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6/27/2020

We are the product of history not the judge of it




When Orville and Wilbur Wright took that momentous flight in 1903, they did not do it alone. Of course there were others present who helped the brothers in their historic quest, but I speak of others, known and unknown who were responsible for the world changing event on Kitty Hawk.

The Wright Brothers were bike makers, a rather new fad which allowed them not only an income to finance their famous enterprise but also gave them the machinist expertise necessary to accomplish it. Bicycles at the time of the first flight were a pretty new mode of transportation, the first bicycle having been built less than a hundred years before in 1817.  A crude contraption  without chains,  brakes, or pedals. Of course there would not have been bikes at all had it not been for the wheel which some unknown human with an enterprising and inventive mind first used around 3500 BC. Interesting enough however, the first historic record of men using the wheel was not for transportation but as a potter's wheel. At some later date someone got the idea for a wheel barrow, then the axle then wallah, we become mobile. 
  
An even more recent invention was responsible for the flight, the internal combustion engine.
The first commercially successful internal combustion engine was created by Étienne Lenoir around 1860 and the first modern internal combustion engine was created in 1876 by Nicolaus Otto.
 All these inventions, did I mention the glider (1853) were not only the product of their inventor's minds, but the accumulated knowledge passed onto them from various sources going back thousands of years. 

It is easy to see how inventions and other human enterprises are the offspring of previous human accomplishments, so why is it so difficult to recognize that all human advancement is built upon the past? That we are the product of history not the judge of it.

As great as they may have been, America's Founding Fathers did not come up with their revolutionary ideas regarding freedom out of thin air. They were a product of their times, taught by the evolving ideas and principles of previous generations.

For a society that sees evolution as the beginning and end of all existence we are remarkably ignorant of it when it comes to our own advancement. We did not suddenly find ourselves ending slavery any more than we suddenly found ourselves on the moon. To demean the advancement in human progress by judging the past from a place of progress is no different than Neil Armstrong condemning the Wright Brothers for their lack of ingenuity.

We don't, or shouldn't, expect children to act like adults. Most people realize there is a learning curve to life. The older one gets the more aware you become of that curve and, with humility, realize how steep it is. In a sense that is what is happening now, Rather than recognizing how far we have come, we belittle our less advanced selves.
Some are demanding that the past conform to the enlightened values that the past itself taught us. In condemning our past we are condemning ourselves. We are saying that "they" should have known better when in fact "they" knew better than the generation that preceded them and the generation before that, it is called progress. 

I have always loved history, but to truly understand and appreciate history requires a different kind of humility. It requires the ability to truly know that I did not walk in history's footsteps, I was not there, then try to be there, to understand what it must have been like.

To judge history from today's platform is worse than arrogance, it is immature. It is like an adult demanding a child act and react based on things that they don't know, on knowledge and experience they have not yet gained. Yet that is exactly the path that is being promoted, not only by misinformed mobs in the street but by a large swath of supposed mature society. 

Corporations whose very existence is a bi-product of evolutionary development of ideas and practices are failing to recognize that what created them, created us. Grown Ups who fail to teach their children, politicians who at the best bow to the loud voices of insanity and at worst, cheer it on hoping to be its champion.

As depressing as it is to watch current events, history teaches us one over riding lesson. When mankind crashes to the ground it will always brush itself off and look to fly again. That is the God spark that was built into us from the beginning and from which we cannot escape, no matter how hard we may try.

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