>>we are the only people that can meaningfully take responsibility. It's not fair, but that's the path ahead.
This is where you lose me..
I am fully supporting of free trade, free exchange of information, making those nations the best through trade and education. Even sending them some aide if needed, wanted and put to good use (not supporting authoritarian governments)
But the sins of the part are not my responsibility at all, dont attempt to foist them upon me
I don't think being-guilty-of and taking responsibility are the same thing. Eg; I don't think I was guilty of starting the argument with my colleague, but I nevertheless have a responsibility to contribute to its resolution.
But there's potentially a deeper implication of your position. Can one simultaneously disown the sins of our ancestors whilst being so attached to the benefits they reaped? If there is no moral connection between then and now, why is it so difficult for me to contemplate foregoing the relative wealth afforded to me by my currency, education, medical health and passport, in order to return the trillions of dollars of labour and natural resources stolen from say India and Africa?
> why is it so difficult for me to contemplate foregoing the relative wealth afforded to me by my currency, education, medical health and passport
Because deep down you know that's silly. Fundamentally, the world is a leveled playing field: Each person is born with a set of internal and external qualities and they do the best they can with the hand there were dealt. You don't feel the need to forgo your (let's say) above average intelligence/good-looks/grit/sanity caused by more or less normal family, etc. Your nationality is just another bullet point on your personal list. If anything, you have moral responsibility to make use of your perceived privileges better yourself and the world around you.
>>But you’re profiting off of the sins committed in the past, and somebody else is paying for them.
I do not believe I am, not in the way you are implying. You have no idea what my family history is, or what indivual actions they took, instead you are imparting these historical sins upon me because I may be a part of a nation today or may have part of a race in my genetic make up that may or may not committed what in modern context we call "sins" when we look back upon history through our modern eyes
It also makes many many assumptions about what the state of those nations would have been with out "interference" from the west, Assumption I do not believe you can accurately make
The further back in history you go the worse those assumption get as well.
I’m not imparting the sins of whatever country you happen to live in on you or your family. I see it akin to finding money on the street, growing up, and then finding out they were stolen. That would make me feel something, even if neither I nor anyone in my family stole that money.
And I’m not arguing against Western contact with other nations, I’m merely stating that the West profited off of immoral things towards other civilizations that those nations are still paying for. The Dutch extracting oil from the Dutch East Indies by wiping out cultures island to island, laying the ground work for wars to break out in the power vacuum, is hard to see as anything but a crime against the native people, the instability it caused hobbling that part of the world to this day, that was exclusively beneficial for the Netherlands.
That doesn’t mean that the Dutch should feel shame for having been in contact at all with those cultures but a Dutch person who profits off of the business generated by Royal Dutch Shell should probably feel something when they hear about political instability in Indonesia. And when that part of the world becomes uninhabitable because of climate change, and the Indonesian economy can’t handle adapting to that, I think a Dutch person should feel something.
This is where you lose me..
I am fully supporting of free trade, free exchange of information, making those nations the best through trade and education. Even sending them some aide if needed, wanted and put to good use (not supporting authoritarian governments)
But the sins of the part are not my responsibility at all, dont attempt to foist them upon me