I have been teaching college/university-level History for 19 years. For all of that time one of my primary goals has been to get my students to see the past not as some tidy box of boring factoids just waiting for us to open the lid and inquire after them, but rather as something that is alive and organic, always changing depending on who’s doing the looking at it, always informing us in new ways. While the future is a shiny object out there on the horizon, it is not yet here, so past and present are all we have. History is our foundation and our touchstone; without it we don’t know who we are.
The other key takeaway from my classes I strive for is that historical context matters. In my opinion, if we really want to know what happened in the past, we need to try to see those people and events on their own terms, understanding their world as they did, as much as possible. Admittedly, this is difficult for us to do. In an effort to try and get my students to grasp this, for years I taught a class wherein I had an assignment titled “Judging the Past.”
It was an exercise in looking at people that seem controversial to us now and then trying to get into their headspace and understand why they made the choices they did. This is the work of the historian. We look at sources critically and carefully and then interpret past events in order to create understanding and meaning. But very often, how and why we come to certain conclusions about the past is a reflection of our own standards, interests, and morals and not those of past peoples. This begs the question: Is it right to judge people in the past based on current, modern values?
The assignment was also, in part, a response to what started to seem fashionable around 2015 or so, namely the removal of statues and names of people from public spaces with what often seemed like an air of righteous indignation. The two case studies my students looked at were the calls for the removal of Cecil Rhodes’ statue from Oxford University and President Woodrow Wilson’s name from a building at Princeton University. Since then, there have been many such instances across the western world.
Let me first state that this behavior is not fashionable or new. People have been destroying, removing, or defacing artifacts left by previous generations all over the world throughout time. But because people have done it, does that make it right? What exactly prompts people to do such things? How are we able to be so sure that if we destroy pieces of our past that it is because we are “correct” and they were “wrong,” or that we are the victor and they are the vanquished, full stop? And if we destroy evidence of our past or somehow hide it from view, isn’t that akin to willful forgetting? Doesn’t it also mean we are dooming ourselves to repeat whatever it was we found so reprehensible in the first place?
For some, the answers to these questions can seem easy or cut-and-dried, but they aren’t. This is an issue that is nuanced and complex, and yet many people in favor of removal or destruction treat their actions as if they are self-evidently the right thing to do. This hubris is a problem because it leads to an oversimplification of the past.
In one of my recent podcast episodes with my friend and fellow history nerd Dan Carlin, we talked about this. Dan sees this issue the same way I do. While I am not a religious person, the concept of “judge not, lest ye be judged,” is an appropriate caution here. The principle is simple: what we think is right or proper now may not – and probably will not – seem so to future peoples. Those people will be looking back at us when reading their history books and seeing the choices we made. Will they condemn us? If so, do they have a right to without first trying to fully understand us on our own terms? A sign of maturity and compassion is being able to put oneself in another’s shoes, so to speak. Wouldn’t it be nice to think maybe future peoples would give us the benefit of the doubt, or at the very least a fair hearing?
Dan has a cool thought experiment that he calls “the celestial court of historical justice.” In this experiment he raises a good question; if we are to judge those in the past by our standards who would comprise the jury of peers? Is it us? Or is it people in history who were actually peers of the people being judged? This is important to consider, because to be a peer quite literally means someone existing in the same time, space, and context – someone with a contemporary understanding of that by which they are being judged. How can you, in good faith, hold people accountable in this celestial court to rules or ethics that they didn’t even know exist? Doesn’t that seem a bit unfair or uncharitable? As one of my students once quipped, “To some degree, filtering history through today’s morals is like belittling Pythagoras for not having a calculator.” True enough.
None of this is to say that I believe we should never revisit our past with a critical eye. That is expressly what historians do and, indeed, all of us in ways big and small in our daily lives. It’s how we learn what we might want to do again but also — importantly — what we might NOT want to repeat. That is how we progress and it is also the closest we should come to passing judgment on the past – simply use it as a mechanism for informing our own behavior.
So what is the answer to these complex historical issues? What should we do when we feel emotionally, spiritually, or intellectually compelled to be judge, jury, and executioner, condemning those in the past for committing current sins? We should look at those things that we find morally or otherwise repugnant and then simply decide not to do them. That decision need not be accompanied by a sense of presentist arrogance that we are somehow better than people of the past. We’re not. We are merely faced with different circumstances and so we make different choices.
All of this takes what I’ve called for in a previous post and even in my bio here on Substack . . . Humility.
To recognize that you don’t always have the right answers, or be willing to be proven wrong, and to learn from your mistakes are all signs of a mature mind. To react emotionally in the moment, assume you are right and everyone else is wrong, and to act in haste is childish. Lashing out is lazy and moral outrage is easy. Tempering it and being more thoughtful in order to gain true understanding is admittedly more of a challenge, but it is one that we must rise to.
Besides, condemning past peoples for their decisions or actions is an inherently unjust act anyway, since those people are long dead and can’t defend themselves. It’s not a fair fight. If we can’t try to have compassion for all people, or at the very least try to understand them on their own terms no matter when they lived, we lose a sense of our common humanity. And in the end, history has proven time and again that that approach never leads anywhere good.
Those are my thoughts. What are yours?
Sorry to disagree with the premise of your essay but you make it seem like we are completely disconnected from the past and we don't understand the people of the past at all. Not to mention you treat the people of the past as a homogeneous blob that did not differ in their opinions in any way shape or form. What you propose would be to let the hegemony of the past to rule the past uncontested, forever till eternity. When phrased like this the answer to the question of "Should we judge the past?" is painfully clear. A resounding YES. People of the past were people just like all of us who live right now and we have the means of understanding them. Some compassion and effort goes a long way. I completely reject the notion of us not being able to understand the motivations and upbringings of the people of the past. After 5000 years, when we read the Epic of Gilgamesh, it can still make us feel things. It makes us think. Judging people of 200 years ago is not a capability issue. More importantly not judging the people of the past is morally wrong. We owe it to other people of the past who were in the good side of the fight. Hegemony of the past might have erased them from the popular culture and might have made morally abhorrent things mainstream. Letting this stay as the status quo for all eternity just because it was the status quo for a single moment is unacceptable. That is not enough reason to let the victors of yesteryear to sit comfortably in their thrones. We owe to the people who stood up but did not have enough power, who was beaten down and had only their ideas to leave to the next generation. We owe it to them to judge the past and to not let the morally corrupt of the past to showcase their trophies. That is the least we can do.