Presentism and veganism: If I’m wrong, I’m wrong now and forever (crosspost from Substack)

I do think that those limits you mention (born before 1600, for example) support the in-principle case that there are material conditions for the possibility of being right on veganism. I’m a long-time vegan and I think there’s a strong moral case for it. I also know that when I speak with people from a different walk of life, or travel internationally to places where it is uncommon, mentioning it is met with incomprehension.

I suppose if one were to make (widely rejected) comparisons with past injustices, the fact that I am a vegan yet not spending my time and energy actively protesting or sabotaging slaughterhouses makes me a bystander and subject to moral condemnation also.

Intellectually I am very sympathetic to Singer’s views, particularly because (i) I think he has an indisputable take on the most plausible account of intrinsic good and evil (pleasure/pain) and (ii) though I think consideration of human virtue can be allied with (i), it will still result in assessing most current practices of meat production as just more and less immoral. As with you John I avoid any obvious conflict that I can–I haven’t had veal in decades and only purchase cage-free eggs, e.g.–but still I also think that even humane treatment of animals for slaughter reminds me too much of The Twilight Zone’s “To Serve Man” episode. I have therefore just accepted that I am a culture-bound moral wanton, and like Oldster above, hope that humankind will get beyond our current incarnation (sorry) of carnivorism.

While I have no expertise in the topic, I have spent a little time on google trying to understand presentism a bit better. Of course, my decidedly non-expert opinion may be completely wrong, but from what I understand I would offer the following thoughts:

As has been previously discussed, people have proposed a number of different “presentisms”, such as teleological, idealistic, analytical, perspectival, and omnipresent. Upon my admittedly amateur consideration of these, it seems to me that, for example, using new analytical techniques to study remains and then draw inferences regarding palaeolithic diets, or proposing that the past is “not independent of its observation” and that the “active role of the historian’s mind” influences how history is “shaped from the fragmentary evidence of the past”, are not unreasonable approaches to consider.

I would further note that (according to what I’ve read) even “pro-presentism” historians who support specific forms of use (such as evidentiary, interpretive, or pragmatic) do not take it as an acceptance of complete distortions of the past to support present-day political claims or of cherry-picking historical evidence to make dubious claims about the present. In short, it seems that historians who embrace presentism still accept that presentism can result in “bad history” – they merely contend that, when wielded carefully in a reflexive manner, presentism can support and extend disciplinary historical inquiry. For example, a student examining census data and diary entries to better understand gender relations in 18th century New France is engaging in work that is presentist in nature (for people from that period gender would be a term unused and potentially difficult to understand; the tools and technology to collate, analyse, and translate that data would likely be inconceivable to people from that period; and finally the terminology and language they would use to communicate their findings would not be particularly comprehensible). And yet, I remain unconvinced that such an activity would really be as ahistorical, epistemologically dangerous, reactionary, and antithetical to good scholarship as some people seem to be arguing it must necessarily be.

Similarly, I find the notion that there is little place for making moral judgements with respect to the past to be somewhat provocative. Certainly, there is an argument to be made regarding the importance of evaluating historical figures and actions within the context of their times, and that we must be careful to avoid historical distortions should we apply current morality to the past – indeed, I am rather sympathetic to the idea that any presentism introduced into disciplines relevant to the study of history should only be done so with the greatest of care and caution (and clearly signposted when done so). However there seems to be an objection to ethical evaluations of the past generally and not merely within the sphere of historical studies – and it seems to me that if one is trying to develop some form of ethical framework, examination with respect to the past (which necessarily would involve making evaluations of that society with respect to the contemporary framework proposed) can indeed be useful.

Consequently, I would suggest that evaluating the past with respect to the present can be a valuable approach which may provide interesting context useful analysis. This does not, of course, mean that everything needs to be evaluated in such a way (to the best of my knowledge few – if any – presentism proponents argue that), but merely that such an approach should be part of the toolkit with which we analyse ourselves and our history. To me that doesn’t seem exceptionally unreasonable, and I do find it odd that it seems to provoke such a strong reaction.

This is the weakest argument I can recall reading on Crooked Timber, ever.

From what I understand, you’re saying that your moral calculus is completely correct, and you’re not concerned about being judged, because:
1. there are already people around you who are vegans and
2. your calculations about animals are correct

But there are people around you who are aghast at what we’ve done to the climate, or the lack of action we’ve taken on behalf of children held in slavery, etc…

The people you’d like to vilify today had thoughtful (and incorrect) moral views about slavery or women or colonialism or fascism. And they were certainly aware that others disagreed with them.

We will be judged, and harshly. There can be no doubt. To imagine that we’ve gotten it completely right is arrogant and not indicated by history.

A little humility is helpful.

Have thought about this less than about other issues discussed here in the past, but I think that to avoid misunderstandings, one has to keep two points apart that can (and in my opinion are) both true.

First, it is difficult to judge past people by the standards of our time.

Second, some of the things past people believed are objectively wrong and should have been recognisable as wrong in their time, and some of the things past people did were objectively unethical and should have been unethical in their time, even if most people at the time thought differently.

The solution to the seeming contradiction is that many if not most people are not interested in being smart and ethical but instead understandably prioritise not rocking the boat too much.

Slavery was always abhorrent, whether 500 BCE or 1850 CE or today. Gender discrimination was always objectively wrong both morally and factually (as in the prejudices it is based on being easily disprovable). Many of these kinds of moral questions are trivially resolved by asking the Rawlsian veil style question, would you like this if it was done to you?, an idea that would have been available to the reasoning facilities of people 20,000 years ago. To take a non-moral question, the idea that our personality or memory are stored in a non-material soul that survives destruction of the physical body is disproved the moment somebody notices things like ‘being concussed’ or ‘being drunk or drugged’, and indeed some people arrived at that conclusion from that very observation more than 2,000 years ago. Many things that people believed (or believe today) are not difficult to refute, it is simply that people derive advantages from believing wrong or evil things. If they are strong, they tend to hurt the weak, and if they are weak, they tend not to contradict the strong to stay safe.

Thus I agree with presentism, but only in the sense of lowered expectations. I can’t expect some random Athenian 500 BCE to agitate against slavery because it would only have caused them trouble, and they would have had no serious chance of abolishing slavery. But that doesn’t mean that most Athenians of the time weren’t stupid and evil for accepting slavery, merely that they weren’t more so than we today, because we aren’t really that different.

As for the specific question at hand, I am not a vegetarian, but I understand the moral argument and can imagine the entire world being vegetarian and looking back at our carnivorous time with disgust. Veganism, however, is objectively silly, whether today or in a thousand years. Milk and honey? Unfertilised chicken eggs? Seriously? And if universally adopted, it would result in the equivalent of genocide for all species and breeds of livestock and poultry that have ever existed, which in some cases means the complete extinction of species that do not persist in the wild. That does not seem very ethical to me either.

I’m very skeptical that, “Animals raised for food live longer and, with humane farming practices, happier, lives than their wild counterparts.” But even if one granted that point for the sake of argument, why is that the correct baseline for comparison? Imagine someone claiming that there’s nothing wrong with how we treat an oppressed group because there’s another group that has it even worse. Surely, that argument wouldn’t pass the laugh test. How is this argument any different?

SusanC@9 is correct. To give an example, during Reconstruction, many people did not know that taxing people to redistribute wealth to the poor wasn’t tyranny. Or that budget busting that undermined sound gold-based money didn’t undermine the foundations of civilization and cause the fall of empires at the hands of the barbarians. Or that labor unions going on strike wasn’t the mob threatening the security of all. It’s like people really thinking that without a king and His Church, society would unravel into Hobbes’ nightmare. Their presentism judged moralizing reformers as Cromwells and Robespierres. Presentism is always a failed idea, not least because moralizing about individuals is not the same thing as understanding. If anything it’s a substitute.

Saurs@11 I think this is saying that at best people moralizing about dead people are implicitly congratulating themselves on their superiority. However gratifying the exercise is, it doesn’t really criticize the status quo. Since we are good people now, then the status quo is actually a moral triumph.

PART 1 of 2

I have 2 bones to pick with this argument, one general or abstract, the other much more concrete.

First, the abstract, which is by analogy to a statistical argument of Stephen Jay Gould’s. Gould made an argument many years ago about the decline in the number of .400 hitters in baseball (see his book Full House, one of my 2-3 favorite books[fn1]). For those not familiar with baseball, a .400 hitter is an individual who is able to get on base safely at least 40% of the time they are at bat.[fn2] In the first century or so of organized baseball in the USA, there were several .400 hitters. The last time a player in the (previously) white major leagues batted .400 was in 1941 (Ted Williams).[fn3] For decades the lack of .400 hitters supported a lively discussion among aficianados about the decline of baseball, and how in the olden days there had been giants striding among men!

Gould’s argument was that because of a range of improvements both in the game and among the players, the unit of measurement was wrong. This number, the batting average, is the consequence of competition between offense and defense, and an absolute number is not informative for comparisons of play over long periods of time. Rather, the appropriate unit of measurement was deviation from the mean; the improvements alluded to above have led to a decline in the standard deviation of the batting average over time (while changes in the rules and improvements in strategy have caused the mean batting average to remain constant). Treating each season as sui generis, one should ask what fraction of players are more than 4 standard deviations above the mean batting average (4 because when there were some .400 hitters their batting averages, according to Gould they happened to be more than 4 SDs above the mean). Looked at this way, the fraction of top hitters is unchanged.
It is just that a .400 batting average is now considerably more than 4 SDs above the mean batting average than it used to be (back in the days of giants). Furthermore, the game is different now (from what it was), and in most ways improved (I will allow purists to argue about details such as the designated hitter and the fall in the number of complete games pitched, representing (a) a change in the rules and (b) a change in strategy!)

For purposes of the discussion about presentism, the analogy is that we should recognize that just as baseball players are playing at particular points in time, dealing with contemporaneous conditions in baseball, an individual is embedded in their society and its contemporaneous morality at the time they are alive. If there are long term systemic improvements in morality over the course of history that should be recognized, but not used against individuals in comparing them to others who came (much) earlier or later. Rather, we should compare them to their contemporaries; how far above the average morality of their time was their own? Or perhaps how far below the highest morality of their time did they fall short. Anything else is pure anachronism, and is useless other than for feeding our own vanity.

The second point is held over for another comment, since this one is (necessarily I think) too long.

[fn1]While plugging my favorite books, I should also mention Robert Sapolsky’s A Primate’s Memoir.

[fn2]Several qualifications are need to make this precise. They involve the rules of baseball that define what constitutes “an at bat”: the interval over which we are speaking, typically a single baseball season: and perhaps some others that I am overlooking at the moment.

[fn3]The last .400 hitters in the Negro Leagues, typically considered comparable to the contemporaneous American and National major leagues were Artie Wilson and Willard Brown in 1948, the year after Jackie Robinson joined the National League, an event which soon thereafter began a drain of talent from the Negro Leagues to the (previously) white major leagues.

WE should judge people in the past according to the most objective moral standards, that practically means our moral standards.

This doesn’t mean that we can expect people in the past to have our same moral standards or beliefs: e.g. people who did witch hunts presumably really believed in witches, people who did religious wars presumably really believed that people with the wrong religion were evil etc.

There is a question if there is some natural “moral intuition” that is common to all people in history, and if we can judge people based on that. I think that there is a natural moral intuition, that derives from our social instincts as primates, but that while that is the base of our morality it is not moral in itself, se we can’t really use it as a standard, though we can expect people to understand it intuitively.
My opinion is: there are some basic moral intuitions, they represent our basic primate level social instincts, they include also a lot of things that we would today consider immoral (but also a lot of things that we consider moral).
In particular in the example of Hitler, who clearly was more than a bit delusional, it is likely that the basic social instincts we all have collaborated to make nazism work, since for example “fear the different, defend your own pack” is very likely to be one of these basic primate moral intuitions.

(this argument goes in the direction of Jung’s “archetypes”, basically your position implies that something like archetypes exist and most people would be able to use them to judge right from wrong, whereas my position is that they exist but are not enough to judge right from wrong).

Feel free to provide better examples.

Socialism (by which almost all the professional class Westerners who comment here will be regarded as the moral equivalent of slave-owners).

All arguments against ethical veganism are bad and these are no exception:
1. Stipulating that farmed animals are better off than wild animals, that does very little moral work. Saying that some other creature suffers more than the creature in your custody is not moral license to do anything in particular. Even if farmed animals were “rescued” from the wild (and of course they are not), we don’t generally think that rescuing someone gives you rights to them.
2. The argument concedes that farmed animals are only better off “with humane farming practices” which rules out the vast majority of existing meat.
3. Cows, pigs, and chickens have memories and are social animals that form relationships that persist over time (with each other, with humans, sometimes with other animals too). The idea that they have no life projects that are disrupted by death is wrong.
4. But even if it were true (and it is not), it still wouldn’t justify killing. The value of life is not reducible to disruptible life projects but incorporates the loss of opportunity for experience and basic desires for health and continued existence. That a sentient being might not understand their mortality only means that they don’t understand the nature of the wrong done to them; it doesn’t turn it into not a wrong.

This is what makes veganism a good example: the arguments against it are weak (and notoriously so) but the overwhelming practice is to persist in not being a vegan. The reason is that moral progress is tied to material conditions. Something as deeply embedded in human practices as meat-eating is hard to dislodge with moral argument alone. And that’s the grain of truth in the critique of “presentism.”

TM @ 17

“Why? Is there reason to believe that people in the 18th century had no concept of gender relations”

Respectfully, I think you misunderstand my point. Caveating that, being neither a historian nor a sociologist, I may very well be wrong, as I understand there would be several different presentisms: the tools and technology; the language and terminology; and that while they likely had a concept of gender relations in some sense, I am under the impression that it would not be contextualised and conceptualised in the same way a modern concept of gender relations would be (similar to presentism from an ethical perspective does not require the people of the past to have had no ethics).

I am, of course, happy to be corrected if I am wrong, but that is my understanding.

I think your use of veganism in this context is apt, but I’m confused by this:

This reinforces the point that veganism is not an example on which anti-presentists can lean to support their case.

Vegan anti-presentists are being entirely consistent if they say that eating meat is evil, but that your non-veganism is properly understood in, and mitigated somewhat by, the context of the time in which you live.

But that doesn’t excuse Calhoun, or Jefferson, or Locke, any more than it excuses Hitler.

Does it excuse Lincoln? I’d argue that anti-presentism correctly asserts that Lincoln’s racism was largely a product of his social milieu, and his responsibility for his views is therefore significantly mitigated. (Contrary to JQ’s comment, I am aware of no evidence that Lincoln repented to the point of becoming non-racist, but even if he did, we can still imagine a hypothetical Lincoln who didn’t repent, and we’d need a framework to judge that Lincoln’s views.)

So I think by your standard, I’m a non-presentist — even though I am very sympathetic to the presentist argument. (Certainly oldster@1 says little that I disagree with.)

Was Thomas Jefferson a racist and rapist? Unambiguously yes by modern standards. Furthermore, modern standards are clearly correct and were — broadly speaking — available to Jefferson when he lived. We know this in part because Jefferson himself spoke appropriately and eloquently against slavery.

Jefferson is no Lincoln, but he is still properly judged with an eye toward the context of his times. In fact, it’s fairly easy to imagine that, if he were born in a different time and place, Jefferson could have been Lincoln.

okay –
so let me use the example of
‘THE WARRIOR’
as in the Archaeology of Hate ‘the strongest warrior’ of any tribe always became the FÜHRER of the Tribe -(and isn’t that what contemporary America – and even AGAIN Germany – wants too?) and how do we deal with such a situation where some currently considered ‘terrifying Warmongering Monsters -(even if they were Vegetarians like Hitler) – with a certain hysterical… I mean ‘historical’ distance – seen as
GREAT CONQUERERS
like Attila the Hun
or
‘Alexander the Great’
or
even ‘Napoleon’?
Is leaving a trail of death and destruction suddenly okee-dokee if it is just waaaay longer in the past than just a few generations?

As far as I can tell from the history I have read, historians typically devote little or no time to recording moral evaluations of the people they are writing about, regardless of whether those evaluations purport to be based on standards of the historian’s time or of the historical period under discussion (and regardless of whether those evaluations are favourable or unfavourable). Who are they supposed to be, the historians who are pronouncing moral evaluations of people of the past based on present standards? On the other hand, who are they supposed to be, the historians who are denouncing this practice and insisting that it’s bad history? Within the field of history as actually practised by actual historians, does this alleged controversy even exist? There is a Wikipedia article title ‘Presentism (historical analysis)’ which tells us ‘Among historians, the orthodox view may be that reading modern notions of morality into the past is to commit the error of presentism’, but it cites no evidence for this claim, and weasels around it by saying only what the orthodox view ‘may be’. ‘May’ be? May be? Well, is it or isn’t it? If you don’t know, why are you writing this into Wikipedia? Suspiciously, the only actual historian quoted is presenting a view which is neither presentist nor anti-presentist but anti-anti-presentist, as if commenting on a controversy which, as far as I can tell, hasn’t actually been shown to exist. What I suspect is that the whole controversy has been ginned up for ulterior (and contemptible) motives.

A bit of pedantry directed at the following usage of politicalfootball@30:

Was Thomas Jefferson a … rapist? Unambiguously yes by modern standards.

Students of animal behavior eschew the term “rape” in favor of “coerced copulation”, on the grounds that the former is a legal term and can vary across legal regimes, while the latter is purely descriptive, though its use requires some judgment on the part of an observer, based on inference from the behavior of the female. It has been used to describe observed activities among a variety of species, including several species of primates and of cetaceans, as well as ducks and geese. The Wikipedia article on the subject mentions other mammals (though in some cases — pigs and dogs for example — because of biological adaptations, it is not clear that the male is actually in control of the situation) as well as some fish and insects.

Until some time in my youth, coerced copulation within marriage was not considered rape, since the woman — the wife — was legally, at least to some extent, the property of the husband, not that he could alienate her like real property, but certainly earlier, her body and its issue was his.

Jefferson lived under a very different legal regime than the current one, and in that regime, both Hemings and her half sister, his wife under law, belonged to him along with any property that she brought to the marriage absent a pre-nup. Of course, this is how he came to own Hemings. In that regime, he had more rights to their bodies than either of them did. Coercing sex may have made him a brute, but under the law, he was not a rapist. Not even by modern standards since there was no law at the time and place where he lived that restricted, much less forbade, his behavior. That was the nature of chattel slavery. I think that Justice (!) Taney’s statement in the Dred Scott decision captured this quite concisely when he wrote that “[African Americans] had no rights which the white man was bound to respect,” including, I surmise, protection from coerced copulation or other forms of violence.

Whenever these kinds of issues come up, I find that the real nub of the question is not anything about history but about how ethics should be approached in general (as I see Dylan notes at 31). On certain kinds of deontology, for instance, moral principles are universal, and therefore what the post calls ‘presentism’ is practically demanded; but on other positions, and this is particularly true with at least many forms of consequentialism and virtue ethics, any kind of moral judgment requires taking into account different circumstances, even where the principles involved are fairly stable. On these views, ‘don’t murder’ (e.g.) may apply to two different situations, but it may not apply in the same way, and the difference might be quite important for certain kinds of evaluations; in Aristotle’s metaphor, the principles cannot be simply applied the same way in all cases, but are Lesbian rules, i.e., measuring devices that are constructed to be bent to conform to different kinds of surfaces. Anti-presentists would not, I think, generally say that growing up in the Bronze Age justifies slavery even in the Bronze Age but that our moral judgments have to take into consideration things like the fact that our own (incomplete) elimination of slavery depends heavily on having industrial-era fuel-driven machines to do the same work, or on the fact that slavery then was in some cases explicitly an attempt to be more humane than merely slaughtering all one’s enemies. Things like these don’t justify the practice, but the anti-presentist would generally say that the circumstances do in fact matter to what they were actually trying to do, and thus to how we evaluate them. (The post also assumes that the anti-presentist will always be going easier on the past, but in fact sometimes it can happen the anti-presentist has reason to judge the past more harshly based on the circumstances of the past — a possible example would be arson, which can be pretty bad today, but in the eighteenth and nineteenth century was one of the most deadly and destructive crimes anyone could commit.)

On such views, it can also literally be immoral and unjust to be presentist in the sense used in the post — you don’t have the right to judge people based on your circumstances rather than theirs. This is not a matter of history as such — it’s the same issue that comes from talking about contemporaries. This is why some people reject presentism (again, in the sense used in the post) as related to imperialist, colonialist, white supremacist, etc., views — the idea is that in all such cases you are unjustly imposing principles that depend heavily on your own situation while treating other people’s situations and circumstances as not mattering. For such anti-presentists, it’s not different from (say) Europeans judging other cultures morally by whether they meet European standards or not. Whether or not this criticism is true will obviously depend on the ultimate structure of the ethics being assumed; but it does seem that they are right that the issue of times is quite secondary — it’s really cultural differences that are being considered.

“Socialism (by which almost all the professional class Westerners who comment here will be regarded as the moral equivalent of slave-owners).”

Marx and Engels (and most other famous socialists) were professional class westerners and, despite a fondness for rhetorical flourishes about bondage and breaking chains, did not share this crude opinion. The Manifesto makes an evolutionary analogy whereby socialism must confront and synthesize with capitalism the way capitalism confronted and synthesized feudalism. The implication is not that bourgeous capitalism is equivalent to feudal systems like slavery, but rather that it is the intermediate step between ancient despotisms and the classless society to come.

Marx’s extensive writing on the American Civil War does not equivocate between North and South, but is rather strongly supportive of the Union because, while he recognized they were hardly socialist, he considered slavery to be the far greater evil.

notGoodenough 28: Your point isn’t clear to me. You seemed to be saying that the historical study of gender relations is somehow different from other areas of historical research, in the sense of being “presentist in nature”, because the concepts and terminology used would not be understood by the people of the period studied. But that is true of all historiography. In that sense all historical study is presentist, always informed by the concepts and frames of interpretation of the historians doing the research. If that is your point, it is an obvious one and there’s no reason to single out gender relations in particular.

Bob 39: “I would argue that presentism is really beside the point when it comes–to cite one area where the question of presentism has been very much in the air–to deciding whose monument should stand and whose shouldn’t. Rorty’s focus on “moral progress” suggests that monuments are less about the past than they are about our future and how we can use our past to make our future better.”

But how is that not a presentist concern?

Brandon 38: “any kind of moral judgment requires taking into account different circumstances, even where the principles involved are fairly stable… the anti-presentist would generally say that the circumstances do in fact matter to what they were actually trying to do, and thus to how we evaluate them… This is not a matter of history as such — it’s the same issue that comes from talking about contemporaries.

It seems to me that this view is consistent with presentism. If it’s right to take different circumstances into account when judging contemporaries, why not apply the same principle when judging historical figures. Of course we may have incomplete knowledge of the relevant circumstances of the past, or for that matter of other cultures. This calls for humility.

#40 M&E weren’t judging capitalism from the vantage point of established socialism so their moral opinions (not central to their thinking about it imho) are irrelevant to my claim.

TM @ 42

“You seemed to be saying that the historical study of gender relations is somehow different from other areas of historical research,”

Not at all. I used the historical study of gender relations as a purely illustrative example of the ways in which (as I understand it) a study could be considered to be presentist in nature. My use of the words “For example,” was intended to convey that this was just an example, not that I was claiming that the example was unique in this sense. Indeed, it is rather my point that it is not unique in this sense at all!

If that is your point, it is an obvious one and there’s no reason to single out gender relations in particular.”

One of the points I am (apparently unsuccessfully) trying to make is that there isn’t one presentism, but rather “many different presentisms” (something I noted in the very first sentence of my second paragraph). This is why I listed not one reason that the example could be considered presentism, but several (all of which are, in my understanding, are considered by at least some academics as being a form of presentism).

I did not “single out gender relations”, and rather resent the accusation – indeed, I specifically gave other examples of topics or positions that might be considered by at least some people as being presentist in some way (though it is also important to note that not all the examples of things which are claimed to be presentism are claimed to be presentism by the same people, nor that all people supporting or objecting to presentism have the same thing in mind when making their objections, etc. etc. etc.).

To be more explicit, there seem to be people who would argue that using a modern term would automatically make a study presentist. There seem to be some who would say that absent a moral evaluation it would not be. There also seem to be many other opinions too. It seems to me that if you are talking about presentism, it is rather important to bear in mind that there is no universal standard as to what would be considered presentist – thus it seems that some people might argue that presentism is X and to be abhorred, while others might argue it is Y and to be accepted, and still others might argue it is Z and we do it already.

However, to try to avoid any doubt, I will attempt to reformulate absent a specific example:

Some people engage in the consideration of history. Sometimes such a consideration involves using tools and language which are not contemporaneous with the period being studied. Some people consider this to be a form of presentism. Sometimes such a consideration involves making observations using concepts which are not contemporaneous with the period being studied. Some people consider this to be a form of presentism. Sometimes such a consideration involves making evaluations using knowledge or concepts which are not contemporaneous with the period being studied. Some people consider this to be a form of presentism. Sometimes such a consideration involves making judgements which are not contemporaneous with the period being studied. Some people consider this to be a form of presentism. Please note that this is not intended to be a complete list of all things which are considered to be presentism by all people, nor to document what all people using the term presentism mean at any given time.

Thus, it is not always clear to me what someone means when they use the term presentism. It is not always clear to me why someone objects to presentism. It is not always clear whether they object to presentism absolutely, or whether they object to certain forms of presentism, or believe it can but not necessarily does open the door to poor scholarship, or hold some other position instead.

It seems to me that there are things which some people claim to be presentism that I think are not particularly useful (e.g. “moralizing about dead people and congratulating themselves on their superiority”) and some things which some people claim to be presentism that I think could be useful (e.g. “analysing the past using modern concepts to potentially provide fresh insight into social or political structures or events”). It seems to me that not everyone means the same thing when referring to presentism, or that they share a common understanding of how presentism is expressed, and so I have the concern that there is the potential for confusion – not least of all by me.

Consequently, I would like to urge people to at least be clear about what they mean when they use the term (not only in the sense of what they believe presentism to be, but also what they believe it not to be), whether it is in support of or in opposition to, and to consider what other people mean by presentism and whether they would support/object to those too.

notGoodenough 45: Your point isn’t clear to me. You are saying things like “there seem to be people who would argue that using a modern term would automatically make a study presentist”. I don’t know whether there are such people, in any case you haven’t provided any reference for that claim nor is there any connection with the discussion in this forum. I pointed out that all historiography uses modern (from the point of view of the historian) terminology. I don’t know what, if anything, is supposed to follow from such a banal observation.

“Elagabalus was transgender” is perhaps an example of the problem of presentism … e.g.attributing to Elagabalus knowledge of the present-day model of gender.

having somebody become leader regardless of their competence merely because they are the oldest son of the previous leader was always an objectively bad idea

But it may have been objectively better than available alternatives. Any agreed-upon principle of succession, if broadly accepted, is better than dueling warlords each time the boss dies.

SusanC: „“Elagabalus was transgender” is perhaps an example of the problem of presentism … e.g.attributing to Elagabalus knowledge of the present-day model of gender“

The statement „X was Y“ doesn’t attribute any knowledge about Y to X. The attribution is a factual statement about X that may be right or wrong but its truth value doesn’t depend on whether X had knowledge of Y.

JHW @33,

I see how they get there, then. Although based in experience, I doubt that all vegans actually reason like that. Many of them are offended by the idea of animals being in captivity.

What is, in your experience, their solution for existing livestock? Give them all birth control, and within ten years or so, they are all extinct? Or give them freedom to do what they want, which means that both farmland and natural vegetation get devastated by multiplying feral animals, given that they have no natural enemies left? If the former, how is that not genocide? (If animals are assumed to have human-like rights, that word does apply.) If the latter, well, where do I even start? I mean, you can hardly cull feral pigs and horses if killing animals is unethical, so I guess goodbye to tens of thousands of other species whose habitats they will destroy. (If culling them is okay in that case, however, what is the problem with killing them in farming?)

In the end, even the smartest animals cannot reason like we can, imperfect even as we are. Pigs won’t decide to have only two children per family. Horses won’t say, let’s keep out of this area because it hosts the last known population of the Corroboree Frog. The world that kept their population levels balanced was destroyed by our ancestors, and now everything is out of whack, and we have to manage the situation. And that includes what vegans find immoral – killing animals. The alternative is staggering loss of biodiversity and ecological collapse. (The fact that we may go for that outcome anyway through global heating notwithstanding.)

J-D @34,

Probably the majority of professional historians has better things to do than moralise, yes, but: I have long had an amateur interest in history, and I have read quite a few who cannot help themselves. In fact, there are, as can be imagined, lots of writers who write on history seemingly primarily to make political points. Beyond that there is how non-historians think about the past, which I took to be at the centre of this post. If you live in a country with a recent history of settler colonialism, it is rather difficult not to be faced with the question whether your great-great-grandfather who you are very proud of for founding the family farm was actually a thief and mass murderer. Conversely, if the surviving indigenous people around you consider him to have been a thief and mass murderer of their relatives, are they doing a presentism? (As mentioned about, IMO the answer is no, because what he did was readily recognisable as abhorrent in his time, and the indigenous people of the time would have told him so in no uncertain terms.)

Now, I can face the fact that one of my grandfathers was a Nazi, but I understand that many people find observations like their great-grandfather having owned slaves troubling to their self-image and identity, and that makes all this very much a live issue instead of a concocted one.

My impression is there is considerable overlap between those who resist moral judgment of the past and those who resist moral judgment of the present. For example, those who reject moral condemnation of the US slave-holder society also reject moral condemnation of racist police violence, etc. The presentism debate is really about the present.

I think that’s one of the ideas I was trying to make my way towards.

Speaking as someone who is trans (nonbinary)… I learned the term nonbinary sometime in my late twenties. I realized that I am nonbinary at age 31. I have been nonbinary my entire life. @Tm (55) is 100% correct to point out that transgender is an adjective that does not depend on knowledge.

@engels (54) apparently needs a reminder that a play at the Globe is a work of fiction. There is nothing at all odd about a work of historical fiction using ahistorical elements.

“#40 M&E weren’t judging capitalism from the vantage point of established socialism so their moral opinions (not central to their thinking about it imho) are irrelevant to my claim.”

What vantage point are you coming from? You spoke for the entire socialist movement, but I’m a socialist and I think equating profesionals to plantation owners is ridiculous and offensive. I cited the most influential (though hardly first) socialist theorists and you tell me that their “moral opinions” are irrelevant. You literally write in one of their names! If they are too outdated to matter (speaking of presentism…), let’s talk about modern “established” socialism like the Nordic model with with its thriving profesional classes. If that somehow doesn’t count, hell, even Cuba is famous for its doctors. I don’t think attacks on the “inteligentsia” have aged any better than Marx (quite the opposite), and you haven’t presented any anyway. Who are you even speaking for, besides yourself?

“Presentist: Even if he[Lincoln] did do more to stop slavery in the US than anybody, we should still be able to talk about his racism.”

Unless your point is that a ‘racist’ person can nevertheless do fantastic things for humanity including people of color, I’ve never really understood the point of labeling Lincoln ‘racist’ under present definitions. If the object is not to feel superior for some reason, what exactly is the point? He opposed slavery of black people in the important ways that were possible, including going to war over it. All of the ways that it seem useful to talk about it include acknowledging that there really isn’t much more he could have effectively done given the rest of the country at the time, which brings us right back to anti-presentism.

Alex 57: I agree with some of your points but your vegan-bashing is a bit over the top.

“What is, in your experience, their solution for existing livestock? Give them all birth control, and within ten years or so, they are all extinct?”

There is really no danger of livestock going extinct any time soon. To the contrary, it is indisputable that the number of livestock needs to decline dramatically to be even remotely sustainable. Perhaps it needn’t be zero but certainly a lot lower. Vegans and vegetarians make a sound moral choice, the more of them the better for animals and humans and the planet, even if one doesn’t have to agree completely with their moral reasoning.

It took me a little while to track down Armitage’s (2022) classifications, as I had only read in passing during the last presentism discussion a while ago and didn’t immediately recall the source. However, if I understand correctly, it was proposed that there are at least five presentisms:

Teleological (the present is the inevitable product of the past, and that the purpose of history is to justify and glorify an ideological, political, and selective vision of the present and future)

Idealist (the past is not independent of its observation, and “the active role of the historian’s mind” influences how history is shaped “from the fragmentary evidence of the past”)

Analytical (the practice of using “present-centered” methods, theories, and concepts not present during the time being investigated to analyze and interpret the past)

Perspectival (the trend in historical research, writing, and teaching to focus on contemporary periods and events rather than the more temporally distant past)

Omnipresent (that we are stuck in an eternal end of history in which the past matters less and less in its own terms, the future is increasingly hard to imagine, and “the present has taken hold to such an extent that one can really talk of an omnipresent present”)

Contrasting this against historicism, which appears to be understood as variously:

Historicism (weak), ”the doctrine that human ideas and values are historically contingent and subject to change, and the methodological principle consequent to this position that human phenomena should be studied in relation to their particular historical contexts” (Retz 2017)

Historicism (strong) not only should the past be understood in relation to its context, but also that every effort should be made to avoid, overcome, or mitigate the influences, concerns, and biases of the present

From this I would suggest that (within this framework) it is possible to see that someone might advocate for one or more presentisms which might (or might not) conflict with one or both historicisms. So to me it seems the answer to the question “is this presentism?” might be “it depends on what presentism is” (it seems to be one of those things which many people know what it is up until the point they are asked to explain it); and that the answer to the question “is presentism bad?” is “it depends what you’re doing, why, and how”.

It seems to me dangerous to use individuals in this game. An individual such as Lincoln or Jefferson or Mandela may be wrong, may be idiosyncratic, may be out of step with the general trend and may get away with it because of circumstances.

Surely it’s better to ask, for instance, whether we should judge a particular time’s overall behaviour based upon a more universal set of ethics, or not. Very often, in fact, one can judge that time by the standards which they pretend to set for themselves. For instance, one can easily see that apartheid contradicts the teachings of Christ, and yet apartheid was justified by many South African Christian theologians and was promoted by an educational system called Christian Nationalism.

So in the present we may look back at South Africa in 1980 and say “They were wrong by our standards”, but then surely it would also be logical to ask “Were they wrong by their own standards?”, and also, therefore, “Are our present standards wholly unapplicable to those past standards?”

There are also issues which have little to do with ethics, in terms of judging people by their historical behaviour.

Pastoral societies often survived through shameful abuse of the animals which they exploited. On the other hand, those societies might not have survived without that abuse. If they could only sustain themselves through intake of animal protein because their local ecosystems were hot, dry savannahs and did not easily sustain other sources of vegetable protein – are we then entitled to condemn them? Whereas now we have the option of eating vegetable protein and choose to eat meat even though this means a massive waste of potential vegetable foodstuffs. Our culture would not die out if we stopped eating meat.

Similarly, coal-burning in 1820 might be seen as a precursor to global warming and therefore condemnable morally, but in 1820 not enough was known about meteorology or thermodynamics to be sure that coal-burning would ultimately endanger the global ecosystem. On the other hand Blake didn’t like coal-burning because it was ugly and smelly. I think he had a point and I think he’d have a point now.

rjb @61
“Serious question. Is there any accepted school of thought that doubts we are in a very large part a product of our cultures and our particular experiences?”

No, there aren’t, but it is easy to unconsciously project one’s own point of view on others, and therefore there is a danger of misunderstanding history by projecting one’s own categories in the minds of people of the past.

For example, take a modern amercian student that studies roman history. She certainly understands racial relations from the point of view of modern americans, since “race” is a very hot topic in the USA. She studies Caesar and learns that C. killed a truckload of Gauls and enslaved an even greater number. She is likely to project her modern understanding of race on Caesar and think that Caesar is the same of white colonialists.
Is this correct? In my opinion no, roman mindset wasn’t so much one of racism but rather one of might makes right.
But on the other hand, we can still think that Caesar action are wrong.

Also, while we are speaking of historians, most people will know history only or mostly from pop culture references, where the problem is much worse because movies, to be interesting, have to frame events in categories that are relevant for us today.

“Presentism” in understanding is wrong, “presentism” in judgement is correct and natural; I think it is logically quite easy to make the distinction, although sometimes practically it is difficult.

@Trader Joe 73

Because you are supposed to judge people with what you believe is the most credible moral standard, and also adhere to it, so presumably you will judge everyone with the same standard you use for yourself and present persons (and actions, in fact more actions than persons).

Sebastian H @63,

I don’t think that the moral choice around meat would be affected by perfect plant-based meat, because not eating meat isn’t a big sacrifice even when there is no fake meat. People like it (mostly because they are used to it), but there are hundreds of millions who live perfectly fine lives with perfectly fine food without it. This isn’t like trying to live in our society without ever using a car; it isn’t even as onerous as trying to manage a food allergy. If eating meat is bad then it is equally bad even if one doesn’t have access to synthetic pseudomeat.

Chris Armstrong @57, TM @66,

Of course I agree that the number of livestock is orders of magnitude larger than it should be. But segregation by sex is a form of birth control. Enforced birth control is genocide. That is trivial – imagine a colonial power that takes over the lands of a tribe and keeps the men and women of that tribe segregated for the next sixty years. What would happen? How would that not result in genocide? And if one believes that animals deserve many or most of the same rights as humans, which is the premise of veganism, then the same concept applies to them.

This discussion is extremely puzzling. I try to figure out what vegans propose to do and how that is going to work out while remaining morally consistent, and the response is some variation of “factory farming is bad”, which is irrelevant. My point is this: many vegans, as I understand it, oppose farming as a kind of enslavement of feeling creatures. If it is okay to keep these animals enslaved after the vegan revolution and manage their population levels to protect biodiversity, then what is wrong with merely being vegetarian and in favour of ‘humane’ farming (animal enslavement) practices, in other words, with not being vegan? That is why I wrote way above that veganism is silly. The differentiator of veganism from vegetarianism, which I find much more understandable, is that even something like free range eggs and honey is unethical because it is expropriated from animals, who deserve the right not to be exploited and not to be kept in captivity. If that is reasoned away as obviously silly because these animals are not sentient enough to live independently, veganism is gone, and you are left with only vegetarianism and being in favour of ‘humane’ farming.

I may just have realised that veganism in practice is another motte-and-bailey only while typing this out, except for the kind of animal rights activists who actually do go and release farm animals into the wild.

J-D,

You are right that how people think about past atrocities is usually coloured by what side they reflexively take instead of by attempts at objective moral reasoning. But that doesn’t mean that the presentism discussion is therefore concocted. “You are doing a presentism” is simply one of the rationalisations people make in that situation.

Alex SL: Your set of assumptions are very strange. Let me correct a few.

It’s not true that vegans generally think that keeping domesticated animals in captivity is immoral, when the alternative is harmful to the animal or to other animals. Vegans don’t usually object to, say, keeping house cats inside to keep them from killing birds, or fencing in rescued animals on animal sanctuaries to protect them. (Vegans do usually object to breeding animals such that they can only thrive in captivity but that’s a done deal for many species.)
It’s not true that vegans generally oppose birth control for animals. Nobody denies that humans and farmed animals are different in their cognitive abilities and that this can matter sometimes. (Vegans don’t think pigs should vote either.)
It’s not even true that vegans oppose killing animals in all cases. (Just as people who aren’t pacifists don’t oppose killing humans in all cases.) But killing someone to profit from their body parts is a pretty different proposition from killing someone in self defense or in defense of others.

Your “free range” egg example is helpful. You’d be right if vegans opposed consuming eggs because they thought chickens should be freed into the wild. But this is not a common view. Instead, as I said above, the problem with egg farming is that farming practices are harmful and cause suffering to chickens (“free range” is pretty meaningless) and that male chicks are brutally killed.

John Q @ 82

As I understand it, suggesting that A Historical Figure is Very Important (and therefore it is entirely reasonable to have a 60 foot high statue of them depicting them as a messianic figure in a public square named after them) is simply engaging with history (scholarly, good), while suggesting that we should examine their actions or how their beliefs shaped them is presentist moralising (‘woke’, bad) and undertaking analysis and critiques of the systemic culture and society in which they existed is critical theory (‘woke’, very bad, banned). That this is rather convenient if you want to gloss over uncomfortable facts about history is, I am told, a mere coincidence that just happens to serve the interests of the wealthy and powerful.

Personally, as a non-historian, I am quite comfortable with the notion of evaluating people with respect to contemporary standards and understandings as well as contextual discussion of the period in which they lived, as I think having access to both in order to better elucidate a more comprehensive perspective on our past and present could be interesting and valuable. However, there do seem to be some people highly invested in arguing that that isn’t what I wish to do, and who are very determined to offer up rather bad fiction about motivations and thoughts instead.

But then I am, apparently, part of the Woke Mob (evil, must be destroyed) so I suppose I would say that, wouldn’t I?

Presentism is the attitude of the boorish American* tourist loudly complaining his steak tartare is undercooked, moralised, academicised and applied across time instead of space: global history written by Emily in Paris.

(* or English tbf)

notGoodenough @ 83

There is this curious asymmetry in anti-presentism. They always talk about the unsoundness of negative judgments, never the positive.

STJ @ 84

At no point have I suggested reading dead people’s minds, nor that of “collective minds”, nor made comments on collective guilt, nor have I “abused dead people”. Given that I have been a socialist my entire life, and come from a family of Irish Marxists (with, admittedly, a few priests too), placing acusations regarding “abusing dead communists” in the paragraph responding to me is, in particular, something I find especially egregious and revolting.

For someone purporting to have such concern about the dead, STJ is certainly very unrestrained in abusing the living – and had these accusations come from someone whom I had any remaining respect for I would probably resent them. As it is I will no longer entertain the possibility STJ is arguing in good faith, and instead assume they are merely an intellectually and ethically bankrupt propagandist and treat them as such.

Simply as a point of record, I will take the opportunity to elaborate on my remarks – though I have no longer have any confidence in STJ, I would like the people of CT to at least have my actual thoughts available to them.

There are things in history we can be highly confident happened (as much as something can be said to be a “fact”, these are facts – though of course the confidence assigned will need to be proportional to the evidence). We can, for example, be fairly confident that Abraham Lincoln and Karl Marx were real people, for example, because we have evidence that they existed (contemporary records regarding them, the things they wrote, photographs, etc.). Now this isn’t to say, of course, we can assign 100% confidence (indeed, even if we ignore the problem of hard solipsism we cannot be “absolutely” certain), but we can be very, very confident indeed. We can, to an extent, and with less confidence, draw conclusions about some of the beliefs that they held. This does not require “mind reading”, but simply evaluating their words, records, and deeds – to the extent that we can be confident in the views of living people, we can (to a lesser degree, admittedly, but still with more than 0% confidence) do the same with the dead. Now of course, people can lodge the same objections too – just as we cannot say X or Y living person absolutely holds X or Y view, we cannot say that of the dead (there are people today who seem to insist that absent a mind reading device we may not draw such a conclusion about current people, so I would not do so with those of the past). But we can say that it is reasonable to suggest that X or Y holds X or Y views, as it is supported by (and not in contradiction with) all available evidence (the words, recorded thoughts, deeds, etc.).

For systemic analysis, this is an important point. Class interests, for example, did not pop into existence the second Marx conceived of them. To the extent we can apply class analysis to current events, we can also (cautiously, admittedly, but nevertheless with some degree of confidence) apply them to the past. This is not, of course, to say that medieval society is identical to that of today (I state this obvious fact as I fear it is the sort of distorted strawman STJ seems so in love with), but simply that there would certainly be some similarities in some ways which can be analysed using more modern frameworks of understanding. To say otherwise is, even on the face of it, patently ridiculous.

Extending this on a more individualistic level, for me the purpose of evaluating “X’s Beliefs” is not to simply declare X to be A Bad Person and then recline on a giant sofa in smug superiority (STJ’s disgusting pretence otherwise being, of course, a flat out lie). Instead, there are many sensible reasons one might do so. For example, one might wish to evaluate X’s views and beliefs (to the extent that we can, and of course with the appropriate caution and caveats such an endeavour warrants) and to use current understanding of how views and beliefs inform society (and vice versa) to see if they would apply to the past. Or, for another example, one may wish to see if a modern theoretical framework when (again, cautiously and with appropriate caveats) applied to the past may provide addition context and illumination. This is hardly abusive, which of course STJ recognises – the game is given away by them offering their own presentism with respect to the proffered opinions on Lincoln.

Similarly, pointing out where the fabric of society was woven under what is so euphemistically often referred to as “less enlightened times”, and as such can reproduce those less enlightened values even today, is hardly some conspiracy minded lunacy demanding “hereditary guilt” – it is, rather, simply applying logical reasoning and being willing to evaluate the past and present (as best we can). As I pointed out, having analysis of both individuals and society allows us to see how each shapes the other – and by applying our understandings of how systems and people interact we can see how well our frameworks apply to the past and what they tell us about it. Of course, this is rather difficult to accomplish these days, as the application of systemic analysis has been so thoroughly demonised and misrepresented – by, I can’t help but note, many of the same objecting to presentism of any form today. This leads me to suspect that their fundamental objection is not that we are “analysing the past in the wrong way”, but rather that we dare to analyse anything at all.

And this brings me to my final point regarding the potential value of presentism in non-academic senses (and, I freely admit, a more controversial one). There seems to be a commonly held belief that if you point out the records we have regarding what X said, thought, and did, that this is somehow A Bad Thing. The notion that highlighting the actual views that important people had and imposed upon society is somehow beneficial to their reputations is, of course, so obviously false I have a hard job believing STJ is anything other than a fool or a knave for suggesting it. Yet STJ nevertheless seems to subscribe to the view that when X is glorified and venerated, it is perfectly cromulent, but when people point out X’s flawed views, it is Bad.

It may have escaped STJ’s notice – they appear to live under a rock – but we live in societies which already venerate people of the past. Where people are presented as having been wise and fair individuals who – though slightly flawed – nevertheless worked hard to bring about a more perfect society. Where the reputations of the powerful have been burnished and are carefully presented today for maximum benefit, with their “problematic” ideas being handwaved away as a product of their time so that people do not have to tarnish the heroic figure with the more nuanced and complex reality of the person. That this helps to reinforce perspectives of the past and present – that our societies, by mythologising the past, help shape the view of the present. All this STJ is happily brushing off with deeply ignorant strawman characterisations. According to STJ, rejecting such mythologising – pointing out the very real problems and harms they caused to provide a counterbalance to the propaganda we swim in every day – is a huge problem, and they demand that we leave the reputations of those who cheerfully traded in lives alone so that they may rest without criticism of their thoughts and deeds (criticism which, contrary to STJ’s childish assertion to be merely accusations of wrongthink are actually undertaken to provide additional context regarding a person already popularly discussed absent the full picture). Of course, by so doing STJ is really advocating that the propaganda of the wealthy and powerful may continue unimpeded. Far from “moralising at dead people”, as STJ wishes to characterise it, it is simply refusing to let powerful dead people be put on a pedestal – particularly in an environment where, very frequently, those same powerful dead people are looked to for wisdom today (forestalling the obvious bad-faith comment, I mean in terms of examining what they left behind in search of “wisdom”, for example quoting from their writings – I am not claiming a form of necromancy).

There are very serious problems with hierarchical discrimination in our societies today, and I am certainly in favour of effective action. I might, I suppose, take pronouncements about what that effective action should be slightly more seriously if they weren’t coming from people who seem so implacably opposed to any action on those matters at all.

Like @notGoodenough, I will attempt to elaborate my thoughts as a point of record and for the benefit of others viewing this thread. I’ll have to do that in a subsequent comment though.

For now, I would like to directly address John Q: stephen t johnson’s comments, most recently (76) and (84) appear to me wildly inappropriate for this forum. They are filled with ad hominem. In (76) he accuses me of lying and then openly admits that he is about to lie himself. I think it is clear that he is not commenting in good faith. I would like to know why he is still allowed to comment here.

I thought I had banned STJ. I’ve deleted his recent comments, and would request no further replies. STJ, please don’t comment on any of my posts from now on

„Anyway she never asked to be referred to as “they/them”, which is impossible in medieval French“

It should really be illegal to write in modern English about a medieval French character.

NB I haven’t seen the play in question and I suspect you haven’t either. I normally wouldn’t comment about this at all but your philistinism is really something.

Joan’s cross-dressing was the topic of five of the articles of accusation against her

Dyk Julian Assange was charged with sexual assault…

Who is interested in moral judgements anyway?

They have a certain value when we try to stop people committing detestable acts, for example stop the Israelis bombing Gaza. But what’s the point passing a judgement without aiming at anything? Showing what an honourable guy you are?

About dead people and past societies one should be relevant and precise, if one writes their history. And it is unavoidable to use any other standards than the present. So John was right in “Zombie Economics” about showing how detestable people were for believing in neoclassical myths, even if they are now dead, because these myths had been exploded already in the 30s, if not earlier.

Just for completeness, I am vegetarian and often eat entirely vegan meals for days, but in my case animal welfare was a minor consideration (I find it sort of difficult to apply moral judgements to other species, that the other species themselves would not recognize – cats – cough, cough). My main consideration was environmental (as for instance is the case with George Monbiot).