The Privilege of Being Now

In the grand scheme of history, our society exists in the future. While human history is frighteningly brief on a geological scale, it is incomprehensibly long on a human scale, and for every person that has come before us, we have been the people of the future.

Now we sit behind our computer screens in the 21st century, with the advantages not only of modern healthcare, agriculture, industrialization, and electronic communication, but with the advantages of thousands of years of science, art, and philosophy brought together from hundreds of cultures, and we look at our ancestors and shake our heads. It seems we just can't comprehend how our ancestors could have been so ignorant and wicked, how they could be so much worse than us. 

We evaluate and interpret our ancestors' moral decisions and actions through a lens of relative privilege. It's essentially the same phenomenon that occurs when an affluent upper middle class white man scoffs at a minority scholarship because he thinks, surely, all those young black people in the 'inner city' must be too lazy to work their way through college. And it's the same phenomenon that occurs when the leader of a first world country calls a poorer country a "shit hole." Through the lens of our "future privilege," we see the failures of our ancestors while turning a blind eye to the advantages we have now (including the benefit of hindsight). 

All in all, future privilege is not as serious a problem as white privilege or male privilege, mainly because the people we're holding our prejudices against are very dead. Despite that, though, it does cause friction in the present, primarily when it comes to deciding what traditions and values have become obsolete or abhorrent. 

Reactionary subsets of our population do glorify the worst aspects of our ancestors. They threaten black children with confederate battle flags, carve swastikas on restroom walls, and sign on to fight Islamic extremists with a prayer on their lips and a Templar cross on their shirt. But at the opposite end, there are the people who seem to believe that nothing of our past has any merit, and will loudly disparage anyone in the middle who so much as turns a fond eye to our past.

To my mind, nowhere is this "future privilege" more on display than when people discuss the Bible and slavery.

Demonizing the Bible from the Future

The Bible is a collection of books by different authors accumulated over a long stretch of time based on secondhand (or 100^th hand) sources that includes some content we now find offensive, and some content that we believe must clearly be fiction.

With the privilege of living in the 21^st century we can read about how the Bible was written and how its morality and accuracy has been challenged and tested, piece by piece, over the course of centuries. We do this, and we shake our heads in disbelief at some of the preposterous content. 

Of course, being the denizens of the future that we are, many of us read about the Bible on one of our most trusted sources of information in the 21^st century – a compendium of crowd sourced information that also includes a lengthy article about Mein Kampf and multiple pages about the Infinity Gauntlet. (Do you want to read about the comic book series or the weapon itself?)

Unlike Wikipedia, the Bible relies on its readers' to use common sense in differentiating fiction and reality, and in the context of ancient history, that’s not strange. If you struggle with a story because it begins with a virgin pregnancy and ends with a resurrection, then I have some bad news for you:

• It’s improbable that the ancestor of ancient Egypt’s ruling caste was actually dismembered and reassembled. 
• King Minos of Crete probably did not have a half-human stepson. 
• Despite a detailed account to the contrary, it’s very unlikely that Atlantis was real. 
• The founders of Rome were almost certainly not raised by wolves. 
• The causes of the Trojan War were probably more complicated than one hot chick cuckholding her husband. 
• The Persians did not have 3 million soldiers at the Battle of Thermopylae, because that would have required fielding – literally – the entire population of Persia at that time. 
• Wiccans do not have a long history of oppression and persecution, given: (1) medieval Christians didn’t assume that a pagan cooking up folk remedies on her hearth was in league with the devil, (2) church leaders did generally assume that anyone who actually claimed to have dark powers bestowed on them by the devil was mentally disturbed (after all, the premise of such dark powers is antithetical to the belief that God trumps everything), (3) the iconic witch trials associates with the Dark Ages were largely perpetrated by one guy trying to sell a book that he published just before the Americas were discovered, and (4) Wicca itself was established in NINETEEN FIFTY FOUR.

The line between mythology and reality gets hazier the further back you go in our timeline, but even the history of our own country is jammed with cute fables that we teach to children alongside recorded ‘facts’, which are themselves subject to the biases inherent in authorial intent and artistic discretion. However, it's 'speculative fact’ and cultural tradition that connect the dots of otherwise meaningless archaeological finds, and provide us with an engaging historical narrative. 

In short, the notion that the Bible is somehow an especially bad source of history is laughable. It’s not a good source of history, mind you, but if we would burn the entirety of the Bible for its absurdities, we would likewise be compelled to sacrifice nearly all of human history in favor of a scant few volumes about pottery fragments and fish hooks.

Demonizing Slavery from the Future

It’s important to note that when I say we "demonize" slavery I don’t simply mean that we condemn it, I mean we treat it as if it were incomprehensibly and obviously evil - as blatantly evil as a mustache-twirling serial pedophile whose favorite pizza toppings are green olives and mandarin oranges. 

The institution of slavery described in the Bible was wrong, yes, but because of our future privilege, people in the present seem unrealistically confident that they wouldn't have endorsed and benefited from it. The seemingly unambiguous immorality of slavery has become a central point in rejecting anything the Bible says, or generally condemning the morality of anyone who celebrates Christmas or Hanukkah. 

Comments from discussions I participated in yesterday alone:

"i particularly like the part where jesus says ‘slaves obey your masters’ because jesus loves slavery" 

[Which is actually - to my knowledge - not something Jesus said, but is rather paraphrasing what Paul said in Ephesians and Colossians. Peter’s account of it reads more like, ‘If your master falsely accuses you of doing something wrong, God will know the truth.’]

“Its cushioned in between the laws on how to beat slaves. How appropriate.”

[Actually the passage in question was sandwiched between two laws placing restrictions on beating slaves, but I guess acknowledging it without abolishing it is sort of like endorsing it?]

"I don;t care what is more or less important to a fictional character in a book that promotes slavery..."

Slavery is a go-to topic for people that want to tell Christians how badly they suck, but (at least for white Americans) doing so reflects a lack of self-awareness that’s so absurd it’s almost darkly funny. Yes, Christ's ancestors owned slaves. And yes, the comprehensive historical record maintained by his ancestors included laws limiting the power of slave owners (detailed in Exodus). 

God forbid someone have ancestors who did bad things or, worse, have written records of them doing bad things.

The Hypocrisy of Future Privilege

If the people who wave their future privilege like a surgically dislocated phallus were consistent in their attitudes towards the past, I might respect their position as simply reflecting a different set of very rigid principles. Unfortunately, people who consistently apply these attitudes to all of human history seem few and far between.

Aggressively non-religious Americans gasp and clutch their metaphorical pearls as if we should all be shocked that slavery was acceptable to people 1550 years before the birth of Christ… And they do this only 155 years after slavery ended in the United States.

Over 50 million Americans are direct descendants of men who fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War, men who killed people to defend the institution of slavery. Many more likely have ancestors who fought under the direction and inspiration of slave owners who sought to gain independence from the British Empire before it could abolish slavery in the colonies. Even more have ancestors who fought to defend a Constitution that not only failed to end slavery, but acknowledges it in the design of the U.S. government.

Because yes, slavery is in the Constitution.

Shocking, right? (The history major says sarcastically.) Rather than abolish slavery altogether in the founding of our 'free' country where all men are supposed to have been created equal, the writers of the Constitution inserted the 3/5ths clause, which allowed the southern states to add 3/5ths of their slave population to their census numbers for the purposes of determining how many Representatives they got in Congress. Why would such a ridiculous thing be included? So that voters in America's rural slave states would - by design - be over-represented in Congress, forestalling abolition in the United States. 

The 3/5ths clause was repealed in 1868, but it wasn't erased - no one went to the hard copy of the United States Constitution and blacked out the offensive passage - they just added more text (the 14th amendment) telling Americans to disregard the aforementioned references to slavery when operating the government. And that’s a sensible way to handle it, because we shouldn’t pretend it wasn’t there at one point.

Yet, while lots of people will pull out passages from the Bible which detail a society we now see as backward, and use those as 'proof' that the Bible is an 'evil' text, very few Americans seem to be willing to apply that same black-and-white scorched-earth morality to interpreting the Constitution (or any other body of work rooted in a culture that once embraced slavery as critical to its functioning).

Does the heinous nature of Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3, make freedom of speech irrelevant? Do we declare that the separation of church and state is bull**** because the Constitution failed to abolish slavery when it was ratified over two hundred years ago? Do we say quartering of troops is fair game because Jefferson was an asshole? No, we don't do these things because we recognize that portions of the Constitution still have merit, despite the unsavory agendas of some of its authors, and despite our decision to consciously disregard flawed portions of the document. 

And yes, I certainly realize that there are terrible evangelical sociopaths who dig through the Old Testament to find justifications for their bigotry, and who try to claim Jesus hates gay people, transgender people, women, etc., but people who do that are horrifically wrong in the EXACT same way that white supremacists are wrong when they use the repealed 3/5ths compromise to justify racism, or when they edit quotes from Abraham Lincoln to support their claims that he hated black people. 

TLDR? 

Jesus's ancestors were awful people.

Yours probably were too. 

And there but for the grace of God* go you.

*(Or whatever power you believe generously granted you the fortune to live in this century.)