Thoughts on Moral Progress in History

26 Historically Speaking November/December 2007 free black planters, and slave owners); and the difficulty of explaining the long dependence of the New World on slave labor, as well as the way southern slaveholding interests controlled the American government from 1789 to 1861. If we really wish to address the "big questions" of human life and find ways to plan effective progress, we must confront the complexity of the past, including many facts, issues , and decisions that are now quite distasteful and upsetting. David Brion Davis is Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University. His most recent book is Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (Oxford University Press, 2006). Thoughts on Moral Progress in History Eamon Duffy I don't believe there is such a thing as collective moral progress, and I see litde in history or the contemporary world order to persuade me that the human race, collectively or singly, is better now than it has ever been in the past. The conditions under which human life is conducted, of course, vary hugely from time to time as well as from place to place, and some societies look decidedly more comfortable and safe to be in, at last for their elites, than others. But most of what we take to be moral improvement strikes me more as a matter of the increase of local amenity than of radical human moral transformation. We remove some of the grosser forms of brutality from the public sphere, as most urban societies in the course of the 19th century removed sewage from the streets. We no longer hang people for minor offenses against property or hold public executions. But brutality is displaced, not exorcised. We cheerfully vote for politicians who think it legitimate to defend national security or national sovereignty by the maintenance and deployment of nightmare arsenals of weaponry designed to wipe out entire populations absolutely without discrimination between whole and half, rich or poor, innocent or guilty. We in the industrialized West are kinder than people generally were in, say, the 18th century, to domestic animals, but we feed growing populations by keeping millions of chickens in unspeakable horror in the animal equivalents of concentration camps and gulags. The abolition of the slave trade is rather misleadingly atypical. It would be hard to argue against the proposition that slavery was an absolute evil that the world is or would be better off without. But few other moral causes look quite so clear-cut or offer as much leverage for the notion that humanity is on an upward moral trajectory. And even the abolition of slavery cannot be viewed in isolaThe Vatican, ca. 1900. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number, LC DIG-ppmsc-06602]. tion from the wider social transformations against which the abolition campaign was played out. I am not competent to enter here into the technical debates that Lamin Sanneh alludes to in his essay as to whether or not abolition was the result primarily of the triumph of ideas of freedom and human dignity or the by-product of shifting economic realities within the trade itself and the wider economic framework of which slavery was a part. But it is worth noting that abolition coincided with the birth of industrialized society, in which working populations of millions had indeed nominal freedom, though in actuality lived lives totally dominated and constrained by the rhythms and demands of factory production. I do not know how one would begin to construct a calculus of good and evil between the conditions faced by a slave on an American cotton plantation in 1750 and those of a Manchester child laborer in a cotton mill in 1850, but I take the abolition of slavery to be connected in some way to die rise of these new economic and social realities of the industrialized West. And it is not obvious that die world in which the new conditions of enforced labor operated was intrinsically a better one than that in which formal enslavement was accepted and promoted. I am not terribly bothered that religion and the churches have not always or perhaps not usually been in...