I’ve previously mentioned on this blog that I’ve done a couple interviews with Nick Barksdale for his YouTube channel “The Study of Antiquity and the Middle Ages.” Today, Nick released a video of an interview with me in which we discuss the question of whether it is fair to judge historical figures by so-called “contemporary standards.” My argument in this interview is loosely based on an argument I made in an article I wrote back in November 2019 titled “Should We Judge Historical Figures by Contemporary Standards.” Here is the video itself:
The article about Persephone that I mention in the interview is one that I was working on about a month ago in response to Overly Sarcastic Productions’ video on the subject. I haven’t finished it and I’ve set it aside for the moment in order to work on other things.
This was wonderful! Whenever I see you on video, the enthusiasm and passion you have for the field, which already shows in the pages of this blog, really leaps into my eyes and ears.
You’re such an eloquent speaker that I wish you made more videos!
The main reason why I don’t do videos on YouTube is because doing YouTube videos would require all the hard work of research and writing that it takes to do an article on a subject, plus the added difficulty of trying to record and edit the video. I’m more-or-less inept at working with technology in general and I know very little about video editing. The only reason why I’m able to do these interviews with Nick for “The Study of Antiquity and the Middle Ages” is because he does all the video-editing.
All this being said, Nick and I are planning to do more interview videos in the future.
Modern “standards” (wokeness) are not really standard but views held by a particular and rather limited population. Only because those views are loud and establishment-promoted, they look “standard”. We’ll see whether the forced ideology stands the test of time and reason.
So, are you saying that you think enslaving, conquering, oppressing, and committing genocide against other people are morally acceptable behaviors, and that everyone but a small minority of people agrees with you? These are literally the things that I talk about in the video. I know that there are a lot of people today who still believe that slavery, conquest, and so forth are perfectly justifiable, but I do think that at least a significant minority (as in, at least something like 45%) of people would agree that these things are generally wrong.
No. I put it carelessly so I understand the misunderstanding. What I’m saying is that wokeness (self-proclaimed moralistic hysteria) is not a standard but views held and imposed upon society by a small but loud and well-positioned crowd. What that crowd is doing is that using the universal values to reach certain political conclusions. Those conclusions are not “standards”, is my point.
The idea that genocide and oppression are immoral are not new nor “modern”. Even those finding them “necessary” would generally agree that they’re “unfortunate”.
With regards to slavery (in the US particularly), the point of contention would be the FACTS about the phenomenon. Few people know that it was African kings and merchants who sold African men and women to Arabs and who in turn brought them to the US and sold them further. Instead, they think that Americans shipped to Africa and just randomly picked Africans and turned them into slaves. Furthermore, people don’t consider the possibility that the Africans in question, who were slaves already and could have served elsewhere, were finding themselves in a new country being established by religious people who themselves had seen persecution. Even though obviously it wasn’t an ideal situation to be in as slaves, the indications are that it wasn’t all “oppression” (rape and whip, as popularly known) since the slaves were good for the economy and had to be maintained accordingly.
I wonder how many “woke” people think about the joy and hope in the black father and mother in their imagining a future for their children in America, which, despite all, would be much better than slavery (or life, for that matter) in Africa or elsewhere, especially after the abolition.
These nuances disappear in “woke” discourse that’s ideological and forced.
You seem to be sorely mistaken about the facts of the Transatlantic slave trade. First of all, your claim that enslaved people were brought across the Atlantic to the Americas by “Arabs” is just plain wrong. There were Arabs involved in the slave trade, but they were mostly involved in the Trans-Saharan slave trade, rather than the Transatlantic slave trade. The vast majority of the slave merchants who shipped enslaved Africans across the Atlantic to the Americas were white people of European descent.
Furthermore, while it is true that white slave traders bought most of the enslaved people they shipped across the Atlantic from native slave traders in West Africa, this does not in any way exonerate them of their crimes. I wrote a whole answer on Quora just a few weeks ago about how the effort to defend white slave traders by pinning all the blame on the African slave catchers and traders who sold enslaved people to them is riddled with holes. Here is what I say in my answer:
Now, moving on to your next argument, it is true that the treatment of enslaved people in the Americas varied significantly depending on who their master was, what kind of work they were doing, and where they were enslaved. Some enslaved people were definitely better off than others. Nonetheless, as Kevin Richardson, a scholar with a PhD in history from the University of Texas at Austin who specializes in early modern African history, discusses in this answer he wrote on Quora about the treatment of enslaved people in the American South before the Civil War, American slavery was genuinely extremely brutal in the vast majority of cases. White plantation owners routinely whipped and tortured the people they enslaved, they routinely raped and sexually exploited enslaved women (to such an extent that, as Richardson doesn’t mention, female slaves were actually advertised for their physical attractiveness), and it was not unheard of for masters to kill the people they enslaved (although they generally tried to avoid killing them for obvious reasons, instead more often preferring to maim them within an inch of their lives).
Furthermore, the fact that some masters didn’t treat the people they enslaved quite as horribly as some other masters does not mitigate the fact that enslaving people in any form is inherently cruel and inhumane. Even if someone treats the people they enslave very nicely, by forcing them to work for them against their will, they are inherently mistreating them.
As for your argument that early white Americans were “religious” and that this somehow makes slavery less heinous, that argument doesn’t work either. For one thing, history has proven that religious people are just as capable of committing heinous crimes, atrocities, and injustices as irreligious people. For another thing, saying that early white Americans were “religious” is itself an oversimplification. It’s true that most early white Americans were religious, but they were certainly not all religious and the men who were most directly involved in the founding of the United States and the drafting of the United States Constitution were very explicit about the fact that they did not intend for the United States to be a Christian nation, but rather a nation with a secular government, in which people would possess complete religious freedom.
Thank You
Was looking for information to compare against others. And I liked they way you broke it down.
A very clear and succinct statement on that matter. Not that I’m a model or important in such matters, but your view is one I generally agree with — and so I object to what you object to: what do you mean I can’t find fault with folks in the past, or decry at their blindness and wrongheadedness with important things! And I may furthermore point out, if some of those folks, Aristotle and Jefferson were often considered then (and to some degree, still are now) as intelligent, thoughtful, skilled and knowledgeable people, and yet still they could be clearly wrong on something like slavery, what is it our cohort or even ourselves, be possibly blind/ill-framed or just wrong about?
Perhaps in the service of clear expression and admirable succinctness, you don’t address in that short video what I am most vexed and puzzled about myself in these matters, in that I am an old person who lives and works in the arts in my small way. There is I believe a widely held position that the arts are not very important, and that there is a overplus of art, more than anyone needs. I’ll even accept the premise of such an oversupply in general terms, but not to the degree or one-size-fits-all “this alone is enough art for all anyone needs” would hold for. What I can’t figure out is where to draw the line on bad actions in life, adherence to harmful beliefs, and propagation of bad ideas in their mix of expressions by an artist on my reading for enjoyment and then propagation to my small public of their artistic work. I’ll give a single example: Walt Whitman, who occasionally moves me a reader and some of whose work I’ve presented as admirable or as a potentially useful approach to be considered. Yet years ago, near the start of my Project I presented a bloodthirsty paean of Whitman’s to revolutionary violence and compared it to terrorism — so I’m fully comfortable with criticism of him. Recently some racist ideas Whitman wrote about which were not widely known have been brought forward with the idea that celebration of Whitman should cease. The arguments I read regarding this often included the assertion or assumption that there’s enough poetry by non-racists to be more than enough for anyone.
Other examples of this sort with artists involving bad acts or allegiance to oppressions are legion. I hope I’m being fair to this belief, because it sincerely gives me pause: that some evils are so monstrous, that we need to deny ourselves totally any pleasure or worth we receive from work by those artists, and that any social good that may have come from such work or artists before we realized this is already sufficient and no argument for continued exposure. Yes, I’m aware that no one has “cancelled” Whitman effectively, that he’s still commonly taught, even read. You and I both know that’s a false to very exaggerated narrative. That’s not my current concern. My concern is what I should do, in my small project and in my small life.
Frank, you think Aristotle was wrong only because you’re a product of your time as he was of his. Another person of another era will come along and tell his audience how wrong YOU are, and so on. It’s seldomly the person talking but the times through him. So, get off that high horse!