Everyone At Any Time Is Just Like Us

For years, I told my history classes that if we understood the people we were studying and knew their circumstances, as well as the culture and society in which they lived, we would discover that they were just like us.  If we had lived in their time and in their societies, we would realize that our lives would have been very similar to theirs and, perhaps, we might even have made the same mistakes they did.

That viewpoint today is increasingly coming under fire.

Last month, the president of the American Historical Association wrote a very brief column in the association publication echoing a warning from one of his predecessors—a warning that today’s historians should avoid the dangers of presentism.   By this, he was referring to two recent trends:  first, he decries the rising trend of historians’ concentrating on the modern era and all but abandoning classical history.

Not only are there fewer graduate students concentrating their studies in the pre-modern era, but universities’ courses in the field are becoming increasingly scarce, with retiring faculty who teach in this field rarely being replaced.  (Of course, sometimes the rarity of such classes is perfectly justified.  I remember when Professor Maleficent put up posters hoping to convince students to take her class on Roman History.  Unfortunately, so few students signed up for the class that the Enema U administrators cancelled it.  Perhaps, the dearth of students might also have been because the professor had advertised her Roman history class using a photo of Brad Pitt as Achilles from the movie Troy.)

Personally, I find this trend a little baffling, since I cannot imagine focusing historical studies primarily on the recent past.  I can hardly open a can of peaches without being curious about the history of food preservation and who domesticated peach trees.  (China domesticated the peach about 7500 years ago and food canning is a byproduct of the Napoleonic wars.). 

Anyone who has worked in the humanities during the last few decades will have been uncomfortably aware that the sociologists have metastasized throughout academia, dominating practically every field.  If we study only recent events, they might as well take over the history departments as well:  then we can all learn to view all of history solely through the lens of social justice.

The second point of the AHA president is the more important:  it’s the warning against the tendency of today’s historians to view people from the past through the prism of contemporary social justice issues—race, gender, sexuality, nationalism, and capitalism.  Simply put, for us to be able to judge the past by today’s standards works only if we happen to be morally gifted people….And we simply aren’t.  Just as surely as we can see the shortcomings of those who lived before us—as measured by the mores of today’s society—future generations will be able to do the same to us, all while marveling at how clueless, callous, and unfeeling we are.

Presentism erects a wall preventing us from understanding the past and those who created the world that we live in.  It is far too simplistic to label everyone in the past as racist, or sexist, or elitist, or any of the other labels that are so quickly and easily applied but provide no insight into what motivated these people.  Terms like racist and fascist have been so frequently used that they no longer convey meaning, transfiguring real people into two-dimensional, cartoon stick characters.

All this judgmentalism reminds me of a man I used to be in business with many decades ago.  The man was two generations older than I, and though highly educated, he was, by many standards, not a very nice guy.  His opinions about race and equality were odious, as were his opinions of sexual equality.  By the logic of today’s political world, he would probably be labeled an extremist or a semi-fascist.

The early life of this man had been truly difficult:  he himself had come from a mixed-race home, a fact that probably helped form some of his own racial prejudices.  He grew up during the Great Depression, and though his family was poor, he had finished a couple of years of college before Pearl Harbor.  Enlisting early in the Army, he was selected for OCS and was trained as a navigator on B-17 bombers.

He arrived in England early in the war, back when it was statistically unlikely that a crew would remain intact through eight missions, much less the minimum 25 missions they were required to serve before being rotated back to the states.  As a navigator, his position was in the forward area of the bomber, just behind the plexiglass nose—the most dangerous location in the plane.  Even later in the war, the odds of a navigator’s dying on a tour of duty was 25%.  Our man was lucky, surviving all 25 missions and returning to the states.

He could have remained stateside for the rest of the war, but he soon began to crave the excitement he had experienced on those bombing runs over Germany.  He volunteered to serve as a navigator on a PBY in the Pacific Theater.  Years later, he modestly told me that his job as navigator was relatively simple, his most important responsibility being carrying a rubber hammer and a bag of golf tees.  Every time the giant flying boat made a water landing, he claimed it was his job to scramble around the hull of the plane, hammering the tees into the holes left by rivets that had popped.  I have no idea whether he actually ever hammered a golf tee into a single rivet hole, but I am absolutely sure of the difficulty of navigating across a featureless ocean without the benefit of electronic aids when the most sophisticated instruments available were a stopwatch and a poor map.

After the war, he returned to college, graduating from both the university and medical school, ultimately becoming a general surgeon.  Reenlisting, he retired as Colonel in the Air Force.  He was a hard-nosed businessman and not very likable, and occasionally he was almost impossible to be around, even for his family.  At infrequent times, he could also be kind, humorous, and understanding.

If I were to write this man’s history in more detail, what should I focus on?  Was he a product of his time?  Or simply a racist and a sexist?  Was he a war hero?  Or just an embittered old man who, despite having a successful medical career, ultimately drove his whole family away?  Just what would be the simple two or three one-word labels I should use to completely distill the lifetime of a man into something the small-minded can use to ignore all the forces that created and shaped him?

The president of the American Historical Society triggered an incredible amount of response to his column (almost all of it negative), with some labeling his comments as racist.  After many members demanded his resignation, he apologized profusely.  You can read both his original column and his apology here.  It’s up to you to figure out if he or his critics were correct.