Sins of the Fathers

“It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.”
  - Abraham Lincoln

I see there is a move in Nova Scotia to denigrate one of the founders of the province, Edward Cornwallis.  People want to remove his statue from downtown Halifax and change the name of the park where his statue is found.  His sin:  he once put a bounty on the head of indigenous people.  Now the fact that he did this in 1749 doesn’t seem to matter.  The fact that almost every other colonial governor in North America was forced to do the same thing does not seem to matter either.  By today’s standards he sinned so he must be expurged. He did put the bounty on – but only on Mi'kmaq warriors who actually fought against the British and it applied to warriors that were either killed or captured. Unlike other Governors before and after him, however, Cornwallis did not target women and children. So it was not, as some assert, a bounty on all indigenous people including women and children.  He did it for the simple purpose of protecting the new British colonists.  The Mi'kmaq of Nova Scotia had been attacking settlers throughout the colony because they did not recognize a treaty that had been signed earlier.  

The problem with this trend to mete out the justice of today on people of the past is one of the most ignorant and arrogant fallacies perpetrated by our current generation.  And it is fairly new trend.  Almost every notable person of the past could be faulted for some part of their lives.  George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Robert E. Lee owned slaves.  So did Popes and Kings in Europe for many centuries.  But it was neither illegal nor frowned upon in those days.  Almost every early American and Canadian colony initially tried to peacefully coexist with the indigenous peoples, but the differences in their cultures made hostilities almost inevitable.

 

We also have the reverse type of “justice” being carried out, the deification of those who were originally condemned by the men of the past.  The biggest example of this in Canada is the case of Louis Riel.  He was, of course, condemned by the men of his era for leading Metis revolts against the settlers in the Prairie Provinces.  But in recent years we have seen new “trials” on television of this same rebel and of course he is fully exonerated . . . by today’s standards, as are most of the people who are subjects of this reverse justice.

The problem with all this re-imagining of justice is that we are trying to judge people that we know nothing about in terms of the times they lived and the experiences that they had.  We do not know the attitudes of the time, nor the prejudices that prevailed.  We do not understand the relatively short and often difficult life that these people endured.  We don’t understand their fears and superstitions.  And even when we read about their lives, we don’t really understand why they did these things or the decisions they had to make.  We are even ignorant of most of the laws that prevailed at their time.  Thus we condemn them by our own blindness.  At the same way that we would not expect them to know or understand our own times, laws and attitudes, we somehow expect them to know and understand ours.  Arrogance!  

“Parents were invented to make children happy by giving them something to ignore.”
  - Ogden Nash

We don’t even have to go back very far to see this in our own lives.  We hear our children say, “But Dad, you just don’t understand!”  Then as parents we realize that they don’t understand us and how we were brought up and educated.  We see that the conditions of our youth are not understood by them.  We call it the generation gap and brush it off.  But when we try and judge history we must understand that there is a generation gap that is ten or a hundred time as wide as the one between us and our offspring.  There was recently news of a woman who at 116 years and several months old was now considered the oldest person alive, and probably the last person alive who was born in the 19^th century.  Do you think any of us really understand the world she was born into?

So be careful when you fall into the trap of condemning the people of the past because some day, a future generation will be judging you.

“The stupid neither forgive nor forget; the naive forgive and forget; the wise forgive but do not forget.”
  - Thomas Szasz