" If history teaches us anything, it's that today's habit may be tomorrow's abomination. What people saw as a matter of course in the streets of 17th-century London -- rich men beating their servants, crowds gathered in a festival mood to watch bloody executions -- would horrify the pedestrian of 2007. Morality, too, has a history, but the people of any given period usually don't see it that way. They think that they already have a pretty solid understanding of right and wrong (even if they find it difficult to be virtuous) and rarely imagine that future generations might view them as unenlightened at best and depraved at worst.
Activists, on the other hand, know different. They count on the evolution of morality. Recently, Adam Hochschild's fascinating "Bury the Chains" chronicled the means by which a group of committed 18th- century idealists convinced their fellow citizens in Britain and America that slavery was an intolerable wrong. It wasn't easy, and it didn't happen overnight. Some people of that era thought that slavery was lamentable but intractable; others found it easy to justify an institution that brought them profits and comfort. Still others -- the majority, perhaps -- didn't give it much thought at all, as they sweetened their tea with sugar produced at brutal slave plantations on islands far, far away. For this reason, even an omnivore should find an intellectual history of vegetarianism interesting. We, like the people of the early 1800s, could be living through a period of slow but profound ideological change. To the people of their own time, men like Granville Sharp and Thomas Clarkson -- early abolitionists and the founders of the first human rights movement -- seemed as impractical, as demanding, as self-righteous and as obsessed as many animal rights activists seem to us today. In the future, right-thinking people might look back at us meat eaters with the same disapproval we heap on those who considered slavery acceptable 200 years ago. http://www.salon.com/books/review/2007/01/25/stuart/index.html
