The Undocumented Mark Steyn (52 page)

But the costume dramatics and the contemporary emotionalizing miss the scale of the abolitionist’s achievement. “What Wilberforce vanquished was something even worse than slavery,” says Metaxas, “something that was much more fundamental and can hardly be seen from where we stand today: he vanquished the very mindset that made slavery acceptable and allowed it to survive and thrive for millennia. He destroyed an entire way of seeing the world, one that had held sway from the beginning of history, and he replaced it with another way of seeing the world.” Ownership of existing slaves continued in the British West Indies for another quarter-century, and in the United States for another sixty years, and slave trading continued in Turkey until Atatürk abolished it in the Twenties and in Saudi Arabia until it was (officially) banned in the Sixties, and it persists in Africa and other pockets of the world to this day. But not as a broadly accepted “human good.”

There was some hard-muscle enforcement that accompanied the new law: the Royal Navy announced that it would regard all slave ships as pirates, and thus they were liable to sinking and their crews to execution. There had been some important court decisions: in the reign of William and Mary, Justice Holt had ruled that “one may be a villeyn in England, but not a slave,” and in 1803 William Osgoode, Chief Justice of Lower Canada, ruled that the institution was not compatible with the principles of British law. But what was decisive was the way Wilberforce “murdered” (in Metaxas’s word) the old acceptance of slavery by the wider society. As he wrote in 1787, “God almighty has set before me two great objects: the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners.”

The latter goal we would now formulate as “changing the culture”—which is what he did. The film of
Amazing Grace
shows the Duke of Clarence and other effete toffs reeling under a lot of lame bromides hurled by Wilberforce on behalf of “the people.” But, in fact, “the people” were a large part of the problem. Then as now, citizens of advanced democracies are easily distracted. The eighteenth-century Church of England preached “a tepid kind of moralism” disconnected both from any serious faith and from the great questions facing the nation. It was a sensualist culture amusing itself to death: Wilberforce goes to a performance of
Don Juan
, is shocked by a provocative dance, and is then further shocked to discover the rest of the audience is too blasé even to be shocked. The Paris Hilton of the age, the Prince of Wales, was celebrated for having bedded seven thousand women and snipped from each a keepsake hair. Twenty-five percent of all unmarried females in London were whores; the average age of a prostitute was sixteen; and many brothels prided themselves on offering only girls under the age of fourteen. Many of these features—weedy faint-hearted mainstream churches, skanky celebs, weary provocations for jaded debauchees—will strike a chord in our own time.

“There is a great deal of ruin in a nation,” remarked Adam Smith. England survived the eighteenth century, and maybe we will survive the twenty-first. But the life of William Wilberforce and the bicentennial of his
extraordinary achievement remind us that great men don’t shirk things because the focus-group numbers look unpromising. What we think of as “the Victorian era” was, in large part, an invention of Wilberforce which he succeeded in selling to his compatriots. We, children of the twentieth century, mock our nineteenth-century forebears as uptight prudes, moralists and do-gooders. If they were, it’s because of Wilberforce. His legacy includes the very notion of a “social conscience”: in the 1790s, a good man could stroll past an eleven-year-old prostitute on a London street without feeling a twinge of disgust or outrage; he accepted her as merely a feature of the landscape, like an ugly hill. By the 1890s, there were still child prostitutes, but there were also charities and improvement societies and orphanages. It is amazing to read a letter from Wilberforce and realize that he is, in fact, articulating precisely 220 years ago what New Yorkers came to know in the Nineties as the “broken windows” theory: “The most effectual way to prevent greater crimes is by punishing the smaller.”

The Victorians, if plunked down before the Anna Nicole updates for an hour or two, would probably conclude we’re nearer the 18th century than their own. A “social conscience” obliges the individual to act. Today we call for action all the time, but mostly from government, which is another way of excusing us and allowing us to get on with the distractions of the day. Our schoolhouses revile the Victorian do-gooders as condescending racists and oppressors—although the single greatest force for ending slavery around the world was the Royal Navy. Isn’t societal self-loathing just another justification for lethargy? After all, if the white man is inherently wicked, that pretty much absolves one from having to do anything. And so the same kind of lies we told ourselves about slaves we now tell ourselves about other faraway people, and for the same reason: because big changes are tough and who needs the hassle? The hardest thing in any society is “the reformation of manners.”

POSTSCRIPT

EVERYONE’S A CRITIC

THROWAWAY LINE

The Daily Telegraph
, January 5, 1987

MOSS HART
,
THE
American playwright, used to say that the most satisfying moment for a writer was when he had finished something and nobody had yet seen it. I agree. Nothing beats the exhilarating feeling of punching that last typewriter key.

Of course, one’s happiness may be only fleeting. But, for the moment, there’s no one around to say it stinks—or, worse, “I appreciate that it was only meant as a ‘humorous’ article, but I should point out that that type of bird is not, in fact, found in Western Samoa.”

I’m not so sure I still agree with that Moss Hart line, and I do like to hear from Samoan ornithologists now and again. One of my favorites in that vein was prompted by a casual aside about the strange misapprehension of the British that the rest of the world wishes it had a health service just like theirs—with its two-year waits for hip replacement and C difficile–infested hospital wards and all the other delights. Here’s what I wrote:

The Daily Telegraph
, September 3, 1993

To any outsider, the capacity of the British for self-delusion is amazing.

“The National Health Service is the envy of the world”: really? Maybe to a yak farmer in Bhutan, but not to anyone I’ve ever spoken to in Western Europe, North America, or Australia.

A couple of days later, the following missive appeared on our letters page:

         
Bhutan’s health service better

               
SIR—Mark Steyn’s off-the-cuff remarks about yak farmers in Bhutan being the only ones in the world to envy the NHS cannot be allowed to pass without comment
.

               
Bhutan, although small and poor, has devoted a large proportion of its resources to provide free, comprehensive health care for its scattered population, including the yak farmers, who incidentally constitute a small minority of the population
.

               
Starting from scratch in the Sixties, Bhutan had achieved 90 per cent coverage of primary health by 1991. . . .

               
I may not be a “yak farmer” but I am a Bhutanese. I regret to say that my experience with the NHS has been disappointing. Both my parents-in-law, who are British citizens, have had to wait more than two years for operations, after being turned away several times for lack of hospital beds
.

               
However basic the Bhutanese health service is, it has not yet come to this sorry state
.

               
SONAM CHHOKI

Say what you like about Bhutanese yak farmers, but they don’t have to worry about Obama tearing up their plans
.

MY FAVORITE WAHHABI

The Daily Telegraph
, September 28, 2002

I AM SORRY
to hear that Ghazi Algosaibi, Saudi Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, has been “recalled” to Riyadh. Like many
Spectator
readers, I enjoyed his recent laugh-a-minute interview with Boris Johnson, in which he demonstrated to Boris the best technique for lashing sodomites and adulteresses and gleefully mocked the idea that the west could transform Iraq into the kind of democracy where Boris would “inherit a safe seat in Basra South from Michael Heseltine.”
¹

At this point, I should declare an interest. In the last year, among the torrent of dreary missives from leftie terror apologists accusing me of being a “hatemonger,” Ghazi (as I like to think of him) was the only critic I looked forward to. It started quietly after one of my routine calls for the overthrow of the House of Saud. His Excellency wrote to
The Spectator
to say that “ever since Mark Steyn, maps at the ready, threatened to dismantle Saudi Arabia, our population has been living in a state of high anxiety and fear. Our children are having nightmares and our old men and women are quaking in terror. We promise,” he added, to “drink our own oil,” “teach nothing in our schools except pornography and devil worship, and refer to all Muslims, ourselves included, as either ‘Islamofascists’ or ‘Islamabaddies.’”

Well, the following week I made some passing reference to “that famous Saudi sense of humour” and Dr. Algosaibi wrote back to mock another “riveting spectacle” by “Mark Steyn, the dismantler of sovereign nations and destabilizer
of whole regions”—which I liked so much I’ve had it put on my business cards (“Consultations by Appointment”). After the Saudi World Cup team lost eight–nil, I mused in this space on whether the entire squad were Mossad Jew infiltrators. His Excellency wrote to
The Telegraph
denying this “interesting theory” and offering the alternative claim that the U.S. team were knocked out by “a Wahhabi Islamofascist masquerading as a German player who used his terrorist head to score the goal.”

A couple of weeks later, I wrote a column pronouncing Osama bin Laden dead. Ghazi responded by noting my “obsession” with “Osama bin Laden’s ‘trouser department.’ Mr. Steyn is looking for a dirty bomb, and he is looking in the right place.”

My obsession with Osama’s trouser department is as nothing to Sheikh Algosaibi’s obsession with me. Me in general, I hasten to add, not my trouser department. They’re not big on that in Saudi, and I wouldn’t want Ghazi landing back in Riyadh to find them sharpening the scimitar for him.

But, if you have to pick a London envoy to get into a feud with, I reckon I did better than Barbara Amiel with her French ambassador.
²
My guy’s a non-stop laugh-riot: he could be the first Wahhabi to play the Catskills, which is more than you can say for the Saudis’ oleaginous man in Washington, Prince Bandar.

But Ghazi’s not just a comedian, he’s also a poet. He wrote an ode to Ayat Akhras, a Palestinian teenybomber who detonated herself in a Jerusalem supermarket and took a couple of hated Jews with her. The ambassador was evidently smitten by “Ayat, the bride of loftiness.” “She embraced death with a smile,” he cooed.

“How come he’s never written an ode to me?” I brooded bitterly. “Who do I have to blow up to get in an Algosaibi anthology?” The Foreign Office rapped him over the knuckles, but Ghazi stuck to his guns—or, rather, her
plastic explosives. He insisted that he personally would be honored to be a suicide bomber if he weren’t so old and out of shape.

This struck me as a pretty feeble excuse. I mean, how fit do you have to be to strap on a Semtex belt and waddle into a pizza parlor? The talk in the diplomatic corps is that that’s why Ghazi was recalled. Alternatively, he was doing so much shtick in
The Spectator
, Crown Prince Abdullah has finally twigged he’s Jewish.