"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.