You are not entitled to feel proud of your ancestors
Park MacDougald writes on Twitter:
“The objection of some Southerners to the recent and crudely partisan attempt to transform their ancestors into local iterations of the quasi-theological evil represented in the popular imagination by Nazi Germany is not, in fact, a form of aggression”
I think that Park is wrong in what he says. building a society on perpetual bondage is a form of theological evil, especially as everyone else is stopping doing it, and especially as I do not see slavery, especially racial slavery, as many rungs in the ladder of evil below genocide. The South, as partisans of slavery in a world in which it was dying represented a world-historic attempt to secure and advance what may be the single greatest evil in human history- comparable even to the evil of war.
But that’s not the point I’ve come to make. Park’s tweet seems to me to be part of a rhetorical trend I’ve been seeing a lot lately- the demand that one has a right to be proud of their ancestors. This tweet to be honest, isn’t a particularly clear example of what I’m talking about, because Park isn’t really saying much here. He just says It’s not aggression to oppose the portrayal of these people as evil.
But I’ve seen numerous people on the Twitter right say “how dare you try to make me shun my own ancestors”. What is asserted is, in effect, the right to defend one’s ancestors – unconditional on any facts about them. This (to me) strange demand isn’t unique to right wingers or the west, but without the rich philosophical ideas that have been developed in other cultures to understand and contextualise ancestor reverence, it takes on a vulgar form among western conservatives. Remember, these are specific and real people, if I say, demanded the right to believe everyone who lived in my hometown was a good person, and refused to believe any evidence to the contrary, people would think I was a nut. The same principle applies here.
Since the right to regard one’s ancestors as good is asserted irrespective of the facts of an individual’s case, the claimaint treats it as a tautology that their ancestors were good. In a flawed world of flawed people, insisting that one has the right to think well of one’s ancestors regardless of specific facts or identities makes thinking well of one’s ancestors free of content.
The most charitable reconstruction of this ethic is that it is a mindless and narcissistic affirmation of the self- what my ancestors did was good, because they were my ancestors, and because what they did led to me. On this interpretation, the affirmation that what your ancestors did is good amounts to little more than screaming “I LIKE ME”. Sometimes this is spelt out explicitly, like the rightwinger on my feed who said words to the effect of “your ancestors did what they had to do to make you”. One is reminded of European great houses that made implausible claims to have been founded by prophets and Greek heroes- this was never about glorifying their real flesh and blood ancestors. It was about glorifying themselves.
The second most charitable interpretation is that it equates goodness with Darwinian success. They must have been good because they have surviving descendants. Presumably, on this account, Attila the Hun and Ramses II were moral heroes. There’s no nobility in the vanquished here. Not only is this outlook immoral it’s also tasteless. It’s not Nietzschean, it’s American in the most vulgar sense: ‘We love a winner’.
The least charitable interpretation and the one I suspect is accurate, is that it represents simply a determination to believe something irrespective of the evidence. I wonder, is a belief, that you formed from sheer will, a belief that isn’t responsive to evidence, a belief that has no relationship with the bit of the world it purports to describe, is such a belief really a belief at all? At least about the subject that it claims to be a belief about? It seems more like a Peacock’s tail feathers than a claim about when you usually eat breakfast.
These options all seem to me to be almost cruel to one’s ancestors. They were people, yet on this view, they’re just ancestors because the traits they actually had are wholly irrelevant to the role they play in your mental life. They are an empty symbol of benignity, stripped of any consideration except passive-positive. They have died a second time, their memory transformed into a motif and all features except ANCESTOR:::GOOD. This reminds me, in a way, of right-wingers who claim to be Christian but have never engaged with any of the things Jesus or the Bible say. They have taken Christianity, ripped out its guts, flung them away, and worn the remains as trophies for BASED OLD THING.
What these conservatives are doing is exhibiting bad faith in the Sartrean sense. Adopting a fixed essence to deny the reality that they need to live in the world and make their own choices. Put another way, they’re engaging in identity politics. Better to honor your ancestors who were, after all, human, by living a fully human life with the responsibility that involves.
I and you alike, and pretty much everyone else, am the child of prophets, racists, activists, rebels, authoritarians, murderers, rapists, poets, God-kings, scientists, bishops, wise women, great hunters, outcasts, oracles, philosophers, thieves, conquerors (but I repeat myself) and so on. Statistically, my specific ascendants probably include Atilla the Hun, Charlemagne, Publius Ovidius Naso, Alfred Magnus, Socrates and Mohammed. I don’t feel the need to feel anything about these people as a total group, though I have thoughts on many of them. I have, or at least aspire to have, the courage to face this world as me. I find it much more wondrous and terrible to think my ancestors encompassed the full sweep of human experiences possible in their times. They have no collective essence, and even less do I have an essence that flows from them. Some would have loved me and some would have hated me, and vice versa. Now I live my life and make my moves, as they made theirs.
I endorse this by and large, but I think it's missing one possible charitable angle which is harder to be entirely unsympathetic too; namely the fact that "your ancestors were *bad*" is too oft conflated with damnatio memoriae. If you don't insist that your ancestors were good, those meanie wokesters will destroy the statues and burn the books and forbid you from passing down their stories onto your children, as your grandparents passed them onto you. And that would be an evil thing. I am sympathetic to the view that there is such a thing as a duty of remembrance; that you owe your ancestors to pass down whatever stories have survived down the decades, to salvage their heirlooms, to spare them a thought now and again. Other cultures ritualise it more than the West, but I think the impulse is basic and human, and an important moral intuition for many.
This doesn't in itself justify asserting that your ancestors were perfect. As you say yourself, when taken too far that sort of assertion ends up doing just as much damage to honest remembrance as vilification. But I think some of the over-the-top defensiveness is a reaction not just to attempted (and factually-grounded) *vilification*, but to attempted *erasure*, and that makes it feel a lot less arbitrary and self-centered. It starts with "We want to remember our history; I want to flower my great-great-grandfather's grave, because his son promised him he would, and his grandson promised his son, and so on down to me". (The promise doesn't need to be explicit if it's a societal expectation.) The somebody rocks up and goes "No, stop, how dare you flower a confederate soldier's grave. Don't you know the confederates were evil?" And if their own principles were straight in their head the mourner ought to be able to say "it's not nothing to do with good and evil, it's just a ritual, a *duty*", but that's a hard line to argue without sounding like a twat even though it's the correct one. So instead they say "Evil? Evil? No he wasn't. Let me flower the damn grave."
Of course our ancestors are a mixed bag. Of course you are correct we look to our ancestors at times to glorify ourselves rather than them. But the reasons to do so might not be the same for all. To some the ancestor can symbolize their own feelings of being adorned to have power. For others is to vacate power to those that tell them their ancestors were more powerful than them. I tend to see the problem as people who feel stripped of their individuality being much more susceptible to follow the leader---anyone who tells them their own sense of loss is due to someone can spark a followship. There is not much difference between the preacher promising doom to your enemies and the authoritarian politician doing the same. Both thrive on dividing people into discordant camps to insure their own power, and yet this somehow never fully satisfies the people who feel left out because they have to continue to be left out. If given the promised respect then they will no longer be the necessary followers, so to lead by division means there must always be an enemy. I believe Orwell captured the concept fully in 1984.
https://ken9yvonne.substack.com/p/a-few-thoughts-on-life-and-learning-4cd?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
https://ken9yvonne.substack.com/p/a-few-thoughts-on-life-and-learning-ecf?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
In the difference I discuss the difference in genetic diversity and ethnicities. Ethnicities shift genetic diversity into ethnic conflicts that leaders can identify as us-or-not us.