Redeeming our Past

Carl Youngblood

All right, so I’m really glad to be with you guys today. I absolutely love it when our guests come and quote Mormon scripture and general authorities to us. It’s one of my favorite things. So thank you very much, James. Very insightful. And you channeled your limited understanding of Mormonism very well. You did a great job.

Carl Youngblood

I have a short amount of time today, but I wanted to share with you some thoughts that I’ve had about ways that we can apply history. Beyond just our looking up our individual family records.

Carl Youngblood

Transhumanists, like other futurists before them, sometimes make the mistake of viewing history as an inexorable upward march, downplaying present problems and looking forward to a bright and inevitable future full of possibility. This optimism is sometimes the product of privilege. Insufficiently aware of or oblivious to the suffering of others, these progressives may ignore or downplay efforts to address societal problems, in a naïve faith that technology will cure all present ills.

Carl Youngblood

Indeed, many critiques of Silicon Valley culture focus on its insularity designing successive social media apps that may be this month’s rage in downtown San Francisco, but hardly even register a blip in The Heartland. or the rust belt, or the favela.

Carl Youngblood

Some futurists may even actively disdain efforts to promote social justice. As people become increasingly frustrated with the digital divide and the difficulty of consensus based processes, some use their technological privilege to promote apathy, cynicism. Exclusion Nativism and even Fascism Their autocratic, deterministic Manifest destiny view of history is one in which historically marginalized groups become less and less worthy of consideration and inclusion.

Carl Youngblood

Someone who experienced the violence of these historical fallacies first hand was Walter Benjamin, a German Jewish philosopher who fled Germany as the Nazis rose to power in the thirties. and after failing to emigrate safely, chose suicide over forced repatriation and imprisonment.

Carl Youngblood

Benjamin observed that, without exception, the cultural treasures the historian surveys have an origin which cannot be contemplated without horror. They owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.

Carl Youngblood

We’ve had some comments about how our descendants may view many of the things we do today as barbaric at some point.

Carl Youngblood

Benjamin claimed that it is possible to reconfigure the past by collecting and calling attention to subtle, pivotal moments that cause prior events to be reinterpreted. He identified these moments as messianic time.

Carl Youngblood

Just as the Messiah is not recognized at first and has no beauty that we should desire him, so the redemptive moments of our lives are not immediately recognized as such, but in fullness of time come to restructure our entire lives.

Carl Youngblood

So there’s this pivotal moment in our lives and in different events in both communities and in nations when suddenly everything gets reconfigured and we start to see things clearly, it seems, for the first time. And suddenly all the events of the past change. And the things that were good are now bad, and the things that were bad are now good.

Carl Youngblood

Mormon philosopher Adam Miller expounds on Ben Yameen’s admonition. He says, we must learn to see history from a new perspective. then we will find ourselves incapable of continued belief in the paralyzing promise of progress, instead of viewing the past as a wave of momentous events whose crest has successfully carried us thus far and will carry us through to the end, we will learn to see the past and present as they genuinely stand in need of salvation.

Carl Youngblood

Miller goes on to enumerate some of the characteristics of a messianic historian. The messianic is that which retroactively reconfigures history itself. It involves the rediscovery of what was lost. It interprets the tyranny of homogeneous time. The messianic exposes homogeneous progress as vain. It carefully collects the heterogeneous debris of history.

Carl Youngblood

Benjamin shares an interesting quote to illustrate the anachronistic quality of Messianic history that should have strong resonance with religious transhumanists. He says, In relation to the history of organic life on Earth, writes a modern biologist, the paltry fifty millennia of Homo sapiens constitute something like two seconds. at the close of a twenty four hour day. On this scale, the history of civilized mankind would fill one fifth of the last second of the last hour The present, which, as a model of messianic time, comprises the entire history of mankind in an enormous abridgment. coincides exactly with the stature which the history of mankind has in the universe.

Carl Youngblood

So he says our very biological heritage, our biological history, is itself an example of messianic time. We see in the very last Split second of our planet’s entire history, a sudden reconfiguration of everything, right?

Carl Youngblood

So in summary, a messianic historian retroactively reconfigures history by calling attention to previously unnoticed details They seek out that which was lost. They interrupt the tyranny of homogeneous time and carefully collect the heterogeneous debris of history.

Carl Youngblood

I see this kind of history as an active endeavor that seeks to root out and bear the burdens of humanity throughout the ages. We need to recognize that we are connected with prior generations, that they without us cannot be made perfect, neither can we without them be made perfect. and that we are unavoidably hindered by continuing to partake of the spoils of the oppressive cultures we’ve inherited.

Carl Youngblood

We have seen some recent examples in the news of individuals willing to approach our collective history in this way. These are only a few of examples among many. They identify pivotal moments in which our historical viewpoints shift, when the dam bursts and history becomes reconfigured, when the Messiah appears and helps us to see the suffering all around us. to exalt the dam downtrodden and abase the oppressor.

Carl Youngblood

So we see, like, just calling attention to a couple things here. Kyle Corver just a couple days ago talked about how he says, you know, are we guilty of the sins of our white ancestors? He said, no, I don’t think so. But he says we certainly are responsible for them, and we can do something about them. We still inherit, we still benefit from the oppressive power structures that exist today that we inherited from previous generations.

Carl Youngblood

Tanahasi Coates made a case for reparations for slavery.

Carl Youngblood

And we’ve seen how Me Too movement suddenly there were these women who just said, This is enough. You know, we’re not going to deal with this anymore. And gain the courage to talk about it, and suddenly all these men are like, oh my gosh, I had no idea that it was even this pervasive, you know. And so these are examples to me of these kind of messianic moments in history.

Carl Youngblood

In closing, I’d like to share some words of inspiration from Ben Yamin for all would-be Messianic historians. Only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past, which is to say, only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments. Otherwise, we will be Ashamed of these past things that we neglect and cover up and try to hide, right?

Carl Youngblood

Ben Yamin also calls us to vigilance. There will always be those who, in their ignorance and selfishness, Seek to cover up the past and erase the stories of those whose suffering and toil birthed our age. Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins.

Carl Youngblood

As Saviors on Mount Zion, called to participate with Christ in extending salvation to all, we are called to become certain kinds of historians. In the more traditional Mormon sense, we seek to discover the individual lives of our distant ancestors so that their story may continue. But this calling extends further.

Carl Youngblood

We are called to notice, identify, reveal, and redeem the humans human lives that touch ours. the cultures, ethnicities, communities, organizations, cities, and nations that we belong to and interact with, even those that touch ours across many distant links and generations, and especially those lives and cultures that have been wiped out Subjugated and repressed

Carl Youngblood

May we learn to practice this kind of history as we research the lives of our own ancestors and participate with Christ in the common redemption of humanity. Thank you.