How To Be A Good Person While Existing Within Time

Here are three simple propositions:

1. Most of the people who have ever lived have held reactionary social views.
2. At the time, those views were not considered reactionary. Sometimes they were considered progressive.
3. If you had been born into a different time, you would also have shared these reactionary social views.

It therefore follows that:

1. Some of the views you hold now are likely reactionary, even if you think they are progressive.

After all, you can’t really tell what will be considered reactionary 200 years from now. It may be things that seem entirely normal to you. It’s an annoying feeling, to realize that the present is only a moment in historical time, that you are not the culmination of all human thought. But you’re not. All of this is going to be old hat pretty soon.

It seems prudent, therefore, to have a little humility, and a little compassion too. When you look back at the people who thought they ought to be the only arbiters of public morality… they don’t look too good, do they? They look pretty conservative, even the progressive ones.

You know what’s really timeless, though? Food. Shelter. Health. Material things, that is. People always need those, and they will always need them, and making sure they have those things has never been bad. You’ll never read the biography of a dead person and suddenly go “oh no, this person supported the poor, how terrible of them.”

In fact, a funny little thing is that you don’t even need to be progressive to do progressive things while trying to accomplish universal goals. The Soviets decriminalized homosexuality in 1917; some of them held reactionary views on homosexuality, but they did it anyway, because they believed that trying to enforce personal morality was not the job of the state. (The Stalinists who brought back persecution, on the other hand, were big on morality and opposed universal goals.)

How will history judge you? You can’t know. Maybe something you believe, something everyone you know believes, will turn out to be horribly wrong. Maybe some movement or ideology you support will be remembered as disastrous and awful, and people in the future will shake their heads and wonder how you could’ve fallen for that. It’s entirely possible. I mean, it’s happened to almost every single human being who has ever lived.

Unless you think you’re perfect, you’ve figured it all out, and human history ends with you. Or you are the one exception, the one person who has discovered the perfect morality. Doesn’t seem likely, does it? Chances are there’s stuff you’ve gotten wrong. Did you believe everything you believe now ten years ago? Twenty? What would you have believed if you’d been around a century ago? Ten centuries?

You can, of course, only do the best you can with what you’re given. But since there’s no way for you to be perfect, since you’re only a human being trapped in a specific moment in time, maybe you can remember that everybody else is also only a human being, in the now and in the past. And maybe you can learn from the past, and instead of trying to fix the morality of human beings, which has literally never led to anything except bloodshed and misery and oppression, you can try to fix the material conditions in which we are forced to exist. Help make this moment in time more bearable for everyone, help people have the material security that allows them to make choices more freely, and then let every person attend to their own morality.

Helping everyone also helps people who may be bad, but really, it’s the only way to be sure.