(The Nationalist, 28 January & 18 February 2000)
It’s one of the oldest of clichés that human memory is selective – we remember what we want to remember. And the judgments that we make on the basis of memory are also selective. We willingly pick the speck out of another’s eye without noticing the log that is in our own.
It’s not hard to find examples of this. For instance, we look back on the institution of slavery, and we wonder how people could have put their fellow human beings up for auction, examined their bodies in public, and then bought and sold them like cattle. We wonder what they were thinking of, what sort of mental blindness it was that prevented them from seeing the wrong they were doing. Of course, nations engaged in the slave trade such as Britain, France or Spain used to say, ‘If we stop the trade, it won’t make any difference; someone else will just step into our place and continue it, so nothing will be gained’. What about our own time? We use that same argument in relation to the arms trade: ‘If we don’t sell arms, someone else will’.
We wonder, too, at the Roman empire, for which the torture and killing of people in the amphitheatre was an accepted form of public entertainment. What kind of minds had they? What kinds of minds have we? Isn’t there something of the amphitheatre in boxing?
Take another example: we regard the car as an example of the greater freedom and personal mobility which people in recent decades have come to regard as a right. But it has been estimated that, world-wide, 25 million people were killed in road accidents in the twentieth century. That’s a high price to pay for personal mobility, but, by our actions in buying and driving cars, we show that we believe it’s worth paying. What will later generations think of us?
What about war in our time? The Swedish International Peace Research Institute in Stockholm lists over 200 wars since the end of the Second World War. Clearly we human beings do regard war as an acceptable means of settling disputes – whatever we may say to the contrary. And in our own recent troubles in Northern Ireland, 3636 people died. Who are we to point an accusing finger at others?
The twentieth century was the one which invented the concentration camp, the gas chamber, and atomic, bacteriological and chemical weapons while large sections of humanity do not have access to clean water: what will later centuries say of our attitude to our fellow human beings? If they are as harsh in judging us, as we are in judging our predecessors, then we will certainly be condemned.
There is one part of the world I can do something about and change for the better: myself. Let me start there, and then move on to the wider field.