I see Caroline’s point about the non-time traveler having little or no power to sway the group. I was thinking not so much of his power in society, but rather of his obligation to his own convictions. In other words, not what can<\/i> he do, but rather what must<\/i> he do.<\/p>\n
After all, even the time traveler needs to proceed carefully, in that his best strategy to effect abolition probably involves stealth. My own current opinion is that the most effective way to work toward the abolition of slavery, in a society that does not yet realize there is a problem, is to work toward transforming the means of production, so that the ruling class no longer finds slavery to be in its economic self-interest.<\/p>\n
I am fairly certain that if you reach people in their wallets, then their hearts and minds will follow (apologies to LBJ). I think history is fairly consistent on one point: Within a generation after any exploitive practice is no longer useful to a ruling class, many people in that class will find said practice to be morally repugnant, and will wonder how their forebears ever could have been so thoughtless and cruel.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I see Caroline’s point about the non-time traveler having little or no power to sway the group. I was thinking not so much of his power in society, but rather of his obligation to his own convictions. In other words, not what can he do, but rather what must he do. After all, even the … Continue reading “Future imperfect tense”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=72"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=72"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=72"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=72"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}