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> What I am saying is that (if you're American) you are reaping the benefits of a society that exists as it does because it dominated a continent, destroying mu
by 13thLetter 11y ago
> What I am saying is that (if you're American) you are reaping the benefits of a society that exists as it does because it dominated a continent, destroying much of the existing landscape and natural inhabitants.
Every society on Earth exists as it does because it destroyed much of the previously existing landscape and natural inhabitants, most definitely including the Native American societies. If you read Over the Edge of the World, a fascinating book about Magellan's voyage around the globe, you'll find that as he traveled the straits at the southern tip of South America -- the most miserable, cold, dreary, and awful environment that could be imagined -- he met a miserable and starving aboriginal tribe: a tribe that, it turns out, had been pushed all the way to the tip of Tierra del Fuego by succeeding waves of "native" migration across the land bridge from Siberia to Alaska. The sin of the United States is not original with the United States: it is the sin of every society.
> But some level of responsibility nonetheless (and when adding up the small responsibility of each current member the responsibility to do something as a group to rectify past wrongs may become quite large indeed).
You could smuggle an elephant inside that parenthetical clause. For starters, how specifically is one to "rectify past wrongs" that were committed against people who have been dead for hundreds of years? And are the remnants of those societies that still exist today also obliged to "rectify past wrongs" against the people they aggressed on even farther in the past?
- simonh 11y agoI think you're blowing the comment put of proportion by deliberately interpreting a very qualified statement in an extreme and maximalist way. The poster dodnt say every wrong against everyone and everything ever has to be rectified. There are many concrete and affordable steps we can take to remediate much of the damage our societies have done and are doing to each other and the environment. I agree with the poster that we have an obligation to take as many of those steps as we feel we can afford.
- 13thLetter 11y agoI'm not going to just sign on to an arbitrary promise like that, though. In the United States the people who talk about remediating what our societies have done, etc., have proposed things like massive and unending wealth transfers, unequal enforcement of the law, explicitly segregationist race-based government systems, and even secession. For that reason I am disinclined to just take someone talking about this subject at their word and say "sure, whatever you want."
- simonh 11y agoNot everybody talking about remediating past wrongs are proposing or endorsing such extreme measures, or not in an extreme way. What's frustrating is that moderate or conservative (small 'c') voices have been essentially silent on the matter leaving the field disproportionately open to more extreme advocacy. Those who are in favour of more moderate steps should advocate them and not use other people's disproportionate views as an excuse for throwing their hands in the air and giving up on the whole subject completely.
- nova 11y ago> Every society on Earth exists as it does because it destroyed much of the previously existing landscape and natural inhabitants, THANKS. Every human culture out there is responsible for wars and horrible crimes and destruction; primitive societies were no better (Hobbes Was Right (TM)), but only a few have built advanced and prosperous civilizations, and what is more, the West is basically the only which reflects on its past. I'm over with modern western ethnomasochism.
- hsitz 11y agoYou seem to think "reflecting on its past" is one of the advances that came with Western civilization. Not sure what "modern western ethnomasochism" is, but I imagine it goes along hand-in-glove with "reflecting on its past." Can you really have one without the other? Do you really think reflection is going to reveal only good things? Why reflect at all if you're not trying to identify things in past that can be fixed or improved upon?
- nova 11y ago> You seem to think "reflecting on its past" is one of the advances that came with Western civilization Not if taken so far as to become self-destructive. > Not sure what "modern western ethnomasochism" is, It means that here in the West we are (were) the best (in relative terms) but we think we are the worst, and wish for our own end. > Can you really have one without the other? Oh yes. Godspeed to Asia which will inherit the future, learning the good bits from the West without the suicidal self-flagellation.