The Case for the Extreme

Back in my brighter and chipperer student days, I became mildly obsessed with stories of Benjamin Lay. A four foot tall Quaker with a hunched back, "Little Benjamin" was an 18th century radical abolitionist and animal rights activist. I was introduced to him in studying Quaker abolitionists broadly — a pursuit that led to the unfortunate conclusion that historians often wrote of mild mannered Good Liberal Quakers as if they were heroes of a movement they supported only in ways convenient to their economic gains — and Benjamin was such a harsh contrast to the median white abolitionist that his biography stuck with me. Stories of Benjamin stabbing a hollow bible, filled with fake blood, and spraying his audience with the metaphorical blood of the enslaved; Of Benjamin kidnapping his neighbors' children to show them to cruel realities of enslavement. He was radical in ways that were extreme, and yet his extreme acts seemed altogether constrained given the genuine evil he witnessed on…