The thread concerning Lewis Wetzel got -- interesting, I suppose would be a good word. Not to continue or resurrect that debate, but it was enlightening in regard to how most of us tend to project our modern-day point of view (complete with political, psychological, religious, and moral/ethical convictions) into discussions of incidents and individuals in the historical past.
Several persons, myself included, made the point that, aside from the fact that most of us have never been in a situation as intimately violent as that of the 18th-century American frontier, the radically different overall circumstances in which most of us have lived our lives in the 20th and 21st centuries make it difficult, if not impossible, for us to understand the thinking and behavior of our predecessors; and, thus, highly unfair for us to attempt to judge them.
I am going to stand by my conviction that, until one of us is confronted by the loss of his home, family, and living to an alien and savage enemy (a circumstance equally applicable to the natives as well as the by-and-large white settlers of the 18th and 19th centuries), that modern person has no right to judge the reactions of those in the past who endured exactly that. While, today, as jurors in a court of law, one or several of us would be expected to judge the possibly criminal actions of someone who'd sought revenge, the gap in time and the absence of a legal authority to help one deal with one's problems, in the period under discussion, make legal considerations at least somewhat irrelevant when we look at what was done by those who perceived themselves to have been wronged.
I've had second thoughts, though, about what I said in regard to us simply not comprehending how our forefathers thought and acted. Now, I will say, right up front, that a part of my reason for so doing was realizing that, as a writer of fiction set in the historical past, I almost have to believe I can relate to the characters whose personalities and behavior I'm describing. I'm not alone in this; I sincerely doubt that many writers, if any, would have the gall to attempt to tell a person's story if, deep down inside, they didn't believe they could come close to the truth. Still, despite an obvious bias being at the core of my opinion, I would like to make a case for it being possible to (at least partially) understand another person -- even one who lived his life and died some two hundred years earlier.
For one, though you may call it "psychobabble" or some such word, my belief -- based on the written statements of numerous historical persons throughout the ages -- is that, assuming a roughly similar code of values and morals (in my case, for the sake of this discussion, what is usually called the "Judeo-Christian Ethic"), we find that the thinking of persons in the past (as in the statement by one of the Roman writers, whose name unfortunately eludes me, to the effect that "the younger generation" was lacking in respect, gravity, purpose, etc, and that the Empire was doomed if the kids didn't shape up) is remarkably similar to our own. Those of us inclined to a certain spirit of thinking can read, for instance, Michel Montaigne (who spoke of tolerance in an age -- the late 16th century -- when the very concept was liable to cause a man to be burned at the stake), or Ben Franklin, and nod in agreement. We can read the Norse Sagas, the Odyssey, or the story of Mary Ingles, and understand perfectly the love of family, desire for justice or revenge, or whatever other motive that drove an individual -- and perhaps give thanks that we're not thus-driven, and forced to find out of what we're made and what we're capable of doing to other human beings.
In addition to a certain degree of shared ideas (modified by time and place, but at their core much the same now as anywhere, any time), there is a process called extrapolation (another bit of "psychobabble", I suppose) that, while imprecise and subject to much error, can at least provide one with a hint of what it felt like to be in a specific situation. I had the living manure beat out of me by three gang members of a specific racial type, when I was twelve. I bided my time and caught one of them alone, and returned the favor. I was shortly after confronted by a somewhat larger group of the same people, who, to make their power very clear to me, had a girl -- not someone I could fight, for what it would have been worth, but a girl -- explain that the next fight I had with one of their group was going to be my last. They weren't speaking metaphorically, either. I was advised by the administrators of my middle school (who called me into the office and demanded to know what "all that" had been about) that to continue fighting would be to bring down a whole lot of trouble on myself that I could, and should, avoid by staying out of the way of those people. Now, this doesn't even approach the degree of potential violence and retribution that would have driven a settler or Indian who'd lost his family to murderers -- but you will not tell me that the rage, frustration, and shame I felt were then and are now irrelevant to a consideration of violence and retribution in the historical past. I can easily throw in the "what if --?" factors of being older, not bound by law, and away from any help or hindrance, and imagine with some accuracy what I would at least want to do -- and what would have been likely to have happened to me, in turn, as a result. There aren't primary sources or datable anecdotes to bear out my supposition, but does that make it less valid in the context of trying to understand the behavior of another person?
I submit that, while their times and lives were different from ours, our Founding Fathers and the numerous unnamed men and women who endured the hardships of the wilderness were not, as some would seem to be saying, as incomprehensible to us as if they were from another planet. If it's so, and we really can't understand or even begin to grasp what they were thinking, how they felt, and what drove them -- then writings of theirs, such as the Constitution and Declaration of Independence, despite their appearing to be written in relatively plain English, are in fact what the enemies of freedom claim -- irrelevant to the modern era, and beyond the capability of more than a few highly-trained individuals (all, coincidentally, lawyers) to comprehend.
I am not stating that a casual reading of history makes any person an expert in that field, or that by simply playing the "what if --?" game any of us can suddenly understand how it would have felt to be in the moccasins of Lew Wetzel, or Logan, or Kenton or Tecumseh or Boone. I'm simply stating that such an understanding, to at least a partial degree, is possible, IMHO. And, I believe that the "partial" element applies equally to the people of the present, as well as the past; no one can ever, really, completely understand another person, but for the most part it's neither wrong nor futile to try.
Sorry for the length of this post. If it's inappropriate within the context of this forum, I will understand completely if it has to be locked or deleted. It's a complex topic, though, and I refuse to even attempt to sum up such a thing in "X" words or less. I would hope, too, that if discussion is permitted and attempted in response to what I've written, it will be in the same civil tone in which I tried to frame the above statement.
Mike
Several persons, myself included, made the point that, aside from the fact that most of us have never been in a situation as intimately violent as that of the 18th-century American frontier, the radically different overall circumstances in which most of us have lived our lives in the 20th and 21st centuries make it difficult, if not impossible, for us to understand the thinking and behavior of our predecessors; and, thus, highly unfair for us to attempt to judge them.
I am going to stand by my conviction that, until one of us is confronted by the loss of his home, family, and living to an alien and savage enemy (a circumstance equally applicable to the natives as well as the by-and-large white settlers of the 18th and 19th centuries), that modern person has no right to judge the reactions of those in the past who endured exactly that. While, today, as jurors in a court of law, one or several of us would be expected to judge the possibly criminal actions of someone who'd sought revenge, the gap in time and the absence of a legal authority to help one deal with one's problems, in the period under discussion, make legal considerations at least somewhat irrelevant when we look at what was done by those who perceived themselves to have been wronged.
I've had second thoughts, though, about what I said in regard to us simply not comprehending how our forefathers thought and acted. Now, I will say, right up front, that a part of my reason for so doing was realizing that, as a writer of fiction set in the historical past, I almost have to believe I can relate to the characters whose personalities and behavior I'm describing. I'm not alone in this; I sincerely doubt that many writers, if any, would have the gall to attempt to tell a person's story if, deep down inside, they didn't believe they could come close to the truth. Still, despite an obvious bias being at the core of my opinion, I would like to make a case for it being possible to (at least partially) understand another person -- even one who lived his life and died some two hundred years earlier.
For one, though you may call it "psychobabble" or some such word, my belief -- based on the written statements of numerous historical persons throughout the ages -- is that, assuming a roughly similar code of values and morals (in my case, for the sake of this discussion, what is usually called the "Judeo-Christian Ethic"), we find that the thinking of persons in the past (as in the statement by one of the Roman writers, whose name unfortunately eludes me, to the effect that "the younger generation" was lacking in respect, gravity, purpose, etc, and that the Empire was doomed if the kids didn't shape up) is remarkably similar to our own. Those of us inclined to a certain spirit of thinking can read, for instance, Michel Montaigne (who spoke of tolerance in an age -- the late 16th century -- when the very concept was liable to cause a man to be burned at the stake), or Ben Franklin, and nod in agreement. We can read the Norse Sagas, the Odyssey, or the story of Mary Ingles, and understand perfectly the love of family, desire for justice or revenge, or whatever other motive that drove an individual -- and perhaps give thanks that we're not thus-driven, and forced to find out of what we're made and what we're capable of doing to other human beings.
In addition to a certain degree of shared ideas (modified by time and place, but at their core much the same now as anywhere, any time), there is a process called extrapolation (another bit of "psychobabble", I suppose) that, while imprecise and subject to much error, can at least provide one with a hint of what it felt like to be in a specific situation. I had the living manure beat out of me by three gang members of a specific racial type, when I was twelve. I bided my time and caught one of them alone, and returned the favor. I was shortly after confronted by a somewhat larger group of the same people, who, to make their power very clear to me, had a girl -- not someone I could fight, for what it would have been worth, but a girl -- explain that the next fight I had with one of their group was going to be my last. They weren't speaking metaphorically, either. I was advised by the administrators of my middle school (who called me into the office and demanded to know what "all that" had been about) that to continue fighting would be to bring down a whole lot of trouble on myself that I could, and should, avoid by staying out of the way of those people. Now, this doesn't even approach the degree of potential violence and retribution that would have driven a settler or Indian who'd lost his family to murderers -- but you will not tell me that the rage, frustration, and shame I felt were then and are now irrelevant to a consideration of violence and retribution in the historical past. I can easily throw in the "what if --?" factors of being older, not bound by law, and away from any help or hindrance, and imagine with some accuracy what I would at least want to do -- and what would have been likely to have happened to me, in turn, as a result. There aren't primary sources or datable anecdotes to bear out my supposition, but does that make it less valid in the context of trying to understand the behavior of another person?
I submit that, while their times and lives were different from ours, our Founding Fathers and the numerous unnamed men and women who endured the hardships of the wilderness were not, as some would seem to be saying, as incomprehensible to us as if they were from another planet. If it's so, and we really can't understand or even begin to grasp what they were thinking, how they felt, and what drove them -- then writings of theirs, such as the Constitution and Declaration of Independence, despite their appearing to be written in relatively plain English, are in fact what the enemies of freedom claim -- irrelevant to the modern era, and beyond the capability of more than a few highly-trained individuals (all, coincidentally, lawyers) to comprehend.
I am not stating that a casual reading of history makes any person an expert in that field, or that by simply playing the "what if --?" game any of us can suddenly understand how it would have felt to be in the moccasins of Lew Wetzel, or Logan, or Kenton or Tecumseh or Boone. I'm simply stating that such an understanding, to at least a partial degree, is possible, IMHO. And, I believe that the "partial" element applies equally to the people of the present, as well as the past; no one can ever, really, completely understand another person, but for the most part it's neither wrong nor futile to try.
Sorry for the length of this post. If it's inappropriate within the context of this forum, I will understand completely if it has to be locked or deleted. It's a complex topic, though, and I refuse to even attempt to sum up such a thing in "X" words or less. I would hope, too, that if discussion is permitted and attempted in response to what I've written, it will be in the same civil tone in which I tried to frame the above statement.
Mike
