From: jocallag@bach.helios.nd.edu (john ocallaghan)
Subject: Re:      Re: Altar girls and millstones update
Organization: OUC, University of Notre Dame
Date: Sat, 10 Oct 1992 17:32:03 GMT

In article <CATHOLIC%92100918003495@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU> Jim McIntosh <JIM@AMERICAN.EDU> writes:
>On Fri, 9 Oct 1992 01:41:05 GMT (Rae Stabosz) said:
>
>We have the advantage of knowing about the past, and being able to
>compare our actions to theirs. If we are performing worse, we can see
>that and change. We do not have the ability to look ahead in time, and
>compare our actions against those in the future.

Though I do not completely disagree with you in this posting, I think some
things are simply false.  I cannot understand how one can look at the
twentieth century and say we have the ability to compare our actions to
the actions of the past, recognize that we are performing worse, and change.
We have seen great technological improvement in the last two centuries, which
seems to have led to a myth of progress-- technology is getting better, so then
must human life and existence.  But this is false; what technology has given
us, among so much good, is much greater evil.  If we honestly look at our
century and compare it to previous centuries, shouldn't the conclusion be that
rather than being able to compare ourselves and change for the better, all
we in fact do is figure out how to do the good they were doing more efficiently, and conversely do the evil they did more efficiently?  We just do not change.
In terms of the magnitude of evil that occupants of the twentieth century have
perpetuated, it does not seem that there is anything in the past to compare with it.  What we do is look at the past, see the evil they have done, and figure
out how to do more evil, more efficiently, with the technology we develop.
This is not meant to be a flame on technology; personnally I like it.  And
technology never does evil-- people do.  It is in the crucial area of moral
evil that I do not think your statement hold up; how is their eany less moral
evil in the world in the twentieth century, due to our ability to look at the
past, compare our actions to it and improve?  Can you imagine what the 
warring parties in the religious wars of past centuries would think of a culture that continues a war in which one million men die in the Argonne forest and the
Somme over a few hundred feet of land?  What would they make of the fire bombing of Dresden or Coventry?  What would they make of Napalm? Of cluster bombing
hundreds of thousands of Iraqi soldiers?  You may say we no longer hold slaves.
But what good is done if for physical slavery we substitute economic slavery of
the same nations from which we used to take physical slaves?  You may say the
position of women is better.  But what good has been done if those women, 
entering the man's world, feel the price of entering a man's world is to
stick a knife in their uterus and rip their children from the womb, because
that man's world says if you're going enter don't brind those damn kids with
you, we won't pay for both; we won't make it possible for you to feel secure
as mothers and equals; and the great irony of all to get those women to agree
that just as men took children to be burdens in their man's world, children are
burdens to them as they enter that man's world.  Where is this ability to cease
doing the evil of previous times?  I just don't see it.  We may be able to
do a lot of good they couldn't do; but they did do good.  But what is truly
terrifying is that while they did evil, we seem to be perfecting it.>
>We may be doing some really horrible things, as judged by the enlightened
>people in the future ("Can you believe they gave poison to their
>criminals, and ate animal flesh as food?") but we have no way of knowing
>that. We can, however, evaluate our actions against the past and
>hopefully arrive at the best possible behaviour of which we are capable.
My point is that we are not necessarily doing evil according to the judgement
of future generations; we are doing terrible terrible evil by the judgement
of past generations.  For all we know future generations may look on the
development of economic slavery as a blessing; nuclear weapons a great good;
widespread abortion as the greatest achievement of the twentieth century;
"see students how those truly intelligent men of the twentieth century kept
the underprivledged countries in line and enslave by having them kill their
offspring, which we know to be the means of economic strength, see how
they kept the underpriveldged in line in their own country by having them
kill their children, rather than developing economic means of including them
and their children in the wealth of their nation, see how they kept women in
line by having them deny themselves.  We owe all we are to the goods they
developed for us in that great century.  Study it well students.  Their will
be a test tomorrow."  Read "Canticle for Leibowitz!"
Better yet read Exodus and how God's chosen people "progressed" when He
delivered them from the hands of their captors the Egyptians.>
Peace,
John