What kind of historical legacy do you want?

  

“What if only ten righteous people can be found in the city?”

God answered, “For the sake of ten, I will not destroy it.”

 

As often explained, a odernity is a phase in a civilisation, which is characterised by rational thinking, cultural and scientific innovation, experimental thought, political ideas and pluralism, but also by conflicts, revolutions and wars. We see high levels of humane thinking and politics, but also shockingly inhumane acts and meaningless bloodshed and suffering. Examples of modernities are: in the First Chinese Civilisation roughly 500-200 BC, in the Greco-Roman 300-0, in the Second Chinese Civilisation 900-1300 and in our case 1800-2100.

 

The judgement of a modernity changes radically with time, especially with the shift from this phase to the time after. The new thinking which during a modernity was hailed as liberation, is now difficult to understand and perceived and criticised as immoral. This is evident already under the rule of Augustus which marked the end of the Greco-Roman modernity.

 

The violence and attrocities which as said, also characterise modernities are praised by the contemporary victors and condemned by not only the defeated. After the modern phase such acts are broadly condemned and the perpetrators go down in history as criminals and murderers. Their legacy is tainted and bloody.

 

Examples are Sulla who proscribed thousands of opponents and others in Rome in 82 BC and Bai Qi who in China in 260 BC slaughtered 400.000 soldiers after they had surrended. Our civilisation has also witnessed several people who might have been heroes of the day for some, but were butchers for others. After the end of their modernity such people in all civilisations were and will be generally condemned. One of history’s worst examples is of course Adolf Hitler who as deserved is condemned by almost everybody already in the present modern phase. Compared to what he and his followers did, the other excesses in the use of violence and suffering in our civilisation, past or ongoing, may seem less significant. But nevertheless, such acts have caused and causes tens or hundreds of thousands or even millions of lost lives. The crimes of Nazism do not nullify them. Neither do the crimes of terrorism. Not in the eyes of contemporaries and certainly not for future historical judges.