“It is the mission of history to make our fellow beings acceptable to us.” Jose Ortega Y Gasset
I think most people don’t realize how different our ‘history’ is now that we have an omnivorous media and access to so many documents we didn’t use to have. Now we can write histories that make people and actions in the past not look acceptable at all. But that wasn’t how it always was.
Drawing © 2022 Marty Coleman | napkindad.com
>Yes, I do understand what you mean. I think the farther away the events are in the past the less we judge and the more we see the events in light of political strategy or big movements of mankind over time. Look at the slaughters talked about in the Old Testament for example. They are more often looked at as steps on the road to the Jews finding their promised land rather than the innocent murder of thousands of people. The history has made it more acceptable.
Larger empires of the time did the same thing and we see it that way as well.
But look at current events (the last 100 years). The holocaust, rwanda, uganda, Serbia, they aren’t seen as just a moment in the big movement of political life on the planet. They are seen as specific genocides(and rightly so)and as such they aren’t nearly as acceptable to us as those same types of events from the distant past.
>i don’t know…. It is pretty ingrained in most religions and mythologies that humans have done something wrong… had a great fall at some point that made us do the “bad and greedy things” that we do. Do you know what I mean? It depends on what kind of history you are talking about: there is textbook, which for any given nation usually portrays everyone else as bad, but them and their allies as good. But then there is a deeper, more subtle history that is found in religion, mythologies, literature, art, etc that tells us that humans have major problems…