A Double Standard in Judgments about the Past

When my mind wanders, as it often does, and I begin to imagine, say, the raids conducted by the Mongol Horde, the psychopathic methods of torture they devised, and the incalculable amount of raping and pillaging that must have gone on, unrecorded, across the Eurasian land mass since the domestication of the horse and the invention of metallurgy, I admit that sometimes I think to myself: Alright! Good show! I am impressed with all this cruelty, not indignant about it, and I suspect you are too. The standards I bring to my assessment of the killers who filled the mass grave at Srebrenica, a little over a decade ago, are completely different. I am still trying to figure out why this is so.  

There is a similar double standard that comes into play in my reading of the history of philosophy. Consider the claim that 'only love does not have to be. God loves without being'. Now it seems to me that if I came across this sort of thing in Gregory of Nyssa or in Nāgārjuna I would think to myself: There is much wisdom here. But when I see this claim in a book written in the 1990s (which is where I in fact saw it), my reaction is very different. What are the author's grounds for claiming such a thing, I want to know. How can he justify this claim?  

Now in both cases it cannot just be that we hold more recent figures to different standards (of morality or of rationality) than past figures as a result of the availability in our age of rules of acting or thinking that were not available then. After all, I spend much of my time insisting on the relative superficiality of the innovations that we think of as distinctly modern. The historical record shows that there were a lot of people being nice to one another long before Kant or Peter Singer or the UN Declaration of Human Rights; and there were a lot of people saying things that were rational and well-founded, by our standards, long before Francis Bacon or A. J. Ayer attempted to spell out for us exactly what such things are like. There is indeed nothing more empirically grounded and practically rational than the 'concrete sciences', like botanical taxonomy, characteristic of la pensée sauvage.  

Given that the distant past featured people who were good and rational in our sense, why not take them as the standard-bearers for their own era, rather than employing different standards for different eras? I think the answer is in part that, with respect to the present, expediency requires something like an ethical suspension of the anthropological: the consequences of actions or beliefs in the distant past are already known. Nothing hangs on my condemnation of Genghis Khan, and so I am freed up to simply observe him and contemplate him as a larger-than-life manifestation of a certain sort of human potential. To disapprove of Genghis Khan would be scarcely different from disapproving of humanity itself (even as, curiously, failing to disapprove of Adolf Hitler is also to disapprove of humanity), for Genghis provides us a useful and vivid demonstration of the vast range of what it is human beings are capable of doing. He is a singular illustration of Clyde Kluckhohn's intriguing but untestable thesis: "During the long course of human history individual men and women have probably thought, felt and done almost everything that was within the range permitted by anatomy, physiology, and the limits of external nature."   

I am freed up by Genghis's historical distance to let him feed my imagination. And it's my imagination, too, that is fed by Gregory of Nyssa: what I want from him is to gain a sense of the range of possible thoughts human beings can have. If I'm looking for the truth here, it's a different order of truth than anything that can be found in the content of his claims. It's a truth about the range of possible beliefs, rather than a particular true belief, that I'm after.  

In the present age by contrast I expect everyone to be straight and narrow, to tell it like it in fact is and to be moderate and sober in their actions. I don't want any new demonstrations of the extremes of human potential or of the range of exotic beliefs people collectively come up with in order to get through their lives. If my wishes are respected, people will be nice and reasonable, rather than mean and unreasonable, with one another, and surely that is good. An unfortunate corollary of this however is that it transforms the past into a sort of age of heroes, and shows our very decency to be a symptom of decline. The present age starts to look like what Goethe feared would be the ultimate result of Enlightenment: a worldwide hospital, where 'everyone is everyone else's humane nurse'.  

I don't want to decide here as between a torture chamber and a hospital, but I do want simply to pause to note the correlation, and possible connection, between the two sorts of double standard. The expectation that our fellow human beings tell it like it is arises together in history with the expectation that they be nice to one another. The chronological upper limit of the exemption that I, and I expect others, allow for saying delirious things about God and angels and spirits and the prophetic power of dreams is roughly the same as the one for raping and pillaging and bludgeoning. If I had to be precise, I would say the boundary lies somewhere around the end of the 15th century (with a good deal of regional variation, and with the non-European world only coming to fall on this side of the historical boundary at the same rate as it is assimilated into the Euro-American global system), and that it is Christopher Columbus who stands as a sort of pioneer of the modern way of being wrong.  

Of course the pillaging and unreason go on as before, not just in spite of the Euro-American global system, but just as often in support of it. Modernity then is not really that period when people begin to think and to act differently--i.e., rationally and morally-- but only that period when disapproval of the default way of human thinking and acting --irrationally and brutally-- begins to make sense.   

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Comments

[Nick Smyth]

As you might know, Bernard Williams argued that there are "real" and "notional" conflicts in this arena. He thought that it was appropriate to pass judgment on others when their way of life was a genuine option for us. If we could live their lives, then their practises genuinely conflicted with ours: "real" conflict.

Perhaps this has something to do with what you are saying. There is something eminently reasonable in only judging someone when you are (in principle) able to appreciate the context in which their actions or thoughts are embedded. This would explain why the 15th century matters to you: it is (roughly) when societies began to look at all like ours. This way of thinking allows us to respect our distance from such people without embracing a full-blown relativism about truth (historical figures may be right or wrong, but there is no way for any of us to say for sure).

However, while this kind of observation soothes our theoretical instincts, it exposes a fault-line in our moral thinking, one you admirably summarize in the Hitler/Khan comparison. The idea that Hitler might one day be viewed as Khan is now viewed... this offends against the pretension to timeless universality inherent in our moral sense, a pretension that is not inherent in our theoretical sense. We commonly accept the idea that science will be both better and radically different in 500 years, but the idea that Hitler might then be seen as just an over-adventurous military leader does not sit well.

Nietzsche lurks here.

[D.P. O'Connell]

Why wouldn't you explain M.'s way of speaking (whereby he appropriates or adapts the style of the 5th-c. pseudo-Dionysius), with the same sort of sociological analysis of French professors and their closed-community linguistic games that you used in your account of Derrida (when speaking about Taylor's 'altarity') a few weeks ago?

Granted this doesn't resolve the larger issue you raise here, but it seems to me a workable (if not easy) solution to place M.'s statement in this context. It is in some sense repeating what the pseudo-Dionysius wrote, but it is situated in a new context of debates involving Derrida's use of Heidegger and other debates with other French philosophers. It also has, one can suppose, a theological context in the narrower world of European Catholicism.

To the larger issue (with regard to the expectation that others 'tell it like it is'): isn't this a sign of the low esteem in which the faculty of imagination is currently held? There's more to be said about this, but that's just a tentative suggestion.

As for Hitler/Ghengis Kahn - we condemn the Shoah especially (it seems to me) because there are still Neonazis in the world who organize into political parties (like the NDP in Germany), and have actually won support in certain areas. And even political 'moderates' such as Sarko in France are deporting the Roma people as I write this. There are no adherents of Ghengis Kahn still among us, as far as I know. If there were no Neonazis would we condemn the Shoah? I suppose so. But it seems especially important in the present political context.

[Picador]

"the idea that Hitler might then be seen as just an over-adventurous military leader does not sit well."

Look at portrayals of Napoleon over the course of the 20th century if you want to see a recent example of how this happens gradually. In fact, Napoleon strikes me as the perfect liminal figure for exploring the boundaries of modernity w.r.t. military atrocities.

D.P. O'Connell:

"There are no adherents of Ghengis Kahn still among us, as far as I know. If there were no Neonazis would we condemn the Shoah? I suppose so."

This seems an incomplete and unsatisfactory explanation. It may also be a bit off factually -- which is to say, while there are probably no actual adherents of a Genghis personality cult seizing political power anywhere in the world, I suspect that the ethnic conflicts spearheaded by Genghis in his day continue to play out in their own ways in eastern Europe, central Asia, and east Asia. This strikes me as comparable to, e.g. the ongoing anti-Gypsy sentiments of the French political class.

[Nick D]

Justin: reading this reminded me of Carlo Ginzburg's "Killing a Chinese Mandarin: the moral implications of distance." Critical Inquiry 21 (1994): 46-60. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343886
It is reprinted in several other places including his Wooden Eyes.

[D.P. O'Connell]

@Picador: Some interesting points you make. I'm not maintaining that the presence of Neonazis in Europe and of practices which were often seen in the early days of the Third Reich (deportation of minorities) are sufficient reasons for a vociferous condemnation of the Shoah.
But it does strike me that they do color our (or, more personally, my) statements in the matter, or the urgency with which I feel the need to make them, and to condemn those who would lie about the Shoah, and to oppose, insofar as I can, parties like the NDP in Germany, and the extra-parliamentary presence and activities of the white supremacist movement in America.
But no, you're right: it doesn't sufficiently address the problem Justin has raised.

[ilya]

I find a similar thing happening in judgments about music. I cannot let current music get away with things that I am perfectly willing to forgive or even admire in music from twenty years ago.

[Cell Phone Spy]

Very informative blog and interesting post. I appreciate your thoughtful writes. Thanks you.