Revisionist History Series: I've Been Writing About Presentism All This Time

 

I've written on multiple occasions about how so many people, at this site and in historical articles, have taken the position of judging the past for the impossible crime of being the past. At the time I thought I'd had a real insight, only to find out, like so many of my other great ideas, someone smarter than me had it first a long time ago.

The term is called 'presentism'. In historical analysis it’s a term for the introduction of present day ideas and perspectives in their work because they consider it a form of cultural bias and believe it creates a distorting understanding of the past. It was first cited in the historiographic sense in 1916 and may have been used in this meaning since the 1870s.

The historian David Hackett Fischer identified it as a fallacy known as Nunc pro Tunc, or now for them. In British history it was used in which 18^th and 19^th century British historians wrote history in such a way to use the past to validate their believes rather than an objective historical context. In this kind of approach, which emphasizes the relevance of history to the present things that don't seem relevant receive little attention.

There has been much debate among historians about the problematic question of history and moral judgments. Among historians the orthodox view (and the one that was prevalent among traditional ones) is that reading modern notions of morality into the past is committing the error of presentism. Slavery is given an example, letting that fact influence judgment about a group of individual would be presentist. Most of the books I've cited for my column, such as Robert W. Merry's Decade of Disunion took this objective view arguing the counterpoint between the secessionist such as Barnwell Rhett and the abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison. Kai Bird's The Outlier, which I recently reviewed, was essentially a presentist version of Carter's Presidency – and its worth remembering Bird's progressive credentials make it clear that this is the kind of history he would prefer to tell.

Critics argue that avoiding presentism on issues like slavery amounts to endorsement of the views of dominant groups, in this case, slaveholders, as opposed to those who opposed who held them at the time. They also argue that to avoid moral judgments is to practice moral relativism. The problem is while one can take that argument in philosophical terms, which is abstract, it has little to do with history which is about the past.  Fischer argued that while historians might not be able to avoid the fallacy completely, they should at least try to be aware of their biases and write history in such a way that they do not create a distorted version of the past. He might very well have been giving side-eye to Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Gore Vidal and other revisionists who only look at America and the world through presentist views.

 

This came up  in 2022 when James H. Sweet, who once served as President of the American Historical Association wrote an article observing a 'trend towards presentism in contemporary historical scholarship. One of the major points of contention was The 1619 Project which I've written about before. The result was predictable. One historian wrote an article about 'Two Cheers for Presentism.'  Another historian wrote that "while we can take disturbing issues of students and faculty on the left seeking to censor what can be taught or even spoken, the concerted attack from the right – in the form of state laws prohibiting the teaching of so-called critical race theory the 1619 Project (italics mine) gender and sexuality and other topics – are much more dangerous to the practice of history. Keisha Blain, an African-American historian, argued 'Black historians have long recognized the role of the present in shaping our narratives of the past. We have never had the luxury of writing about the past as though it were divorced from the present concerns."

In other words, when it comes to presentism those historians who use it refuse to be objective.

John Quiggin took this to an extreme: "When academic opponents of presentism say that current moral standards are being imposed on the past, what they mean is that racist views that are now deprecated were once dominant and vice versa. The real issue isn't to do with time, it's whether any moral standards at all apply to history. Rather than saying that (for example) Pol Pot was a man of his times and exempt from contemporary judgments, they should just say that's it's not their job to decide whether genocide is good or bad, just to report the facts.

Now the idea that Pol Pot, who was a 20^th century figure, could be viewed as 'a man of his times' is perhaps the most reduction view of history you could take. I don't know of any historian whose even put that into print, I seriously doubt the most Marxist of all historians would do so. (Or if you're Noam Chomsky, you'd say too much attention was paid to his actions compared to East Timor.) And to paraphrase an old friend on the idea of the difference between the right and the left, the left is defending a presentist version of history by saying "they feel it is too important to ignore."

There's no factual reason to give a presentist version of history.  All the arguments for it fall into the version of morality which is a hodgepodge of 'this is too important to be objective' and 'why don't you focus on what the right is doing?" The former argues that you can't do two things simultaneously; the latter argues is just another version of 'never push back against the left'

Sweet said the left's argument is: 'If we don't read the past through the prism of contemporary social justice issues – race, gender, sexuality, nationalism, capitalism, are we doing history matters?  If history is only those stories from the past that confirm current political positions, all manner of political hacks can claim historical expertise. Too many Americans have become accustomed to the idea of history as an evidentiary grab bag to articulate their political positions."

That is a truth that, I can personally verify, both sides are guilty of whether it is the writings of Victor Davis Hanson or Nikole Hannah-Jones. That one is doing it as part of the holding the past in high regard and the other it by holding it in  complete contempt doesn't make their revisionism contemptible.  And it's clear the defense of Keisha Blain argues that like everything else the past can only be afforded to be held objectively if you're a white man. (Which last I checked Zinn, Chomsky and Vidal are and they sure as hell were presentists.)

But even if I were to argue that the presentist approach is the correct one and that it should be applied to historian the question I ask is: why? I want to know what the end goal is. Say we teach every American student The 1619 Project, The People's History Of the United States and Lies My Teacher Taught Me. What does that do?  The presentist view of the past isn't any different from the view of today. It just does on a bigger scope. America is as racist, sexist and homophobic today as it was in 1619 and it'll never change.

So what is the student who reads these books supposed to take away from it except a loathing of your country? Don't give me that argument it's telling people not to trust those in authority, the left basically makes that argument for everything. Healthy skepticism and questioning your country's leaders are good things; arguing that all of them are basically corrupt and untrustworthy is the view of an extremist. The arguments for presentism's counterargument hasn't really changed: it's that the right is the bigger threat and all Americans need to be focused on them. That's another kind of moral relativism, you know, the exact same thing the presentists are saying we shouldn't have in our history.

What this is based on, of course, is the left's moral superiority, the certainty that if they had lived in 1776 they would have the values they would today. But time moves in one direction and most things that were acceptable a hundred years ago aren't.

The famous saying about history was once: "Those who don't learn from the past are doomed to repeat it." The presentist doesn't want to learn from the past; he was to judge it. The presentist is incapable of realizing the only reason they have the values of today is because we learn from our mistakes and we make improvements. Since the presentist has judge a dim view of people who aren't them in the present, they don't believe people can do that either.

I'll end with a statement from Eugene O'Neill in A Moon For The Misbegotten: "There is no present or future, only the past happening again and again, now." I'm fond of it now more than ever because when it comes to how so many on the left try to bring about their vision they never learn from their mistake and as a result they keep trying to have their past happen again with no improvements. Either from an objective perspective or the presentist one, their approach keeps failing in the present so they can't realize their progressive future. No wonder they keep trying to rewrite the past.