Astral Codex Ten

Quakers

3 min read

Quakers

Article

Quakers is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between August 23, 2022 and January 16, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “Would we still have widespread race-based slavery in 1950 without the Quakers”; “he was already standing on the shoulders of generations of … Quakers”; “on the shoulders of generations of Quakers”. It most often appears alongside Elon Musk, Muslims, New York Times.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: August 23, 2022
  • Last seen: January 16, 2026

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Book Review: What We Owe The Future
August 23, 2022 · Original source
MacAskill thinks yes. His example is the abolition of slavery. The Greeks and Romans, for all their moral philosophy, never really considered this. Nor was there much abolitionist thinking in the New World before 1700. As far as anyone can tell, the first abolitionist was Benjamin Lay (1682 - 1759), a hunchbacked Quaker dwarf who lived in a cave. He convinced some of his fellow Quakers, the Quakers convinced some other Americans and British, and the British convinced the world.
So do we credit abolitionists with locking in better values for all time? MacAskill wants to do this, but I’m not sure. I think he amply proved that abolitionists made slavery end sooner than it would have otherwise. But would we still have widespread race-based slavery in 1950 without the Quakers and the British abolitionists? Would we still have it today? Or were they the leading edge of a social movement that would have spawned other activists to take up the cause if they had faltered? MacAskill admits that scholars continue to disagree on this.
The Dilbert Afterlife
January 16, 2026 · Original source
Nothing is more American than inventing weird cringe fusions of religion and atheism where you say that God doesn’t exist as (gestures upward) some Big Man In The Sky the way those people believe, but also, there totally is a God, in some complicated sense which only I understand. When Thomas Jefferson cut all the passages with miracles out of his Bible, he was already standing on the shoulders of generations of Unitarians, Quakers, and Latitudinarians.