Pearls: Sometimes we get it right, sometimes not

EDITORIAL MUG: Matt Pearl

Before I was born, a lot happened, evidently.

The portions of history that have occurred since I began my life are fascinating, don’t get me wrong. But I fully concede that human beings did quite a few interesting things before I entered life in this world.

I wonder at times whether people really understand this principle. Oh, I know everyone basically grasps that time and events occurred before their births. They know that people lived and died, broken bread and fought wars, danced and mourned for the many, many generations that humankind has ruled the planet.

No, it’s more in the arena of thought and philosophy where we tend to get a little bit, well, narrow-minded. It’s an easy error to make: to become so enamored with the way we think and solve problems today that we forget that smart people have always been around.

When we examine any change or shifting in attitudes you can find in the modern world, and you’ll see a persistent few in any group whose desire seems to be to throw out every bit of traditional learning or thought. Nobody ever knew how to think about this issue or that problem before you and I came along to fix the world. Talk about narcissism. What kind of God complex does a person have to be carrying to believe that his ideas are better that the entirety of history combined?

That’s not to say that I don’t believe everything that is past was good or beneficial to our race. Ans I also do not wish to say (or imply) that I believe that all tradition is positive or meaningful. Just because a behavior , a practice or an idea of any sort is from the past does not automatically make it right.

Or wrong. Don’t forget that part.

From my current seat – middle-aged guy with mortgage, we’ll call it – I have witnessed an indiscriminate contempt, on the part of a few folks, for anything and everything that came before you and me in the human experience. This is the manifestation of what we already discussed, that there is a core of narcissism within our race that has caused some of us to believe that before we blessed this earth with our presence that nobody really had any good ideas.

If mankind had been so enlightened as the 21st century has become, then there would have been no wars. No religions. No violence or hate. Just a spinning globe populated by advanced thinkers sharing all the planets resources whilst the people sing harmoniously about our collective perfection. Sorry, but I’m not buying it.

I hate wars. I hate suffering. But I equally believe that the condition of humanity is such that these evils could not have been wholly avoided ver human history. Are some of us so repulsed by the stories of the previous generations of this earth that they are actually willing to abandon the lessons of yesterday?

How do you learn to prevent future wars if you don’t dedicate yourself to the study of our conflicts past?

How can you stop a dictator early if you don’t pay attention to the methods and actions of dictators from the past?

I hate slavery. But we have to teach it, right? When you don’t want something evil to return to the future, you educate yourself on how terrible it was in the past, don’t you?

It seems like an easy formula: I don’t want another civil war, so we should all learn abouth The Civil War, right? I don’t enjoy the thought of an economic collapse, so shouldn’t we focus upon mankind’s mistake that caused past collapses?

But if I chose to do as I earlier noted, and I assumed that until I reached adulthood in the mid-1990s that no good ideas had ever been formed, I’m really eliminating quite a few key pieces of history’s grand narrative, aren’t I? No Lincoln. No Jesus. No lessons from colonization. No scoldings about giving rise to demagogues. Nothing that happened before me.

Here’s the thing: everything that happened before me created the world into which I was born. And mankind’s actions since are creating a present and future. We get it right sometimes, and we get it wrong. But history doesn’t start with me, and the past cannot become irrelevant – not if we want to learn from it.

Matt Pearl owns and operates The Tri-County Ledger.