We All Have Asshole Ancestors
So what does that mean for you?
You are not your ancestors, for good or bad
When I worked in a local history archive, I sometimes got annoyed by the people coming in to do genealogy research. They always seemed to think that you should care about this random person they were descended from who was so great because of X, Y, or Z reasons. The person they were talking about was usually someone who had done something nifty, and while I’m glad that those folks are happy to find out those things, is relationship really a good reason to be proud (or ashamed) of an ancestor?
Organizations, like Daughters of the American Revolution, which promote pride based on who your ancestors were, strikes me as a similarly hollow source of pride. The basis for that pride or even engagement in the organization can be based solely on something that you did not have control over — your distant relations. You were not responsible for the actions of the person whose existence allowed you entry to the club.
Simple blood relationship to someone who was known for something good or bad doesn’t imply anything about your own life. Whether that particular ancestor was delightful or horrible doesn’t mean that you are good or bad. You get to choose that for yourself. (Side note: if you’re also an asshole, that’s your doing, not your ancient so-and-so ancestors’. Knock it off already, punk.)
Nothing was EVER perfect — no individual, group, or time period. Period.
Just as people look back at individuals they’re proud of, sometimes people look back as a particular group, tribe, society, or even whole time period as being idyllic. Romanticizing the past — whether it’s a time period, an entire group of people, or individuals — only covers up the blemishes but doesn’t make the faults go away.
Do we not acknowledge the blemishes more freely because we’re scared of them or because that perfect image gives us something to aspire to?
When we admire people and claim not to see their blemishes, are we afraid that admitting their faults means that we can’t like them anymore? Thomas Jefferson was a slave owner, and that can be hard to grapple with for some people who really appreciate Jefferson’s professional work and writings. His being a slave owner doesn’t mean that he was entirely bad and never did anything good though. On the flip side, people who want to remove all mention of Jefferson are throwing out the baby with the bath water. He was a human who was very imperfect, and we need to consider the whole man, the good and the bad, when considering his history and impact. We can still admire some of the things he did without condoning the things that we wish he hadn’t.
If we are scared of admitting the blemishes of past people, we do our current selves the disservice of acknowledging the great things that people did despite their flaws. Hopefully we can acknowledge at least to ourselves that we are flawed individuals. If we can admit that the people we admire were imperfect and still did great things, surely that should inspire us to be our own best selves and strive despite our own limitations as well.
Pretending that any group of people was entirely saintly is… stupid. It’s nice to believe in miracles, but no one is or was perfect. While the European settlers who came to North and South America were not exactly angelic in how they behaved, neither were the native peoples already here saints. Every society and civilization is complex and has darkness as well as goodness.
This complexity within individuals is a good thing. It means that you can be better than your ancestors, and maybe your descendants will be looking up to you as they remember your life.
You are descended from people who:
- were really bad — assholes, murderers, thieves
- had varying levels of power — slaves, rulers/kings
- were really good — helpers, teachers, selfless
Let’s start by considering the individual: every single person will behave in good and bad ways in varying amounts throughout his or her life. So, none of your ancestors was entirely good or, theoretically (I’m more torn on this one), entirely bad.
Then let’s consider the group, or tribe, level of people. Tribe in this sense is any small group of people, especially as we consider further back in history when humanity was made of nomadic tribes. So, every tribe or group of people is made up of individuals who are just that, people. They are capable of good and bad behavior, and we’ve already established that individuals are some mix of good and bad.
Consider the timeline we’re talking about when we consider our ancestors. I’m not talking a hundred years or even a thousand. Consider the thousands, millions, of years that gave rise to us as the feeling thinking organisms that we are.
Consider that even in a 100 years it’s easy to have three or more generations at least of people. Then consider that you have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, sixteen great-great-grandparents, and exponentially back (with the caveat that you’ll start having some people filling more than one relation when distant cousins start marrying).
There are a lot of people whose lives eventually led to you now breathing on this planet. It’s safe to say that a lot of those people were jackasses. A lot of them were really good though.
Our ancestors’ actions don’t decide whether you are a jerk or a saint. It makes me personally feel good to cling to the identity of being a ‘good’ person, so I try for the more saintly path but fall far far from it, of course. Trying is the point, and while it doesn’t mean that I always act kind, it certainly keeps my moral compass pointed in the right direction . Striving to be, to do, better feels good to me and is a personal decision I make for my life each day.
I didn’t really care, and I still kind of don’t care, about the individual lives of the people I’m descended from in many respects, even while I would like to explore my genealogy at some point. I was born with certain benefits in life that help me in this society. I also have some disadvantages and plenty of hurdles that not everyone else has. While my ancestors got me to this point, they don’t dictate my next steps. I am not doomed because of them, and I won’t rule the world because of them.
Humanity is complex. We are feeling, thinking animals that sometimes work together, other times tear each other apart. We all came out of what is now Africa and spread across the world and every continent fighting the whole way through, within our own tribes, with other tribes, against the very environment. We are a violent species, but nature itself is violent, as much the hawk ripping apart its prey as a mother sweetly tending her baby. So too with humans, so I encourage an empathetic perspective when considering our history, as individuals, nations, and a species.
Your, my, our ancestors were total jerks, killers, lovers, gentle heroes, and everything in between. Let’s not be assholes, too.
