Judging Ancestors: The Distortions of Hindsight (A Cannibal Story)

An earlier edition of this post appeared in my blog, The Golden Egg Genealogist, in April 2019. Genohistorians are encouraged to see the link to our discussions of “the now of then” in recent posts. A “Call to Action” and “Zotero Notes” have been added to the original post.

Hindsight will never be 20/20. The further back we look, the fuzzier the view gets. In looking back past our own personal experience—that journey we call “studying history”—we become strangers in a foreign land. Observing what we see there can be immensely valuable. Evaluating the effectiveness of our ancestors’ choices can enhance wisdom. Morally judging ancestors through the eyes of the 21st century, however, is a destructive misuse of hindsight.

Studying our long-dead ancestors, we will sometimes find them doing things that disgust, disturb, or even anger us. We should certainly acknowledge and process those feelings. We should question the hows and whys. Most importantly we should ask, “How do we prevent this from happening again?” And if we have inherited a broken world from them, we should ask, “How can I leave it better than I found it?”

But what do we do with the pressure we might feel to morally judge our ancestors?  And by “judge,” I mean that we assume a position of moral superiority. We say, in essence, “I would not have done this awful thing they did.” But can we say that?  Had we been born with their exact DNA, their parents, teachers, preachers, community, economic conditions, and laws, can we honestly say we would have made different choices? Of course not. We would have been them.

Are we handling history responsibly, then, when we judge their human worth based on 21st-century morals? Or is arrogantly ignorant hindsight creating a damaged mythology?

Where we can agree on judging ancestors

We can likely agree that:

–Our dead ancestors are not here to testify as to the charges laid against them.

–They will never have a jury of their peers from among us.

–They were as different from each other as we are from each other, rendering broad stereotypes unfair and usually wrong, when applied to any one person.

–They were raised in their world, not ours.

–Our world has changed dramatically from the world they inhabited.

Likely, we can also agree that by 21st-century standards many ancestors could be accused of being:

–backward

–barbaric

–misogynistic

–superstitious

–treacherous

–bloodthirsty

–racist

–rapacious

–imperialistic

–genocidal

–fill in the blank

Given the problems of hindsight distortion, though, are we seeing them with historical clarity? Are we able to see them as they saw themselves and each other? Were they moral by their own world’s accepted standards? Answering that will tell us something truly valuable about them and about morality, more broadly.

If we are the judged ancestors

In hopes of getting a helpful perspective on this, let’s flip things around. We are now the ancestors who were walking the planet way back in 2020. As descendants tend to do, ours have found the flaws we never saw in ourselves. Here is a completely plausible possibility:

They are revolted and ashamed that we ate the meat of dead animals.

Uh-oh. Ninety-five percent of us just got nervous, myself included. Surely not, we think. How could anyone fault us for eating meat? That would be ridiculous!

Would it? From whose perspective?

The imagined timeline of our future demise

How could the world change so much, you might wonder? Here is a possible timeline, starting about the time I will be dead and eligible to be judged in absentia.

Imagine, in the year…

…2050    The World Health Organization has declared the consumption of meat produced from animals in captivity to be a serious threat to world health. People are dying, as are animals.

…2075    U.S. insurance companies have drastically increased premiums to insure people who consume meat, and corporations have begun to use meat consumption as a disqualifying factor on job applications. Meat consumption begins to plummet.

…2100    Meat consumption has disappeared almost completely from urban areas of the U.S., and only poor rural families still indulge. They are parodied on “Saturday Night Live” and ridiculed as “meat-eaters.” Old people who used to eat meat will no longer talk about it. Family reunion videos and photographs of long-ago chicken leg consumption are being destroyed or carefully hidden by embarrassed families.

…2125    Society now generally sees meat eating as not only unhealthy and repulsive but as immoral. It is an abomination committed upon precious animals. The descendants of vegans have created the Sons & Daughters of the Vegans lineage society, celebrating their proud heritage. The descendants of meat-eaters have rewritten their family stories, eliminating all memory that their family consumed meat. They work for years to find a provable vegan line in their family tree, for acceptance into the illustrious society—their ticket to important networking and personal pride.

…2150   Meat-eating becomes a felony and butchering animals for food is a capital offense. New generations of passionate young Americans are demanding that their society own up to the horrors of their ancestors’ butchery. They reject the label “meat eaters” as not harsh enough. True activists must use the term “carnivore” or be labeled backward or insensitive. People begin to write confessional books about their shock and shame to discover evidence that their own ancestors were carnivores.

…2175    Yet another new generation derides its parents’ generation for casually referring to an ancestor as simply a carnivore, “like it was nothing.” “They were ‘Cannibals,’ with a capital C,” they cry in outrage. If a publisher agrees to publish a biography of someone from our time, circa 2020, their Cannibalism has to be a key theme of the book. They will not allow us to be treated as valuable people, because to them, that would justify our murder of animals. And when someone says, “But they didn’t see it as immoral,” others cite vegan moralist literature of the 1990s and say, “See? They did know. They are responsible.”

Did they get it right, my fellow Cannibals?

If our descendants come to despise meat consumption, history may prove them wise, and the healthier for it. Perhaps they will even be on the moral high ground here.

But what about their handling of history, as laid out above? Let me ask a few key questions of the Cannibals among us:

–Do we consistently read the writings of those who oppose meat eating?

–Do we feel moral guilt as we eat meat?

–Are we losing sleep over the animals slaughtered to feed our habit?

–Is it fair that all that we have done in life will be eclipsed by our Cannibalism, when viewed by our descendants in hindsight—that no story of us can be told without making our meat-eating habits the major defining measure of our moral worth?

I am guessing most of us said “No” to the above. What about our descendants?

–Do they know us at all?

–Do they understand our world?

–Do they have a history worth reading?

If they do not attempt to understand our world as we knew it, their history of us becomes little more than arrogant ignorance—no matter how passionately the history writers feel their moral outrage and no matter how right they were to abolish the practice of meat-eating. History becomes a device to serve present-day self-righteousness, rather than to comprehend and fairly interpret the past.

Back to the present

Let me turn this back around on us.

If we of 2020 do not attempt to understand our ancestors’ world as they knew it, the “history” we are writing is also arrogant ignorance. A mislabeled fable.

I do not suggest we are to declare our ancestors innocent of anything, for that is also a moral judgment. I do not suggest we are to justify their decisions or actions. Nor am I suggesting that the present generation is required to honor or put tax dollars to the maintenance of public monuments to people who are no longer icons of civic pride.

I only suggest that, if we take up the task of studying the past—if we claim to be “historians” of any sort—we check our moral judgments at the door, put on our labcoats, and try to do it with a sincere goal to understand what was.

Perhaps we should keep this as a standing maxim:

Do unto your ancestors as you would have your descendants do unto you.

Call to Action

Consider whether you have discarded an ancestor from your focus because you consider him unworthy or you find her despicable. I have met some genealogists who have completely shut down their research on a family line when slaveholding was discovered. What might you learn if you take a step back and approach the study like a scientist? Surely scientists observe smelly and vile things for the greater good. Give that person or that line another look, with an eye toward understanding.

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Accessing URLs Quickly

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