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