If you are fully convinced you are in the right, then don’t quit on it when it gets hard.
If you know you are in the right morally, don’t quit when everyone else decided to do what’s wrong.
If you know it’s the ethically right thing to do, then don’t quit when no one else is doing it.
Basically, don’t quit.
The medieval period lasted about a thousand years. During most of that time, slavery was absent from Europe. The early medieval period is called the Dark Ages because we know so little about it – turns out that temperate forests are lousy places to store things like vellum so books don’t survive without a good deal of care. The result is that the story of Telemachus is probably apocryphal – but clearly SOMETHING happened because slavery was a normal part of the ancient world and then suddenly, it wasn’t.
That something is almost certainly Christianity. It’s the biggest difference in culture. Also, it’s the only known worldview that has resulted in the ending of slavery. Every culture on Earth, excepting perhaps some smaller tribal ones, has dabbled or gone wholesale into slavery – most for long parts if not all of their durations as cultures or nations.
Then sometime after the fall of Rome, slavery ended in Europe. Again, we don’t have great records (wars and thunderstorms just don’t do good things for document preservation) but there’s little indication of it in the early medieval and nothing thereafter. Slavery had to be reintroduced to Europe, possibly as early as the Twelfth Century but definitely by the Fourteenth/Fifteenth Centuries. So late medieval, early renaissance – after the Black Death, before the Enlightenment.
It lasted through the Renaissance and the Enlightenment (which evidently wasn’t quite as enlightened as its Medieval predecessors) and wasn’t finally ended in the West until the late 1800’s (in the US 1863 but the US wasn’t the last – Brazil’s abolition was in 1888).
So from its reintroduction to Christendom, slavery only lasted a few hundred years. Mind you, that’s a few hundred longer than it should have lasted but the point is, slavery was ended. It wasn’t unprofitable when the British outlawed it in 1833 – far from it. The trade was still highly lucrative. So what happened?
Decades of political pressure in Britain happened. Many of those who fought for the abolition of slavery and the slave trade wouldn’t live to see it come to fruition. But come it did.
Abolition movements were already active in the US – but they wouldn’t see the end of slavery for another forty years after Britain banned the trade. Again, many, probably most of the earliest American abolitionists didn’t live to see that day. They fought for decades for what they believed in, even when it seemed that they would never win.
That’s the take away – persistence. We don’t know for certain how slavery ended in the Early Medieval period – but we do know how long and hard people had to fight to end it during the Industrial Revolution. Had they all quit, we’d still be trying to decide what to do with the slavery issue. But without the political freedom that we Americans take for granted, the British people still managed to change their government for the better long before the telephone, let alone the smartphone.
If they can do it, so can we. Don’t quit.
