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Edmund's avatar

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."

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ken taylor's avatar

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.

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