A bold statement: People of the past should almost always be judged by today’s standards. This results in thinking of a lot of historical figures as horrible people. So yeah, I’ll say it: most historical figures were horrible people. Some of them were horrible because their surrounding culture was horrible, and others were just plain horrible.
My basic reasoning: Moral judgment isn’t for people of the past. The people of the past are dead, and their actions are already foregone conclusions. Moral judgement is for people of the present. I do not wish for people of the present to valorize or emulate people of the past just because they were great by the standards of their own time. I strive for the perpetual improvement of humankind, not the stagnation of virtue.
I made this argument to a friend the other week regarding Teddy Roosevelt. To be honest, I was mostly assuming that Teddy Roosevelt was terrible because he was president in the early 20th century. But I now see that my assumption was well-founded: Roosevelt’s positions on immigration and race easily rival those of Trump. Or maybe I’m misremembering, and we were actually talking about Franklin D. Roosevelt? Yeah, so FDR was responsible for those Japanese internment camps that we’re so worried Trump will try to emulate!
My friend didn’t like my argument because it gives permission to future generations to negatively judge us. God, I hope so! I hope that future generations can look back on us and recognize how terrible today’s society is by the standards of tomorrow. Especially given our society’s decisions in the past month. I want people of the future to see how wrong I am, just as I wish I myself could see how wrong I am.
Caveats and exceptions: Even if a historical figure was horrible overall doesn’t mean that they couldn’t have performed some praiseworthy actions. I am also more lenient to people who are still alive.
Yeah, like the prophet Muhammad, he raped a 9 year old, damned one of his numerous wives for sewing a picture of a dog into his pillow and curtains, not to mention the many wars he raged and the amount of torture he okayed, in order to further his cult until it flourished into a full blown religion.
A bold statement: People of the past should almost always be judged by today’s standards. This results in thinking of a lot of historical figures as horrible people. So yeah, I’ll say it: most historical figures were horrible people. Some of them were horrible because their surrounding culture was horrible, and others were just plain horrible.
This seems pretty much spot on, to me. A number of times I’ve argued that an objective moral system (if such a thing existed) would give you the same answers whether you moved forward or back in time. I.e.: if we think that slavery is wrong today, we think it’s wrong in 100BC, and we’ll think it’s wrong in 5000AD. Argument otherwise says, in effect, that moral standards (if such a thing existed) are a product of society at a particular time and place – i.e.: our notions of right and wrong are merely a cultural artifact and anything we think is wrong today could just as easily be right, if the circumstances warranted it.
I can’t pretend to resolve that question so I suspend judgement regarding morality; the arguments I’ve heard that there are objective moral systems tend to introduce reified social values, i.e.: opinions. So that leaves me a somewhat uncomfortable moral nihilist and skeptical about the whole thing.
My friend didn’t like my argument because it gives permission to future generations to negatively judge us
Our psychiatric practices will eventually provoke the same kind of horror we reserve for blood-letting and trepanning.
“They were people of their time” is an explanation, it’s not a justification or an excuse. After all other “people of their time” didn’t share those bad beliefs, and took action that changed things for the better.
We stopped doing some things because we decided that those things are wrong.
While it may be helpful to present-day people to think that way, I tend to think that judging the past by present standards is mostly useless if you really want to try and understand that past. “They did it because they were bad people” doesn’t explain very much, and doesn’t really tell one anything about the past. It can also lead to a smug “we’re so much better than them” attitude that obscures the fact that people today are capable of the same things that people of the past were capable of.
I disagree entirely. I don’t think we should be making moral judgments about past societies at all – it’s anachronistic and gets in the way of understanding them. Going through history and picking out good and bad examples is not good history. Yes, it’s what historians and biographers traditionally did, but when we start seeing the people of the past in terms of how they reflect our concerns we distort our picture of what happened. Our morals and our concerns played no part in how history played out – to overlay them as a judgmental framework does violence to our understanding of the thought worlds of past cultures. Interpreting history through any ideological lens will do so. The past is not a prop for modern moralising, it has its own existence and its own rationales.
Also, making moral judgments about the people of the past from a modern perspective really isn’t interesting. It doesn’t tell us anything profound – we know already that moral thinking has changed! Examining the actions of historical figures within the context of their own societies helps us to understand both much better. Indeed, the moral thinking of past societies is a valid object of study just as much as their political systems and physical environments. Historical morality needs to be pieced together from evidence, and sheds light on all aspects of past cultures. Take, oh, lets say the outbreaks of witch burning in Early Modern Europe. Yes, we can sit there and wallow in being appalled at it and wagging our fingers at the perpetrators, but where does that get us? About as far as being appalled at cancer gets us toward understanding what causes it. Much better is to examine why these attitudes arose, what was going through the minds of the persecutors and persecuted, and how societal factors shaped people’s attitudes. In doing so we reveal shifts in religious belief, patterns of economic hardship, the fallout of political fragmentation, crises of local identity and all kinds of profitable avenues of inquiry.
Ultimately demonising historical figures as “horrible people” is just as anachronistic as lionising them as culture heroes. We should not see history as a drama written for our delectation and instruction.
cartomancer@#3:
I don’t think we should be making moral judgments about past societies at all – it’s anachronistic and gets in the way of understanding them.
I see what you’re saying, but couldn’t I just as easily claim that it’s crucial to our understanding of them that we assess them in terms of today’s morals?
Our morals and our concerns played no part in how history played out – to overlay them as a judgmental framework does violence to our understanding of the thought worlds of past cultures. Interpreting history through any ideological lens will do so. The past is not a prop for modern moralising, it has its own existence and its own rationales.
Then you’re dooming the study of ancient societies to be irrelevant — if we look at the ancients only in their own context, it seems to me that by definition we can’t use any of what we observe, today. The only way we can “learn lessons from history” is through comparison of historical societies with the present. You can’t do that without touching on judgements. Was the French Revolution a good idea or a bad one? (As Mao said, “we don’t know enough, yet to make that assessment.”) Yes, you’re right it’s what happened – it’s what is and was but the only reason to talk about those events is to assess how they shaped the world, and that necessarily includes how they shaped the people who shaped the world, and the ongoing effect those events had to the present.
Yes, we can sit there and wallow in being appalled at it and wagging our fingers at the perpetrators, but where does that get us?
But that process you decry, is how we became appalled at it. We had to look at it, and go “nuh uh” and we continue to point and wag our fingers as reminders of that assessment. And that’s necessary — look at what can happen when certain barbarous ideas like genocide become normalized!
When we wag our fingers of disapproval at the nazis of yesterday, we are mostly speaking to the nazis of today. If cancer could be cured by informing it that it’s not appreciated, then we’d be lecturing our bodies constantly about the dangers of cancer.
Insert obligatory Santayana quip.
@Marcus,
I’m a moral subjectivist, but I don’t think an objective moral system is actually necessary. Sometimes one person has better ideas about morality than another person, and sometimes that person is me, and sometimes it isn’t. If you can’t judge people of the past without objective morality, it seems to me you can’t judge people of the present either.
@Cartomancer and springa73
I think for some historians, it may be useful to put aside judgments in order to better determine facts. I am not a historian, I am more of a social critic. Challenge: make this argument relevant to me.
Consider, say, Genghis Khan (d. 1227) & Tamerlane (d. 1405), both notoriously bloody-handed conquerors of most of Eurasia. (Trigger warning: carnage.)
The former was absolutely ruthless, using a domino strategy in which the survivors of a besieged city-state would flee to the next cities further away from the Mongols, weakening them by spreading terror and consuming resources.
The latter, though not as successful militarily or territorially, was even more fearsome, piling up mountains of severed heads and catapulting corpses over city walls, just because he could.
By today’s standards (n.b.: IANA psychologist), the Khan would rank as a calculating sociopath, and Big T as a sadistic psychopath. I consider that relevant information, useful in assessing their respective careers (not sure how those unlucky enough to share the same continent and centuries saw it). Likewise, ranking the three men named by our esteemed host in terms of their narcissism may provide a clue as to what we might expect soon (namely, further confirmation of Deep Shit straight ahead).
Why on Earth would they need our permission? I’m really not sure what your point is. That scholarly historical articles should include moral assessments? If so, I disagree completely. See cartomancer. If you can read a dispassionate treatment of the Third Reich and not feel moral outrage, it’s not the historian’s fault.