Who Do You Think You Are?

[poliphilo]

Who do I think I am?

Well, I'm a sort of a Buddhist. I believe in reincarnation. I think this no longer very active body is the latest of many I've knocked about in-  which means my so-called ancestors are only related to me for the duration of this particular short life. When I shuck this body off I'll lose them as well.  My real lineage has nothing to do with my family tree but consists of all the random, genetically-unrelated people I've been.  So if I were to discover that my blood ancestors were slave owners and slave traders I wouldn't be greatly bothered. Those guys ain't me

Silly Ben Affleck.

(As it happens, the ancestors I know most about were Quakers, which means they'd have been abolitionists as a matter of course. Those are my mother's people. My father's lot were shopkeepers on one side and unknowable on the other. I think (can't prove but have reason to believe) that my grandfather was illegitimate. His mother had a lodging house in Erith and his father was what- some passing sailor? My grandfather was very swarthy- which makes me speculate (indeed hope) that his father may not have been English. All this is quite good fun- but I can't take it seriously.)

The soul's journey from incarnation to incarnation is a story of checks and balances. You go badly wrong in one life, you get back on track in the next.  I'm sure, on the law of averages, I must have been some pretty awful shits in my time.  Never mind. That was yesterday. We're here to explore the potential of life in human form on this planet- to have experiences- and we'd be doing a lousy job if we only kept to the straight forthright and never veered off into the bush.

Comments

[michaleen.livejournal.com]

Several of my ancestors were slave owners and at least one a slave driver, on a local plantation. My mother's great-grandfather fought to defend slavery during the War of the Rebellion and spent eleven months in a prison camp for it. Shameful, but I'm not personally ashamed.

My mother also descends from at least one witch, who swung for it in Connecticut in 1653. They were Puritans, on that side, and in their own way nearly as noxious as the slavers. If you go back far enough, she also descends from, among other notables, Waltheof, Earl of Northumberland and last of the Anglo-Saxon earls, who had his head struck off at St Gile's Hill, near Winchester, in 1076. It's an interesting way of learning history, but for me nothing more.

As for reincarnation, well, I agree, though alas we have no proof. Sometimes, the idea does seem to answer more questions than it raises.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I suppose absolute proof is impossible (I mean, what would satisfy the sceptics?) but there's a heap of evidence- the most convincing being the many well-documented cases of young children who remember being someone else- who can then be proved to have existed. Quite recently there was an American boy who remembered being a WWII fighter pilot.

I once knew a very young kid who had memories of being in a German tank that crashed into a wall after being attacked by partisans throwing Molotov cocktails.

In addition there's all the evidence from spontaneous recall by adults, hypnotic regression- all that sort of thing. I think wishful thinking plays a part in many cases, but not all of them. I remember a case in a TV documentary where some woman living in Australia recalled being a medical student in Scotland c. 1900 and was able to guide researchers round the building where (s)he'd trained, correctly identifying rooms and their uses- even though those uses had changed over the intervening century.

My mother's family have a very impressive family tree that goes back to the Plantagenets.

[ingenious76.livejournal.com]

Like many actors - take away the script and they spout rubbish.

[kamomil.livejournal.com]

I think that the treatment of African Americans by police, which has been in the news a lot, was probably influencing him. In article comments, some people consider all white people to be racist, simply because they are part of the dominant culture, and cannot experience discrimination. There are a lot of raw feelings right now. Maybe if the US had a truth and reconciliation thing like they had in South Africa, the healing might get started. I'm sure he didn't care what his ancestor did as much as he didn't want to add fuel to the fire of race relations.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

And why should we expect them to be intelligent? They're people who spend their lives dressing up and playing let's pretend.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I can see that. And he has a reputation as a Hollywood liberal to maintain. All the same I think he might have done some good by confronting and publicly coming to terms with his ancestry.

[kamomil.livejournal.com]

Bringing something out into the open and being honest is better. I guess he acted out of emotion instead of logic.

Off on a tangent about Quakers and abolitionism

[lblanchard.livejournal.com]

Your ancestors wouldn't have been abolitionists as a matter of course, just because they were Quakers. At least, that's not how it worked here in the colonies. William Penn owned slaves; John Bartram owned enslaved people for his own farm and purchased additional enslaved people for his son's ill-fated rice plantation venture.

William Bartram, later in life, wrote an anti-slavery treatise. And Benjamin Franklin, former slave owner, became the first president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society in 1775. That organization (which is still around and giving small grants to worthy causes) was indeed composed primarily of Quakers, but I think that if you shook their family trees a slaveholder or two might have fallen out.

In current scholarship, there is a shift to substitute "enslaved person" for slave. It's a bit of an awkward construction, but it does help reinforce the notion that an enslaved man is a man.

(This pedantic lecture has been brought to you by a member in good standing of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, who held their annual meeting just two days ago, so all of this is really fresh in my mind at the moment.)

I am liking some of the thoughtful commentary coming out of the Affleck affair -- one African American commentator noted that blacks and whites in this country are still yoked together in the cycle of guilt, shame, and anger brought about by the country's slaveholding past, irrespective of whether their ancestors were enslaved or not, slaveholders or not. That's a useful point. We're all suffering as a result.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I'm a little shocked. I had no idea that some Friends were also slave owners.

I'm not keen on "enslaved person". I think these well-meaning reformulations drain the life out of the language.

If it's stirring up intelligent debate then Affleck didn't suffer in vain.

[stevenusa.livejournal.com]

Wow. I like the idea of including ones past to the front. Knowing who you are is important. I know that to be who I am has taking much. Man has no master that enslaves him. Man can only cooperate. The goal of working the truth of ouro past is to inform the community about changes in the family. Cool. Ben is a up to something. Could it be a stunt? He does wacky things in movies. Have a good weekend. 

[veronica-milvus.livejournal.com]

I didn't understand the Affleck thing. I don't understand anyone who feels guilty about what their ancestors did - we weren't around to stop them even if we wanted to. We can't possibly be ashamed of what we didn't do, all we can do is recognise the wrong that was done and vow not to let it happen again.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I quite enjoy the TV show where celebs pretend to go looking for their ancestors, but I've never bought the mandatory scene in which they shed real tears over some awful thing that happened to some recently discovered forebear in the late 18th century. I think it's bogus and sentimental.

If I found out an ancestor had been a slave owner my reaction would be "Hmm, how interesting" but I wouldn't take it personally.

[michaleen.livejournal.com]

Nice. My one gateway ancestor takes us back to a surety baron of the Magna Carta and ultimately to the ancient kings of France, via the Normans. My favorite might be Roger the Moor Eater. I like the little pile he left behind at Conches-en-Ouche. His son, and my ancestor, Raoul II of Tosny, was one of the few proven companions of William at Hastings.

Sometimes, I think reincarnation seems to answer more questions than it raises. Of all the weirdness I've experienced in my life, one of the oddest things involved drinkies. When a coworker mentioned vodka and tonic, one day, I suddenly remembered how much I enjoyed gin and tonic and how long it had been since I'd had one. I bought the makings on the way home and found it exactly as I'd remembered. The problem is that I can't for the life of me recall when I'd first drank G&T. It's possible that I first tried it at a fraternity house, in '81, but that begs the question of why, if I liked it so, I'd never thought to have another in the thirty years since.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Why does almost anything to do with the Crusades bring tears to my eyes? Does it mean anything? I dunno.

My daughter went for hypnotic regression and remembered three wonderfully unglamorous lives- as an American business woman, a French nun working with babies and an Indian merchant. Would these be lives that anyone would come up with if they were just imagining things?

[lblanchard.livejournal.com]

I'm of two minds about "enslaved person." It startles the eye and ear and makes one think. That's good. It's awkward as heck, but maybe that's good, too.

I do have a thing about euphemism creep. In this country, first they were Africans, then they were Negros, then they were colored people, then they were Negroes again, then they were blacks, then they were Afro-Americans, then they were African-Americans. And starting at about the time of the first usage of Negro there was "the N word," which has persisted for 150 years or so. Now they're African Americans, blacks, or people of color, but heaven help you if you slip and say colored people instead of people of color, as Benedict Cumberbatch recently did.

My mother fell of the nomenclature bus in about 1950 and proudly called them colored people (rather than the N-word that most of her family used out of ignorant innocence). Oh, well.

Similar euphemism creep for those with physical or mental or emotional disabilities is pretty mind-boggling, too.

[michaleen.livejournal.com]

Why do I speak French with a German accent? I can't even hear it, but it drove my ex-wife to distraction. Doesn't happen with Spanish. I have a German 'twin', too. We don't look so much alike, but I've never been more perfectly at ease with a nominal stranger in all my life. Our personalities were so weirdly similar that his girlfriend brought us together, just to see what would happen. We talked, ignoring everyone and everything else, for about six hours without stopping.

The results of hypnotic regression are indeed fascinating. I remain somewhat agnostic about what it's telling us, though, in part because I'd rather just close my eyes, exhale one last time, and be done with it.