SINS OF THE FATHERS

The Inheritability of Guilt

The question of whether one should be punished (or feel guilty) for the iniquities of one’s ancestors has plagued humans for thousands of years. There are two common opinions:

(1) The biblical accusation that “the sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the sons to the third and fourth generation” — if your grandfather killed my grandfather, I’m justified in killing you.

(2) The child’s defense that “I wasn’t even born then, so it’s not my fault!”

It seems difficult to find a compromise between these two philosophies, but people are still dying as a result of (1), and each one who dies causes his or her descendants to thirst for revenge by the same logic. We don’t seem to be “wired” to accept (2) as a valid defense, even though it is perfectly logical.

Where did our urge for vengeance come from in the first place? As far as I can tell, animals do not usually seek revenge for its own sake. They certainly do look for opportunities to take valuables from others by force. If you catch a salmon in an area frequented by sea lions, don’t leave it on the dock unattended! If you want to give your smaller dog a rawhide bone, don’t let the bigger dog see you do it. It’s reasonable to assume that early humans were no different. Then we learned to band together and carry out raids on smaller or weaker bands to take their stuff. After a while, a band that became notorious for this was apt to motivate all the smaller, weaker bands to “band together” and wipe them out. This seems likely to have been the origin of a code of vengeance.

But there seem to have been exceptions. Some tribes were perhaps too big to make tempting targets for raids, or perhaps they just got lucky by living in an inaccessible region, and they never found vengeance necessary. Until modern times, of course — nowadays no region is inaccessible, and the predatory supertribes compete with each other for the chance to take whatever they covet.

Meanwhile, we have struggled to rise above our evolved nature by inventing “ethics” and “rights” and “laws” and other political mythologies whose purpose is to override our limbic drives. How’s that working out?

Not so great, but perhaps there is hope for a cessation of feuds.

One argument centers on cui bono — “Who benefits?”

If your ancestors committed some perfidy against others’ ancestors but the only benefit you got from it was to be born, how much do you owe the descendants of the injured? That sounds straightforward, but what if the only reason you got born was that your desperate ancestors killed off their ancestors to secure a place to raise their descendants? What if only a few of the others survived? This is not very different from the narrative of European invaders in North America. An apology would be entirely appropriate; but what about reparations? How much money would it take to “make things right”? (I apologize for such a silly question. No amount of money could make things right.)

Is there an important difference between the above case and the case where your ancestors got rich from slave labor and your parents are still rich today as a result of that wealth being passed down from generation to generation? I feel like there ought to be, but I can’t justify my feelings logically. Once again, it’s not something you did, or even asked for.

In the end, I think I must fall back on my favorite aphorism: “Justice is ill served by shame, blame or fame.” Going forward, if we share our kindness and understanding freely and try to do right by each other in the present, perhaps over time the sins of our fathers (and mothers) can be forgiven.