"A person is good not by avoiding those evils he already finds horrible, but by avoiding those evils that he finds attractive and available. We must measure a person's virtues by his circumstances, not our own." -Marc Barnes, First Things, December 2017
I read old copies of First Things as I am able, passed from my father on to me. This short article by grad student Marc Barnes expresses well something I've struggled to put into word myself- the concept that "a generation is good or evil according to its genuinely possible actions." Barnes argues that "Moral arrogance and historical ignorance reinforce one another. To ennoble ourselves, we make irrational barbarians our of our ancestors and ignore the complexities of their times."
There's something dissatisfying out of my own explanation, where I often find myself saying something along the line of- We ought to judge a person in the context of their times...
Read the entire article here.
