[Serious] Is the Past Real?

[Angrboda]

Does a promise made yesterday become no longer a promise because yesterday is in the past and therefore doesn't exist anymore?

Let's go with 'be a decent human'.

But what does that mean? To whom are you being decent when the person either no longer exists or does not and may never come to exist?

I'm reminded of some analogous situations. Winterhold repeatedly has insisted that the west has a debt towards the Islamic world in the middle east on account of how he traces many of their problems to the arbitrary partitioning of the region in the Sykes-Picot agreement at the end of World War I. It seems a bit extreme to lay the lion's share of the blame for recent Muslim nations' behavior at the feet of the western powers for what occurred then. But at the same time, one can't ignore the influence it had on the development of those nations, either. Regardless of where you draw the line in the past and say that no events prior to it are going to be counted as meaningfully relevant, some events that are relevant are going to be excluded, and some events, such as recent Islamic extremism, are going to be apportioned significance in a way which may not accurately model their contribution to the current day. Reparations for blacks as a result of slavery in the U.S. is another example. It seems a bit skewed to hold current generations responsible for the behavior of past generations, yet it's also skewed to ignore how those same current generations have benefited from the unjust acts of their forebears. So if the past, real or not, has any meaning for us, it's still a difficulty determining what relationships between the present and the past should be honored and which relationships should be ignored.