Edward Ball

“The past feels like a comfortable place to make moral judgments. It is comfortable because we underestimate the people who live in it. We regard them as less than we are—or in reverse, grander than we are—but always, not like what we are. The past is a place where we can enjoy moral judgment and feel superior to a roomful of unfortunate people, not so enlightened as us, who had the bad luck to live when and where they did. One value in spinning out the story of a plain man is to show how complex an ordinary person can be, or was; to show the multitudes a life contains. It is dreadful what this character, my unlikeable protagonist, does with himself and with others. What would it mean to say that his judgments are not different by much from our own? One value in writing this particular life is to refuse to let the past be a refuge, to decline to feel superior to it, to reject feeling good because you are better than the uncountable idiots who are conveniently dead.”
― Edward Ball, Life of a Klansman: A Family History in White Supremacy