A Sudden Change of Heart: Lessons from the Abolitionist Movement

Can social change alone resolve the crises of global environment damage and consequent climate change? You guys must know by now that I'm a champion of social movements. Science is amazing, and critical in these efforts, but I noticed a few things at the Houston/London conference. Not one Prius was parked in the garage. Conference materials were not printed on recycled paper. Lunch was tripple wrapped in plastic and cardboard. While the scientists and policy experts attending were undoubtedly brilliant in the long view, they weren't exactly walking their talk. The military depends on social movements with Hearts and Minds campaigns and disinformation activites. Why aren't we?

This is just a small excerpt from a longer, eloquent and readable essay on the brief social movement that swept the UK in the late 1700s. This movement is credited with the English abolition of slavery, despite the fact that slavery was economically advantageous and the English economy was dependent on it. If we're going to approach climate change from the aspect of social movements, this is a great place to start:

WorldChanging: Another World Is Here: A Sudden Change of Heart: Lessons from the Abolitionist Movement: "Social values, it's commonly understood, move at glacial speed.

Yes and no: sometimes they can change astonishingly fast, a fact that many people overlook or downplay. A powerful case in point is the massive and relatively swift shift in attitudes and policy towards slavery in Britain during the Victorian era.

As the popular historian Niall Ferguson puts it in his highly readable Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British Empire and the Lessons for Global Power:

It is not easy to explain so profound a change in the ethics of a people. It used to be argued that slavery was abolished simply because it had ceased to be profitable, but all the evidence points the other way: in fact, it was abolished despite the fact that it was still profitable. What we need to understand, then, is a collective change of heart. Like all such great changes, it had small beginnings.

Small beginnings were necessary because overturning an ancient, almost universal practice was a seemingly impossible challenge. While considered barbaric today, slavery was accepted for most of human history as a necessary, if unsavory, part of the natural order of things. The Bible nor Christian tradition explicitly opposed it (although religious activists would later use the teachings of Jesus to support their cause), and slavery was easily rationalized by logic of the times which favoured a proto-social darwinian explanation for why people should be oppressed, for why the British Empire and white folks were at the top of the social hierarchy. Accidents of birth were justified in this way. (By the by, much of today's right wing economic policy is still highly influenced by these assumptions, however implicitly, when it comes to the 'have nots'.) So given this widespread social mindset and the fact that powerful entrenched economic interests supported the trade, it's truly amazing how quickly and decisively this practice was overturned.

So how did this happen? Through the efforts of a small but committed group of anti-slavery activists in the late 1700s. Remarkably diverse and equally as colourful, the champions of the abolition movement included religious leaders across dominations -- Quakers, Evangelicals, to Unitarians -- people like Granville Sharp and Zachary Macaulay who lead the Clapham Sect. We also had ex-slaver John Newton, enlightenment thinker Edmund Burke, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the industrialist and pottery king Josiah Wedgwood leading the charge.

Two new books recount this important story: Bury the Chains: The First International Human Rights Movement by Adam Hochschild; and Though the Heavens May Fall: The Landmark Trial that Led to the End of Human Slavery by Steven Wise. [...]"