The Outrage Brigade is ever busy and needs feeding. Always it is feeding and gloating for more. (Apologies to Clarence Darrow.)
As we all know, the Authoritarian Left, not satisfied with demonizing and purging ideological transgressors of the present (and yes, some of them, like Harvey Weinstein, should be demonized and purged), have started in on history, going back to efface traces of those who were bigots in their time. Among those who have fallen to this drive are Mohandas Gandhi, Woodrow Wilson, and many others, not to mention literature like To Kill a Mockingbird.
The problem, of course, is that Western culture was different just a hundred years ago. Misogyny, racism, and bigotry were rife, and if you go back to then, and even farther back to the dawn of civilization, you’ll hardly find anybody, black or white, who were not tainted with some strain of bigotry that we find offensive today.
We cannot of course excuse these attitudes in modern people, but what do we do about historical figures like Gandhi, Darwin, Aristotle, or Churchill—figures who were colonialists, racists and misogynists? Should we take down their statues? Do we need to put a caveat in every textbook that these people were bigots?
This attitude, as Julian Baggini discusses in a nice Big Think piece (click on screenshot below) is a bit self-serving, for it implicitly assumes that the outraged caller-out would certainly not share those attitudes since he or she would surely not have been a bigot in, say, 1859. But show me a white Englishman then who wasn’t! There may have been a few, but society was still in the process of ascending the moral arc, and we’ve got a ways to go. Given the fact that, as Baggini also notes, many “normal” Germans found themselves supporting Nazism in World War II, we can’t blithely assume that we would have been morally pure in times when nobody else was.
One solution, which I’ve written about before (I can’t for the life of me find where) is to regard these figures as “people of their time”: not excusing the attitudes we find reprehensible today, but to use them as history lessons, trying to understand a social milieu in which bigotry was acceptable. This allows us to admire the genuine accomplishments of “tainted” people while at the same time not glossing over their problematic attitudes.
Baggini makes a lot of sense. Here are a few excerpts:
. . . the idea that racist, sexist or otherwise bigoted views automatically disqualify a historical figure from admiration is misguided. Anyone who cannot bring themselves to admire such a historical figure betrays a profound lack of understanding about just how socially conditioned all our minds are, even the greatest. Because the prejudice seems so self-evidently wrong, they just cannot imagine how anyone could fail to see this without being depraved.
Their outrage arrogantly supposes that they are so virtuous that they would never be so immoral, even when everyone around them was blind to the injustice. We should know better.
. . . Why do so many find it impossible to believe that any so-called genius could fail to see that their prejudices were irrational and immoral? One reason is that our culture has its own deep-seated and mistaken assumption: that the individual is an autonomous human intellect independent from the social environment. Even a passing acquaintance with psychology, sociology or anthropology should squash that comfortable illusion. The enlightenment ideal that we can and should all think for ourselves should not be confused with the hyper-enlightenment fantasy that we can think all by ourselves. Our thinking is shaped by our environment in profound ways that we often aren’t even aware of. Those who refuse to accept that they are as much limited by these forces as anyone else have delusions of intellectual grandeur.
When a person is so deeply embedded in an immoral system, it becomes problematic to attribute individual responsibility. This is troubling because we are wedded to the idea that the locus of moral responsibility is the perfectly autonomous individual. Were we to take the social conditioning of abhorrent beliefs and practices seriously, the fear is that everyone would be off the hook, and we’d be left with a hopeless moral relativism.
But the worry that we would be unable to condemn what most needs condemnation is baseless. Misogyny and racism are no less repulsive because they are the products of societies as much, if not more, than they are of individuals.
. . .The classicist Edith Hall’s defence of Aristotle’s misogyny is a paradigm of how to save a philosopher from his worst self. Rather than judge him by today’s standards, she argues that a better test is to ask whether the fundamentals of his way of thinking would lead him to be prejudiced today. Given Aristotle’s openness to evidence and experience, there is no question that today he would need no persuading that women are men’s equals. Hume likewise always deferred to experience, and so would not today be apt to suspect anything derogatory about dark-skinned peoples. In short, we don’t need to look beyond the fundamentals of their philosophy to see what was wrong in how they applied them.
One reason we might be reluctant to excuse thinkers of the past is because we fear that excusing the dead will entail excusing the living. If we can’t blame Hume, Kant or Aristotle for their prejudices, how can we blame the people being called out by the #MeToo movement for acts that they committed in social milieus where they were completely normal? After all, wasn’t Harvey Weinstein all too typical of Hollywood’s ‘casting couch’ culture?
But there is a very important difference between the living and the dead. The living can come to see how their actions were wrong, acknowledge that, and show remorse. When their acts were crimes, they can also face justice. We just cannot afford to be as understanding of present prejudices as we are of past ones. Changing society requires making people see that it is possible to overcome the prejudices they were brought up with. We are not responsible for creating the distorted values that shaped us and our society but we can learn to take responsibility for how we deal with them now.
The dead do not have such an opportunity, and so to waste anger chastising them is pointless.
In some ways the argument for demonizing people like Aristotle and Churchill resembles the ideologizing of biology by people like Cordelia Dean. In their case they must deny that there are no innate average differences between men and women in behavior and brain function, for to admit such a thing would, to them, excuse sexism. Likewise, to admit that people adopt the attitudes of their times, attitudes that are bigoted and repel us today, is somehow seen as a justification for racism and sexism. In one case you deny innate and evolved differences between people, in the other you deny the effects of acculturation on a presumed “blank slate” brain. Neither is justified, and neither justifies bigotry today.
h/t: Kit
Typo? “…who were NOT tainted with some strain of bigotry that we find offensive today.”
Yes, a typo, now fixed. Thanks.
Doesn’t it (justify bigotry)?
(I’m playing a bit of devil’s advocate here, and I personally haven’t arrived at a firm position, so take this more of an exploration than a position.)
If we can’t condemn Churchill for his, er, unenlightenment, how can we condemn people of current times, but are products of much more primitive cultures (e.g. cultures with deeply ingrained misogyny)?
If we make allowances for Churchill’s culture, mustn’t we make allowances for all cultures, regardless of time?
Maybe we shouldn’t condemn any person, instead condemn the system that produced the person. Then we end up with “Hitler was merely a product of his environment” kind of thing (and I think Sam Harris might agree with this).
I’m honestly unsure about how to think of this.
There’s a big difference between living and dead people, though. As the article rightly point out, the living can be reprimanded, or even punished, for bad actions, and their bad ideas can be exposed and challenged, potentially even getting them to learn and grow.
The dead are no longer present among us, only the results of their actions and the records of their thoughts are. You can still address and challenge their bad ideas, but they cannot be scolded, or punished, or made realize their mistakes. They’re gone and exposing them is no longer as productive. Better to take the good things they’ve done and reject the bad parts.
Mussolini made the trains run on time?
I think of it by comparing the enlightened values of a person to the prevailing values of their time. The fact that enlightened people of their time may have and usually do have moral blind spots that we, from our Olympian perspective (ha ha), can now see as wrong should not detract from the enlightened values they held or their personal worth. John Stuart Mill was one of the most enlightened human beings of the nineteenth century, yet he thought the people of the sub-continent were incapable of self rule. But surely his moral blindness on that particular subject, and his possible self interest as a stakeholder in the East India Company, cannot diminish his contribution to enlightenment values, or his integrity in promulgating them. He wasn’t perfect, okay?
Also, one can (and people do and did) argue that by his own principles he was inconsistent on the subject. To me that’s the beauty and wonder of the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution – they include the seeds of their own criticisms.
Why do we have a need to condemn people in general? I am just exploring.
My guess is that it’s an evolved trait that strengthens social structure.
That would be the hard-determinist, enlightened (IMO) point of view.
But do we really not want to demonize Hitler?
😉
That is fair enough.
It is a useful tool for manipulating people’s behaviour. We have been demonizing people of all sorts for millennia. It works.
I can’t help but think, we understanding people would be an even better tool.
Just as an aside I read in Noire (A great book) that the Cantonese word for foreigner is gwai lo. I asked a Chinese friend what gwai lo meant. Of course he said foreigner. I pressed him further and asked what does it mean literally. Sheepishly he replied white devil.
It is understandable, but funny.
I wonder if having the personage of Hitler to demonize facilitates teaching our children that genocide is a terrible thing.
It is not so much the future Hitlers I am worried about, it is more the everyday folk that will follow. Should we condemn/demonize them?
Perhaps we should pointing out to our children we all can be shaped to follow. Look at the US today.
Demonizing the opposition is going to fail. We need a more subtle mode of manipulation.
To me, Hitler was an extraordinary individual and, hence, was not produced by a system – at least not entirely. But most of his followers were. Jerome K. Jerome wrote long before Hitler’s time that it would be disastrous if Germany got a bad leader, because Germans were psychologically unprepared to disobey their leaders. I have an impression that after WWII, denazification was put on wrong rails, relying on the good government to cure the bad Germans of their wickedness.
About people from modern “cultures with deeply ingrained misogyny” – I think it is really better to condemn the culture rather than the individuals. And even better than condemnation would be simple matter-of-fact discussion how to minimize the damage done by these toxic cultures to us and other people.
“. . .we can’t blithely assume that we would have been morally pure in times when nobody else was.”
Indeed! The same applies to the Japanese internment camps during World War II. It’s like bragging about your moral compass when, in fact, someone else has taken the trouble to point out where north is.
I agree in general, Gary, but I’m not so sure the WW2 Japanese internment camps are such a great example. Three of the justices on SCOTUS dissented in Korematsu v. US, and the two great liberals on the Court — Hugo Black, who wrote the opinion, and William O. Douglas, who joined it — came to regret the decision almost before the ink on their signatures was dry.
But who is to be the goat, the blamed for that incarceration. It would have to be FDR would it not? So, do we hang FDR from the first tree or do we say, yes, that was a big mistake but it does not remove him from history or greatness. He could have done better but he didn’t.
Sure, I agree, Randy. All I’m saying is that recognizing that it was wrong to intern Nisei Japanese — who were, after all, natural-born American citizens — in 1942 doesn’t require historical revisionism on par with decrying Aristotle’s misogyny.
Very much agree. I was just trying to find the proper person to hang it on. It was quite racist when we think about it. How big would the camps had been if we rounded up all the Germans and Italians.
Germany and Italy did not attack the USA.
Okay, so you think we rounded up the Japanesse American citizens because Japan bombed Hawaii. Had Germany done so, we would have rounded up all the Germans in the U.S.?
I would also ask why was the strategy from the very beginning – Germany first.
They did, however, declare war on the USA, after we declared war on their Axis partner Japan.
Anti-German hysteria was widespread in the US during World War I (when sauerkraut was rechristened “liberty cabbage” 🙂 ).
Ken, remember “Freedom Fries” when France would not go along with Bush on the invasion of Iraq ?
No, the USA bombed Germany and Italy.
You’ve just made a distinction without a difference. The USA was at war with all three of them.
And there was, I believe, a well-known movement by German-Americans in favour of Germany – which kept the US ‘out of’ the European war for some years. That would have been a strong argument for suspecting the loyalty of German-Americans when war was declared.
(Note I’m not in favour of interning anybody).
cr
I didn’t know about this movement by German-Americans. As far as I know, Americans as a whole wished to stay out of any Old World wars, like they do now. I knew also about Charles Lindbergh’s vocal lobbying on behalf of Nazi Germany, which seems strange to me, given that his child was murdered by a German.
Supreme Court Justices aside, very few people in the country, especially on the West Coast, had any moral qualms about the internment and most thought it was a practical necessary. I was born in Bremerton, WA, where all of the ships not at Pearl Harbor were moored, and my family (except for my grandparents, who worked at the shipyard) was one of the many that fled inland. The internment was the result of panic, not racism; moral considerations were simply not high priorities at the time. That it seems obviously wrong in retrospect strikes me as a reasonably good example of what Jerry is talking about.
Which is why I’m not so sure it’s an apt example. Panic (like the poor, according to Jesus 🙂 ) will always be with us. It isn’t subject to the same type of historical revisionism as racism, and tends to be recognized much sooner. Heck, we had a similar situation after 9/11, resulting in the Patriot Act and the backlash against Muslims (the lingering effects of which continue to be felt with Trump’s travel ban).
Always good to hear from you, Gary.
And they certainly had no moral qualms about buying the properties of the Japanese internees for pennies on the dollar.
That wasn’t racism, that’s just normal greed.
[/sarcasm]
‘Greed is good. Greed works!’ – Article 1 of the US Constitution. 😉
cr
Gordon Gekko was a founding father? 🙂
Only of the GOP 😉
cr
Apparently due to a mishap involving a contraceptive and a time machine.
very few people in the country, especially on the West Coast, had any moral qualms about the internment and most thought it was a practical necessary
Presumably you mean “very few white people”. There’s a difference, you know. The panic was a result of racism.
Termites sadly don’t have the capacity to make these distinctions. It is easier just to shout down historical figures.
I wish that I could look back upon this era in a few hundred years and read its history.
How did it come about that the part of the world, Western Culture, least sexist, racist, and homophobic is tarred again and again by progressive and other secular fundamentalists as being the most sexist, racist, and homophobic?
That total mischaracterization has cause me to break with the left and distrust its social interpretations.
As you may know, both feminism and gay rights are inventions of what is now invidiously termed “whiteness” and dependent on technology: As example, Would feminism be possible without antibiotics, which have reduced vastly number of pregnancies women had prior to modernity?
Slavery and colonialism have been constants of human societies everywhere for thousands of years. I believe it was in the West, partially due to economic self-interest, that slavery began to vanish and be declared illegal. (And not always because owners were willing to do so, as we know.)
‘antibiotics, which have reduced vastly number of pregnancies women had’
I think you mean ‘contraceptives’ 😉
I tend to agree that modern medical and technological advances have been factors in enabling more enlightened social policies.
cr
No, I meant antibiotics because they vastly reduced child mortality…and all mortality.
OK, that’s a bit more indirect than I was contemplating, but I get the point.
cr
I just saw this essay in Quillette and wanted to share it:
“How I was Kicked Out of the Society for Classical Studies Annual Meeting”
https://quillette.com/2019/02/26/how-i-was-kicked-out-of-the-society-for-classical-studies-annual-meeting/
Thanks – I guess. A very dispiriting account.
My wife is a Classics graduate; and so are some of our best friends. I would like to think that the academy on this side of the Atlantic is less blinkered, ignorant and censorious; but, sadly, these days one can’t be confident about anything.
That is the saddest thing I have read today.
Woodrow Wilson, I think, was racist by the standards of his own era. That’s not to say his accomplishments should be denigrated, but his reputation in this regard isn’t purely a matter of past-posting either.
Ironic (to me) that the Authoritarian/Regressive Left condemns historical figures, but gives a pass to current misogynist/homophobic attitudes prevalent in many 3rd world countries/societies. Presumably this is because we modern first worlders can’t/won’t understand their cultural context?
So, OK to criticize Churchill or Gandhi, but not female genital mutilation, or brutally enforcing female dress codes, or consenting adult sexual behavior, or “honor killings,” or…etc., etc.?
While I tend to agree, I will say that you would have to do a survey of each individual person to see if it’s the same people allowing for one and condemning the other. That said, assuming there is at least some overlap, this does seem like an illogical stance to me. I am of the opinion that we shouldn’t be too quick to judge those living in impoverished environments with little infrastructure, because we don’t really know what they have to do in order to maintain some kind of livable order and, more importantly, we don’t know what we would do in those same circumstances. As Maya Angelou said “I am capable of what every other human is capable of. This is one of the great lessons of war and life.”
Overall, though, my guess is that if you could erase the memories of today’s loudest virtue signalers and time-travel them back to any given era, they would take up that exact same mantle in said era, regardless of that era’s social mores. People tend to retain form longer than content, to my mind. Take the hellfire and brimstone / holier than thou types of one society and put them in another, and to me they’ll likely find their way back to that role pretty quickly, again, regardless of specific content. If they’re woken than thou in 2019 they’d probably be More Christian Than Thou in 1819.
That last bit, that members of the Ctrl left would certainly grow up to fit within the range of attitudes of a more distant age seems very true. They would also fit in with the attitudes of someone in the heart of Islam today as well. They too would then have views that their ‘other self’ would see as misogynistic.
So what you’re saying is the intersectionalists are just the secular world’s creationists.
-Ryan
I think a distinction should be drawn with regard to monuments to the Confederacy. Those statues weren’t erected to historical figures whose reputations have fallen on hard times due to the vagaries of history. They were erected during the post-Reconstruction and civil-rights eras in defiance of the abolition of slavery — many of them specifically placed in public settings for the ostensible purpose of intimidating black citizens from exercising their constitutional rights.
They were accursed at the time they were built, and have been an embarrassment to this Republic ever since.
Yes, I agree with you, though statues erected in other circumstances might be kept up.
I agree. I would like to see those Confederate glorification taken down and melted into garbage cans.
I’d like to call some hard, pipe-hittin’ brothers down to Stone Mountain, give ’em jackhammers and chisels, let ’em go to work on Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall Jackson, get medieval on their asses. 🙂
I think you are misinterpreting a little bit. Many of the confederate monuments were funded by veterans or family of veterans, often at significant anniversary years of the civil war.
Those confederate veterans, after the war, did normal things, like join the US military, or go into business. However, the experience was not easily forgotten, and they often left financial consideration in their wills to fund memorials to those who did not come home.
The confederate memorial in my town was erected on the 50 year anniversary of the end of the war, and is inscribed “In memory of our Confederate dead”. I don’t think it was making any different political statement than the similar WW1 and WW2 memorials that came later.
Big historic events tend to come back into the national awareness at such anniversaries, or when significant participants pass away. In other eras, it was typical to minimize the bad and focus on the good. So less attention to the institution of slavery and the horrors of domestic conflict, and more about acts of bravery and clever military tactics.
There were a lot of reunions, where veterans from both sides met again, mourned the dead, and celebrated life. They were putting the horrors behind them. Now, we focus on those elements.
Yesterday, I was reading about “Hogan’s Heroes”, and the people who were able to put the Shoah behind them, and find humor there. And they were, to a large extent, witnesses and victims of the actual events.
I am not sure that the centennial observations of the war would not have happened anyway, had the civil rights conflict not been going on in 1965.
I suppose it has to depend on the monument. Who was involved in erecting it and what does it symbolize, specifically. The one you describe seems more passable than ones erected by avowed supporters of the KKK during the Jim Crow era.
But even the more ‘acceptable’ varieties might make some African Americans uncomfortable, and that should be heard out. Not sure what to do then.
Undoubtedly there were Confederate monuments erected for more benign reasons, Max, as our host alluded in his comment above. But, off the top of my head, I cannot recall any other historical instances in which such monuments have been built to celebrate the losing side fighting for an unjust cause. (Certainly, for example, many members of the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe and the Kriegsmarine fought nobly in defense of the Fatherland in WWII, without monuments having been built to commemorate the Third Reich on the 50th anniversary of that war’s end.)
Whatever benign reasons there once may have been, I think they’ve been lost in the miasma of the horrid Lost Cause mythology, the obstinate Confederate flag waiving, and the wheezing strains of “Dixie.” Our nation, I think, would be better off rid of it all.
‘Our nation, I think, would be better off rid of it all.’
In response to your several posts on this topic, Mr. Kukec, I agree, but am brought up short by iconoclasm. Iconoclasts always think they’re not only right but righteous.
Well, we also have monuments in our town square to the fallen from the Korea and Vietnam conflicts.
The Vietnam memorial does not pretend that there was American victory, and leaves the issue of colonialism in Indochina unaddressed.
Neither victory nor a good cause are required to memorialize a conflict, or even romanticize elements of it.
I have been to several wars, some of which were romanticized in print and film, or at least some elements from them were. Two of the big ones were terribly misguided, and one was absolutely a defeat. But as combatants, we were not asked our opinion of neither the conflict as a whole, nor the specific rules of engagement. The gallantry and sacrifices made by the individual should not be judged on the justification of the conflict as a whole.
As for “The South”, I grew up there, when I was not overseas. My Mom was a historian focusing on the Reconstruction era. My Dad has his PHD in Military History. We grew up steeped in it, walking battlefields and searching for forgotten sites.
I know how the current narrative is being spun, but 99% of people who display the confederate flag and sing “Dixie” are not making a racist statement. When I was younger, it was ubiquitous, and was about southern identity and lifestyle, which included the food we ate, the music we listened to, the sort of sports and activities we enjoyed, the way we talked, and how our families interacted. You could not make assumptions about someone’s prejudices based on whether they had a rebel flag on their truck.
I don’t believe I have ever known anyone who advocated slavery or wanted to bring back the Confederacy. My Mom knew, and told us stories about, some of the racist people she met in the mid 60s. But they are largely long gone.
I see a lot of flags flying now, and a big reason for that is that people hate being told that their identity is repugnant and that they are hateful people. Especially when we know that we are not.
Another major point is that we, as Americans, have never been big on banning symbols or erasing unpleasant history. And we are stubborn people. If you tell us that you do not plan to allow us to do something, our first impulse is to do it BFYTW.
I know people who wear MAGA hats because they are offended that it has become popular to attack children or the elderly for wearing them. And these are people who did not necessarily vote for Trump. They do not seek or expect conflict, even. They are just not the sort of people who are usually messed with. The statement they are making is more like “I dare you”.
Imagine an America where wearing campaign paraphernalia of the sitting President, and belonging to one of the two major parties, can get you attacked or told “the red hat is the new white hood”. To me, that is ridiculous and troubling, even though I would never support Trump. Likewise the rebel flag. I am no racist or supremacist. Heck, I am a Zionist, if anything. I am fond of the flag because I was born in the deep south, eat banana pudding, and really like Skynyrd music, as well as other aforementioned trappings of southern identity.
I do not expect you, as an outsider, to agree. But you should understand that this is a common position here. If you oppose southern identity because of stereotyping or an inaccurate perception of who we are, then I think you might be misguided.
And Germany is a special case. Unique, even. One of my favorite places is the Yasakuni shrine, and has been since I was a child. There are also Japanese monuments all over the Pacific.
There are WW2 German monuments, but they are pretty low profile. If MacArthur had supervised Occupied Europe, and Japan controlled by Eisenhower, Montgomery, and Zhukov, Perhaps Yasakuni would have been razed and a Wehrmacht memorial built in Berlin.
Of course they are. The reason for the creation of the Confederacy was to continue slavery.
The confederate soldier might not have thought “I’m fighting for slavery”, just as the Nazi soldier might not have thought “I’m fighting to kill the Jews”, but in both cases the ultimate goal was extreme inhumanity to fellow human. Germany was able to reject it’s evil past, but the American south is not – not yet, but with proper guidance they’ll get there.
The people now flying the flags are not trying to resurrect the Confederacy.
It is hard to explain. It is more like southerners have a common culture and identity, and also have ancestors who fought an unjust war for bad reasons. Where I am writing this, the war was about guerrilla warfare between groups with divided loyalties. The town people were mostly supporters of succession and the Confederacy, while rural people were often loyalists. There were few, if any, Black people.
And the decades after the war were a time of scores settled for wrongs done during the war, often involving the “home guard”, who sometimes massacred whole families.
But that was over a century ago, and families on both sides are likely to have a rebel flag sticker on their truck, and a Skynyrd tape in the deck.
The new obsession with hating the rebel flag and old monuments is sort of puzzling. As is the rope thing. Any sort of rope, string, or clothes line is now strongly associated with lynching, in certain circles. But a few years ago, even informal hangings were mostly associated with western films, posses, and cattle rustlers.
But about warfare- I think there have been very few just wars. And even those were largely composed of daily injustice and horror. One of the few universally legitimate causes for violence is the defense of one’s family and home. I have never had to fight to defend my home, thankfully. But I would. Even if the attackers had a just cause. But I probably would not be able to see that larger picture anyway, at the time. All of that gets retroactively organized and categorized, much later.
Sorry, but this outsider doesn’t believe this for a second. We know there are quite a few racist people in the South, right? The recent attempts at voter suppression have support in these parts, to name just one example. Or is that in dispute? If we can assume that’s the case, are you really expecting us to believe that those that fly the confederate flag, sing “Dixie”, or wear MAGA hats just don’t intersect much with the racists of the South? That, although they display items connected with racism, they are in fact the South’s non-racists? It is just too hard to believe.
Obviously there are racists. However, I am not sure that they are more numerous in the south than in other places. It is hard to quantify, since racist speech or action is no more acceptable here than anywhere else.
It may seem counterintuitive that people who display the rebel flag and sing Dixie (or Free Bird) would have no tolerance for KKK members or neo-Nazis, but that is reality, at least as I have experienced it. The 200 or so degenerates who keep showing up at places like Charlottesville are not representative of southerners as a whole. It has been decades since I have heard a White person here refer to POCs by the “N” word, even in private.
It just means they are well-trained to avoid using the N-word and to deny their racism. Just look at the elected officials in most of the south. They often vote in ways that benefit whites over non-whites and they get re-elected for doing so. It is commonly thought that the reason the Democrats lost the South in the 1960s is because of their embrace of civil rights legislation. There are many studies that support this.
A lot of people still admire mass murderers such as Stalin, Mao (Diane Abbott, a British MP, said he “did more good than bad”).
Then of course, we have Che Guevara, who adorns many a social media account header and T-Shirt. He was a murderer, and was happy for his men to rape and kill civilians.
One “humanist” I know, Peter “Humanisticus” Ferguson, argued that it was possible the people killed by Guevara were not innocent. Some humanist!
Then of course, we have Dan Arel, an “anarchist” who was described by “Humanist chaplain” Ryan J Bell-End as a great example of a “good humanist”. In between defending North Korea, Dan Arel like to defend various mass murderers and rapists.
One dictionary definition of the word “admire” is to “regard (an object, quality, or person) with respect or warm approval.” Confusion arises because our admiration of a person is always relative and subjective and rarely total. If a person says she admires Darwin it is because of his scientific contribution, not his racism. Others may say that Darwin is not admirable because he was a racist despite his scientific contribution. Likewise, one may conclude that Hitler was admirable because he lifted Germany out of the Depression in the 1930s despite all the horrifying things he did. For me, Confederate generals are not admirable despite their military prowess because they knowingly fought for a terrible cause.
It is my view that good historians in their works do not and should not characterize their subjects in their subjective view as to what is admirable. Rather, they should describe them as completely as possible, particularly in biographies, and allow readers to draw their own conclusions, based on their values.
If a person persists in calling an historical figure or a contemporary admirable and understands (more or less) the totality of the figure’s life, what is being said implicitly is that the good outweighs the bad. That person’s job is to convince others with a differing view why that is. In other words, the value system of the others needs to be changed.
Yes. I was about to write something like this but you beat me to it and almost certainly did a better job than I would have.
We can’t just ignore the bad things that our past heroes did. Everyone does both good and bad things. We should be able to celebrate the good without legitimizing the bad. It would be very strange if we were to ignore Newton’s work upon discovering that he beat his wife, for example.
It’s almost as if otherwise good people can do bad things and even bad people can do good things. Who knew people were so complicated, right?
What if, for the sake of curiosity, I pondered the notion of being in awe of the brilliant chemistry of Fritz Haber, yet be horrified by his willingness to use same brilliance to create chemical weapons for use against the allies in WWI which, if I trust a recent podcast, led to the suicide of his own wife in protest of the horrors he unleashed?
And for the record, I found the photograph of Einstein (in the following post about historical photos) to be extremely offensive, as he said as culturally appropriating that feathered headdress and insulting the Native Americans with whom he was posing. We must erase all his achievements from all science and history texts posthaste!
I know you’re being facetious about Einstein.
Personally, if any of those Native Americans in the pic had been one of my ancestors, I would be inordinately proud of the fact that I had an ancestor who had met Albert Einstein and had honoured him with the loan of a headdress. (I assume the headdress is a mark of prestige).
I know for certain that if a famous celebrity had been photographed attempting the hula in the company of one of my wife’s ancestors, that photo would be framed and on our wall and irremovable.
cr
Traditionally, earning feathers was a mark of accomplishments; one Native friend I had explained they are vaguely like diplomas. Consequently Einstein receiving some is vaguely like him receiving an honourary doctorate or professorship, etc. This makes the situation the *opposite* of cultural appropriation – it is a group choosing to honour an outsider. If of course that’s what happened: there is, oddly, a large segment of Germans who like to play as “Indianer”, so …
I would put up Thomas Jefferson as the measure in this issue. If you dig down and know enough about him, your moral opinion will be the lowest. Yet there he is on that mountain in South Dakota and a big memorial smack in the middle of DC.
For those inclined to judge without consideration for the time and culture he should be condemned along with tar and feather. So, if you still hold Jefferson up as part of the founding fathers you have passed whatever test there is to study history. If you cannot, then join that class, whoever they are that skips history.
On Presidents I believe the criterion for judgement should be consequential rather than personal characteristics. Jefferson was consequential president because of the Louisiana Purchase.
So shall we condemn the elderly, who are still living but of advanced age, who hold bigoted views, views formed generations ago when those views were not only more prevalent but acceptable and who struggle to change, even when they admit they are wrong and know those prejudices are incorrect and unfair?
Stones and glass houses. I find consolation in the fact that the SJW’s who worship at the alter of Our Lady of the Perpetually Offended will one day in the future be deemed horrible racist and/or sexist bigots who must be viewed with contempt.
Or, to quote Led Zeppelin, 🎶 Your time is gonna come 🎶
As Sam Harris put it:
“First Rule of Woke Club: There’s always someone more woke than you…”
https://twitter.com/samharrisorg/status/1052309388734619653?lang=en
Which sparks my mathematical side into thinking there must be someone who is “most woke”. Who might that be?
Well, me, of course.
I’m too White Trash ™ to be Woke ™
There can never be a “most woke” person because being woke is a constant game of one-upping. The most woke person at any moment will be immediately surpassed by another person who figures out a way to claim that the “most woke” person is, has said, or believes something that is somehow x-ist or x-phobic. The cycle will continue forever. Wokeness is a continuum that stretches to infinity.
I’d propose excluding Woodrow Wilson from such consideration. My understanding is that he was actually along the more racist side of the spectrum of his time.
I think that leads to a general point. If a famous individual was no more bigoted than the general population of the time then you can hardly judge him or her by today’s standards – because ‘standards’ are relative in the social setting that they spring from.
Once again, we are entering an area where I have some minor expertise, primarily because I assisted a professor who had did excellent research on the subject.
One of the biggest challenges to a historian or archaeologist to do is to get into the head of your subject, and be able see from their perspective, which had been shaped by the stresses and environment under which they lived.
You cannot really understand those historical events unless you can see from their perspective, and set aside your own for a little while. Without that ability, it is natural to just judge everyone as evil, or at least morally defective.
There are some assumptions that are being made in this discussion which should not be assumed to be true.
For one thing, those outraged persons are assuming that they are, in fact, more moral than people in the past, and that there is some sort of linear progression from the ignorant past to the enlightened present. I don’t think that is necessarily the case. We just have different things that we are scandalized by, and others we ignore.
Many of those people being judged harshly now, if transported to the present, would likely see a great deal of things in modern life that they would find very upsetting and offensive.
What I do believe to be more or less a certainty is that those convinced of their perfect morality now will eventually be humored or mocked by later generations, even their own grandchildren, for their outdated views.
To my mind, one of the biggest crimes – and the greatest hypocrisy – is applying 20/20 hindsight, whether it’s in condemnation of a historical figure or even of what a living person did decades ago.
Did someone still alive today, once enjoy watching Blake Edwards’ The Party with Peter Sellars in blackface as an Indian movie extra, in 1968? Millions did, and most of them not racist by the standards of the time. (In fact I’d argue that an out-and-out racist would not have enjoyed it since the ‘hero’ was non-white).
Did someone still alive today enjoy reading** Playboy in their teens? (Like almost every male of their generation). Or laugh at, and tell, dreadful sexist/racist jokes at drunken parties?
(**Okay, looking at the pictures. ‘I only read it for the articles’ is a cynical meme very like ‘Some of my best friends are…’)
That just means they were a typical young person of their times. Dredging up such incidents and demanding that targeted individuals justify their behaviour by ‘modern’ importunate standards is, to my mind, police-state stuff to rank alongside McCarthyism and Chinese ‘show trials’. It’s a witch-hunt. Thoughtcrime.
(Full disclosure: I thought Peter Sellars’ bumbling ‘Indian’ was brilliantly acted and very sympathetic. And as it happened, some of the articles and interviews in Playboy were very good journalism that modern magazines should aspire to).
cr
This seems fairly simple to me. We should celebrate people for the good things they do and criticize them for the bad things. A statue to Thomas Jefferson is great if it celebrates his writing of the Declaration of Independence, not so great if it celebrates his keeping his wife’s half-sister as a slave. U. S. Grant deserves a statue for his achievements in the Civil War; R. E. Lee, not so much. Aristotle was right about some things, wrong about others. And so on.
Baggini’s succinct characterization of the
offense brigade says all that needs saying:
“Their outrage arrogantly supposes that they are so virtuous”. The more-woke-than-thou pose is exactly that, a pose, and a form of oneupmanship. The pose is adopted, I submit, to mask feelings of mental inferiority, in most cases entirely justified.
It’s worse than that I think. Just as young people wore flared jeans back in the Sixties and Seventies as a social marker of their peer group (we’re all non-conformists!) so a certain block of people now wear outrage as a social marker (we’re all woke! (especially me)).
Around Jan 19th PCC wrote an article about a NY Times article by Brian Morton. Morton wrote, “I think we’d all be better readers if we realized that it isn’t the writer who’s the time traveler. It’s the reader. When we pick up an old novel, we’re not bringing the novelist into our world and deciding whether he or she is enlightened enough to belong here; we’re journeying into the novelist’s world and taking a look around.” It is cheap and easy to malign the past. It is hard to see our own social failures.
“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” ~ L P Hartley
Go back in time. You start by losing some everyday technology. The population falls rapidly. Peoples’ vocabulary changes. Peoples’ attitude changes. You begin to have trouble understanding their accents. Levels of wealth fall. Levels of education fall. People die earlier from trivial causes. The increasingly wide gaps in knowledge are filled with the supernatural. You have even greater problems understanding their language – and more importantly the concepts that that language is built on.
Difficult issues. President Woodrow Wilson and Thomas Jefferson are both examples where one could make a good argument for retaining their names on streets and buildings in some circumstances, and effacing them in other circumstances. At least I think so.
Streets and buildings named after Wilson would be justifiably offensive to the residents of a primarily black community, for example. Having a building named after him on the campus of a historically black college? How about no?
I lack understanding for hero worship of any kind and believe it is irrelevant “what else” someone did or didn’t do. A person’s name is simply the shorthand for some accomplishments, no more than a reference.
Churchill might stand for the steadfast British resistance against the Nazis. It only matters when the achievement itself is apparently tainted by questionable actions.
I also consider it alien to pass judgment over the totality of an individual, and it’s one of the key things that render me incompatible to wokeness (who exclusively see people in absolutes).
But I understand that people want to name airports, schools and steets after individuals. That’s another problem involving prototype theory and its offshoots.
The accomplishments of a person should be prototypically about something praise-worthy, like when you hear “Bach” you know its about composing music, not some questionable esoteric trivia, that is honoured. For that reason, most politicians should never be honoured. Ghandi would be the exception, but Churchill and a Kennedy (JFK was heinous war criminal) should not be honoured.
Writers fall somewhere in the middle, but when we can see a moral progress, we can also reevaluate someone’s accomplishments.
I don’t know what it means, who I “can” admire, coming back to my opening, it’s empty words.
“But there is a very important difference between the living and the dead. The living can come to see how their actions were wrong, acknowledge that, and show remorse.”
Baggini is wrong here.
For even the living cannot choose whether or not what they do corresponds to the values and moral rules of their society (since there is no free will).
That is why there is no difference between the dead and the living and that is why there can be no attribution of guilt to the latter. The only difference that there is for the living is that they live in a different time than the dead and thus in an environment in which the prevailing morality has changed: whether the living can adapt their behavior to it or not, they do not have that in control.
Sentences such as that the living could “learn to take responsibility” “are nothing but idle
philosophical chit-chat.