does anybody know where this saying comes from. I know it refers to modern western civilisations tendency to look back at past eras as though they were ignorant and unclean but i would like further information to win an argument with my boyfriend. thank you.
Neither Google nor Wikipedia seem to have anything to say about it, and a look through the Wikipedia’s list of fallacies and list of cognitive biases don’t reveal anything very similar. Most examples are of cases where the past is viewed to be better than it was or assumed to be like today.
If you could tell the specifics, we could probably point out the issues with your boyfriend’s argument.
I assumed it related to the phrase “The winners (of wars) always write the history books” - I have no idea whom it is first attributed to.
Essentailly it means that revisionism is inevitable. Just as we tend to anthromophise animals and even innanimate objects, we tend to be chronospecific in our understanding of the cause and effects of history, and the motivations, feelings and understandings of the people in the eras being analysed.
Although most people now see the treatement of Native Americans in the late 1800’s as little more than Government sanctioned genocide, or the treatement of African American slaves as in humane and attrocius (I know I do) , the people who did/believed those things at the times felt that their actions were normal, justified and even required morally. We simply can not wrap our 21st century heads around a mind set that would feel that way so we wind up creating revisionist strategies to create a psuedounderstanding of those times which we can model onto our own times.
I once read a science fiction story, set in the future, in which a character encountered the fact that their were blind children in the 20th century (Something that would be easily quickly “cured” in her own time) and it left her so shaken that she was sick to her stomach. (I think it was AC Clarke’s “3001”).
Imagine that character creating a rationalization that allowed her to consider blind children did exist, but that they were a product oif the indifference of the times (The reason they had blind children was that they spent all their time and resources on silly squabbles over nationalistic driven wars over resources!)…
When I was working on my muesum science degree, I was CONSTANTLY reminded not to contexturalize artifacts, but to simply record them. Record EVERY bit of information about the ietm(s) but try not to editorialize or judge or contexturalize. This was not always easy; a set of child’s shoes from Dauchau, for instance.
don’t know if any of this helps… but thought I would add it…
FML
Take a look at this Wikipedia entry:
Also take a look at the three links at the bottom to the entries on the historian’s fallacy, presentism, and Whig history.