Leadingchurch.com

New Republic

It was a contingency that, by Davis’s reckoning, marked “the final stage of the Age of Emancipation,” and served as a reminder of alternative possibilities for the United States and the Atlantic world. New World slavery, Davis argues, was neither retrograde nor economically backward, nor was it headed for some type of “natural extinction”: it was profitable, productive, and expanding in Cuba and Brazil as well as the United States. Had the Civil War turned out differently, the Confederacy might have succeeded in establishing “at least a minor slaveholding empire” and slavery would surely have survived for decades to come. Instead, the Civil War–era emancipations liberated the largest number of slaves in the Americas, had a “profound influence” on freeing slaves elsewhere in the hemisphere, and left a powerful political legacy for radical reformers of all stripes and the ongoing fight against slavery in various parts of the world in the twentieth century. American emancipation and especially the Reconstruction Amendments ending slavery and establishing a national citizenship, Davis insists, “represent the climax and turning point of the Age of Emancipation,” an era that witnessed “probably the greatest landmark of willed moral progress in human history.”

Really cool article on how we think about extinction.

Ironically, much conservationist thinking involves an implicitly mythological conception of species diversity that agrees in its essentials with the creation account offered in Genesis. In the scriptural tradition, God looked upon his work and deemed it good, and what ensued was a stable order of fixed, discrete, and well-bounded kinds, with no relations of descent among them. The best metaphor for conceptualizing biodiversity in this view is Noah’s ark, where each kind can be neatly separated from the others in its own compartment. The conservationist view generally leaves the creator out of the picture, yet the creatures are still deemed good, intrinsically good, and if they do not remain fixed and unchanging, then we may conclude that something is out of order—or “unnatural,” to use Kolbert’s term.

Darwinism, properly understood, is the opposite of this mythological outlook. It tells us that no particular arrangement of biodiversity is good in itself, and that no species has any absolute reason to exist. For a given species to be “better” than another is simply for it to have an adaptation that enhances its likelihood of surviving to reproductive age. Are humans better than fish? It is impossible to answer, without specifying whether the contest is to take place on land or under water. Should there be air-breathing animals at all? That depends on whether the planet has a breathable atmosphere. If not, it would be better to live in the ocean and to breathe through one’s gills. And so on.

The point here is not to relativize the current ecological crisis, or to call for an approach to mass extinction that simply says, que será, será. Rather, it is to suggest that conservationism might do well to acknowledge the endurance and the strength of the mythopoetical conception of nature, the one that sees our fellow creatures not only as more or less well adapted, but also as good, truly good. This would not require any overt theology, as it is already implicit in conservationist thinking, and many if not most conservationists have no patience for cosmological arguments for the existence of God. But it would require an abandonment of our piecemeal wisdom about animals and our relations with them, a wisdom thrown together out of sloppy scientism, utilitarian half-­measures, and basic ontological mistakes.

We try to convince ourselves that our commitments to animals flow from their neurophysiology alone, from a recognition of their capacities to experience pain, to have episodic memories, or to plan for the future. We blame ourselves for inconsistency when the well-being of an animal with lesser capacities concerns us more than that of one with higher capacities—a pet cat, for example, as opposed to a pig bred for food. In thinking this way, we fail to note that the boundaries of moral community have never in human history been drawn along species lines alone, nor have they been drawn in view of a theory of the complexity of other beings. Rather, moral commitments emerge out of the way creatures, human and nonhuman, enter into meaningful exchange with one another.

A complaint of the absence of God

Rational Doubt

PVK comments below.

Again, the notion here is “inside/outside” and somehow by leaving you can see and think more clearly. The metaphor always suggests that it’s like leaving a building. What is lost is that it is more like changing rooms. Room 2 shapes, assumes, impinges, influences just like Room 1 did whether you know it or not. This is still the myth of modernity.

Good Man Project

Blog link

Elizabeth Stoker

 Here is the secret: Christianity is radically countercultural and deeply politically inconvenient.