ORIGINALISM AND PRESENTISM: IDEOLOGIES THAT FURTHER REND THE SOCIAL FABRIC – Part two
We should not be judging historical times by the values of our own. Presentism too often serves to divide the left when unity among progressives is necessary to combat forces coming from the right.
In my previous essay, I presented some thoughts on originalism as a method of constitutional interpretation employed by the right-wing justices on the Supreme Court. Despite theoretical contestation, my conclusion is that appeals to originalism are a front masking the justices' extremist ideological and political positions.
I want to turn attention to presentism, a phenomenon identified with sectors of the left. I do so while denying that, in content or political consequences, the phenomena are equivalent. The effects of Supreme Court decisions based on originalism are far more destructive to our political fabric than presentist interpretations of history. What they bear in common is an appeal to extremist modes of thinking that lack nuance and have intensified tribalist divisions while doing great injury to our democratic values and practices. Both phenomena are making news.
Presentism has a technical meaning for philosophers. It relates to the ontological proposition that only present things exist. But its employment as a basis of historical interpretation is more commonplace, and this is the usage I choose to comment on. Debates over presentism have made their way into the culture wars.
Presentism as a mode of looking at history can either be descriptive or can serve as the basis for moral judgment. It is the latter employment that has become politically charged and has led to intensified debate among historians with political repercussions on the ground.
In briefest terms, the debate over presentism raises the question as to whether values and practices of the past can be morally judged – and held wanting - by values that we subscribe to in the present.
Slavery is arguably the paradigmatic case. In our age, slavery in all its forms is universally condemned. Article four of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights explicitly states “No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.” The 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration will be celebrated this December and has been adopted by all the member states of the United Nations. Among human rights scholars, the prohibition against slavery is construed as one of the few “core rights” from which there can be no derogation or qualification. In other words, the prohibition is absolute. This doesn't mean that slavery does not exist, (all human rights are violated) and chattel slavery, the most traditional form of slavery, in which human beings are sold and bought at auction, still survives, at least in Sudan and Mauritania. The prohibition against slavery “in all their forms,” would include the trafficking of human beings for the purposes of sexual exploitation and bonded labor, crimes that tragically flourish on the international scene. But those who engage in these illicit and despicable practices would have to defend them against a consensus that finds them morally indefensible.
The condemnation of slavery is universal in our time but this has not always been the case. Throughout much of human history, slavery was construed as an acceptable and normative societal institution. I studied classical philosophy and literature in my early years. In my reading of ancient Greek and Roman thought, I cannot identify a single thinker, not one, who condemned slavery or questioned its moral acceptability. The Stoics may have come close in that they recognized a common humanity inherent in all people, including slaves. But this is not the same as finding fault with the institution of slavery. Closer to ancient consensus was the opinion of Aristotle who held that slavery was constitutive of nature and some people were naturally born to be slaves.
Are we to hold accountable and condemn the ancients for a moral perspective that they did not hold, was totally absent from their culture, and did not come into currency until more than two thousand years after their time?
I went out to lunch a while back with a friend who is a retired professor of philosophy. We enjoy discussing trends, movements, and ideas current on the political scene. We looked at presentism. In critiquing presentism, my friend proffered the following analogy: Would we hold accountable Isaac Newton, in his path-breaking discoveries in the field of physics, for not making use of Einstein's theories of relativity? The answer is self-evident: it would be preposterous to do so. Likewise, my friend contended that it would be inappropriate to critique the people of earlier times for holding values and engaging in practices that were consonant with and confirmed by the science and prevailing views of their times. In short, it is wrong to judge the behaviors of others of earlier times by the standards of our own to which they did not have access. Historians would most likely agree, and presentism is construed as a fallacy by many professional historians.
Yet, this view needs parsing. While the ancients did not hold the institution of slavery up to moral scrutiny or condemnation, they assuredly recognized the desirability of freedom over enslavement and the empirical fact that slaves would not choose to be such if the choice could be theirs. Slave revolts provided undeniable validation of this fact. Knowing such, it was not unheard of for aristocratic Romans to manumit their slaves and even set them up in business to live free, independent, lives. Yet these realities, born of proximate relations, did not translate into a moral critique of slavery as an institution.
An even more dramatic example of this disconnect is found in the practice of torture. The visceral wrongfulness of torture is evident in the excruciating pain of its victims. It doesn't require much moral imagination to conclude that no one would want to be so treated. Yet torture was an accepted component, for example, of the French judicial process until the late eighteenth century. Prior to changing social attitudes ushered in by the Enlightenment, no one thought there was a moral problem with torture until they did. It is as if humanity as a whole, and until modern times, had turned a blind eye to cruelty. Among the seven deadly sins, we find pride, greed, and envy. But cruelty is not counted as one of them. As with slavery, the lives of people who suffered oppression and pain were not translated into a superstructure of values and norms that enabled people in their own times to see beyond them. Their pain and suffering did not coalesce into societal norms. In short, we are all creatures of our time, and our values are shaped by the cultures in which we are embedded. A logical conclusion is that it is fallacious to condemn people for engaging in practices informed by normative values which were outside of their temporal and cultural horizons despite immediate experience.
In our current fractured political environment, a defense of presentism has most often been raised by people representing groups that have been marginalized, are relatively powerless, and are therefore voiceless. A fundamental question to be considered is, who have been the norm setters? Just as we may conclude that history is written by the winners, so our understanding of the values of a specific time were the values of those who were most empowered, those who had the capacity to ensure that their values and interests were salient and their voices heard. Norms and events that have been passed down to succeeding generations – the substance of history – are the norms that have been articulated. But what of those without voice – the enslaved, the impoverished, minorities, and women? If we were to know their values, history may have been very different. But with rare exceptions, we cannot know.
Interpreting or recounting history cannot be objective. Our understanding of the past is a retrojection of what we select as significant issuing from our current values and interests. It cannot be otherwise. In significant ways, the past can only be understood through the lens of the present. This is true not only as facts of interpretation but by the choice of those events and personages we elect to look at. By necessity, gaining an understanding of history requires a great deal of cherry-picking. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that what we find is, in significant measure, a product of interpretations we bring to the facts that are under review. In other words, descriptively there must be an element of the present retrojected into our understanding of the past.
John Dewey argued that “all history … is, in an inescapable sense, the history not only of the present but of that which is contemporaneously judged to be important in the present.” The British historian E. H. Carr concurred in his classic answer to the question What Is History? (1961): “we can view the past, and achieve our understanding of the past, only through the eyes of the present;” because history is written not simply for the present but in the present, it constitutes “an unending dialogue between the present and that past.”
Arguably we study history for the sake of human flourishing. If the study of history is to not be sterile then history is written, at least in part “for the present.” That it is written in the present is self-evident.
If this is all that presentism means, then it is anodyne and unobjectionable. As such, it is epistemically descriptive. It is when our understanding of the past is condemned by the values of the present that presentism becomes politically relevant, charged, and a basis for the formation of ideologically adversarial camps. We witness this in the tearing down of Confederate statues and in the condemnation of iconic historical figures, once venerated but now condemned by the politics of the moment.
I return to slavery. As noted, I believe it is intellectually incoherent to condemn Aristotle and his ancient contemporaries for accepting and defending an institution that was normative, indeed universal, in his day. But what of more recent figures? How are we to assess antebellum American presidents, all of whom were slave owners, John Adams being the only exception?
Admittedly these assessments are more morally ambiguous. The case of Thomas Jefferson is perhaps the most morally fraught. Much has been written about Jefferson's internal conflicts, ambiguities, and contradictions about slavery. The same figure who penned “all men are created equal,” the most potent affirmation of universal humanity ever inscribed, could at the same time look into the face of a Black person and not see a complete human being.
Unlike the ancients, a person informed by the thinkers of the Enlightenment, and Jefferson was himself an Enlightenment thinker, lived in a time of historical transformation. The consensus that reinforced slavery as normative was breaking down. There were abolitionist societies in America in the late eighteenth century. Quakers of the day staunchly opposed slavery, and arguable ambivalence with regard to slavery was written into the Constitution, left unresolved to another day. Jefferson, who wrote condemnation of the British monarchy for the perpetuation of the slave trade into the Declaration of Independence, could not bring himself to liberate his own slaves, even after his own death.
Jefferson invoked the notion that Blacks lacked an equal capacity to Caucasians for abstract thought as his highly dubious justification for slavery. Yet in that conclusion, Jefferson was upholding the prevailing science of the day. Even fervent white abolitionists in the decades leading up to the Civil War could share platforms with Blacks, yet personally believe that Blacks were not truly equals. Justice demanded the abolition of slavery, but that abstract standard is not identical to the notion of social equality or acceptance. From our standpoint, it is easy to dismiss such conclusions as nothing but bigotry, pure and simple.
My personal conclusion is that such dismissal speaks to the ideological reductionism to be avoided. It foments the divisiveness and political tribalism which has brought our democracy to the brink. Like originalism, presentism, which most notably finds expression among leftists whose instincts are otherwise positive, when so employed is a destructive posture. It is absolutist and unmindful of the complexities confronting the lives of those earlier times. As such, it is also lamentably anti-intellectual.
The preferred interpretation, I aver, is to place historical actors within the fullness of their contexts and draw moral assessments from that standpoint. Jefferson, like all personages, was a flawed human being. His slaveholding ran against the progressive commitments of persons with whom he associated and constituted his intellectual environment, and, with that understanding, he can be held accountable. However we may condemn his position on slavery, Jefferson simultaneously was also a multifaceted and brilliant thinker who endowed the oppressed with history's most potent and liberatory idea. Any assessment of the man needs to account for his revolutionary commitments as well as his flaws. Again, dismissing Jefferson on the basis of his single shortcoming can only be done at the expense of discounting the social, political, and scientific environment in which he lived and within which his values were formed.
Those who defend presentism might be concerned that assessing past actions solely within their contexts, however reprobate we find them, is to endorse moral relativism, which we otherwise find wanting. Yet, this concern is obviated by that very contextual understanding. A salutary reading of history need not endorse past practices but enable us to gain greater clarity as to how they emerged and were congruent with their times. They can also serve us to understand our present society more clearly.
This leads to my perspective. My view is that the progressive agenda would be best served by assessing how historical figures advanced the cause of human flourishing given the realities they inherited. By these lights, we should not hold Newton accountable because he did not employ Einstein's physics. A more fruitful assessment is to examine how his contributions advanced our scientific knowledge based on the state of science to which he had access. Likewise, while we should support the dismantling of Confederate statues, we should reject removing statues of Abraham Lincoln because his views on race were not what ours are today. Rather, he should be assessed by the categorical advances he made in regard to the status of Blacks in his time and political environment.
In sum, the problem with presentists, as with originalists is that they grasp absolutist ideologies and employ them to advance extreme political agendas that minimize the possibilities of nuanced, detailed, positions that allow for compromise and cooperation. I conclude that by excoriating historical figures for their sins, ideologues (and, again, this approach is employed by sectors on the left) augments their moralistic capacities to demean and marginalize their adversaries here and now. It further aggravates division among progressives at a time when the left needs to be unified to better combat the onslaught of authoritarianism coming from the right.
We do not need ideologically-based moralistic judgments. Rather, our relationship with history is better served by fostering dialogue between the past and the present. We can learn from the past in order to learn about the formation of our current society. And with this understanding, and inspired by visions of a more inviting future, we can move ahead in a progressive spirit to build a more secure, more just, and more equitable society.
If democracy is to be revived, we need to find ways to move beyond the allure of ideologies that tear apart the social fabric and instead restore a commitment to those common ideals necessary to construct a more benign and harmonious future.
Excellent essay, Joe. I, too, lean toward a Deweyan view of history, a progressive view of how to best evaluate moral agents and the social progress they effect. We are mortal beings living in definable social and material conditions. Moral possibilities are anchored and defined by the socio-economic conditions in which we live as well as by the moral values to which we aspire. We are not angels contemplating our eternal natures, as absolutists of all stripes might opine. We are mortal beings, qualified by our living circumstances, aiming to push the envelope of civilized life forward one step at a time.
Moral absolutists believe that moral ideals, the possibilities for moral progress, exist independently of the existential conditions of our lives. Oddly, they cannot subscribe to the notion of moral progress. They back themselves into binary corners of right and wrong, good and evil that have existed from the beginning of time, itself. Time, place, and socio-economic conditions can't play a role in their concept of history or human agency. They live in the eternal present and history itself becomes an oxymoron or something that simply doesn't exist.
I wonder how thought leaders in jurisprudence come upon and embrace this or that methodology when deciding issues of law and its endless cases. Are their methodological choices made in bad faith? Do they embrace theoretical outlooks that best fit their pre-existing political or moral outlooks? It would appear that what the press calls conservative judges and justices are reactionaries seeking a status quo ante - not only a time before the present but a mythic golden age that never existed at all. The deepest and saddest irony is that conservative judges and justices are activists despite their sincerest avowals. And, not for nothing, Senators vote for judicial nominees based on the most probable outcomes of their judicial rulings. Few bother to dress their quest for political power in methodological robes. They leave such matters to debate societies such as the Federalist Society.
Very nuanced discussion of the difference between originalism and presentism
Excellent