A Brief Reflection on Ancestors and Descendants

When we reflect on the past, we are admonished not to judge our historical forebears by the moral standards of our own time. It sometimes cannot be helped, however. We recoil at those who took part in the institution of slavery, or the subjection of women, or any number of crimes against humanity, and we disdain those who stood by in craven or complacent acceptance of the practices we now rightly abhor. We imagine ourselves placed within their milieu, thinking to ourselves, “If I had been in Germany during the war, I would have resisted. I would’ve been like Oskar Schindler.” and “If I had lived in antebellum America, I would’ve been an abolitionist.” Would we have indeed?

Many of us who’ve spent time researching family history, especially those Americans of European heritage from the southern part of the country, will be familiar with the unsettling experience of browsing records of wills and finding that an ancestor had bequeathed human beings as “property” to their children. To us this is heinous. To them it was banal. Many younger Germans must have no doubt experienced similar feelings regarding relations who lived during the time of World War 2.

We may look askance at these ancestors, wishing they had instead been more of a Garrison or Schindler, standing firm against the immorality of their time, or at least wishing that they had not been active participants in it. But they were who they were—common folk who perhaps simply did what their peers did, without stopping long to reflect upon the ethics of the common institutions or practices of their time. Or, perhaps they recognized these moral wrongs, but for lack of certain personal virtues remained complicit, or remained silent.

Would we have done any better in their shoes? Would we have had the courage to stand against heinous moral wrongs when they are commonly accepted and normalized? Would we even have had the capability to recognize them as such? The truth is that these questions are poorly framed. They are not really counterfactuals after all. We should rather ask, “Are we doing any better? Do we have the penetration to recognize what is unethical within our society's common practices, and the courage to do something about it?” For history has not ended, and good has not triumphed over evil. The history of the future is being written now, and we are the ones writing it, with our own contributions, large or small.

It bears considering what future generations of humans will make of us. What sociocultural institutions and practices of today will our descendants look back upon with similar regret? When family genealogy albums are perused by our great-great-great grandchildren, and they read out what remains of the records of our doings, whose foresight and moral rectitude will have stood the test of time and ethical progress? One thing is certain—if we wish to become the good ancestor, we will have to do the intellectual work.