Warren on Wilberforce and the West

Spencer Warren has produced another well-written, historically informative, and morally and culturally informed movie review at the website of the American Conservative Union. It is about Amazing Grace, the current movie that tells the story of William Wilberforce, the English politician who spent decades crusading, with ultimate success, against the British slave trade and then against slavery itself in the British empire.

Based on the enthusiasm for the movie Warren expresses in his opening paragraphs, I thought I was going to have to disagree with him substantially about a movie for the first time, since I felt Amazing Grace was quite a poor movie, though not a terrible one. Once past the opening, however, the article consists largely of a polite and restrained catalogue of everything that is wrong with the film. So I’m glad to have less to disagree about with Mr. Warren than I feared.

The best thing about the review is Warren’s discussion of the historical Wilberforce, whom, as he shows, the movie outrageously scants. Wilberforce’s Christianity—virtually gone. His scope as a thinker and a man—not there. His largeness of spirit and mind—not there, since he’s portrayed as a worried looking sourpuss, through most of the film. His great eloquence and great speeches—not there, replaced by a couple of brief and nasty witticisms directed at his opponents in Commons, who are absurdly shown as being crushed by his rejoinders (Hollywood can never show the hero’s antagonists as having dignity, even if it means constructing a dramatic situation the utter falsity of which any casual viewer of Prime Minister’s Question Time on C-SPAN would instantly recognize). His involvement with many other causes—not there. The evangelical nature of his anti-slave trade political group—not there (they are shown as a bunch of leftist misfits). The extraordinary tributes paid to Wilberforce in the House of Commons for his achievement following the final vote outlawing the slave trade—virtually excised (see the below sample of what the movie left out). And on and on.

Why are all these things not there? Because they don’t fit the anti-Western, countercultural mentality of our time. Even a non-leftist movie that takes a basically admiring, non-debunking interest in an important Western historical figure must filter him through the modern mentality that cannot tolerate the notion of anything really positive, great, and true about the West.

The ahistorical character of the movie leaps out at you in almost every scene, but here is the worst example (not mentioned in the review): the Duke of Clarence, son of King George III, is shown as being a member the House of Commons.

Concerning the House’s acclaim of Wilberforce on the passage of his bill, here is an excerpt from the article:

The House is shown standing and rather politely clapping, when in fact the members were cheering three hurrahs. And the fantastic tribute to Wilberforce by the penal law reformer and Solicitor-General, Sir Samuel Romilly, is given to Fox, who practically mumbles his speech. Worse, this tribute is completely rewritten and dumbed down, as is so typical in contemporary entertainment (and education as well). Here is what Sir Samuel did say, comparing Wilberforce to Napoleon, the French tyrant. It merits quoting at length:

When I look to the man at the head of the French Monarchy, surrounded as he is with all the pomp of power, and all the pride of victory, distributing Kingdoms to family …, seeming, when he sits upon his throne to have reached the summit of human ambition, and the pinnacle of earthly happiness, and when I follow that into his closet or to his bed, and consider the pangs with which his solitude must be tortured, and his repose banished, by the recollection of the blood he has spilled, and the oppressions he has committed; and when I compare with these pangs of remorse, the feelings which must accompany my hon. Friend from this House to his home, after the vote of this night shall have confirmed the object of his humane and unceasing labours; when he shall retire into the bosom of his happy and delighted family, when he shall lay himself down on his bed, reflecting on the innumerable voices that will be raised in every quarter of the world to bless him; how much more pure and perfect felicity must he enjoy in the consciousness of having preserved so many millions of his fellow-creatures, than the man with whom I have compared him, on the throne to which he has waded through slaughter and oppression.

To which I can only say: Wow!

In telling us about this extraordinary man and the effect he had on his time, and in bringing out the gap between the history and the movie, Mr. Warren has done a real service. He is a Richard Grenier for traditionalists.

- end of initial entry -

Russell W. writes:

I’m willing to believe that the movie tones down Wilberforce’s explicit and ever-present Christianity, but I’m not sure the claims that it sanitizes out Christ is fair. Albert Finney in the movie plays John Newton, the former slave trader who composed the song, and at one point he says to Wilberforce: “I am sure of only two things: that I am a great sinner and Christ is a great savior.”

I believe also (according to the producer of the film) that it also includes content about Wilberforce’s other great crusade aside from ending the slave trade: restoring gentility and public morals into society.

On those points I think this film is pretty good from a traditionalist perspective.

LA replies:

Newton is played as a physical and emotional wreck of a man, tormented by guilt; he seems more like a broken-down bum in a settlement house than a priest in a church. There is no sign of any Christian light and happiness about him, no sign of forgiveness and new life, indeed no indication at all of the man who actually wrote:

Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound,
That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost, but now I’m found,
Was blind but now I see.

This epitomizes how the movie-makers filtered Christianity and Christian characters through a non-Christian, liberal, whites-are-guilty filter. Yes, the movie portrays in positive terms Wilberforce’s crusade against slavery; of course it does, because that was a liberal thing. The larger British culture and Christian religion of which that liberal thing was an expression, is mostly whited out.

Spencer Warren writes:

You write:

“Why are all these things not there? Because they don’t fit the anti-Western, countercultural mentality of our time. Even a non-leftist movie that takes a basically admiring, non-debunking interest in an important Western historical figure must filter him through the modern mentality that cannot tolerate the notion of anything really positive, great, and true about the West.”

This point is excellent and articulates what is so awful about Robert Osborne, the host at the Turner Classic Movies channel. It explains what I have been reaching for in trying to describe his repeated wisecracks about the movies he introduces. In fact, Osborne’s conduct is the kind of thing that in the forties justified the blacklist of the Hollywood Ten.

“This epitomizes how the movie-makers filtered Christianity and Christian characters through a non-Christian, liberal, whites-are-guilty filter.”

Your point about filtering is very well-taken.

Another problem with the really bad script is a lot of it is talking about what W did, rather than dramatizing it. I remember images from the BBC Fight Against Slavery TV series of 30 years ago about Wilberforce, and I remember not one image from Amazing Grace.

LA writes:

Another point worth noting is that the movie’s director, Michael Apted, 26 years ago directed the marvelous Coal Miner’s Daughter . The realism and naturalism of that movie and the sympathetic treatment of the characters are all the more remarkable given that Apted is British and had spent almost no time in America, let alone in the Appalachians, prior to making it. I’m not aware of anything he has done since then that comes remotely close.

Gintas J. writes:

I, too, saw the movie, but I didn’t know anything about Wilberforce. If the goal was to get people to read up on him, it worked on me. I read a biography, the promoted “companion” biography by Metaxes, which is a decent popular treatment. The criticisms of the movie are quite correct, it’s just a scrubbed, washed-out, wrung-out, and flattened Wilberforce we see.

Wilberforce requires someone like DeMille to tell a Grand Heroic Christian Epic. Our culture is just not up to it, we’re 50 years too late.

Ben W. writes:

With respect to the Wilberforce film, and the dourness of John Newton, I’m sure the film-makers have bought into the liberal belief that it is anti-slavery that frees western man, not Christianity.

This comes from the same belief that the civil rights movement is the apex of American liberty.

Until that moment, the U.S. didn’t really experience freedom 100%. Nor was Great Britain truly free until the anti-slavery moment.

That’s why everything else about Wilberforce is minimized while the anti-slavery impulse is maximized.

LA replies:

Ben’s point is absolutely correct, but what makes him think that liberals think that America or Britain is 100 percent free now? Didn’t our president say in Africa that America still has the same racism that was responsible for slavery? Hasn’t his twin brain said a hundred times in a hundred capitals that America, while it has made some progress, still has a long way to go before it is truly equal and morally just?

Remember, each new step forward of liberal equality and freedom means that America prior to that moment was unfree and unequal. In January 2007 Nancy Pelosi became the first female Speaker of the House. Prior to that event, she and many others said, women had not experienced true equality and freedom, the glass ceiling was holding them down. Does this mean we have now reached true equality and freedom? No, because there is always some other “first” to be attained, such as the first female or black majority leader of the Senate, the first female or black vice president, the first female or black president, not to mention the equivalent “firsts” for every other “oppressed” group. With each one of those firsts, America’s entire history before that moment will be cast as a pit of darkness.

Thus liberal progress toward greater equality and freedom does not result in America becoming progressively better in its own eyes. It results in America becoming progressively worse in its own eyes. Under the terms of liberalism, America can never be good, can never have moral legitimacy as a society. How, for example, can we possibly feel good about living in a country that is so prejudiced and bigoted against homosexuals that it won’t allow people of the same sex to “marry” each other? For Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, the absence of homosexual marriage is such a crying injustice that it delegitimizes the existing institution of marriage between men and women. They say therefore that will not get married until same-sex couples can also get married.

This unappeasable quality of liberalism would be brought out if people would ask liberals or minorities who are complaining about this or that injustice: “Please tell us what an America that you would approve of, an America that you would not be angry at, would look like.” They won’t be able to answer, because they could only conceive of justice in terms of a condition of total equality that could never be realized on this earth, and therefore they could not describe, at least in non-risible terms, a morally legitimate America. Once it was realized that the liberal and minority agenda has no attainable standard by which America can become good and worthy of love and protection, but is only used to tear down whatever America is, the falseness and destructiveness of liberalism would be exposed.

All this requires is that conservatives, instead of accepting liberal premises in general and resisting them only at the margins, ask liberals pointed questions about their real beliefs, and not stop until they get an answer.

LA writes:

I want to underscore Ben’s point:

With respect to the Wilberforce film, and the dourness of John Newton, I’m sure the film-makers have bought into the liberal belief that it is anti-slavery that frees western man, not Christianity.

What Ben is saying is, Newton could not looked “saved” or be in a calm or harmonious state of mind as a result of repenting of his slave trading and becoming a Christian, because Christ does not save him, only the actual ending of slavery could save him. Since slavery had not yet ended, Newton still had to be miserable and tormented. Thus the movie perfectly replaces Christianity with liberalism as the true religion. Christianity is at best an approach, an aid, a handmaid to this true religion.

John D. writes:

I just read your (first) reply to Ben W’s comment on the Wilberforce film. I must say that your reply is quite possibly one of the most profound statements I have ever encountered by you (or anyone else for that matter), describing liberalism’s interminable pursuit for all things equal. There really is no end game for the liberal in all of this, is there? How disheartening it is that even their goal of the unmitigated destruction of everything that is good and righteous would still not have the ability to satisfy them. What will be then their “new world order”?

LA replies:

To the extent that they give up the unprincipled exceptions by which they have preserved thus far, in resistance to their liberal principles, a livable world for themselves, their future will be the literal destruction of their social order, and its takeover by Muslims and others.

For years one of my recurrent themes was the “radical mainstream,” the idea that what we think of as the ordinary, moderate, workaday belief system of mainstream modern society is really very radical. But even then I don’t think I realized how radical it really is. Consistent liberalism is more radical than Marxism, since Marxism still believes in a social order, tyrannical and perverted though it may be, organized around Marxist lines, while consistent liberalism, with its radical attack on all moral and cultural distinctions and all moral and cultural inequality, is incompatible with any social order and even with existence itself. The end of liberalism, consistently followed, is the annihilation of self and society. Look at the English. They literally do not exist anymore. (I don’t mean that they don’t exist physically.) That is what liberalism does to people. In The Lord of the Rings, nine lords of men are given Rings of power and in exercising this power they become invisible ghostlike beings, no longer flesh and blood but entities of sheer power under the greater power of Sauron. Well, in addition to Tolkien’s Ringwraiths of power, there are Ringwraiths of liberalism, who lose their human existence not by the exercise of evil power, but by the rejection and abandonment of all good power, the power to create, the power to build and maintain a good life and a good society, the abandonment of the very idea of goodness and rightness and thus of the right to exist. Having become non-existent themselves, they seek to impose non-existence on everything else as well. But, as always with liberalism, proceding from its egalitarian agenda to make the better seem worse and the worse seem better, there is a double standard: they only seek to impose non-existence on their own society and on people like themselves, while they want to be taken over by the sacred power of that which is most unlike themselves.

So, to answer your question, their discontent with existence will not be satisfied, nor will it be given up, rather it will disappear as they themselves are absorbed under the power of the Other and cease to exist.

Gintas J. writes:

I am by no means an expert on Eastern religions, but what you say about liberalism,

“… their discontent with existence will not be satisfied, nor will it be given up, rather it will disappear as they themselves are absorbed under the power of the Other and cease to exist,”

sounds suspiciously like Nirvana, wherein one’s own personality is completely destroyed by aborption into the Great Happy Collective.

Gintas writes:

I have a friend, a Christian, who doesn’t believe in an eternal hell for damned souls, but is an annihilationist. That is, the soul is annihilated at judgment and ceases to exist.

I, however, am orthodox on hell. I suppose that people in hell will be wishing for annihilation, and this sense you find in liberalism may be a foretaste of hell. Perhaps that is how, in trying to make a heaven on earth, we instead get a hell.

Ben W. writes:

John D. writes, “There really is no end game for the liberal in all of this, is there?”

There are three basic streams of thought underlying liberalism that share this lack of teleology—one biological (Darwinian evolution), one historical (social progress), and one philosophical (existentialism).

The Darwinian cannot posit an end point to evolution because all species are constantly in flux. Every form is in chemical and biological transition. Who knows where something ends?

In terms of history, as you have pointed out, where does progress end? Every previous era can be measured as partially progressive but not completely so.

As for philosophy, liberalism is informed by philosophies that eschew essence in favour of the existential. No essence, no form, all in flux and transition. All this leads to the negation and destruction of sexual identities, national boundaries, religious distinctions and cultural traditions.

Such nihilism creates voids that become occupied by foreign cultures that assert their own forms…

The Book of Nehemiah is a good read for those who want to see what it takes to rebuild one’s fragmented homeland. It first starts by building walls.

Interestingly the first thing that Nehemiah undertakes is to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem. And his enemies try to engage him in “discussions” to avoid having the walls built. But Nehemiah through the spirit of God begins by building walls. And thus he begins to reform the essence of the city because walls define a form and space. Perhaps the President of the United States should learn something about walls…God sanctions them.

LA replies:

Ben is onto something. Let’s say with Ben that the three basic dimensions of order that define human existence are the biological, the social-historical, and the philosophical-spiritual. As Ben points out, liberalism, which he defines as a “lack of teleology”, a good phrase by the way—or maybe we could call it “progress without a teleology,” or “progress without a purpose,” or just “anti-teleology”—undoes each of those dimensions of order, by denying that it has an essence toward which man moves or from which he turns away. One of the oddities of liberalism is that it insists on progress and the goodness of progress even as it denies the reality of any objective order by which progress and its benefits could be measured.

Thus Darwinism denies any biological teleology, but insists that the ever changing species are really “evolving” and thus “improving.” How? By living longer and having more offspring. The “better” is defined by the fact that organisms are producing more copies of themselves. But why is this good, unless the organism itself is good? How do we determine if a species is “good”? Darwinism declines to address those questions. “Value” for Darwinists comes down to sheer will and worldly success: the will to reproduce, and success in doing so.

The Darwinian view contrasts with the view that the human species represents the fulfillment of a teleology. In the early ’80s, at a great exhibit of hominid fossils at the American Museum of Natural History which I visited several times, I had an epiphany in which I saw that the skull of modern homo sapiens—that delicate, symmetric, high-domed arch, so radically different from the heavy, long, forehead-less skull of Neanderthal and of Homo Erectus (which I’m not dismissing, they were also beautiful and extremely evocative in their own way though far more primitive) that it seemed to exist in a different world, was the end or goal of hominid evolution, not in the Darwinian sense, but in the sencc of an unfolding inherent form. Man is not a mere transition from an earlier transitional form to a later transitional form. Man is the physical representation, the image, of a divine essence. Value in the truest sense is therefore defined by how well men fulful this essence. Darwinists rejects all this as mysticism and say that all change is good because all change can only come about through superior reproduction which is a good.

In the realm of society, liberals insist that society is “progressing,” but the very thing they think it’s progressing toward is the ever greater and more equal freedom of people to choose what they choose. But why is this good, unless what people choose is good? And how can we have a notion of what is good for people to choose without a sense of the good of society? People may choose to have as many children out of wedlock as possible, people may choose to spend their lives hatching jihadist campaigns, and in a society that subsidizes out-of-wedlock mothers and out-of-work jihadists, such behavior will seem “good” or at least not bad. Without an ideal of society, social “value” comes down to sheer desire and will, the will to choose what we choose.

Similarly, in the realms of philosophy and religion, liberalism becomes nominalism and says there are no higher essences discernible by reason or spiritual intuition or faith, there are just lots of individuals, all of whom are good and all of whom have their rights. But why are they good, and why do they have rights? For essentialists, rights arise from the good essence or nature of the class of beings to which a being belongs. Since man has a nature which in its highest sense is good, he has an inherent right to those things which he requires to fulfill this nature. He does not have the right to things that are destructive of his nature and its natural ends, though society may leave him alone to destroy himself, which is not the same as his having a “right” to destroy oneself. Liberalism by contrast says that man’s goodness and his rights do not proceed from and are not limited by any supposed “nature” or “essence.” He is good simply by virtue of being a desiring, choosing creature. If he puts metal studs in his face, that is praiseworthy, or at least deserving of sympathetic understanding and support, because by doing so he is expressing his will and his self.

Liberalism thus attacks the three-fold teleological nature of man, the biological, the social, and the spiritual, and ends by destroying man.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 29, 2007 03:01 PM | Send