FEELING GUILTY OVER SOMEONE ELSE’S HISTORY

With the destruction of statues of historical figures in the US, figures who played a key role in the nation’s history, there’s been a lot of uncritical and false thinking about history itself. What it represents, what it means, the historical contexts in which things happened. The issue is about people of previous ages who did things that we today consider “bad.” For example, back in the 18th century when the United States began, the presence of “slavery” was prevalent and most of the emerging leaders who created the new nation had slaves. Washington did; Jefferson did, most anyone of any wealth did. And given that slaves at that time had no rights, no standing, it was often the epitome of compassion and protection to take a slave in.

Why? It was the social environment of that day and had been the status quo for centuries— for millennia. It was only in the late 18th century (1750s onward) that the most advanced nations began to question it and began to end it with legislation. In fact, unknown to most people today, the founders of the US constitution put 1809 as the ending of slave trade. Some had argued to outlaw such trade long before that date.

So here’s something very “bad” that happened hundreds of years ago that was a world-wide phenomena. Question: Who today should feel guilty about that? A strange question. Right? Of course, if there was no demand for cheap labor back then, there would not have been slave trade in the first place. So who should feel guilty for the social demand that called for slaves? Who should feel guilty for the slave trade business? And without tribal leaders in Africa willing to provide slaves, there also would not have been a slave trade industry. So who should feel guilty for selling their own people into slavery?

The answer to all of these questions is— no one. At least no one living in the 21st century did any of that! Nor anyone in the 20th century. And only a few people actually participated in such despicable behavior at the first of the 19th century. With Lincoln’s Emancipation Declaration of 1860 and the American Civil War (1860-1865) the evil of human slavery ended— at least in the US (it continued in other countries, but at least it ended here).

Guilt is an appropriate emotion for the person who does wrong against another person or persons. But you cannot be guilty and do not need to feel guilty for something you did not do (if you did, that is another pathology). How could you? You weren’t there. You weren’t born. The idea of “white guilt” for actions taken two, three, and more centuries ago is a cognitive fallacy. So also the idea of “black guilt” for actions taken by tribal leaders those many centuries ago.

Slavery of human beings has a very long history being the legacy of ancient wars. When one group of people “conquered” another they would gruesomely slay hundreds or thousands and then take hundreds or thousands of them back to their country as slaves. When the “new world” opened up in the Americas, slavery was used as an economic process for cheap labor. That activity began many hundreds of years ago —when the whole world was at a much lower level of consciousness.

The good news is that mankind as been growing up, maturing, and our ethics, morality, and sense of consciousness has also matured. Another cognitive fallacy today is to judge those in previous age by today’s values. They didn’t know our values nor lived by them. To apply a basic NLP premise— they were doing the best they could with the mental models they had. They had positive intentions, even though it resulted it a lot of hurtful and ugly consequences.

When we fail to consider the context, the economic and political environment of a previous age and judge it with our thinking today, we engage in a cognitive bias and distortion. It prevents us from understanding that age, the struggles at that time, the historical advances that they made, and learn from that history.

Ah yes, learning from history— from mistakes so that we do not repeat history. That’s why we need the statues and memorials, not to celebrate the wrongs, but to learn from them. Learning enables us to understand how we got here and that enables us to plot the next steps toward creating a more perfect union.

The mainline media and others who are over-simplifying things, looking at things only from today’s perspectives, creates a false narrative. The United States was not created to be a racist country— it was created to become a color-blind country as Martin Luther King Jr. noted. It was created on a premise of equality that had never before been uttered in politics— “that all men are created equal...” King quoted that as a promissory note in his I Have a Dream speech and said that he was there to “cash in on that check.” He didn’t reject the Constitution or the Founders as racists; he quoted their enlightened vision as a guiding light for the Civil Rights Movement. He did not want to promote black lives matter or white lives matter, he wanted a color-blind society where we would not judge a man or woman by the color of their skin, but the quality of their character. Now that is the thinking of a self-actualizing person!

Want More? I came across the following links from a good friend in the UK, Kenneth Attwell; https://unherd.com/thepost/coleman-hughes-the-moral-case-against-blm/

https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/07/09/blm-rebels-without-a-cause/