Reading Robert’s History of the World:
When we talk about ancient history, we don’t really pass judgment. Nobody seems to take the time to condemn the Inca for sacrificing children. Or to tell us that the Huns were too warlike. It would seem petty and displaced, no?
This, to me, is an argument against the religious definition of morality. Morality is not a code of standards against which all behavior may be judged. If it were, we would be perfectly ready to say whether the way Homo erectus conducted itself was “good” or “bad.” Morality is in fact really meaningful to us only when the possibility of choice still exists; we apply it to past events only when their consequences for the present can be identified.
Moral principles and moral discernment are useful because they guide each individual to choose actions that are beneficial. But moral judgment in the religious mold – the sort that, in God’s hands, purportedly decides which prize you get in the afterlife – has no real application when practiced by humans. We might well have intra-societal reasons for pointing out whose behavior we think is “good” and who is “bad,” but it’s disingenuous to say that these reasons are “because we have a moral standard, and we call it like we see it.” Otherwise we’d be equally willing to judge things that happened today and in 1200 BC. But we are not.
This is why it is so disheartening that certain political elements in the US place such an emphasis on a rhetoric of unequivocal moral judgment. It’s true, the Republicans take a pretty strong stance on terrorists, but they’re soft on the Aztecs.
The only real “stance” that can be taken on anything, by a government or an individual, is one of policy. Moral judgment can at its best be an aid to this end, but it has no merits of its own. Obviously, since there can be no policy toward the distant past, there can be no judgment of it either.
The preceding doesn’t make much of a case; it just records my thought. I already agree with me so I don’t need a lot of convincing.
Of course, the mindset that the Inca needn’t be reprimanded because they’ve been gone for 500 years may well be a new one, or specific to my culture. Books from a century ago often surprise me by managing to hold out a judgmental or superior tone about the oddest things. So that pretty much nullifies my little argument.
Not sure I stand by any of it anyway. It flickered through my head while I was reading about ancient Egypt. Maybe I don’t agree with me after all.
Maybe nothing is absolute and nothing is permanent.
I’m not going to comment on current government policies, but I totally disagree with the statement that people don’t feel a need to pass moral judgment on events from past history. I’ve taken bucket loads of history classes, and I can certainly testify that 21st century man loves to moralize just as much as 19th or 20th century man did. I think part of why they may seem unusually quiet about, say, the Huns, is that the morality of the Huns is no longer in question. We’ve already passed judgment on them, and we all agree. Huns = bad. Mongols = bad. Vikings = cool, but bad. There’s no point in writing history tracts about how morally bankrupt hordes of barbarian pillagers were. Moral questions only come up when someone wants to buck the existing trend. I could write a book about how Caligula was just terribly misunderstood, and that might inspire some people to start writing about the obvious—that, yes, he was a crazy, immoral murderer. It’s interesting that you bring up the Aztecs, because that IS one ancient civilization whose morality is still hotly debated today.