In William Barrett’s novel The Shape of Illusion, those who view an obscure Renaissance painting of Christ being marched to His crucifixion are horrified to see their own faces among the mob howling for His condemnation and death.
It’s been years since I read Barrett’s book, but the question he raises remains: Would most of us, thrust back in time without our current knowledge of the past, stand on the side of the virtuous?
When we reflect on history, we imagine ourselves as the “good guys,” standing with those who wept for Christ, who died opposing Adolf Hitler, who merited the Gulag for offending Joseph Stalin, who as Southerners abandoned family and native land to fight against slavery in the Civil War.
We like to believe we would stand “on the right side of history.”
It’s been years since I read Barrett’s book, but the question he raises remains: Would most of us, thrust back in time without our current knowledge of the past, stand on the side of the virtuous?
When we reflect on history, we imagine ourselves as the “good guys,” standing with those who wept for Christ, who died opposing Adolf Hitler, who merited the Gulag for offending Joseph Stalin, who as Southerners abandoned family and native land to fight against slavery in the Civil War.
We like to believe we would stand “on the right side of history.”
It’s a great fantasy.
In reality, however, we would be persons of a certain time, place, and culture. Some few of us might rebel against the “politically correct” thinking of that era, but if so, we would be a minority, just as those in the above examples belonged to a minority. To the contrary, most of us would have shaken our fists at Christ, joined Nazi youth groups, revered Stalin as a god, and fought as Southerners to leave the Union. We know this is true because the great majority of people living in these historical eras did these very things. They bought into certain beliefs, ideas often subjected to little or no debate, and went along with the majority, sometimes willingly, sometimes at the point of a gun.
We do the same today. A belief of one sort or another takes hold in certain people, and they band together, make common cause, and call for change. Despite evidence tempering or even contradicting the ideas they advocate, the group pushes ahead, waving their banners and signs, shouting and shaking their fists, and labeling those opposed to them as fascists or politically incorrect, the latter a horrible term reminiscent of the show trials, the whispered objections, and the Gulags of Stalinism. A bullet to the head silenced Stalin’s critics. American Stalinists of all political parties use slander and bullying to silence their opponents.
Let’s take women’s rights as an example. In the 1960s, a growing number of women demanded equal pay for equal work and the right to enter freely into different professions. Eventually, and given the slow pace at which culture changes, rather quickly, others heard these demands and addressed them. The government, corporations, universities, and other such institutions changed their hiring and admissions practices. Women today do receive pay equal to that of men in the same job. (The key to any indiscrepency here, often overlooked, is the phrase “equal work”; the single man who works eighty hours a week at the law firm will surpass in output the married mother of two children in the same position.) In universities, women now earn more degrees, both at the undergraduate and graduate levels, than do men.
All well and good.
Now, however, some feminists have proclaimed men and women equal in every way, with no differences at all existing between them. Really? Even a casual observer of human anatomy can see the delusion behind this declaration. And if this absolute equality is true, that same observer might wonder, for example, why women and men don’t compete against one another in sports. The women’s high school track team doesn’t race against men. Women’s basketball teams don’t take to the court against men’s teams. Even on the golf course, men play men and women play women. The push to produce female combat infantry soldiers equivalent physically to male soldiers continues to fail. To say, then, that men and women are equal in all ways, that biology has nothing to do with the reality of who we are, is based on willed blindness, an attempt to wish away reality.
This same blindness extends to a multitude of positions being “debated” today: climate change, multiculturalism, transgenderism, open borders, gun control, vast areas of economics, the value of communism based on its historical record. Whether these positions are founded on reality or data is rarely debated. Instead, both their advocates and their opponents far too often espouse their positions by emotion rather than by reason, deriding those on the other side of the fence with smears and sneers because an appeal to reason cannot be mustered.
Another item: there is no “right side to history” except, perhaps, in retrospective. The Soviet Communists who murdered and starved vast numbers of kulaks in the Ukraine believed they were on the right side of history. Pol Pot and his gang of cutthroats marched hundreds of thousands into the killing fields of Cambodia, believing they were on the right side of history. The people in the mob demanding the death of the Christ were certain they were on the right side of history.
Hindsight, as the adage goes, is 20/20. It’s easy to look back at the men and women of the past and condemn them for their misdeeds. Bringing that same lens to bear on the present is a much more complicated proposition, and predicting the future is impossible. We who deck ourselves out in self-righteousness vis-à-vis the past may one day find our own ideas condemned in the courtroom of history. What, for example, will people five hundred years from now think of our abortion centers, given that our society was awash in birth control pills and prophylactics? What will they say of a nation unable to control its very borders? How will they judge a culture in which pornography and sex figure so largely? What will they think of a century whose wars and genocides have killed more people than in any other century in human history?
These are not rhetorical questions. In his The Story Of Civilization, Will Durant again and again cites these and other causes as explanations for the decline and fall of a civilization. So I intend my inquiry sincerely: What will our descendants think of us?
In the Catholic Church, as in many other Christian churches, the readings for Good Friday involve responses from the people in the pews. Here the people become the mob that, when asked by Pontius Pilate what they would have him do to Jesus, cry loudly, “Crucify him! Crucify him!”
Every year, saying those words with my fellow parishioners thrusts a blade of ice into my heart.
It’s then I wonder what I would have done had I lived that day in Jerusalem.
It’s then I can imagine myself shouting, “Crucify him! Crucify him!”
In reality, however, we would be persons of a certain time, place, and culture. Some few of us might rebel against the “politically correct” thinking of that era, but if so, we would be a minority, just as those in the above examples belonged to a minority. To the contrary, most of us would have shaken our fists at Christ, joined Nazi youth groups, revered Stalin as a god, and fought as Southerners to leave the Union. We know this is true because the great majority of people living in these historical eras did these very things. They bought into certain beliefs, ideas often subjected to little or no debate, and went along with the majority, sometimes willingly, sometimes at the point of a gun.
We do the same today. A belief of one sort or another takes hold in certain people, and they band together, make common cause, and call for change. Despite evidence tempering or even contradicting the ideas they advocate, the group pushes ahead, waving their banners and signs, shouting and shaking their fists, and labeling those opposed to them as fascists or politically incorrect, the latter a horrible term reminiscent of the show trials, the whispered objections, and the Gulags of Stalinism. A bullet to the head silenced Stalin’s critics. American Stalinists of all political parties use slander and bullying to silence their opponents.
Let’s take women’s rights as an example. In the 1960s, a growing number of women demanded equal pay for equal work and the right to enter freely into different professions. Eventually, and given the slow pace at which culture changes, rather quickly, others heard these demands and addressed them. The government, corporations, universities, and other such institutions changed their hiring and admissions practices. Women today do receive pay equal to that of men in the same job. (The key to any indiscrepency here, often overlooked, is the phrase “equal work”; the single man who works eighty hours a week at the law firm will surpass in output the married mother of two children in the same position.) In universities, women now earn more degrees, both at the undergraduate and graduate levels, than do men.
All well and good.
Now, however, some feminists have proclaimed men and women equal in every way, with no differences at all existing between them. Really? Even a casual observer of human anatomy can see the delusion behind this declaration. And if this absolute equality is true, that same observer might wonder, for example, why women and men don’t compete against one another in sports. The women’s high school track team doesn’t race against men. Women’s basketball teams don’t take to the court against men’s teams. Even on the golf course, men play men and women play women. The push to produce female combat infantry soldiers equivalent physically to male soldiers continues to fail. To say, then, that men and women are equal in all ways, that biology has nothing to do with the reality of who we are, is based on willed blindness, an attempt to wish away reality.
This same blindness extends to a multitude of positions being “debated” today: climate change, multiculturalism, transgenderism, open borders, gun control, vast areas of economics, the value of communism based on its historical record. Whether these positions are founded on reality or data is rarely debated. Instead, both their advocates and their opponents far too often espouse their positions by emotion rather than by reason, deriding those on the other side of the fence with smears and sneers because an appeal to reason cannot be mustered.
Another item: there is no “right side to history” except, perhaps, in retrospective. The Soviet Communists who murdered and starved vast numbers of kulaks in the Ukraine believed they were on the right side of history. Pol Pot and his gang of cutthroats marched hundreds of thousands into the killing fields of Cambodia, believing they were on the right side of history. The people in the mob demanding the death of the Christ were certain they were on the right side of history.
Hindsight, as the adage goes, is 20/20. It’s easy to look back at the men and women of the past and condemn them for their misdeeds. Bringing that same lens to bear on the present is a much more complicated proposition, and predicting the future is impossible. We who deck ourselves out in self-righteousness vis-à-vis the past may one day find our own ideas condemned in the courtroom of history. What, for example, will people five hundred years from now think of our abortion centers, given that our society was awash in birth control pills and prophylactics? What will they say of a nation unable to control its very borders? How will they judge a culture in which pornography and sex figure so largely? What will they think of a century whose wars and genocides have killed more people than in any other century in human history?
These are not rhetorical questions. In his The Story Of Civilization, Will Durant again and again cites these and other causes as explanations for the decline and fall of a civilization. So I intend my inquiry sincerely: What will our descendants think of us?
In the Catholic Church, as in many other Christian churches, the readings for Good Friday involve responses from the people in the pews. Here the people become the mob that, when asked by Pontius Pilate what they would have him do to Jesus, cry loudly, “Crucify him! Crucify him!”
Every year, saying those words with my fellow parishioners thrusts a blade of ice into my heart.
It’s then I wonder what I would have done had I lived that day in Jerusalem.
It’s then I can imagine myself shouting, “Crucify him! Crucify him!”