The biblical phrase "perfect in his generation" has often struck me. It seems to me that it means that a person has lived as justly and well as his historical situation warranted. Each of us is bounded by the cultural and intellectual horizon's that surround us. Such boundaries are not impossible to breach, or change could never occur, but such a feat is highly unusual.
Such an insight might teach us to avoid the common modern error of judging historical figures by the mores and standards of our century instead of carefully placing them in their own context and understanding how much that context informed their range of choices and the breadth of their vision.
The following passage from Havel's prison letters is a thoughtful appraisal of "the question of what my imprisonment means to me, and what role it plays in my life." I think a careful examination of our own lives would reveal similar, if more subtle, constraints.
"...the fact of my imprisonment...affects my life far more than I would have assumed at first sight. To begin, it permeates every aspect of my everyday life: it establishes my daily schedule with great exactness, and from morning till evening influences to a greater or lesser extent all my activities, their intentions, the conditions under which they take place, their scope; it affects my demeanor and behavior, it shapes my habits and routines, the conduct of my life, how I obtain what I need, do my personal chores - in short, it penetrates into everything....Nor is that all: it more or less determines the character, the motifs, the circumstances and the expression of all my moods; it establishes my perspective on space and time; it gives a concrete aspect to my joys, hopes, aims, fears and afflictions, and to all the complications I have to contend with each day; it colors the criteria I apply in judging the many different phenomena and events that surround me; it gives concrete form to a large part of what sociologists call one's "value system." This ubiquitous, pervasive influence penetrates to the minutest details of what I do..."
Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga
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