James H. Sweet warns against the dangers of “presentism.” He’s a historian writing for other historians,* so he assumes that his readers will know what this means and will agree that it’s bad.
And some of the many and varied things he condemns under this heading of “presentism” do, in fact, sound bad — like things that historians should avoid and should be careful about passing on to us non-historians who rely on them as trustworthy guides. But some of those other many and varied things Sweet also seems to regard as “presentism” seem not bad at all. In fact, they seem like exactly the sorts of things the rest of us hope that historians had better be doing if they expect any of the rest of us to be able to trust them.
Here’s the bit that set off alarm bells for me:
If we don’t read the past through the prism of contemporary social justice issues — race, gender, sexuality, nationalism, capitalism — are we doing history that matters? This new history often ignores the values and mores of people in their own times, as well as change over time, neutralizing the expertise that separates historians from those in other disciplines.
Justice, apparently, was only recently invented — some time in the 1960s, perhaps — so evaluating the justice or injustice of any person or group’s “values and mores” before then is just an anachronistic projection of “contemporary social justice issues” into the foreign country of the past
And that’s what’s putting the pucker on his puss here, the audacious presumption of evaluating the past. Sweet critiques this by saying this presentist faux history “ignores the values and mores of people in their own time” but if it were doing that he wouldn’t be so upset. He’s not mad that the “values and mores of [some] people in their [and only “their”] own time” are being ignored, but that those values and mores are being judged by standards that he — despite being a historian — insists did not exist until the very recent present.
Whenever you hear anyone tut-tutting that you’re failing to consider the “values and mores of people in their own time,” ask “Which people?” And then ask, “And why is it only their time?”
George Whitefield’s role in introducing plantation slavery to Georgia is dismissed and diminished because, you have to understand, he was a man of his time. But John Woolman and Benjamin Lay were also men of his time.** And so were all of the men that Whitefield purchased and enslaved and stole the lives, liberty, and labor of on his Georgia plantation. Were those enslaved men — as is frequently said of Woolman and Lay — “ahead of their time”? Or is regarding them as “men” too, as also fully human persons, just a “presentist” anachronism — an inappropriate projection of “contemporary social justice issues” back into the alien world of the past?
This is, of course, the text and subtext of Sweet’s concern about “presentism”: Slavery. It almost always is when an American historian warns against judging people in the past according to present-day values and morals rather than exclusively the values and morals of exclusively them in a time we treat as exclusively theirs. Sometimes it’s about Indian-killers and the genocide of Native Americans (mustn’t say the g-word — that’s presentism!). But usually it’s slavery.***
I think the archetypal example of what Sweet condemns here as presentism isn’t found in the work of some “new historians” or in some uppity work of journalism trespassing onto historians’ turf like the 1619 Project. It is, rather, the famous confession from Lutheran pastor and remorseful former Nazi Martin Niemöller:
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.
This violates every taboo of “presentism” that Sweet warns against. It uncharitably and anachronistically judges the past according to moral standards held in the present. It passes judgment on the Martin Niemöller of 1933 through the prism of the contemporary social justice issues of 1946, steadfastly refusing to acknowledge “the values and mores of people in their own times” way back in 1933 when he was far from alone in writing paeans to the glorious “national revival” being ushered in by Hitler and was enthusiastically voting National Socialist (twice). By 1946, Niemöller has become a presentism-peddling “new historian” who insists on arrogantly evaluating those past values and mores and on condemning them — explicitly — on the basis of “race, gender, sexuality, nationalism, capitalism,” etc.
Granted, Niemöller’s confession is not a work of academic “history,” but the same “presentism” present in his confession can be found in most history written about the Holocaust and the rise and fall the Third Reich. That seems appropriate. And important. And necessary. It seems like good history by historians doing history as history ought to be done.
So why is it that when someone criticizes Thomas Jefferson or George Whitefield for enslaving other people, historians as historians feel compelled to scold us for failing to judge them only according to “the values and mores of people in their own times,” but those same historians don’t seem quite as compelled to offer the same exculpatory argument when anyone criticizes, say, Wernher von Braun for being a big honkin’ Nazi?
What is it about American slavery and Indian-slaughter that prompts us to suddenly start fretting about the alleged dangers of evaluating the values and mores and morals of the past? “We mustn’t start writing about the history of America’s holocausts the way we write about the history of the German Holocaust” seems like an odd argument to make. Perhaps it’s because I’m not a historian, but I don’t find it convincing.
If someone were to write about Nazis the way that Sweet urges historians to write and think about American slaveholders — with a scrupulous refusal to judge them by any standards not shared by their contemporary compatriots and with no regard for questions of justice or injustice — would any of us think this was better history? Would we think, “Here, at last, is an accurate and disinterestedly objective portrait of the past” or would we just think “Dude, they have skulls on their caps! They’re the baddies! Don’t you understand any of what you’re writing about?”
Such a neutral history could never be an accurate one. Nor could it be in any way a neutral one. Its starting point would be a wholesale concession to the point of view of the Nazis themselves — an acceptance of their assertion that they were the people who owned their times, and thus that they alone were people and their times belonged only to them.
That would be gross. I was going to say that it would be an erasure of their victims and of their opponents (overlapping categories), but I was worried that using a word like “erasure” would be seized on as the prompt for another spasm of reflexive fretting about “the prism of contemporary social justice issues.” And in any case if you don’t already appreciate how gross that would be, then what more is there to say?
Quite a bit more, actually.
But it’s been said already and said better by Malcolm Foley over at the Anxious Bench whose post on this — “Am I A Historian? : On Presentism” — is what led me to Sweet’s essay.
Foley recognizes that the construct of “presentism” in Sweet’s essay not only precludes him from being accepted as a legitimate “historian” but that it also precludes him and everyone like him from ever being regarded as worthy of consideration in officially legitimate “history.”
Foley’s essay has more coherence and more force than Sweet’s does because he’s not merely defending his discipline against perceived interlopers, he’s defending the legitimacy of his very humanity and existence. “Am I a historian?” turns out to be less an inquiry about his place in that academic discipline than it is a paraphrase of Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a woman?” — with all the same implications.
Here’s Foley:
This impulse, in fact, is central to the Black American intellectual and political tradition. This tradition has never been “objective” nor has it sought to be so. In fact, so-called “objectivity” is not only a myth, but it is morally reprehensible. We do not think merely to think; we think in order to resist evil, in order to live, and in order to love. Because Black people in this country have, since its beginning, been subject to the threat of terroristic violence and attempted domination and exploitation, we have marshaled much of our intellectual and political resources not to speculation or to thought experiments, but to liberation. When Sweet laments the fact that historians seem to only now focus on “race, gender, sexuality, nationalism and capitalism,” I see the constructs that shape the world in which we live. But it is precisely because I am a historian (although perhaps in my own mind!) that robust engagement with these dreaded concepts is most fruitful. Being a historian reminds me that race and capitalism, specifically, are historical phenomena. History taught me that people created the category of race in order to exploit one another. History taught me that what keeps capitalism going is often the development of new technologies in order to exploit labor. History, through voices like Oliver Cox, Cedric Robinson, Edward Baptist, Robin D. G. Kelley, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, taught me to connect the two in understanding racial capitalism and its tendrils that have extended through world history for a few centuries now. History then also reminds me that if people made it, then people can unmake it.
Such an accounting does not in fact ignore the values and mores of people in their own times. But it does pass judgment, and it does not haphazardly do so. I am reminded of the voices that call prominent theologians in the eighteenth and nineteenth century “men of their times” when referring to their virulently racist pro-slavery stances. It is not an imposition of a foreign standard that I apply when I call those stances virulently racist; it is the recognition and elevation of a standard contemporary to their own, namely that of the enslaved. If objectivity means that I treat evil ideas the same as I treat just ones, I have no time for it.
That’ll preach. I suspect it will also result in better — more accurate, more insightful, more truthful — history.
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* I am not a historian. At all. And I’m sure that some credentialed historians will perceive my layperson’s opinions about their priestly disputes as little more than an exhibition of my ignorance as an outsider. Fine. It’s even possible that I’m a uniquely dim outsider whose inability to grasp the nuanced finer points of their disciplinary disputes represents only the exceptional obtuseness of a lone individual.
But it’s also possible that if one fairly clever, otherwise educated and interested outside observer is perceiving those disputes this way, then there may also be others. So please talk to me like I’m dumb, but talk to me like I’m teachable, because I suspect I’m not the only one in the class who’s misunderstanding this. (That is, if I am misunderstanding this. Which I don’t think I am.)
** Another problem with the noxious “values and mores of people in their own times” construct is that it reduces the past to a unitary, unanimous set of “values and mores” the same way that some space operas reduce entire planets to a single culture or city or stereotype (the Desert Planet, the Beach Planet, the Vegas Planet, the Planet of Amazons, the Planet of Musicians, etc.). That’s never been an accurate description of any time or place. Values and mores and morals have always been disputed and contested. It’s rare to find any expression of them — in word or deed — that does not assert or defend them in contrast to competing values and mores.
When we’re asked to be more sympathetic to, say, Anti-Masons, judging them only by the values and mores of “their own times,” the implication is that everybody back then was anti-Masonic. That’s neither accurate nor logically possible if you think about it.
But that non-slavery example is a distraction because, again, this discussion is always about slavery. And there the illogic is twofold. “You have to understand that everybody back in that time was denouncing the abolitionists and defending slavery” cannot apply to the abolitionists being denounced. Nor, again, can it apply to the enslaved.
*** Again, I am not a historian. (Or, for the pretentious, I am not an historian.) But you’d think anyone who is one would be aware of this long-established pattern in which appeals to “the values and mores of their time” are primarily offered in defense of enslavers. If I were an academic historian concerned about the potential pitfalls of “presentism,” then, it would seem prudent for me to select examples of what I’m talking about that don’t allow anyone to mistake my argument for a press release from the United Daughters of the Confederacy defending the bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest that they donated to some public library in Indiana.
Just once, you’d think the historians railing against presentism would write in defense of Nat Turner rather than of Benjamin Turner.
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