First, one word: metallurgy.

I’m not suggesting the Greeks were ready to set up a trans-European railroad with locomotives. Pumps, on the other hand, make mining and irrigation far more practical.

<blockquote They did not forbear from “practical experimentation” and fail to consider the “practical possibilities” of Heiron’s toy for their own “security” for the very simple reason that they did not consider experimentation at all and had not thought to our modern good of technological innovation.

And have you noticed how stagnant slave societies are? The Confederacy had no shortage of clever people, but ‘innovative’ isn’t an adjective that leaps to mind when describing it – except in military tactics, I suppose.

I suggest there’s causation there, not simply correlation.

Astrology was not a previous version of astronomy. Astrology was an application of astronomy.

A I’ve put it before, astrology begat astronomy. That doesn’t make astrology right, any more than contributing to the creation of a leisure class, which led to the creation of a still smaller intellectual class, made slavery right.

I am doing some research at the Library of Congress that entails reading 1930s documents of the Communist Party of the USA. Over several hours of this, one gets a picture of the times—the suffering caused by the Depression, the frightening rise of fascism, social and economic inequalities and injustice, etc. The CP took up the causes of legal immigrants who were jailed and then sentenced with deportation for, in effect, protesting their inhumane working conditions.

The communists also were actively seeking to join in the civil rights struggles of African Americans and women. There is more than a whiff of political opportunism and expediency in their support of these progressive causes—I kept thinking of Nixon and LBJ and their similarly complicated motives for pushing civil rights legislation. However, the CP of the ’30s was aware of racism (“white chauvinism”) in its ranks and sought to quash it.

I said to my mother last night that given the times, I might have been a communist! At least, I could see why people joined in the 1930s. She said, however, that her father and uncle (liberal democrats who were officials in the Carpenters Union) always regarded communism as a threat. I will have to pick her brains on why this was so….it gets curiouser and curiouser…

Many Americans today buy products which were manufactured or produced using people (including children) in ways that mirror slavery.

Many of these Americans may not do it intentionally – since production conditions and networks are often obfuscated, especially in a global system. But many Americans wouldn’t lift a finger to find out who is being severely exploited in their work conditions, even if it entails horrible abuse, unless the information is dropped onto their laps. And a good PR firm usually takes care of easing any concerns of work-related abuse overseas (or internally), even when nothing changes for those being exploited.

And yet, all of these Americans will feel this smugness of having overcome their ancestors’ enthusiastic appreciation of slavery, while taking part in and benefiting all the same from its modern version.

We are all men and women of our times. Even peg’s predictions are projections from our times. We cannot live by future historians’ opinions of ourselves. If we are wrong we are wrong—and in at least some things we will be—yet we must make our best decisions based on who we are and what we know now. It’s what we have to work with.

C.S. Lewis famously recommended that we read old books, to learn from the past and (somewhat) correct ourselves in the present. It’s not a perfect answer, but it’s markedly more practical than learning from the future.

We only get one shot at life. We can make it up as we can go along, or we can look to a good example as our guide to making the most of it. The best such example in history, without a doubt, is Jesus Christ. It doesn’t require believing in his divinity to see that about him.

There is only one way into the future: to live in the present in light of the past.

As for what we get wrong, maybe future generations will learn from that, too; but that is for them, and not for us. For us, it is to do as well as we can do—and to seek God’s forgiveness in Christ for all the ways in which we will inevitably fail.

I am not saying I approve of the future condemnation that might transpire. I love my pet dog, after all. I also am a lax vegetarian.

E.g. the Greeks had everything they needed to invent the steam engine but never regarded it as more than a curiosity, never dared to consider its practical possibilities.

In a similar way, astronomy probably had to develop through astrology, and likewise the development from alchemy to chemistry was probably inevitable.

But that doesn’t mean that slavery – or astrology, or alchemy – wasn’t wrong.

That always gets peoples’ heads spinning.