They’d Do The Same, Wouldn’t They?
One thing that humanity has in common, across the board, are our amazing capacities for both good and evil. It seems one can find any group of people who developed a society and see them go from periods of enlightenment and equality into periods of darkness and hatred, and with many of the most positive and most negative qualities being seen at the same time.
The very fact that humans are morally equal to one another should produce a better sense of understanding the people who are on the wrong side of history, so to speak.
When you look at the clashes of civilizations we’ve seen we often get comical portraits of history: native Americans are all hippies preaching peace and environmentalism while the settlers were war hungry racists; the institution of slavery was applied exclusively by white anglo-saxon protestants on the world, the Japanese were war mongering barbarians exploiting their technological advantage to brutalize all of Asia only towards that end, etc.
It is vaguely true that the victors write history, but in civilized societies it often ends up with the victims writing history out of an acute sense of guilt the descendants of the victors feel.
In no way do I seek to lessen the horror of the atrocities committed by white settlers, slavers and Japanese imperialists, but rather I think it needs to be understood that if the tables were turned there would be the same result.
No human group is exempt from cruelty — there have been books written documenting the horrors that Native Americans forced on one another, and the extensive participation of African tribes themselves in the slavery system.
In an alternate world the Native Americans would have gladly settled Europe and destroy our indigenous culture, the Koreans would have gladly taken over the Japanese isles and committed cultural genocide, etc. It is the nature of humanity.
No single group has a monopoly on cruelty.
I sometimes wonder what it would be like if the North Americans were the poor, impoverished region of the world fighting off pandemics with a low average life expectancy; what if we were the poorest?
I have no doubt it would merely be a mirror image of today — because humanity is what is humanity is.
In a different world it would be the folks in Zimbabwe making multi-million dollar films and getting plastic surgery, going to see a Tanzanian version of Bono throw a benefit concert for the war refugees in Illinois and Iowa, and we’d have a South African Angelina Jolie adopting children from Montana, victimized by the war between the ethnic Norwegian tribes and the ethnic German tribes.