Overlooking Savagery—Are We Creating Just Another Bonfire?

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“New occasions teach new duties; time makes ancient good uncouth,” says the poem by James Russell Lowell. Perhaps we’re seeing that evolution of morality and ethics that are apparent to honest historians as they notice just how reprehensible our heroes, recent and ancient have been by current standards.

If you are looking for confirmation just look carefully into biblical accounts of savagery we are taught to overlook. History should teach humility but sad to say, it’s often taught arrogance and triumphalism. But are we proud of what we see as improvement or are we in our vanity, just creating another bonfire?

Still to realize that the Sierra Club has been diagnosed with terminal racism seems the product of another kind of arrogant triumphalism. John Muir had attitudes less acceptable and less tolerable a hundred years afterward. So we tear down more statues, chisel out more names from walls of fame as the ancients once did with no longer favored pharaohs, and sing about racism while we denounce a race for being racist.

I think the Sierra Club has done much to elevate our national regard for the natural world our species has inherited. I think the people who belong to it are mostly good people who have chosen a worthy cause, but sure let’s choose to hate because of long-dead people and to punish long-dead empires for colonialism rather than to acknowledge the rise of environmental responsibility.

Let’s burn books and punish people for the sins of earlier times and in our own way repeat them. And we wonder about the rise in violence as we pump up the anger, pump up the hate. Retribution and vengeance; damnation unto the 5th generation or longer – for are we not woke?

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