We live in prosperous times. And one way we like to spend that prosperity is atoning for the mistakes of our fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers... whew! There's no end!
An example of how far the guilt trip and atoning can go is found in this 25 Oct 13 WSJ Numbers Guy article, “In Accounting for Slavery’s Cost, Figures Vary Widely: Different approaches to tallying the harm wrought by slavery produce a vast range of results”, by Carl Bialik. This article is about a group of people who want today's western European nations (slaving colonial powers in the past) to pony up cash to the Caribbean nations for their great-great grandfathers’ sins of importing slaves. From the article, “Fourteen Caribbean nations and a British law firm are trying to find the solution to a puzzle that has eluded many economists, historians and activists: how to put a price tag on the harm wrought by slavery, and then persuade someone to pay.” Keep in mind, we’re talking eight to twelve generations ago. This 17 Feb 14 The Telegraph article, “Jamaicans lead Caribbean calls for Britain to pay slavery reparations” by Jon Swaine, is a human interest variation on the same topic. And yet another, this time about the Jewish holocaust, in a 18 Mar 14 Atlantic article, “Doing Business With a Company that Took Jews to Their Deaths” is about a strange venue for such a guilt trip. From the article, “The battle [about who should pay for the Holocaust] is now playing out in a rather unlikely arena: the Maryland General Assembly. Keolis, a company that's mostly owned by SNCF, was recently invited to bid on a public contract to build a new metro line, the Purple Line, in the Washington, D.C., area.” The outrage, as described by the article, is that SNCF is a French train company that helped transport Jews to camps during the Holocaust.
In eastern Asia a common version of this is focusing on “comfort women” who involuntarily serviced lonely Japanese soldiers far from home during World War II. There are periodic calls in the Far East media for the Japanese to compensate for the trauma these women experienced, and related, apologize more vigorously for bringing on the Asian side of World War II.
Goat sacrificing appears in three primary ways with some people seriously calling for money to pass hands over these long-past issues, other people seriously believing the money-passing should happen, and media making serious money reporting on the reparation attempts. From a practical standpoint the slavery issue in particular makes no sense. The European countries have changed, the Caribbean countries have changed, the world has changed! The only way this kind of reparation-appeal makes sense is as a form of wealth transfer based on stroking guilt and atonement feelings. This is all about heart-thinking. A further indication of the lack of critical thinking involved in this issue is there's no mention of the damage done to the African nations that lost the slaves.
This is not an isolated case, and some examples can get quite strange. This 24 Nov 13 Slate article, “Tell Your Second-Grade Teacher I’m Sorry” by Belle Boggs, is about a crusading journalist trying to atone for the use of HeLa cells used in cancer research. From the article, “Although their mother’s cells - taken without her knowledge during her cancer treatment in 1951 - have indeed helped cure diseases and have made millions of dollars for biomedical supply companies, pharmaceutical companies, and research laboratories, the surviving members of the Lacks family still live in poverty, without reliable access to health insurance or proper medical care.” Heart-string pulling, right? But who in 1951 had any clue how cancer research would evolve? And these cells could have come from any of a thousand candidates. What made them special since then is simply that they became a standard. The important part is: This only looks special after the fact. There was nothing special in what was happening at the time.
The root of the waste here is the lack of understanding for something that is quite important: different circumstances call for different solutions to problems. When people start campaigning for ancestor atonement, or give money to a person calling for ancestor atonement, they are ignoring differences between the harsh realities of the ancestor’s circumstances and the harsh realities of today. As pointed out above, this leads to a lot of heart-string-pulling that is, in fact, delusional and leads to a lot of waste.
This lack of understanding the significance of different circumstances is also a form of prescriptive intolerance: If those ancestors didn't live in a way that seems right today, they must have been doing it wrong. Think about this idea long enough, and you will realize that succumbing to this conviction is an insult to the ancestors.
In Neolithic Village times, atonement was a signal that a person recognized they had made a mistake in dealing with another person or the people of the community, and they wanted to be forgiven. This was a way of signaling that a person wanted to remain in a positive relation, not be shunned or exiled. If the community accepted the atonement they were agreeing that the atoner could remain part of the community.
Mistakes happened often so atonement happened often, and this ritual became part of instinctive thinking. It is still a useful ritual today, as many a husband who has forgotten an anniversary can attest to! But being instinctive thinking, it can be abused. Ancestor atoning is an abuse of what atoning is designed to do. It is a case of heart-thinking leaping out without enough head-thinking being added into the mix.
At its root, ancestor atoning is another form of begging. The crusader is using guilt tripping to collect money. This is wasteful. It is also intolerant because it presumes the ancestors' circumstances should support today's moralities.