Last summer, we asked our Twitter followers for clichéd statements about history. We got a whole pile of great responses and decided to build a small mailbag series out of them. This is the first in that series. If you like our mailbag articles, please share them and submit questions for future articles. We’re happy to receive questions from students or non-historians wanting to know more about what historians do and why.
Don’t We Have To Judge People By The Standards Of Their Time?
In any conversation about history—online or face-to-face—you’ll probably hear someone offer up the advice: “You have to judge people by the standards of their time.”1 This sentiment is often used to push back against people, including academic historians, who say that someone in the past did a bad thing or participated in a bad system. The criticism often ramps up from that point, saying it’s unfair—even wrong—to “make moral judgments” about the choices people made in the past.
First of all, why?
Seriously, why is it so wrong to make judgments about people in the past? Especially if another historical cliché, “those who do not learn history are condemned to repeat it,” is to have any meaning at all. Looking to the past for examples of things that we think were wrong or right, good or bad, is one of the reasons people engage with history, both as lay people and as professionals. Not all historical inquiry is explicitly about judgment, and not all historical judgments are about good and bad, but neither are these things outside the boundaries of historical practice.
Some discomfort with the idea of judgment seems rooted in the notion that judging the goodness of someone else’s choices is somehow unfair, especially if it’s lacking in understanding.2 But historical judgment isn’t inherently knee-jerk or ill-informed. Instead, it can be, and most of us would say it should be, about learning, understanding, and assessing.
That’s what most of us who practice and teach history try to do, and that includes pushing back on particular kinds of judgment. One kind of judgment that really bothers me is the rush to conclude that people in the past were stupid, or didn’t have reasons for doing what they did. Doing the work to understand the world in which people operated is the necessary precursor to assessing the choices they made and didn’t make. Though the circumstances and reasons behind a choice might not be apparent to you upon first glance, people in the past had reasons for doing what they did. Once you work to understand those reasons, you still don’t have to agree with the choices—you might even think they were really bad choices—but you may have a different understanding of them, and that can be important in taking something useful from what you’ve learned about the past.
One situation in which it’s always important to moderate our judgment is when the people we’re talking about couldn’t have known differently, when they were lacking information—as an individual or a society—that might have made a difference. But even making that assessment requires a lot of understanding and self-reflection, as we can be far too quick to give people the benefit of the doubt if we want to find a way to let them off the hook.
And this gets us to the real problems with the way this cliché is used. When pushed, people who talk about “the standards of the time” will often say it’s about how people in the past were just “a product of their time” and “didn’t know any different.” Those don’t mean the same thing, though, and their conflation (intentionally) hides the rot at the core of this cliché.
To understand why, let’s consider one way the cliché is frequently used by white people in the United States: in conversations about the history of enslavement, especially ones about “Founding Fathers” who enslaved people. It is right to say they were products of their time—products of a time that affirmed in law the right of people like them to own other people. It’s why they set up innovative new systems of government that still preserved their right to own people.
To shield them from criticism or judgment because the rightness of enslavement was a “standard” view is to erase the fact that no society, even a culturally- and religiously-homogeneous one, has a “standard” view of anything. There are always disagreements and factions. Moreover, there’s no situation in which everyone who holds one view doesn’t at least have a sense of opposing views.
And this is why bolstering this argument with the idea that some people just didn’t know is so wrong. It wasn’t about knowing or not knowing, in this case. It was about believing and choosing. There were a lot of people who believed that enslavement was wrong. Enslaved people believed it was wrong. Free black people believed it was wrong. Even some white people believed it was wrong. People in all three of those groups allowed their beliefs to guide the choices they made, including small and large public and private resistance where and when they could, sometimes at great risk to their lives.
On the other hand, many white Americans were aware of abolitionist sentiments but didn’t agree with them, and instead made choices based on their own belief that chattel slavery was a necessary evil—or even a positive good. What I suspect is more distressing to white Americans, however, what provokes the use of this cliché more often, is the idea that many white people in the past believed enslavement was wrong and chose to keep their mouths shut and participate anyway, even as secondary recipients of its “benefits.” In this sense, perhaps the “standard of the time” we’re talking about is moral cowardice, though I doubt that’s what people who use the phrase are thinking.
The history of enslavement in the United States makes clear that it’s never just an issue of knowing, but rather one of believing and then making different choices. Hard choices. Brave choices. The cliché of judging people by the standards of their time, by working to exempt people in the past from the critical eye of the present, simultaneously obscures other historical figures who we might appraise more positively, especially knowing the context in which they were making their choices.
Many who reach for this cliché seem to want it to function as a shield against judgment, not just for those in the past, but for themselves as well—a shield against being judged by people in the future. You can’t be judged because you weren’t different from anyone else. You just held the standard belief. You didn’t know any different.
But if you’re afraid of people in the future evaluating your choices, placing you in the broader context of your historical moment, and finding that you were not unaware, but rather not quite brave enough to make different choices, well, maybe you’ve just discovered one of the reasons we do history.
- You may also hear its inverse: “So-and-so was ahead of their time.”
- This is a whole other ball of wax, and a fascinating one, given how all in American society is on “justice” and punishment.
