Day 767 - What Is Our Responsibility For The Past?

A few people were arguing several points, one being whether we can judge the actions of people in the past by today's standards of ethics and morality. Their argument appears to boil down to an argument about the ISIL terrorists in France and whether Islam is to be judged by its fundamentalist or peaceful factions. Some sought to pin it on the former claiming the Koran is not based on peace but violence towards non-believers.  By extension of their argument, some want to apply the same standard to Christianity based on its violent history.

This caused me to think about the genre of Nathaniel Ha(w)thorne and Washington Irving. That genre struggling with dark romanticism claims we suffer at least by guilt if not by our own action from the sins of our forbearers,  i.e., historical personal guilt. Some modern proponents of “postmodernity” might well travel to the opposite end and claim no one is guilty of anything (or everybody is guilty of everything?) since there "are no absolute rules."

Ultimately, where one sits on the moral issue seems to depend on one’s presumption of the evil or goodness of humanity. The latter would argue humanity is essentially good but social institutions corrupt it. Thus, they insist evil is not in humanity but in social institutions (including religious denominations).

What these proponents seem to forget is that social institutions are comprised of people whose collective values shape social policy. 

Puritanism perhaps, too heavily influenced the former group. Realism may be a better landing place. William Golding (Lord of Flies, etc.) with a foot in both boats captures the idea of the realist when he said that he was an optimist by nature but a pessimist by intellect. Of course his opinion of humanity, like that of many Reformed theological realists of the time, was forever twisted by the events of World War II.

World War II reveals what lies in the heart of humanity. It is very difficult, if not impossible to get past the human reality of World War II. (Every war previous and since tells the same tale, but WWII did it in an exquisite way.) In the heart of every person lies a propensity for doing harm to another (or to self) in the interests of perceived social good.

We can look back on Nazism and see how morally distorted is its idea, but what do we say today when we read of General Curtis LeMay saying he hoped all Japanese smelled the burning flesh of firebombed Tokyo as payback for Pearl Harbor? What of folks cursing and damning the moral stance of Muslims, or Baptists, or Republicans, or Democrats, or Presbyterian or abortionists, or pro-lifers, or immigrants, or social institutions such as the courts and government? The reality of WWII is alive and well.

The only bit of intellectual game I play today is this. There is no present, only the past and the future. As soon as one is aware of the present moment it is gone, it serves only to bridge the gap between what was and what can be. (Here is that dratted verb again, “to be.”)  We measure ourselves by what we have done or not done and hopefully it guides our future actions to create precious memories and a promising future.

We may use and judge the past only as a metric and instructor to guide our future choices. To judge the past by its morality according to the view of today is really pointless, the past cannot be purified or changed. It can be forgiven by choice, or not. In either case its only value is to inform, or not, our choice about the tomorrow that will soon be our past.

A person can certainly point to the past to indict Humanity for being. When it is used selfishly or pridefully for that purpose we can identify with Shakespeare, “The fault dear Brutus is not in our stars but in our hearts.” When we use it selflessly striving to make tomorrow a little better than it deserves to be based on our Humanity we can identify with Christ.