in vitro fertilization back in the early 80s.
Thus, my point is that Mr Swensen’s statements about slavery and British colonists are, barring some clarification on his part, false, and thus that his attempt to extend Douthat’s argument by analogy is a failure.
July 4th, 2012 | 4:35 am
Benighted Savage
Of course they could have drawn on biblical or classical models – but they didn’t. There is no evidence that Jewish law, any more than Roman law, influenced their slave codes, no more than the leges barbarorum or the servile institutions of Poland or Russia
Indentured labour and penal servitude are as remote from chattel slavery as chalk from cheese.
American slavery was sui generis.
July 4th, 2012 | 12:30 pm
[...] You Ought to Panic When You’re Sliding Down the Slippery Slope – David Mills, Frs Thn [...]
July 5th, 2012 | 1:38 am
Michael PS,
Once again, since I’ve not been addressing the question of legal codes, your “response” is decidedly beside the point. That slavery as represented in Biblical and Classical traditions had a strong (but hardly the only) influence upon literate British colonists’ traditions concerning slave holding and slave-trading is true to the point of being trivial. Just because the first British colonists hadn’t engaged in slave-holding and slave trading before arriving in the Americas does not mean that they did not arrive possessing British traditions — albeit ones that had not been put into practice for centuries — that soon afterwards told them exactly what to do when persons whom they could profitably use as slaves became available. Or am I to assume that the British, aside from their legal codes, are a “people without history”?
Do you really think that your Chestertonian glibness adds to the seriousness of this discussion? Indentured labour, penal servitude and chattel slavery are all forms of unfree labor. In practice, penal servitude is especially close to chattel slavery; for the American context, cf. Douglas A. Blackmon’s recent Pulitzer Prize-winning book.
Your bald assertion that “American slavery was sui generis” is simply not true. As David Brion Davis points out towards the beginning of his _The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture_:
“…a comparative analysis of historical forms of servitude reveals precedents for most of the striking traits of American slavery. As we have already suggested, this does not mean that American Negro slavery was the same as earlier varieties of servitude. But although American slavery was shaped into a distinctive pattern, few of its features were unique to the New World. Previous forms of servitude bore enough resemblance to the South’s peculiar institution to warrant the main criticisms of the abolitionists.”
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