Being attention-getting and obnoxious probably paid off with slavery because abolition was tractable. But animal advocacy is different. I think a big question is whether he was being strategic, or just obnoxious by nature? If we put Benjamin Lay in 2000, would he start cage-free campaigns or become PETA? Or perhaps find some angle we’re overlooking?
I’ve been thinking about Emre’s comment since I read it — and given this event on the Forum, I eventually decided to go and read Marcus Rediker’s biography of Lay. I recommend it for anyone interested in learning more about him as a historical figure.
To share some thoughts on the questions you posed, my feeling is that his extreme protests weren’t based on any strategic thinking about social change, and I definitely don’t think he’d be an incrementalist if he were alive today. Rather, I think his actions were driven by his extremely firm, passionately felt, and often spiritually-derived moral convictions — the same ones that convinced him to live in a cave and practice radical self-sufficiency. Actually, it seems like he had what we might describe as an excessive degree of “soldier mindset.” From the Rediker text:
He was loving to his friends, but he could be a holy terror to those who did not agree with him. He was aggressive and disruptive. He was stubborn, never inclined to admit a mistake. His direct antinomian connection to God made him self-righteous and at times intolerant. The more resistance he encountered, or, as he understood it, the more God tested his faith, the more certain he was that he was right. He had reasons both sacred and self-serving for being the way he was. He was sure that these traits were essential to defeat the profound evil of slavery.
I don’t know if the EA community would be wrong to exclude him today. He turned out to be ahead of his time in so many ways, and probably did meaningfully influence the eventual abolition of slavery, but this is so much easier to celebrate ex post. What does it actually feel like from the inside, to have extreme personal convictions that society doesn’t share, and how do you know (1) that history will prove you right; and (2) that you are actually making a difference? I really worry that what it feels like to be Benjamin Lay, from the inside, isn’t so dissimilar from what it feels like to be a Westboro Baptist Church member today.
I do think the role of radicalism in driving social change is underrated in this community, and I think it played a big role in not only the slavery abolition movement but also the women’s suffrage movement, the civil rights movement, the gay rights movement, etc. It’s worth looking into the radical flank effect or Cass Sunstein’s writing on social change if you are curious about this. Maybe one thing I’d like to believe is that the world is antifragile and can tolerate radicals ranging the moral spectrum, and those who are on the right side of history will eventually win out, making radicalism a sort of asymmetric weapon that’s stronger when you are ahead of your time on the moral arc of history. But that’s a very convenient theory and I think it’s hard to know with any confidence, and the success of so many fascist and hateful ideologies in relatively recent history probably suggests otherwise.
In any case, I really admire Lay for his conviction and his empathy and his total dedication to living a principled life. But I also really admire communities like this one for their commitment to open debate and the scout mindset and earnest attempts to hear each other out and question our own assumptions. So I expect, and hope, that the EA community would ban Benjamin Lay from our events. But I also hope we wouldn’t laugh at him like so many Quakers did. I hope we would look at him, scowling at us through the glass, and ask ourselves with total sincerity, “What if he has a point?”
Being attention-getting and obnoxious probably paid off with slavery because abolition was tractable. But animal advocacy is different. I think a big question is whether he was being strategic, or just obnoxious by nature? If we put Benjamin Lay in 2000, would he start cage-free campaigns or become PETA? Or perhaps find some angle we’re overlooking?
I’ve been thinking about Emre’s comment since I read it — and given this event on the Forum, I eventually decided to go and read Marcus Rediker’s biography of Lay. I recommend it for anyone interested in learning more about him as a historical figure.
To share some thoughts on the questions you posed, my feeling is that his extreme protests weren’t based on any strategic thinking about social change, and I definitely don’t think he’d be an incrementalist if he were alive today. Rather, I think his actions were driven by his extremely firm, passionately felt, and often spiritually-derived moral convictions — the same ones that convinced him to live in a cave and practice radical self-sufficiency. Actually, it seems like he had what we might describe as an excessive degree of “soldier mindset.” From the Rediker text:
I don’t know if the EA community would be wrong to exclude him today. He turned out to be ahead of his time in so many ways, and probably did meaningfully influence the eventual abolition of slavery, but this is so much easier to celebrate ex post. What does it actually feel like from the inside, to have extreme personal convictions that society doesn’t share, and how do you know (1) that history will prove you right; and (2) that you are actually making a difference? I really worry that what it feels like to be Benjamin Lay, from the inside, isn’t so dissimilar from what it feels like to be a Westboro Baptist Church member today.
I do think the role of radicalism in driving social change is underrated in this community, and I think it played a big role in not only the slavery abolition movement but also the women’s suffrage movement, the civil rights movement, the gay rights movement, etc. It’s worth looking into the radical flank effect or Cass Sunstein’s writing on social change if you are curious about this. Maybe one thing I’d like to believe is that the world is antifragile and can tolerate radicals ranging the moral spectrum, and those who are on the right side of history will eventually win out, making radicalism a sort of asymmetric weapon that’s stronger when you are ahead of your time on the moral arc of history. But that’s a very convenient theory and I think it’s hard to know with any confidence, and the success of so many fascist and hateful ideologies in relatively recent history probably suggests otherwise.
In any case, I really admire Lay for his conviction and his empathy and his total dedication to living a principled life. But I also really admire communities like this one for their commitment to open debate and the scout mindset and earnest attempts to hear each other out and question our own assumptions. So I expect, and hope, that the EA community would ban Benjamin Lay from our events. But I also hope we wouldn’t laugh at him like so many Quakers did. I hope we would look at him, scowling at us through the glass, and ask ourselves with total sincerity, “What if he has a point?”