Time and Place for Morals

Think about your past self and some of the things you’ve done. There’s some cringe in there. But, we change, get better, and do new things with additional time. Then we look back on what we used to do and wish we’d only known better.

I look back on some past things I wrote and wonder if I knew anything at all. Why would I write that way, and how could I reach that conclusion?

But things should be viewed when they happened, not applying what we know now to ourselves back then.

Let’s explore.

For example, if I looked at my writing when I was a kid, it would be less developed than when I write now. But I’ve had years of doing it. And new resources became available to me, and I practiced.

Next, let’s tie that from ourselves to us as a group. If you wanted to go from the East Coast to California in 1900, you’d prepare your horse for the long ride. If you rode that horse across the U.S. in 2022, people would ask why you didn’t fly or drive. Oh, I just love the months of saddle rash and eating dirt.

That’s a fun exercise, but this applies to our morals and the environment we’re in too. Let’s take Moses from the Bible; in Numbers 31, Moses, a prophet and example of how to live, instructs and encourages female captives’ enslavement. More, the Bible doesn’t discourage slavery and was used in the American South to justify it. And at that time, everyone enslaved people – it’s how things worked. They’d talk about the morality of enslaving people compared to outright killing them.

To be clear, I condemn slavery. And everyone reading this after 2022 agrees. But our environment enables us to be this way. One hundred years ago, it would have been controversial. Should we tear down every Moses depiction and burn the Bible because they profligated slavery? If so, we’d condemn everyone who has lived before us and wait for our condemnation for those who come after.

What do I mean? Let’s look at current practices which could fall out of favor—for instance, eating meat. There’s a groundswell of meat replacement options, both because it’s good for the environment and humane. Meat comes from slaughterhouses, where we breed and raise animals as food. Have you looked at veal factories, where we restrict baby cows from moving to keep the meat tender?

Go forward 200 years, and let’s say everyone eats greens fallen from plants and human-made food because you’d have to be some monster to eat another animal. Would humans want to be eaten by animals or other humans? No, so why would we do it to cows, pigs, and chickens? Maybe there was a rising tide where meat-eaters became outnumbered and condemned for their malice. And people tore down statues and buildings of carnivores.

Back to today, is anyone who eats meat immoral? Are these terrible people? If so, posterity won’t think of us too well.

But we should be judged by our environment; 86% of the population eats meat. That’s not to say don’t celebrate people leading a better way; they should. But if eating meat is the worst thing you can do, you could still be in the top 15% of morality during your time. For example, if you championed stopping human trafficking and discrimination against others, are you still an evil person because you enjoy steak?

Barbara Tuchman, a historian and author, said:

“To qualify as folly for this inquiry, the policy adopted must meet three criteria: it must have been perceived as counter-productive in its own time, not merely by hindsight. This is important, because all policy is determined by the mores of its age. “Nothing is more unfair,” as an English historian (D.A. Winstanley) has well said, “than to judge men of the past by the ideas of the present. Whatever may be said of morality, political wisdom is certainly ambulatory.”

To avoid judging by present-day values, we must take the opinion of the time and investigate only those episodes whose injury to self-interest was recognized by contemporaries.”

Therefore, it’s good that we grow and get better. Or we’d still be brushing our teeth with sugar. Actually, dentists are still on the fence. But it’s essential to be compassionate to our past selves – we didn’t know what we didn’t know.

I test my actions against the shining rules – do to others what I want to be done to me, and don’t do to others what I do not want to be done to me. But I’m sure I miss things at which history will frown.

Time lets us discover better and better answers. So let’s be easy with our red pen on those who couldn’t have had that answer.