One reason to be careful with that whole "Of course we have the right to pronounce sweeping moral judgement on whole eras of history" thing is that we haven't the slightest idea what coming ages will say of us. And what the next crackpot who claims to be more enlightened than you or I will claim that they will, so they are just a little ahead of the curve -- but obviously right, of course! -- in condemning you or me, personally, for whatever moral position we hold obviously just and right.
I suppose the danger is believing that we are substantively different to people who came before us, or that our current moral beliefs are correct. Our moral judgements may seem correct now but there's a good chance future generations will look back on us unfavourably too.
My entire point is that we need to give people from centuries past some leeway and make an effort to view their lives through the lens of their time. And we should view them through our current lens as well but we're not likely to learn anything but that we think our morality is the best morality.
My chain of responses is meant to highlight this tension. That I can personally find something reprehensible in 2020, but taken in it's cultural or historical context, also find it enlightened or inspiring. In the USA we have an increasingly militant progressivism and we close ourselves off to our own history if we can only judge things by one set of standards.
Okay, let's just sit here and impotently judge and condemn them to satisfy our own sense of moral superiority. I'm sure there will be no shortage of moral condemnation of our current worldview in another 200 years.
I think we can only evaluate things on their present merits. One can't go back in time and indict previous cultures for their norms. So, perhaps one day in the future people will look at us and find it repugnant. That may very well be the case, but that's how it has to be. You evaluate by your current standards not by an undetermined future enlightened state (or who knows, things could all go backwards some day just the same.)
More importantly, most of us hold moral judgements that our grandchildren will find horrifying, and it's a tautology that we're unable to see our moral blind spots (or have a good guess where they are). I'm happily in an interracial marriage, but I'm not sure that I would have been in favor of (or even neutral toward) interracial marriage had I been a product of the culture a century earlier.
I'm very glad we've made moral progress as a culture, and that progress has required some voices in the wilderness speaking out. History has shown that these moral errors aren't all attributable to one side of the political isle, either.
We should have some humility in our policies. Almost all of us are on the wrong side of history in ways we are blind to. An absolute belief of being on the right side of history has lead to most of the major disasters of the last century.
Do you think that your current views will be acceptable by the standards of society 20 years from now? 50 years from now? If not, you are basically guaranteeing that on a long enough time scale, you (along with everyone else) will be cancelled.
I could see future societies tearing down statues of anyone who ate meat. Or anyone who opposed the legalization of cannabis. Society's morals drift in unpredictable ways. If we choose to judge everyone (past and present) by our current views, we'll never stop tearing down statues and renaming things.
The only way to prevent this is to recognize that people are products of the societies they grow up in. If either of us were born in the 1700s, we'd probably think slavery was acceptable. In general, people back then weren't evil, they were mistaken. And you don't punish mistakes by ruining someone's life and legacy, especially if the society around them is the reason for those mistakes. The same should be true for us today.
This is one of those things that sound well-meaning, but rubs me the wrong way.
Each person has to live in the time they are in -- and looking back from each age to the previous one, we've always thought the old ways were barbaric.
This means that everybody in those ages did things we think are awful: persecution of gays, slavery, infant selection, serfdom, Jim Crow Laws -- the list goes on and on and on.
Going back and applying our current morality to 50 years ago is silly. The people this happened to are dead. The people who did this are either dead or very, very old. Many thousands or millions more suffered the same fate and received no such modern recognition. It serves no purpose other that to pat ourselves on the back at how much more morally superior we are today. And in fifty more years? Guess what? They'll be feeling the same way about us.
We live in a world where people are still kept as slaves. Where millions starve. Where governments systematically kill large groups of people who they don't like. I'm thinking we should take real, live action against current evils in the world instead of symbolic action against evils we had no part in and did not observe.
EDIT: I'm going to rant a bit more here, because I think we've grown this generation of people who think that all of history has to fit inside of their modern mind, i.e. that history is some kind of morality play made for current moral standards. It's not. It's a complicated dance of personalities and forces that has to be observed in it's own way, by it's own lights. To retroactively expect history to fit into some kind of conception of what you think it ought to be denies all those people their humanity. </rant>
And yet we're still smug about the fact we're so 'enlightened'.
Meanwhile, this was happening not even 100 years ago.
Maybe a little historical perspective is needed next time we demonize others for what we consider overly-conservative values, in light of the fact that western society hasn't exactly been particularly progressive throughout the ages...
I think if anything, the talk about moral decline can be ignored completely. It seems people have been complaining about moral decline since earliest written records.
Every so often, I come across something which makes me feel a certain way. That something is this. That way is best described as follows:
Thousands of years from now, historians (in a more enlightened society, one can only hope) will look back on our time with disdain and pity, for our countless fellow people allowed to suffer due to war, poverty, famine, persecution of various kinds, curable disease, &c. They will find Locke's Natural Rights of Man and wonder how a civilization like ours, with all of our understanding, our might and technological prowess, our impressive wealth, allowed these atrocities to continue. They will undoubtedly find something which is to them like our rosetta stone, something which unlocks an understanding of this phenomenon, something which makes our misguided priorities clear, and they will be ashamed to be born from us.
I don't think you can make the historical case that the past was uniformly more brutal or unjust than the present. I think it would be more accurate to say that in our current place and time, our current evolution of moral standards and expectations looks unfavorably (and rightfully so!) on human slavery, but there's no guarantee that we or others aren't regressing on other issues. That's probably a cause for humility as future generations will almost certainly look back on us and wonder how we could have tolerated those things that they will consider injustices.
I can't help but think you rely on Whiggish assumptions about history. Invasions in the Middle Ages and today seem different if you think we have progressed beyond our ancestors, that to act against that supposed progress is to betray it.
In fact, we're cognitively identical to the Medieval and Roman people. We have different ethical frameworks in the 21st century, but human nature doesn't change so fast. The British in the 19th Century were driven by the same underlying factors as the Romans 2000 years ago and Russia, China, and (arguably) the US today. We can certainly condemn it and trumpet our moral outrage, but that doesn't help us to understand or avoid it.
As uncomfortable as it is, this is all true. I'm not saying that means we need to 'cancel Jefferson' but maybe we should take notice of the ways in which standards of acceptability have changed throughout the ages. These changes in morals continue, one has to wonder what we do today that will be seen as barbaric in 100 years
I expect one could complain and it seems apparent at least some did, but in the context of the environment it would have seemed out of place, it's very hard to apply contemporary moral values to historical times, morality is not a fixed thing, our lives are entwined with social convention that for the most part is invisible until viewed from the future. Try and consider now, what things we do that in the future could be seen as abhorrent, it's hard, eating meat maybe, not including externalized costs in commercial endeavours, but, history shows, it's probably true that something we do now will fall 'out of time' and be viewed as a moral deviation in the 'new contemporary'.
Clearly no modern person has the moral high ground on anything when looking through the lens of history. I'm surprised the world hasn't fallen into total anarchy since no one can stand up and say "That's wrong!"
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