Kevin M. Levin, “What We Owe the Past” (3.18.26), kevinmlevin.substack.com. Accessed 4.1.26.
Future generations will almost certainly look back at us with bewilderment and grief. Perhaps it will be our treatment of animals, raised and slaughtered by the billion in conditions of documented suffering, which we know about and mostly prefer not to think about. Perhaps it will be climate change, not the fact of it, but the years we spent debating it while the window to act narrowed. Perhaps it will be something we cannot see yet, some cruelty so woven into ordinary life that we no more notice it than a medieval peasant noticed the theological assumptions that saturated his world.
If we hope that our descendants will say, they were limited, not monstrous, that they worked within what they could see, then intellectual honesty and consistency demands we apply the same generosity backward. Again, this does not mean abandoning criticism. It means that our criticism becomes more targeted and contextualized and therefore more useful when it is measured to what was actually knowable, actually resistible, actually imaginable in the time and place in question.
The Amateur Exegete 
I wonder sometimes if rather than focusing on the faults of our ancestors, a different approach might be a good alternative: recognizing those who stood out through their heroic deeds and ideas within the limitations of past eras.
So, for example, we can scratch our heads at some of the unusual beliefs of the ancient world regarding the shape of the earth, but at the same time appreciate the work (done by people like Eratosthenes) to establish that we live on an sphere-like astronomical object. Of course, this understanding would be further refined as time went on.
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