Anti-presentism = anti-wokeism ?

Someone like Marion Sims is a bit more complex to deal with. He experimented on slaves using practices that wouldn’t be acceptable in medicine today, but he did it to find a cure for a debilitating condition and he cured several of the slaves from what otherwise would most likely had been a short and miserable life.

“Anti-presentism fails miserably on the issue of slavery.”

But doesn’t the rest of this paragraph show that slavery can be condemned on anti-presentist grounds?

I’ll admit I haven’t followed the presentism debate closely, but here goes:

It seems unarguable that present day concerns should motivate historical research. What is foreground vs background? Out of all the detail of the past, what warrants attention? Presentism answers that question constructively, although it’s not the only conceivable answer. (The pure entertainment value of history shouldn’t be overlooked.)

But if that were the whole story there wouldn’t be a debate. I suspect the real issue is about the role of current values in flattening reporting and interpretation of events from times before those values were entrenched. So it could be argued, for instance, that debates over slavery between whites didn’t matter much because both sides were racist. This could lead to historical research that largely ignores such debates (including the drama of the Constitutional Convention) and instead occupies itself with endless demonstrations of the racist thinking of just about everyone white. The problem would not be the application of today’s values to the past, but the failure to consider the actual processes of social change that, among other things, made today’s values possible. Put differently, denial of change over time, because the status quos ante and post both fall short of today’s values, strikes at the heart of what history should be about. (Imagine writing a history of the Roman empire from an anti-colonialist perspective: nothing really happened because it began as a colonial project and ended that way.)

If this makes sense, perhaps the problem is the term “presentism” itself, which is so loose it can be used to describe both the legitimate mining of history and the illegitimate denial of it. Meanwhile, FWIW, I would strongly caution against anyone lining up with the far right over anything. Not only does it warp the communication of our ideas, it also subtly influences us to a sort of both-sidesism. The evolution of Matt Taibbi is a case in point.

JQ: two points, if I may.

One: in the first of your earlier posts that you cite, you asked the very reasonable question “looking backwards, when does the present stop and the past begin?”

As far as I understand it, in your current post you take the view that the present stops before “modern times” in western Europe. At some other times and places slavery was generally accepted. Eurocentric/present-centric, surely?

Two, you wrote “Once you identify as “anti-woke”, you’re committed to racism, misogyny, science denial, book-banning and, ultimately, fascism”.

Well, there are aspects of the woke movement I do not approve of. I do not think that makes me a racist, misogynist, science denier or a bookburner. (Fascist has for a long time become so meaningless, except in the sense of “I do not like the way you think”, that I will ignore it.)

But specifically, would you not agree that:
Some aspects of the woke movement are anti-white racism.
Ditto for the misogyny of the “punch a TERF, burn a TERF” mob.
Some aspects of transgender enthusiasm deny biological science.
Burning books is not logically distinct from no-platforming.

Over to you.

CB@5: dead right. Would you apply the same standard to, say, Aztec or Benin human sacrifice?

‘So, when academic opponents of wokeism/presentism say that current moral standards are being imposed on the past, what they mean is that racist views that are now deprecated were once dominant, and vice versa. So, they can pretend to oppose actually existing racism, while excusing that of their chosen period of study, whether it’s 1619, the Jim Crow South or, for that matter, the Trump Administration.’

I couldn’t agree more with the one exception – when I studied two semesters of Anthropology I used to dream about – it was me (MOI!) who would be ‘discovering the last existing cannibalistic tribe in some jungle’ – and then how important it would have been NOT to make the canniblas mad -(at me – MOI!) by judging them with some ‘presentism’ say ‘current moral standards’ and somehow the same feeling I have about Jefferson -(who I dearly LOVE) and who I would prefer NOT to judge for his terrible ‘slave holding ways’ as wasn’t that ‘the sink’ in these times he lived and if he would have lived in the times -(or societies of some cannibals) wouldn’t it be foolish -(or far too dangerous – as he could have eaten US) to… ‘woke’ – I mean ‘wake’ him?

And just saying – as you hopefully will get… a… a kick out of it?

I agree with Chris Bertram @5 that we can distinguish wrongness and blameworthiness, but I’m always surprised how quickly people gravitate towards the view that we should see wrongfulness as objective and adopt some kind of relativism about culpability. Don’t we want to use the standards of right/wrong conduct in understanding blameworthiness? If we do that, it seems that views that link blameworthiness to de re unresponsiveness (i.e., not responding to the grounds that make acts wrong or required) are better than views that link blameworthiness to de dicto unresponsiveness (i.e., not responding to the thought that something is wrong or required). When I try to imagine someone who is selling people to people aware of what they are doing, aware of all the suffering this causes, but somehow unaware that the wrongs are wrong, I don’t think I see a good person doing unfortunate things but a cruel person doing vicious things. (He’s vicious and acts viciously, but I don’t judge???) Or when I try to imagine someone (akin to Hick Finn) who believes, in keeping with prevailing moral standards, that duty might require helping the people who kept slaves but ultimately decides to help an escaped slave because of friendship, kindness, or sympathy, I don’t think that we should think of this as a case of right action that’s culpable because it went against prevailing moral standards. I don’t think we want to end up with the view that Miss Watson was blameless for buying people and Huck was blameworthy for helping Jim make his escape, but it’s hard to get both results if we go relativist about blame. I think it’s really weird to care about praise and blame if we believed that praiseworthiness and blameworthiness patterned with an agent’s disposition to conform to moral standards we see are wicked. The relativist about blame who moonlights as an objectivist about rightness seems to want to reduce praiseworthiness and blameworthiness to fit between attitudes even when detached from moral reality, but this kind of intracranial coherence seems relatively uninteresting.

It’s important how people now evaluate past and present actions, because the way we evaluate past and present actions has some influence over how we choose to act in the future. There are differences between the likely future actions of people who think, now, that enslaving people has always been wrong and people who think, now, that enslaving people has not been wrong in every instance.

It’s much less important how people now evaluate the character of people who are dead, because it can’t make the same kind of difference. I expect most dead people, like most living people, have on their record both good deeds and bad deeds, and there’s not much point in drawing up a balance sheet for them, even to the extent that it’s possible. My judgement of you, or your judgement of me, may be important if we’re ever going to interact; but none of us are ever going to interact with people who have already died.

It’s probably not possible to disentangle these two things completely. If I judge the actions of a major historical figure as having been monstrous and villainous, then I may not be committed to judging that figure a monstrous villain, but I’m making some kind of approach to that position. But it doesn’t matter so much, one way or the other. It’s more important to know what is right than to know who is right.

Peter Dorman 6: I find it hard to make sense of that objection.

“So it could be argued, for instance, that debates over slavery between whites didn’t matter much because both sides were racist.” Does anybody make that argument? Does anybody argue that debates between racists are of no historical interest? I don’t see how this relates to the question of presentism at all.

“Imagine writing a history of the Roman empire from an anti-colonialist perspective: nothing really happened because it began as a colonial project and ended that way.” Why would an “anti-colonialist perspective” (whatever that means in the context of the Roman empire) imply that the development of colonial empires were of no historical interest? I think it’s rather the opposite.

Once you identify as “anti-woke”, you’re committed to racism, misogyny, science denial, book-banning and, ultimately, fascism.

‘Identify as …’ – truly the psychosis of our (post-modern) times.

Assuming ‘woke’ is understood in the form identified by various philosophers and other non-politically motivated critics to consist of stances such as: race essentialism, biological denialism, ahistoricism and a general culture of total intolerance of points of view contrary to the truths established by woke culture warriors, then anyone who doesn’t consider him or herself intellectually anti-woke (or more obviously, ‘non-woke’) is quite detached from reality. Indeed, every term on the OP list above is easily observable in woke culture.

So, when academic opponents of wokeism/presentism say that current moral standards are being imposed on the past, what they mean is that racist views that are now deprecated were once dominant, and vice versa.

That is just a fact.

So, they can pretend to oppose actually existing racism, while excusing that of their chosen period of study, whether it’s 1619, the Jim Crow South or, for that matter, the Trump Administration.

That is a non-sequitur, for most. Sincerely opposing contemporary racism doesn’t entail denying widespread racism in the past. How could it? There may be some insincere (presumably racist) ‘scholars’ who fit your description, but they are politically motivated actors and a minority of society.

The problem with your general argument against presentism is that it forgets two basic facts of human development.

it has taken many centuries to build the necessary ontic, epistemic and moral categories to even name and discuss what might be wrong or right. We have to accept that there was no possibility of sophisticated moral philosophy the minute humans gained consciousness and awareness.
there is no avoiding the effect that the cultural reference frame at any time established in the minds of all but a very few what would be assumed to be the uncontroversial facts of reality – whether it be slavery, magic, the presence of God(s) and much else. There is no doubt that nearly everyone 2000 years ago thought that slavery was just a natural fact of life – regardless of how obviously bad it appeared, and not an avoidable choice on the part of the powerful. In other words, slavery was in the same category as earthquakes – something that happened to you if you were unlucky. Judging people on assumptions that were part of their reference frame and who had no philosophical framework or even language to question such things makes little sense.

The unavoidable consequence of 2. is that there are many historical personalities / groups / societies that did ‘great’ things in their own time, while at the same time as doing ‘terrible’ things – when viewed from our time. Hence the hand-wringing over the Caesars, the founding fathers, Cecil Rhodes and everyone else who contributed to human progress. The very societies that kept slaves in the past also provided sustenance to philosophers, artists etc. who developed the ways of thinking we now have that allow us to make such judgments.

Dorman: I have absolutely no idea what this paragraph is supposed to be evidence of., or how you think it is related to your earlier comment.

Presentism is not “the view that we should examine events and actors in history (at least in modern history) in the light of our current concerns, rather than treating them as exempt from any standards except those that prevailed (in the dominant class) at the time.” Right-wing historians constantly project their politics and morals backwards, imagining a continuity of patriotic faith where the selected heroes are uncanny cardboard cutouts anticipating the rants of wingnut pundits. That’s presentism. Just because it’s manufacturing heroes instead of villains isn’t a significant difference. History as a morality play is fundamentally reactionary.

“The real issue isn’t to do with time, it’s whether any moral standards at all apply to history.” Again, even if Butterfield was right about the existence of “Whig” historians, the notion of Progress is a moral concept. If a historian deems some phenomenon of today a moral problem and studies its historical origins, this is applying a moral standard, even if—practically speaking, especially if, as hostile readings aimed at persons are not apt to be good history—there is no obsessive concern with sitting in judgment. It’s not an accident that one of the most reactionary of hanging judge historians was Lord Acton. Like Acton was apparently convinced that condemning the villains of the past was condemning the villains of today, but he was wrong. So, when academic proponents of wokeism/presentism say that current moral standards should be imposed on the past, what they mean is that racist views they now assign to others were unenlightened, unlike themselves. And that they are the historical heroes who have been fighting the good fight for always. The standpoint the “we” now know better should always be interrogated.

I suppose there may be a place for moralizing, as fiction follows no rules and whatever the author can make work, works. But overall any fictions the rely on mindreading the minds of dead people makes for implausible SF. And any fables that rely on concepts like collective guilt, or worse, hereditary collective guilt, or magic DNA transmitted without physical descent, or culture as a intellectual phenomenon, or worse, intellectual property is not likely to give a convincing moral.

Tm: If you’ve read through Oakes’ response to 1619 and can’t see how it offers evidence of a moralizing view that obscures historical change when most of the actors are held to fail the morality test, I can’t help. Nor I guess can Oakes.

This creates a dilemma for anti-presentists. Do they welcome political support, even if it comes from rightwing culture warriors?

If the worry about presentism is partly about the distortions political views create in historical narrative…

It’s maybe worth recalling that a lot of the early (or earlier) debates about “presentism” dealt with issues in the history of science – including questions about whether we should see science as “progressive” in some straight-forward sense, and if we should judge earlier scientists by the standards of “modern” science (and so, say, Aristotle comes out looking like a kind of dumb guy), and so on. Kuhn, of course, was important here, but before him was Butterfield – it’s important to remember that, among other things, he was a very important historian of science. (His Origins of Modern Science is a favorite book of mine, one where you can find lots of stuff later developed in Kuhn.) So, to think that the debates about “presentism” are primarily about ethical relativism (especially if this is then seen as an apology for various bad political views) or are primarily political, seems wrong to me – to focus on too narrow of a view, and to be mislead by current events in an unhelpful way.

@20
Thank you for the clarification – I’ll take my “F” for reading comprehension even though I apparently had an “A” for content understanding.

If you’ve read through Oakes’ response to 1619 and can’t see how it offers evidence of a moralizing view that obscures historical change when most of the actors are held to fail the morality test, I can’t help. Nor I guess can Oakes.

Reading what James Oakes has written, what I get from it is that he thinks the following: the object of the 1619 project is to make a case for reparations (he quotes somebody to that effect, and I have no reason to doubt it, although if somebody else denied it, I’d be in no position to judge); if slavery did not contribute to the current wealth of the US, then there is no case for the US to pay reparations for slavery (I’d say that’s a fair point to make); in fact, slavery did not contribute to the current wealth of the US (that doesn’t seem plausible on the face of it, but I don’t know enough to judge with confidence; it is, in any case, a significant factual point, worth settling if possible); the campaign for reparations is a bad thing because it distracts from the struggle against capitalism.

At this stage of the discussion, what I would then ask is: if I’m right about what James Oakes is doing, how (if at all) is it different from moralising?

I quoted him because he directly linked the dichotomous judgment of people in the past (whether or not they were racist, which all white people were said to be) …

In the article you cited, James Oakes wrote ‘Black nationalism … defines racism as … a sin that has been all but universal among whites …’ I don’t know what he may have done elsewhere, but in the article you chose to cite, he did not cite any actual examples of anybody (black nationalist or otherwise) saying this, or anything similar. Do you know of any actual examples of anybody actually saying ‘all whites are racist’, or anything similar? If you do, why haven’t you cited any?

One of the mainstays in my teaching over the decades has been the use of true-false-why questions on exams. I’ll make a statement, ask the student to say whether it’s true or false, and then briefly explain why. Almost all the credit is given for the why part, which is what matters. That’s also my ideal for public debates.

If the statement is ‘Some people say that all whites are racist’, is it true or false, and why?

J-D 25, thanks for that, you sum it up well. Afaict, Oakes’ article doesn’t support the kind of claim you Peter 24 are making. At least not the part you have quoted. To be a bit more explicit, the paragraph doesn’t offer any evidence for anything. What it does offer are theses: strong, sweeping claims about the 1619 project. Such theses need to be backed up by a careful analysis of the object of criticism. I haven’t had time to read the whole piece carefully but I do note that Oakes only superficially engages with Nikole Hannah-Jones, whom he criticizes. He doesn’t quote her extensively or summarize her work. He does quote a paragraph from Jake Silverstein’s introduction in NYMag. Silverstein is not a historian. Oakes points to what he thinks are historical errors or omissions in the 1619 project. I think he accuses the authors of cherrypicking the historical evidence to suit a preconceived political program. That is not “presentism” in the sense that JQ uses the term.

I was going to let it go, but I’ve been directly asked to respond, so briefly:

I think slavery was always wrong in some sense, even during historical periods in which there may have been no dissent from it. (Although I also suspect there was never such a period.) I would take no issue with readings of the past based on transhistorical value judgments, as long as they’re sensitive to uncovering processes by which the things we condemn changed and evolved. (They don’t have to evolve in a value better-worse sense to evolve meaningfully.) In some ways, we have always lived and continue to live in an ancient regime

Second, in retrospect I realize there were aspects of the Oakes paragraph I quoted that divert from what I wanted to get across. The main thing for me was the explicit link between sweeping moral judgments of actors in the past that deny important differences between them or how their views and actions changed, and the erasure of processes over time quite generally. Granted, the paragraph is a reflection on the evidence he adduced and doesn’t reference the evidence itself.

As for who says all white guys in US history were racist, and movements against slavery etc. truly mattered only to the extent and in the ways black people were involved in them, Oakes is saying this is the cumulative argument of 1619. Again (for the third time I think), I admit I’m not a historian by trade, and I’ve only dabbled in the relevant literature, a book or so every few years. Oakes may have been wrong, and I may have been wrong to follow him. I’d learn something if people could point out where and how that was the case.

Finally (whew), presentism as I understand it is a composite term. To the extent it says, we have every reason to bring our current values and objectives to bear on the study of history, I would say of course To the extent it tends to erase the historical processes of change that created the world we live in — and therefore the context for the emergence of our current values — it’s an obstacle. Is there anyone on this list who, while recognizing Lincoln’s views on race were far from ideal, doesn’t agree that there was a massive and historically consequential difference between his views’ and Stephen Douglas’? Or is it the claim that no one of significance in current debates holds the position that differences between Lincoln and Douglas were superficial and should not be given much weight in US history? If you want to call that tendency something other than a malignant form of presentism, fine. It should have some sort of name, though.

“I’m pro-union. The union movement is a good thing. If you’re asking that question, maybe it’s because you’ve heard some bad things about the union movement, and I’ll admit that being pro-union doesn’t mean having to endorse everything every union does.”

This would be nice, but what feels like the difference between woke and merely socially critical is that this kind of position is pretty much not ok. The woke idea of ally-ship feels less like ‘working toward common goals’ and more like ‘you should do literally anything I say’.

If you think slavery was always wrong imo you should be open to the possibility that basic features of our current capitalist social arrangements are also wrong and will be regarded by future societies in much the same way we now view slavery. If you incline towards UBI (as I do) you might think our treatment of those on the margins of our economy is comparable. If you incline towards socialism (as I also do) you might think wage labour and private property are. Perhaps people in the future will regard well-off people today as we now regard slave-owners like Edward Colston?

This would be nice, but what feels like the difference between woke and merely socially critical is that this kind of position is pretty much not ok.

You say it’s not okay, but you don’t explain what you think is not okay about it.

The woke idea of ally-ship feels less like ‘working toward common goals’ and more like ‘you should do literally anything I say’.

You say how it feels to you, but you don’t explain why it feels that way. If you could produce actual examples of people saying ‘you should do literally anything I say’, or anything like that, it might be different; just saying it feels like that to you is not the same thing.

MisterMr, it’s hard to do, ahem, justice to it because it’s a careful reading of various texts but crudely put for Marx justice derives from the state and the state derives from the economy, so justice is essentially a standard for what behaviour is appropriate to a given form of economy. Slavery is unjust under capitalism but conceivably was just within ancient economies for which it was functionally necessary—possibly a familiar idea to people here but it’s a nice, clear exposition of it (one thing I would not recommend doing if you’re interested is searching Libgen as that could lead copyright infringement.)

Anti-presentist history does not rely on views prevalent among elites. Revisionist history portraying a false continuity of a united nation may tend to default to a glorification of past elites but there is no hesitation whatsoever to attribute to them the ideas and values held by the revisionist today.

The NRA’s reading of the Second Amendment is projected backward in time and attributed to the elites who remembered the Paxton boys (hence the phrase “well-organized” militia?)

Or the revisionists who believe devoutly in balanced budgets and small government and wax wroth over the tyranny of national debt tell us that the “Founding Fathers” believed the same. Those people would have us believe Alexander Hamilton was a modern Republican who could rub elbows with Grover Norquist!

The principle of “No taxation without representation” wasn’t just an elite view, but the revisionists firmly believe the good and noble and divinely inspired, aka “elites,” believed just like they do in the principle of “No taxation.”

The hypothetical example of future historians being presentists as proposed in the OP is instructive. Any future historian who refuses to go easy on the capitalists but bravely insists that—-unlike the enlightened present—the mass of the people supported inequality because they enjoyed being cruel to their inferiors and were blindly subservient to their superiors would not be a good historian. The future historian who insisted that today’s people lived to support capitalism and inequality because of their psychic wages would be self-congratulatory rather than insightful. And the future historian who insisted for example that contemporary concerns about totalitarianism were simply transparent pretenses proffered by elites who knew better.

A future historian who dismissed the proponents of UBI, a mild reform designed to ameliorate the wages system to make it function better, as nothing but criminal frauds who knew better, rather than people who are just wrong, would be a bad historian.

Cheap self-flattering judgmentalism about dead people helps no one. Moralizing is not history in any desirable sense. If it were, Parson Weems deserves to be taken seriously! Further, even worse, this is not even performative politics on the contemporary scene. It’s a substitute for real politics, a cover. Diverting from the real stuff of contemporary politics, policy, personnel, program to imaginary plays about values in the end sows only confusion. Insofar as it diminishes human sympathy for others, it tends to a negative effect.

engels 44: “Perhaps people in the future will regard well-off people today as we now regard slave-owners like Edward Colston?”

I could only the abstract of the abstract of the Wood article you reference. My understanding is that Marxist theory, since it held itself to be scientifically objective, rejected what Marx would have considered moralism. For Marx, it was pointless to accuse a capitalist of acting unjust or immoral, he was just acting in the way that the objective mechanisms of capitalism required him to act. If this is your view, I’d be interested how your comment at 44 fits into the picture because here you do seem to be suggesting moral judgment?

For my part I think that Wood probably has a point (as I said I only read the abstract). A materialistic account of history must focus on structural factors and not on the moral choices of individuals. But it’s also clear that Marx as well as his followers did engage in moral judgment. To deny that in the name of pretend scientific objectivity doesn’t do him a favor imho.

Steven Johnson, I agree UBI is only a mild reform to capitalism: that’s why I was proposing its absence as an example of contemporary injustice that people who weren’t anti-capitalists might accept.

TM, I don’t think I made any moral judgments in 44 but it was meant to be a separate line of thought to Wood/Marx (sorry that wasn’t clear). MisterMr (& JQ) could be right. The only point I was really making was that the idea you can’t straightforwardly condemn past injustices in the basis of today’s morality isn’t just MAGAism.