Ancestral Answers
Years ago, talking about one’s ancestors was not done, except maybe at Thanksgiving or some other family occasion, but nothing to boast about outside one’s kin. So none of my friends suspected that I was deep into my family tree, way beyond my siblings. Names and dates were a start, but pretty soon I wanted to know what these forebears had done with their lives. Best of all was reading their own words in letters or diaries that thankfully no one had thrown out. I loved family portraits, old photographs, daguerreotypes, cartes de visite. If an ancestral house survived into our world, I had to go see it.
I was born nostalgic. My nostalgia was purely aesthetic, a longing to visit, but not be forever confined to, a lost physical world. Places and things shrouded with oldness, like 17th century saltbox houses, the Wayside Inn, New England greens, country roads bordered by stone walls, and ancient elms and oaks, were sacred, and I was a pilgrim. When old places got demolished, I took it personally.
I became a landscape preservationist decades before the words environmental sustainability suggested a different kind of nostalgia: we long for a return to a proper balance of nature. That is a nostalgia for a past truth. Alas, our world is beset with irreversible climate change and Covid disruption. We can forget going back to cooler days, and maybe even a Covid-free world. We will adapt to a Brave New World.
Looking at lost worlds through rose-tinted glasses can still entertain and soothe us, but now we know how much it deceives us. Nostalgia for what used to be called a golden age needs a reality check. Halcyon is dead. That bygone era was not what it is cracked up to be. If we take those glasses off, and look at the past dispassionately, we can experience fraught history with a deeper appreciation for what our forebears faced.
Now more than ever, we are reminded of Faulkner’s apt observation that the past is never dead, it is not even past. That is usually applied to the persistence of evil, but it applies no less to the remarkable persistence of decency, indeed, the arc of the moral universe.
So if nostalgia is not what is used to be, that is all to the good. An honest look at the flawed world of former generations actually gives us hope and encourages us to persist. Henry Louis Gates’ Finding Your Roots on PBS demonstrates the widespread interest in family history and rediscovering family stories, balm or bombshell. Tell-all genealogy is coming of age. If a child was born only two months after his parents’ marriage in 1770, no big deal anymore. If an ancestor of European descent has married a Native American, no more need to hide it as somehow improper. Nowadays, some of us are eager to celebrate the fact. Ancestry.com is now big business, with $1 billion in annual revenue: the private equity firm Blackstone acquired it in 2020 for $4.7 billion. Ancestry.com TV ads show young people of all the ethnicities connecting with their past. People are swabbing their saliva to learn their DNA, explore their ethnicity, and discover their inner diversity.
The West is rightly alarmed that the misplaced nationalist nostalgia of Russian and Chinese irredentism might trigger World War Three. What would their Russian and Chinese ancestors say? But weaponized nostalgia should raise a red flag anywhere. Here in America, the envy of the world, we are divided. Some of us reject the science of climate change and vaccination and want to do a U-turn on the arc of the moral universe away from equal access to justice, toward a misplaced nostalgia for tribalism. Some things are apparently worth fighting for in the good-old-fashioned way—brawling and shooting. Conversely, some demand a perfect union, with their notion of perfect justice realized right now, going for woke. Most radically, some demand that reparations be paid by our tax dollars for righting the wrongs perpetrated by countless white males of yore. Civility be damned.
Both sides need to take a deep breath and look at how the human species has actually evolved. We can shake our heads in unison at many past norms that are thankfully in decline or gone for good at least in the West, like beheading, scalping, and lynching. On the other hand, gun violence is surging. Yet too many of us have the arrogance to assume that we, in this generation, in this moment, are finally able to grasp, as previous generations never could, a perfect understanding of what is right, what is wrong, what matters. As if we are in the End-State at last and forever after. We need to trade in our hubris for some humility.
At the very least, we need to be reminded that others in previous generations had said the same, that their milestone was where all human progress was meant to stop. The availability heuristic—our tendency to be swayed by information that comes to mind easily—is no help.
And that flawed thinking also applies to the originalists who claim to have explained, for all time, what our ancestors understood by the Second Amendment. It accords gun rights to “the people” in “a well-regulated militia.” Let’s remember that the only arms that the Founding Fathers had seen were single-shot pistols and muzzle-loading muskets, not revolvers, and certainly not AK-47s or hand-held nuclear devices or whatever else will weaponize us before long. Let’s also remember that collective rights and individual rights are not synonymous.
Most of our ancestors went along with the norms of their day, just as most of us do now. To blame members of past generations for failing to imagine how future generations would come to look back on, say, the intolerance of their times, is harsh. But to thank them for what they got right seems like something we can get right.
Some members of previous generations went to extremes, and we must call the perpetrators out. My perspective is uninformed by what it is like to be descended from a KKK lyncher or slave trafficker or terrorist or Nazi, but anyone who feels nostalgic for such inhumanity should seek help, and find life after hate. That would be heroic.
Thankfully, other members of past generations were on the right side of history. If you have been interested in ancestry all your life, by the time you become a grandparent, as I have been lucky to become, you have had time to delve deeper than names and dates. You may even have found pure gold—a deeply moving story of an ancestor’s amazing pluck in the face of the challenges of her time, doing what we today would call the right thing, despite the mainstream gainsayers of their time. If they acted with great courage or overcame intolerance, they are worthy of gaining newfound appreciation from a wider audience than descendants and historians. They have remained unsung heroes for too long. They belong to all of us, inspiring us to take heart and take action as we face the dangers and hatreds of our own time.
We have entered an era in which those whom we choose to honor in public space as heroes must now pass the test of whether their actions sought to undermine what we now consider to be basic humanity. If they did so, then their continued presence in public must include a disclaimer. There are degrees of slavery enablement and enslavement complicity, and the conversation is just beginning.
Among my ancestors, I find such imperfections. A 17th c. forebear owned a slave whom he planned to set free but a transaction stood in the way and he never got it done. An 18th c. forebear had a house-slave, Cato, who volunteered twice to fight in the French & Indian War. I wish I knew more about his life. Cato is a hero. My great grandfather’s attitude toward Blacks matured greatly during the time that he served in uniform on the Union side in the Civil War. As the freed men of color under his command proved themselves on the battlefield, he laid to rest some tiresome old epithets, and started referring to them simply as men. Indeed, they won Medals of Honor. When the war was over, he worked to assure the Black vote in North Carolina, where he was stationed. The men under his command had taught him something. His story is worth sharing.
If you reach age seventy-five, you will have lived one quarter or even one third of the history of this young country. You may come to feel that your ancestors did not live as long ago as you once thought, when you were twenty, and had lived only a tenth of the span of the nation. Our forebears are more present than we realize, and more relatable.
If only our ancestors were here to weigh in, they might right a few wrongs in our perceptions of them, and remind us about disruption of yore. But since they cannot make it, our responsibility is to try to hear what they once said. Not literally of course, but through circumstantial evidence. The standouts among them who faced challenges as daunting as our own might truly have answers, if only we would listen to them.
© 2022 Thomas M. Paine
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