Not all that different…

It is easy to peer out from your ivory tower, look haughtily down upon the landscape of human history, and fall for the fallacy that we are somehow fundamentally different to the grunting, club-dragging, morally-unconscious oafs that populated our primitive past.

From this lofty height, don’t you agree that the ancient Celts, Native Americans, and all those other linguistically-limited, nomadic hunter-gatherers look positively repulsive?

And what about those Roman, Mayan and Greek so-called ‘civilisations’? They were about as civil as a house party in the Holylands.

Speaking of which… No, actually, do I even need to pass judgment on the people that crucified Jesus Christ himself?

I mean, of all the fellas to wrongfully execute, they just had to go and nail the literal Son of God to a cross?

Brad brutes, the whole lot of them.

Thankfully, those days are gone, and we could never go back… Right?

Well, while I have you up in this tower, notice how when we observe the barbarism by which we define certain societies, we don’t see the perpetrators as a product of their environment, but, rather, as free agents; authors of their own actions, deciders of their own destinies.

We look at them and think that there was something innate in people belonging to that particular time and place that made them capable of such callousness and cruelty.

But, while this explanation might be intuitively appealing, and maybe even morally reassuring, it cannot, logically, be the case.

See, while it often takes a civilisation only a few hundred years to become virtually unrecognisable from its former self, human beings take a long, long time to change.

In fact, when it boils down to it – and I am talking flesh, blood and brains – people, today, are pretty much identical to our ancestors of 300,000 years ago, and that includes all the seemingly monstrous men and women that have since been born and have died.

For example, recently, I have been reading about a tribe of Native Americans called the Comaches.

You may be familiar with the name from its colloquial usage, which normally means something like ‘eejit’, or ‘not a dislikable person, but a bit of loose cannon after a few jars’.

(I haven’t looked into it, but my Gen Z offensiveness antennae is receiving a signal that says it is probably a term that is a lot less fashionable today than it would have been back when there was less of a gulf between casual racism and having thecraic).

But anyway, back to the boys.

Expert archers and masters of the horse, the Comaches were warlike, bloodthirsty and torture-prone people who ended up the last clan of Plains Indians to be brought down by the bullets of the Texas Rangers.

They were the final, ruthless resistance on the American Frontier.

Anyway, when their near-extermination led to their eventual submission, one of the ways the white men who conquered them justified their genocide was to fixate on their habit of killing children and taking women as sex slaves.

Naturally enough, this argument was a powerful one, which greatly alleviated the guilt of the settlers who soon found themselves building ranches on what was once Comanche land.

Fast-forward then 20 years or so, and these same settlers, who once ostensibly held the moral high ground, would have been slave owners.

I mean, for God’s sake, it wasn’t that long ago that a picnic at a public hanging was considered a cheap and cheerful family day out!

Which leads me to my conclusion…

Last week, I stood back and watched as a husband and bride-to-be were kidnapped, bound, strapped to the back of a trailer, covered in rancid foodstuffs, and driven about Dromore until they were both shivering and begging for mercy.

Will the enlightened folk of the future look back through the mists of time, and throw McElhatton into the same sub-human pot as the Cowboys and Comanches?

Only time will tell…