Why Judge The Past By Standards Of Today?

Great Debates
41

General Christian theological views from Paul to Augustine to Calvin to now.

And by what I’ve said, I mean people do have the tendency to act selfishly-to lie for instance. You don’t need to be taught to lie and like virtually all other kids my parents probably lied until they were taught it was wrong.

Which is why I would say adultery by mutual consent would be fornication not real adultery.

See for instance the account of Jesus saving the adulteress from stoning.

[QUOTE]

Quite a few of the biblical laws at first sight, may seem to have no logical basis and can only be seen as a test to see if people could obey God.

As the POTUS is not a king, he cannot simply cancel all of his debts just because he’s President.

42

Are you this tolerant of people nowadays who do unethical things because they are in debt? Is it okay to steal if you owe money on your BMW? Is it okay to sell your children if you want to buy a bigscreen TV?

43

People in the past had more primitive technology, no one disagrees with that. But their cultures were more primitive too. We, over time, are producing cultures that allow more personal freedom and happiness for individuals. To the extent that humanity can have a purpose, producing a society that minimizes misery is a good one.

The founders were way ahead of the curve for their time, but they weren’t done. We aren’t done either. This only underscores how counterproductive and destructive it is to rely on the first century of the common era for our moral direction. Those people (of the first century) didn’t have any insights that we lack. And following their rules moves us backwards and increases misery.

I personally think we need to grade on a curve. Washington wasn’t an asshole because he had slaves. He was a typical member of a society of assholes. To the extent that he treated them well and minimized their misery would only improve his standing.

44

This is a complex issue for me, as I am more or less a non-practicing historian at the moment. There are two sides to it.

  1. You really have to consider the world people live in, and judge their actions with that knowledge in mind. To often we forget that there is a link between the material world people live in, and the morality they are capable of practicing. Too often, being kind to those fortunate meant death in the past, where it would mean only inconvenience today.

1a. An Icelandic farmer in the “saga age” who refused to kill his neighbors children over a perceived insult would soon be unable to protect his own children - because he was now known to be weak. We should consider that before we call him a psychopathic killer.

2a. The inquisition saved far more lives than it took. In fact, it was initially set up to stop people just killing heretics outright. Most people sent to an inquisition got away with a slap on the wrist and some bible lessons, and were thereafter safe from secular legal action. When you look at it like that, the image becomes less one-sided. I don’t think most inquisitors were evil people, I think they were more or less analogous to people in legal professions today. Particularly when compared to countries who still practice the death penalty in this day and age, who really don’t have an excuse.

  1. On the other hand, if you always judge people by the standards of their time, you can end up in a mindset where you look at people from the past as stupid, or not capable of complex thought or emotion. I’ll use American black slavery as an example (since most people will have an emotional response to it, which is what I’m after here), and contrast and compare with other events.

2a. The people who stuffed a ship full of suffering people, mistreated them, starved them, dumped the dead and dying overboard, and sold them to a short brutal life of pain and suffering knew damn well what they were doing, and it is fair to judge them as evil by our standards.

The people who bought a healthy slave, had a fuzzy idea of what went on in the slave trade, and personally treated them well are slightly different case, and might be treated more kindly by us. After all, many people now buy clothes made by foreign workers whose conditions are comparable to what the slaves went through - at least the slave owners were honest.

2b. The Bryant and May match factory, until a strike in 1888, insisted on using white phosphorus in their matches. This caused a condition known as phossy jaw, a painful rotting of the jawbone. In the last stages of the illness, the bone glowed in the dark. At that point, the person might be saved by amputation, but most died. The workers were mainly teen girls, who worked long hours standing up in awful conditions, were paid almost nothing and treated like worthless trash. A girl was famously fined for letting go of a piece of machinery to save her fingers. She was told “never mind your fingers - take care of the machines!”.

The people who ran these factories knew damn well what they were doing. As did the politicians who for so long refused to ban white phosphorus when red works just as well in matches.

But the people who just bought the matches, and complained when the price went up slightly after better wages and red phosphorus were forced trough? Maybe we should be more understanding, and think of the log in our own eye.

45

I agree with jsgoddess here. You can’t excuse poor behavior by complaining about your own straits. If freeing his slaves would have meant that Jefferson lost his farm, so be it. He legally could have done it, and so he morally should have done it.

46

You take the good, you take the bad, you take them both and there you have the facts of life…

The message of that 1980s sitcom theme song is relevant to this discussion. There’s no reason you can’t point out the failures, inadequacies, immorality, barbarism, stupidity, ignorance, mistakes and et cetera of the past and at the same time learn from and appreciate all the good things, too.

The Romans did a lot of bad things but there’s a lot their society left behind that subsequent societies learned from, same with the Ancient Greeks. The “Founding Fathers” tend to be overly focused on when it comes to “judging people of the past” because on this forum conservatives tend to venerate them and liberals tend to think they are irrelevant.

I think of them the same way I think of all historical figures, there are good and bad things about them and there are valuable lessons to be learned from both of those things. It’s actually a valuable lesson to look at the failures of the Founding Fathers and recognize that we’ve come a long way because we can now see those failures for what they are, that doesn’t diminish or undo the other things they did.

I think this is the only rational way to talk about people from the past. The alternatives are the methods of the apologist and the Der Trihs method. The apologists just white wash history and essentially are lying to themselves and lying about the past. Der Trihs basically can’t talk about anyone from the past without foaming at the mouth about how evil they were, this means he can’t ever learn from all the good things those people did–things that actually advanced society to the point it is at today. If you can’t look at both the good and the bad of the past you can’t see how it was we got to where we are now, and you don’t learn from all the stumbles that we as a people have already had.

47

Possibly he was talking about George Washington. Washington wasn’t hugely wealthy before marrying Martha Custis, and many of the slaves on Mount Vernon were “dowager slaves” and while he was their master as head of the household he didn’t technically own them. So in Washington’s case, with many of his slaves, he didn’t have the option of bankrupting his farm even if he had wanted to–it was actually a situation in which he could not legally free his wife’s slaves. That would have been illegally dispossessing her.

Now, Washington also owned slaves that were not dowager slaves, and there’s no getting around that. If you want to compare Washington to Jefferson, Washington did free all of the slaves that were not his dowager slaves upon his death.

I’ve always thought that was a moral thing but not as moral as freeing them while he was still alive would have been.

George Wythe, a Virginia political leader of the time (signed the Declaration) actually came to view slavery as evil and freed all of his slaves in his lifetime. He also provided for his freed slaves so he was not just turning them loose to live in the woods.

A few of his former slaves stayed on with Wythe as paid servants, and they became close associates of his and he provided for them in his will. Unfortunately Wythe’s grand nephew did not appreciate the fact that his inheritance was being diluted by servants, so he poisoned everyone on the estate with arsenic. I believe the servants survived, but Wythe, who was elderly at the time did not. Wythe’s nephew was never punished for the act, because the only living witness to the act was black and was thus barred from testifying in the court system of the time. Wythe did linger on long enough after being poisoned to change his will and entirely disinherit his murderer, though.

48

I also wonder if Jefferson could have legally done it. I don’t know much about bankruptcy laws of today, and far less about bankruptcy laws of the 18th century.

If I decide I do not wish a creditor to get my assets when I fail to pay my debts, is it legal for me to destroy the collateral? For example let’s say my business fails and I do not want the bank to get any of my assets in the bankruptcy, so I demolish everything. (Let’s assume I do so in a legal way, as arson is always illegal.) Was it illegal for me to do such a thing?

In essence, if I had a bunch of slaves as collateral and I freed them, I’d be destroying the collateral. I don’t know what the legality of such a thing would be. I do know that during the 19th century, in the run up to the Civil War when many Southern plantation owners became deeply indebted, the largest owner of slaves became financial institutions. They had to take possession of them when their owners failed to pay their debts. I know that laws on freeing slaves varied wildly from State to State. I think I’ve heard that some States even required freed slaves to leave within x number of days after being freed (in essence evicting them from the region.) It’s not impossible laws on manumission would have prevented freeing slaves that were collateral on a loan.

49

Interesting point. If I can’t pay my mortgage, I can’t prevent the bank from repossessing my house by giving it to you.

Not that I’m saying TJ was in the position of not being able to free his slaves, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were instances when an owner couldn’t do so because he didn’t technically own the slaves-- some bank or other investors did.

50

The fact that slave owners were so afraid of slave insurrections belies their claims that the slaves were happy. Happy people do not incite insurrections. Prior to the end of the Civil War most of the lynchings in the south was done by supporters of slavery against abolitionist. In fact, many states outlawed the dissemination of abolitionist texts. No, southerns did not believe their slaves were happy. That’s just a convenient fiction invented after the Civil War to justify the righteousness of the southern culture.

51

I’m almost certain some of them did believe just that - just like many Victorians believed the poor were just “idle” and that factory workers and miners were in the wrong during strikes, because their wage was “fair”. Even when they knew perfectly well what these peoples living conditions were like.

The human capacity for conveniently believing contradictory things is endless.

52

There’s no way to prove or disprove what Southerners as a group believed about the emotional state of their slaves. There were slave owners I think who genuinely behaved in a manner they felt was benevolent and probably they believed their slaves were happy enough.

I’m not saying that belief wasn’t self-deluded, or a product of internal reinforcement of a desired state of things repeated enough that it is eventually believed, but I do believe it was there.

I’ve often found the topic of moral relativism in terms of people of the past to be interesting, but I find it unfortunate that here on the SDMB the topic invariably just becomes a discussion about the small segment of American society that owned slaves over a 150 years ago.

53

Right, and actually if you just gave me the house in spite of the law, it wouldn’t result in me having the house. The bank would just take possession of it because they have right to it under the law, I’d have no legal leg to stand on.

Given we’re talking about a society in which human slavery was practiced, I wouldn’t be shocked that an indebted slave owner who manumitted his slaves would basically be doing something that had no legal basis. The bank would just point to the persons in question and say “they aren’t free, we own them per this legal agreement” and given the society we’re talking about I imagine the legal system was more in favor of the interests of creditors who had claim to slaves than they were in favor of respecting the slave owner’s act of manumittance.

54

I love this new revisionism by conservatives which constantly tries to find new ways to minimize, apologize for, and deny the evil of the American chattel slave system. Oh, it was only a few people that had slaves and they treated them like royalty. My hairy balls.

Everybody knew it was evil. We know this because they said so.

55

If I remember correctly, Jefferson was a spendthrift. He inherited some debt, but he also spent lavishly on himself. He NEVER went without his bigscreen TV and his (likely) mistress and (likely) children were his (and other people’s) slaves. (They were either his children or his close relatives.) I find it very hard to handwave that away as Qin is doing.

56

Which conservatives are making that argument in this thread?

Cite that “everybody” said so?

It’s absurd to think that people 150 years ago thought the same we we do, now. Slavery had always been a part of life until the modern era. I doubt that many thought the slaves were really happy, in the sense that they wouldn’t want to trade places with them, but that doesn’t mean they thought slavery should be abolished. If everyone knew it was evil why did it take 5,000 years to end it?

57

Just like everybody today knows that child labor is wrong, and that adult workers in many countries are exploited. We still don’t stop buying cheap stuff. Are we evil? Aren’t we just owning slaves by proxy? What standards should we be judged by?

58

It’s also absurd to pretend that they didn’t know better, and for longer than 150 years. Why do you think they came up with all the excuses they did for justifying slavery? They knew better. The South behaved the way it did because they knew (or should have known) that slavery was wrong; they were just in denial of it. That’s why they warped their society and culture into being almost nothing but a machine for excusing and protecting slavery.

Because people knowingly do stupid or evil things that are convenient or profitable all the time.

59

I’ve said this in other threads on this subject, but I really do make a distinction of what people thought pre-Dariwn and what we think post-Darwin. Darwin, more than any other person, made the scientific case for all humans being equal by taking the whole religious mindset out of play. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that the end of slavery occurred at the same time as the scientific revolution of the 19th century.

If you think of some of the nonsense held as “common knowledge” even by the intellectuals of the 16th and 17th centuries, it’s pretty obvious that the scientific mindset we have today is entirely different from what people had a few hundred years ago. When you don’t understand much about how the world works, it’s easy to hold beliefs that justify the status quo as somehow being just the way things ought to be.

60

A society that didn’t do this would be right to judge us, as they would be superior to us, at least in this regard, where as a society that did would be right to point out the fault in both sets of collective actions, but should work to eliminate it’s own faults as it criticizes them in us.

In other words, they need to practice what they preach.

If you don’t like this in our society become part of a fair trade system, or maybe just buy fair trade stuff, or maybe lobby for laws to fix these problems, or think of some of your own ideas to implement. The faults of our society can be fixed by enough people choosing to fix them. If you work hard enough you could become a hero to future generations.