By Brian Britton French
We live in an age of effortless judgment. With the comforts of antibiotics, central heating, and a life expectancy that would have seemed godlike to any medieval king, a peculiar class of modern people has appointed itself the supreme moral tribunal of all human history. From oversized air-conditioned homes with fine trimmed lawns, they scroll through centuries of human struggle and pronounce verdicts: “How could they?” “They should have known better.” “That was evil.”
The past is reduced to a morality play in which every historical actor is expected to behave as though they had been born in 21st-century Brooklyn with a gender-studies degree and a subscription to The Atlantic. This is not wisdom. It is chronological snobbery dressed up as compassion. Its a dangerous form of mental illness that can tear down society, not build a better one.
The World Our Ancestors Actually Inhabited
Let us begin with a fact that is almost never mentioned in the popular retelling of history: until the late 19th century, the average human life expectancy at birth hovered between 25 and 35 years almost everywhere on Earth. That number is dragged down by infant mortality, but even those who survived childhood rarely saw 60. A woman who lived to 45 had outlived most of her peers. Pain was constant, famine recurrent, and violence omnipresent.
There were no police, no antibiotics, no anesthesia, no welfare state, no international humanitarian law, no concept of “human rights” as we understand them. Childbirth regularly killed the mother, a scratched knee could mean death by sepsis, and a bad harvest meant starvation.
This was not a world in which one had the luxury of pondering the finer points of cultural appropriation or systemic power dynamics. Survival itself was the moral imperative. When a tribe A pushed tribe B off a piece of fertile river valley, it was not engaging in a seminar on settler-colonialism; it was trying to ensure that its children did not starve next winter.
The moral calculus was brutally simple: us or them.
Yet today we sit in judgment as though Charlemagne, or the Lakota, or the Aztecs, or the Bantu migrations should have paused in the middle of existential warfare to consult a 21st-century ethics textbook that did not yet exist and could not have been imagined.
The Myth of Pristine Indigenous Ownership
One of the most cherished modern myths is that pre-modern peoples lived in harmonious, static relationship with “their” land from time immemorial. This is romantic fiction. Human history is a 300,000-year-long story of migration, conquest, assimilation, extinction, and replacement.
Europe alone has seen Cro-Magnons displace Neanderthals, Indo-Europeans overrun Old Europe, Celts overrun Iberians, Romans overrun Celts, Germans overrun Romans, Vikings overrun everyone in reach, Normans overrun Anglo-Saxons, and on and on.
The same is true everywhere. The Navajo arrived in the American Southwest in the 1400s and pushed aside the Fremont and Ancestral Puebloan peoples. The Lakota were expanding westward across the Great Plains in the 1700s, displacing Kiowa, Crow, and Pawnee, at the exact same moment that the Comanche were driving the Apache south into Mexico.
The Zulu under Shaka were conducting genocidal campaigns of expansion in southern Africa in the early 19th century. The Maori conquered the Moriori of the Chatham Islands and ate them.
The land that the Mayflower settlers purchased (yes, purchased—multiple deeds exist) from the Wampanoag in the 1620s had itself changed hands many times. The Wampanoag had only recently taken control of parts of eastern Massachusetts after the Narragansett and Pequots had been weakened by epidemics and warfare. Go back further and the archaeological record shows layer after layer of earlier cultures—Paleo-Indian, Archaic, Woodland—each displacing or absorbing the previous inhabitants.
There has never been a square inch of the Earth’s habitable surface that was not taken from someone else at some point, usually many times. The idea that 17th-century New England was “stolen” in a way that is uniquely reprehensible, while the Bantu expansion across sub-Saharan Africa or the Han expansion across southern China were natural and unproblematic, is not serious history. It is political mythology.
It Is What You Do with the Land That Matters
Consider Manhattan Island—22 square miles of rocky hills, swamps, and forests. In 1626 the Canarsee (or perhaps the Munsee; the records conflict) accepted trade goods worth about 60 guilders for it. Today that same island generates more economic value in a single day than the entire pre-contact population of North America probably produced in a year.
Was the island intrinsically valuable? Obviously not. The same 22 square miles exist today in thousands of places around the world—coastal, defensible, with deep-water harbors. What made Manhattan valuable was not the dirt but what people did with the dirt: Dutch merchants, English traders, Irish and German immigrants, Jewish refugees, Italian laborers, and millions of others who poured concrete, laid subway lines, invented the skyscraper, built the financial markets, and turned a mosquito-infested outpost into the crossroads of global civilization.
If the Lenape had been forcibly removed from paradise, they were removed from 22 square miles that were, in global terms, completely ordinary. There are tens of thousands of comparable 22-square-mile parcels on the eastern seaboard alone. What prevented any displaced group from taking another equivalent piece of land and replicating the achievements of Manhattan? Nothing—except the cultural, technological, and institutional toolkit required to do so.
The crime was not that Europeans took Manhattan. The tragedy, if you insist on seeing one, is that no pre-modern society on Earth had developed the combination of property rights, scientific method, capital markets, and legal stability required to turn 22 square miles of ordinary coastal real estate into one of the most valuable plots of land in human history.
The Arrogance of Hindsight Morality
Every generation believes it has reached the summit of moral enlightenment. Every generation is wrong. In 2125 our descendants will almost certainly look back on us with the same scorn we direct at the 19th century. They will ask how we could possibly have raised cattle in feedlots and slaughtered them by the billions when perfectly viable protein could be grown in vats.
They will ask why we allowed people to live in 3,000-square-foot houses when 600 square feet would have sufficed. They will ask why we flew jet aircraft that burned fossil fuels when electric vertical-takeoff vehicles were already in prototype.
They will ask why we permitted billions to live in poverty when automation and energy abundance could have provided a comfortable existence for all. And they will be as wrong as we are. Because they, like us, will be judging the past using moral and technological assumptions that were simply unavailable to the people who had to make decisions under conditions of genuine scarcity and risk.
The comfortable moralizing of the future will be built on the sacrifices and experiments of the past, sacrifices that the future will conveniently forget.
The Real Moral Question
The real moral question is not “Who owned the land in 1491?” but “What kind of world do we want to build on the land we have today?” Condemning the dead for failing to live up to moral standards they could not have conceived is the cheapest form of virtue. Building something better—something that your own descendants will not spit on—is the only virtue that matters.
History is not a morality tale. It is a record of people doing the best they could with the cards they were dealt, in a world where the stakes were survival and the rules were written in blood and hunger. We owe our ancestors gratitude, not sermons. Without their ruthlessness, their ambition, and their willingness to cross oceans in wooden boats to face plague and starvation, none of us would be here to engage in this comfortable moral preening.
The blame game is easy. Building is hard. Our ancestors chose the hard path. Perhaps we should show a little humility before we condemn them for it.
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