"Presentism" Imperils Our Future by Distorting Our Past

[Ptarmigan]

"Presentism" Imperils Our Future by Distorting Our Past
https://fee.org/articles/presentism-imperils-our-future-by-distorting-our-past/

New York City is famous for its fashion runways. Amid the oohs and ahhs and camera flashes, men and women sashay past the clothing cognoscenti hoping for approving reviews.

With a little help from Star Trek technology, the Big Apple was the site of a most extraordinary apparel show just last week. Several people from the past were teleported to a runway in Soho so they could strut their stuff: Cicero from ancient Rome was there. So was Joan of Arc from the 15th Century; medieval Russia’s Ivan the Terrible; and Tastiguy, a cannibal from Papua New Guinea. Even Thag the Bohemian caveman showed up.

Judges in the audience represented some of the world’s most famous fashion houses: Giorgio Armani, Fendi, Prada, Versace, Salvatore Ferragamo, Gucci, and Max Mara, among others. The show, unfortunately, was an unmitigated disaster from start to finish. The critics were merciless, their worst epithets so distasteful I cannot repeat them here. But here’s a sample of the less offensive remarks:

“Hey Cicero, is that your mother’s blanket you’re wearing? And what’s with the sandals? Can’t you afford a decent pair of shoes?” cried the Gucci guy.

Judging the past with today's moral standard without taking into context of time and culture. It is called Presentism, which is commonly seen in woke.

My contrived report may or may not be humorous. You might think it ridiculous. Fair enough. But the sentiments expressed by the fictional fashion show critics are not far removed from a trend that’s disturbingly on the rise today. It takes the form of judging people of the past by current standards, a failure to consider them in the context of their time and culture, a narrow focus on certain attributes rather than the whole person. Sometimes it takes a little absurdity to illustrate why something is absurd.

Terms for this way of looking at the past range from intertemporal bigotry to chronological snobbery to cultural bias to historical quackery. The more clinical label is “presentism.” It’s a fallacious perspective that distorts historical realities by removing them from their context. In sports, we call it “Monday morning quarterbacking.”

Presentism is fraught with arrogance. It presumes that present-day attitudes didn’t evolve from earlier ones but popped fully formed from nowhere into our superior heads. To a presentist, our forebears constantly fail to measure up so they must be disdained or expunged. As one writer put it, “They feel that their light will shine brighter if they blow out the candles of others.”

Our ancestors were each a part of the era in which they lived, not ours. History should be something we learn from, not run from; if we analyze it through a presentist prism, we will miss much of the nuanced milieu in which our ancestors thought and acted.

It prevents understanding history.

All too often these days, the poison of presentism prevents that very thing. Nonetheless, as writer Rosamina Lowi puts it, “History demands our humble understanding, not our hubristic outrage.”

Presentism deserves your attention. If it becomes the conventional wisdom, we will corrupt our history and forget much of the rest. My gut tells me that any people who judge the past by the present will in the future be harshly judged themselves.

[Ptarmigan]

Against Presentism
https://www.historians.org/research-and-publications/perspectives-on-history/may-2002/against-presentism

Who isn't, you say? Hardly any "ism" these days has much of a scholarly following. Yet presentism besets us in two different ways: (1) the tendency to interpret the past in presentist terms; and (2) the shift of general historical interest toward the contemporary period and away from the more distant past. Although the first propensity was implicit in Western historical writing from its beginnings, it took a more problematic turn when the notion of "the modern" began to take root in the 17th century. Over time, modernity became the standard of judgment against which most of the past, even the Western past, could be found wanting. The second trend, the shift of interest toward the contemporary period, clearly has a connection to the invention of modernity, but it did not follow as much in lockstep as might be expected. As late as the end of the 19th century, and in some places even after that, students in history expected to study mainly ancient history and to find therein exemplars for politics in the present. Ten or fifteen years ago, survey courses routinely stopped at World War II. French historians still refer to history in the 16th–18th centuries as histoire moderne; for them "contemporary history" began in 1789, and until recently, it stopped about the time of World War I, the rest of the 20th century being consigned to the province of journalism rather than historical scholarship. I believe that the 20th century should be part of historical scholarship and teaching, of course, but it should not crowd out everything else.

There is a certain irony in the presentism of our current historical understanding: it threatens to put us out of business as historians. If the undergraduates flock to 20th-century courses and even PhD students take degrees mostly in 20th-century topics, then history risks turning into a kind of general social studies subject (as it is in K–12). It becomes the short-term history of various kinds of identity politics defined by present concerns and might therefore be better approached via sociology, political science, or ethnic studies. I'm not arguing that identity politics have no place in historical study; women's history, African American history, Latino history, gay and lesbian history, and the like have all made fundamentally important contributions to our understanding of history. It is hard to imagine American history in this country without some element of national identity in it. And present-day concerns have helped revivify topics, such as imperialism, that needed reconsideration. But history should not just be the study of sameness, based on the search for our individual or collective roots of identity. It should also be about difference. World history, for example, should be significant not only because so many Americans have come from places other than European countries but also because as participants in the world we need to understand people who are hardly like us at all.

This curiosity about difference should apply to the past in general. The "Middle Ages" or "Ancient World" (themselves presentist designations when they appeared) are not just stepping stones to the "modern" present we know. As historians of those periods know all too well, we must constantly remind students that the Greeks and Romans did not think of themselves as "ancient" and 12th-century people did not imagine themselves to be living in an in-between period of time (except perhaps in relationship to the Second Coming of Christ in Christian Europe). Some of the interest of these "early" periods—but only some—comes from the ways in which people then thought and acted like us now. Much of it comes from the ways in which they differed from us, indeed, lived in ways that are almost unimaginable to us.

An article from 2002.