Hacker News Reader

Comment by thesumofall | Hacker News Reader

Personally, it feels much different to know that my own ancestors did something horribly wrong than some other completely unknown people. Yes, this makes no sense but I guess it is human nature.

Knowing that, I believe that it is critical that we all reflect why people not so different to us could possibly commit whatever crime they did

View on HN

It's not about past crimes and past wrongs; it's more about rising moral standards and rising expectations of peace and comfort.

The past was just a lot more brutal than the present. Judgement should be in that context.

Look again. In different ways, moral standards have fallen.

You are going to have a very hard time selling that theory. The world is a vastly more fair and less savage place now then at any other point in human history.

I'm sure folks in Syria would disagree.

That's the result of technology, not moral standards. People are the same as they've always been, and I'd describe the moral evolution as a random walk, more than anything.

That's an extremely broad statement. Do you really know that much history?

Agreed. And yet: some nation-scale crimes are not that far in the past (or are being committed right now). On a tangent, it is also interesting to reflect what our children will think of our times when they’ve grown up. Will they e.g., see our lack of action on climate change as moral failure? Or even more interesting: will they see failure where we don’t even see an issue nowadays?

I don't think you can make the historical case that the past was uniformly more brutal or unjust than the present. I think it would be more accurate to say that in our current place and time, our current evolution of moral standards and expectations looks unfavorably (and rightfully so!) on human slavery, but there's no guarantee that we or others aren't regressing on other issues. That's probably a cause for humility as future generations will almost certainly look back on us and wonder how we could have tolerated those things that they will consider injustices.

This article contains actually interesting not much known history. It is more about learning about past and ditching away self serwing comforting tales. People want to talk about noble heroes going into adventures and celebrate them, but really really don't want to know about ugly stuff that was inherent to all that.

But when you accept ugly stuff for what it was and past leaders for who they were, you will find also a lot of lower level people standing in their way, arguing with them, becoming poorer or even risking their lives because they don't want to participate. Who are also interesting and complex.

We can judge Nazi and Stalin in their historical context, just like people from any other period. Just like slavery, they did not appeared via divine intervention of past - they appeared because of human decisions, activity, ideologies and struggle for power.

I agree with such reflection, but a lot of people want to use slavery as an indictment against white people generally, even those whose ancestors took no part in the slave trade. There is certainly some truth to the claims that such white people benefitted transitively, but the error margins are gargantuan.

But in the states, white people still get the benefits of slavery and black folks still pay the for the costs. Why should that be allowed?

My parents were forced out of their country and came to the US in 1956. So..?

and What? How does your parents immigration affect US history? Do you think paying for true cost of slavery means you will have to give up your house or bank account?

Unless that country happens to now currently be a part of the USA, it has no relevance.

White people in the U.S. don't get the benefits from slavery, they benefit from a severely broken social fabric.

"Slavery" is a racial institution, and racial institutions do not exist in the U.S. But a social divide that somehow puts people of colour on the receiving end of society is an effect of the free market, and to be against that is to be a socialist, because everyone is responsible for their own success, with society having little to no bearing on that; that's the American dream.

To finally abolish slavery, institute universal healthcare, make high quality education available for everyone, create a social fabric that is inclusive. But that is not the American way: every success and every failure has to be self-made, and to think otherwise is communism and an attack on American values.

I agree with the last part, but not the first. As a class, white folks got capital, property, education, opportunities, and more—all denied to black people. I have to think that amassing of resources have an effect today.

Blacks aren’t denied opportunity in the US; some of them live in low-opportunity areas due to effects of historical slavery (too many but far from all). These problems are hard to solve even for those with great intentions. The distinction is important.

My apologies. In my post I might have been more sarcastic than I intended, which notoriously doesn't carry well over the written medium.

The effects of slavery have been, in my opinion, been carried over to modern times in the U.S., but everyone on the right side of the divide hides behind "equal opportunity" and "personal responsibility". The defence is that everyone with an equal amount of assets has the same opportunities, which might be true, but complete disregards the historical opportunities of people to have amassed those assets in the first place resulting in the narrative that the U.S. isn't racist in nature, it's just that its ideals of equality just happens to put people of colour at a disadvantage so everyone not affected can shrug it off, secure in the knowledge that they really earned their wealth, and that those less fortunate should just work harder. The system is fair, after all, since it worked out for them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com