Signs of The Times

Thomas Jefferson has been roundly criticized recently for being a slaveholder.  Sometimes the implication is that we should discount everything he said and wrote because of this failing.  When you think about it, though, Thomas Jefferson was a very intelligent and educated man.  He wrote the Declaration of Independence and was the President who grew the country substantially through the Louisiana Purchase.  He had expertise in surveying, mathematics, horticulture, mechanics and architecture.  Even compared to other historical figures, he was very impressive.

So what would make someone with that kind of talent and credentials decide that owning slaves was acceptable?  For almost 300 years there had been virtually no slavery in all of Western Europe.  While he was president, England and France were in the process of legally banning slavery.  What was he thinking?  Perhaps he was just following the prevailing values and beliefs of the society he lived in.  His behavior was acceptable for his place and time.  Perhaps before we judge Jefferson too harshly, we should look at what is acceptable in our place and time that future generations will find shocking or shameful.  What are we not seeing?  The trend toward complacency is pretty clear just by looking at how often people accept actions based on good intentions or questionable science without considering the human cost.

In 1972 the use of DDT was banned primarily due to negative publicity from the book Silent Spring, by Rachael Carson.  This source and several others argue that the action resulted in 50 million deaths over 30 years by depriving people, primarily those living in Africa, of the option to use the insecticide prudently to control mosquitos.  Three years before the ban, the director of the World Health Organization (WHO) stated confidently:

“DDT is so safe that no symptoms have been observed among the 130,000 spraymen or the 535 million inhabitants of sprayed houses [over the past 29 years of its existence]. No toxicity was observed in the wildlife of the countries participating in the malaria campaign. Therefore WHO has no grounds to abandon this chemical which has saved millions of lives, the discontinuation of which would result in thousands of human deaths and millions of illnesses. It has served at least 2 billion people in the world without costing a single human life by poisoning from DDT. The discontinuation of the use of DDT would be a disaster to world health.”

Nevertheless they banned it, and to this day few are horrified.

Over thirty years later the limited use of DDT is again allowed, but caution is advised.  In 2006 a Scientific American article stated:  “Malaria is one of the world's most deadly diseases, each year killing about 880,000 people, mostly children in sub-Saharan Africa, according to the World Health Organization.”  This total lack of perspective – the ban-it-preall approach – cost millions of lives, but this same thinking is being applied to other products today without consideration for the long-term unintended consequences.

Look at the number of people who, without any more information than tweets, posts, the word of neighbors and other reinforcement from their ideological echo chambers, cringe at the mention of the herbicide Roundup.  Likewise, look at how it seems acceptable for millions of Africans to starve as long as we protect the environment from the spread of GMO grain and corn, primarily for political, not scientific reasons. 

Let's not be too quick to criticize.  What we support today or have in the recent past may be seen by our grandchildren as both immoral and racist.  But we fall into that same trap as our forebears when we greet each new scary headline with “OMG,” and rush to repost to spread the word hoping others will also become adamant about these conspiracy theories and irrational fear.  In many cases, this non-critical thinking reaction has dangerous consequences.

Do people really honor Jefferson because he was a slaveholder or despite the fact that he was.  It's not a matter of ignoring the fact, but of putting them in the perspective of the time period.  Before we judge the choices of figures of the past too harshly, we should consider how critics in the distant future will paint our behavior with the same broad brush, condemning us for following the trends of our times without thinking things through.