The civilization that mistook animals for people

www.americanthinker.com

It’s the question that haunted Mark Twain: How did the Christianity-drenched antebellum South come to regard slavery as “right, righteous, sacred, the peculiar pet of the Deity, and a condition which the slave himself ought to be daily and nightly thankful for”? How could Twain’s fine friends and neighbors collude in a “lie of silent assertion… that nothing is going on which fair and intelligent men are aware of and are engaged by their duty to try to stop”? A belief so certain that "for a man to speak out openly and proclaim himself an enemy of negro slavery was simply to proclaim himself a madman. For he was blaspheming against the holiest thing known to a Missourian, and could not be in his right mind.”

Ultimately, Twain concluded, “that strange thing, the conscience… can be trained to approve any wild thing you want it to approve if you begin its education early & stick to it.”

A societal disaster of slavery’s scale inevitably leads us to wonder if we, too, might be blindly participating in a catastrophic moral failure of our own. Is there an aspect of our daily lives that will cause future generations to recoil in horror at our inhumanity?

Current speculation centers around factory farming and its mistreatment of animals, which has been called “the greatest moral atrocity of our time.” Even the venerable Charles Krauthammer (RIP) wrote that the contemporary practice most likely to be found abominable by future generations is, “that we actually raised, herded, and slaughtered [animals] on an industrial scale -- for the eating.”

But if there’s any hope for us, the answer to that question must be the fact that we abort more than a million children each year. This despite the fact that, according to a survey of 5,577 biologists taken by the National Institutes of Health, 96% affirm that a human life begins at fertilization. It’s a self-evident truth that abortion is the taking of an innocent human life, and yet it’s a commonplace. Our grandchildren had better look back in bewildered horror at what we’re doing, or the future will be ghastly.

Our progeny will be doubly appalled that we perceived the treatment of animals as our greatest moral failing in the midst of our slaughter of the innocents. And the fact that Americans, “driven by the increasing pet humanization trend," spend $3 billion a year on pet apparel and almost $6 billion yearly on human-grade pet food only serves to underscore our devaluing of human life. What a difference even a small fraction of those billions would make to St. Jude Children’s Research or Shriners Children’s Hospitals.

The time for America to regain its moral bearings is now. The future is watching.

Peter Merkl blogs at pmerkl.co

Image: PxHere