Turning the Clock Back: the Progressive March to Barbarism

social reform. In ancient Rome after the conversion of Constantine, Christians lobbied for prison reform, abolition of the gladiator battles and they adopted babies that were left exposed to die.

In the medieval period Christians formed the first universities in the modern sense and Christian Europe was the first continent to abolish slavery.

Modern thinkers tend to take the moral reforms of the last 2,000 years for granted as if such sweeping changes happened by accident. People alive today don’t have much of an idea of what it was like to live in ancient pagan Rome or Greece.

The unbridled brutality of pagan life was recorded by the ancient historians such as Tacitus and Herodotus. Even the writings of Plato and Aristotle depict ancient Greeks leaving babies exposed to die and many other such atrocities.

Ancient Greece and Rome were more than half slave. They obtained slaves by conquering surrounding nations and taking people captive. Wars of aggression were the order of the day.

The Romans forced the Slavic peoples of eastern Europe into slavery to such an extent that even their name “Slavic” became the word for slave.

The pagan tribes of Europe were similarly barbaric and practiced not only slavery but also human sacrifice.

A chapter in Arthur Koestler’s book The Thirteenth Tribe describes life among the pagan tribes of northeastern Europe. The brutality was mind boggling.

Things began to change for the better when the peoples of northeastern Europe converted to Christianity in the tenth century.

This brings us to the social progressives of our own 21st century. Secularists who work for

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