Many people seem to be filled with discord about
events and circumstances in history that happened long before they were born. Perhaps
the most (in)famous is the call for slavery reparations, alongside behaviour
conducted during the British Empire, and things of that nature. Now, it’s true
that not everything about our human past, including the British Empire, was
rosy (welcome to humanity), and it’s also true that some things that happened
in the distant past decades before you were born could go on to have some
effect on your family’s current situation. But in virtually every other sense
that’s conceivable to you, things that happened in the distant past, decades
before you were born, have caused you no personal harm at all. In fact, it’s
difficult to think of anything that happened before your parents were born that
had any discernible harm to you, alive today – and even more so if you
understand that you have a lot of control regarding how you reflect on such
events.
Yet, strangely, society is awash with people who are convinced that the distant past is responsible for all sorts of their perceived woes, victim status and injustices. If you choose to focus on the distant past in this way, you are likely to be ensnared by a very unhelpful narcissism, attention-seeking and victim-mentality that is impeding your chance of being the person you could be.
If that’s you, not only should you desist from all this regretful preoccupation, in actual fact, I think it’s highly probable – given the socio-cultural butterfly effect and the fragility of causal chains – that if history hadn’t happened exactly as it did, you wouldn’t be here to think about it. Such is the precarious contingency on which the precise historical narrative rests, that if you altered any of the small details, it would have such a profound knock-on effect that everything about the present would look different, and you wouldn’t have been born. Even if you don’t buy the proposition at that level of tiny detail (and I think you should), certainly if any past event significant enough to be retained in your historical knowledge had not occurred, the specific combination of genetic material that led to you or me would not exist. Therefore, strange as it may seem, you cannot claim to have been harmed by past significant events because their absence would preclude your existence altogether.
One issue you may have with the above is past harms, like historical institutional racism, that might have brought systemic disadvantages affecting a group (black people, for example) due to historical injustices. But strangely enough – although past injustices should serve as a catalyst for us to not repeat such mistakes, and to treat each other as well as we can, for you to retain the argument that you’ve been personally harmed by the distant past, there must be a coherent scenario in which you could possibly exist in a better state due to that injustice not occurring - and there isn’t one. That is, even if a past group was systematically disadvantaged, individual members of that group today would not exist but for the specific combination of genetic material that led to their birth, and the unique history that led to their parents’ sexual union. Thus, the claim of personal harm or entitlement to feel individual harm is undermined by the argument of non-identity without such a past, and that many seemingly obvious present individual harms are not harms at all if the alternative is individual non-existence.
To be clear, we can all see that some historical injustices have created slight systemic disadvantages - such as wealth gaps and educational disparities - that persist today in certain regions, where individuals could claim that they are still enduring the consequences of institutionalised disadvantage. And this does mean that some individuals have to work harder to seize opportunities, to break through barriers and to address their consequences. But since your existence is contingent on the very events you claim harmed you, and since harm requires a comparison to a revisionist, counterfactual state where you exist in better conditions, do you really want to live a life where you’re constantly burdened, upset, defined, and limited by your interpretation of the past? A much more fulfilling path is to live with wonder and gratitude for your improbable existence, to rise above any inherited hardship, and to shape a life that is grounded not in grievance, but in growth, positive agency, and the exhilaration of personal responsibility that aims to make your part of the world a better place.
