Friday, February 1, 2019

'The Feelings of One Age'

We are experiencing a revival of the time-honored practice of erasing history. Stalin had former comrades he no longer favored, and in some cases had already shot in the head, airbrushed from photographs. Lately, censors of the past have toppled statues, pried plaques from the wall and painted over offending murals. Their rationale for vandalism is the unenlightened waywardness of our ancestors, who simply refused to behave like us. ....
Related, Philip Jenkins, today, on "Slavery, History, and Relativism":
At this moment, you (and I) are almost certainly doing, saying, believing, or thinking something that, in the eyes of sensible and educated people in 2050, will appear morally reprehensible and utterly wrong, and especially for thoughtful religious believers. What exactly is that? I don’t know, as I don’t know where political opinion or moral debate will stand in twenty or thirty years time. By the same token, you and I are today failing to protest or condemn something that generally appears acceptable today, but which in another two or three decades will seem far beyond the moral pale. Again, what is that? Personally, I have no idea.

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