Prisoners of Our Times

It occurred to me today - once again and in vivid detail - how imprisoned we are sometimes by our accidental place in history. Too often, we accept the values inculcated into us in our youth without question or analysis. From our extremely limited vantage point in history we look back, morally assessing the relative ignorance of our ancestors (e.g., slavery, apartheid, segregation, disenfranchisement of women and minorities, "humors" as explanation for illness, geocentricity, flatness of the earth.. ad infinitum). Ironically, particularly for the reactionary social conservatives among us, we likely would have believed the same nonsense.

If we are mindless followers of the status quo, is it unreasonable to assume that we would have been then? To be sure, such a charge runs the risk of ahistoricism or presentism. Still, it may be fruitful to consider whether we are leaders or followers - whether we passively or actively affirm the conventions we were born into, or challenge those conventions - affirming some and discarding others. Ultimately, it is an epistemological question: On what basis do we as individuals determine knowledge?

That is not to say that we glibly discard tradition indiscriminately. Nor am I endorsing some neophilic fallacy. My point rather is that we ought to assess the merits of our inherited mores, folkways, morals, and conventions on a case-by-case basis, elevating reason (based upon the current state of human knowledge) - not slavish submission to tradition - to the position of arbiter; and regularly reevaluating those cases. Such a position requires a certain liberality of mind. Alas, some are precluded from such thought, owing to their rigid, reified - even petrified -schemas.