Against Presentism
By Michael Jaffrey
In this article I would like to take a brief look at three examples of “presentism” at UC from my own experience and examine some of the failings and contradictions of this mindset.
A few years ago, when I was in the second year of my Bachelor of Writing degree, I decided it would be a fine idea to enrol in a unit of children’s literature. I have many fond childhood memories of being read Winnie the Pooh by my grandmother and I still return to the works of A. A. Milne to marvel afresh at the mastery and simplicity of his prose. So, I enrolled in Children’s Literate 0 – 18 with a delicious sense of anticipation at the garden of delights that awaited me.
It was a broad ranging course covering the development of children’s literature from the Victorian “golden age” up to the present day. It was an interesting journey which looked at changes in the literary and intellectual fashions of children’s books over that time, focusing particularly on the modern period.
However, there were some startling and even disturbing elements of the course which arose in tutorial discussions.
Early in the semester, when we were studying the Victorian Age, our tutor put a slide on the overhead with a picture of a mother sitting on an ottoman lounge with two small children, one on either side of her. She was reading to them from a small book. Then our tutor asked the class, “What is wrong with this picture?” A forest of hands went up. “That’s right,” she said. “Gender stereotypes.”
She didn’t ask, “What do we see in this picture?”, or “What values are represented in this picture?” but “What is wrong with this picture”. This struck me as odd. I thought art should be studied first in its historical context before comparative studies were undertaken – or possibly concurrently.
Somewhat taken aback, I asked loudly, “According to who?” I think she, in her turn, was taken aback because she paused for a moment before responding, “Because I say.” She thought for a moment, then qualified this academic gem with another one, “You won’t find anyone else around here that thinks differently.
She appeared to be preaching to the converted because her appeal to “truth from authority” didn’t raise a murmur among the laity of second-year student teachers.
This was an eye opener to say the least. Was this how they did things “around here”? Was this the academic method I had come to university to learn? The presentation of unsupported theories as fact to effect social change? Is the academic method synonymous with indoctrination? I never thought so.
Before coming to university, I believed that we should study literature in its historical context – intellectual and moral – so that we had an external metric from which to view the values of our own time – and vice versa. To see where we came from and possibly where we were going too. There are other reasons to study literature, but this was one of them. That was my belief. Silly me.
The American Historical Association puts it like this,
“Consequently, history must serve…as our most vital evidence in the unavoidable quest to
figure out why our complex species behaves as it does in societal settings…it offers the only
extensive evidential base for the contemplation and analysis of how societies function, and
people need to have some sense of how societies function simply to run their own lives. (1)
Judging another time through the lens of present values is called “presentism”, which the President of the American Historical Association Lynne Hunt describes thusly,
Presentism, at its worst, encourages a kind of moral complacency and self-congratulation.
Interpreting the past in terms of present concerns usually leads us to find ourselves morally
superior; the Greeks had slavery, even David Hume was a racist, and European women
endorsed imperial ventures. Interpreting the past in terms of present concerns usually
leads us to find ourselves morally superior.” (2)
There is a word from the ancient Greek that describes this mindset – hubris.
I am not saying here that this kind of blatant authoritarianism is the norm at UC or that all the teaching staff aren’t overworked, underpaid, and don’t care deeply about the students. None of that. What I am saying is that presentism itself is a form of authoritarianism that is not uncommon at UC or many other Universities.
The second example of presentism occurred in a literature lecture looking at European folktale archetypes – the wicked stepmother, the handsome prince, the sighing lovelorn princess, etc. A similar question was asked, “Which of these should we get rid of?”
A third example came from a tutor who advised our class on “how to approach” the reading of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.
Another way (to get through the book) is to try to focus on the humour in the text in
your first reading. By humour I of course do not mean that you should try to find racism
funny but that ridiculousness of Robinson’s self-importance and exaggerated image of
himself can be incredibly humorous if read a certain way. The last chapter in particular is
an excellent source of this.
Each of these incidents is an example of judging the past by present values with no understanding of what past generations valued to behave the way they did. In each case, there is the smug, unspoken, and insidious assumption that we know better now and how could they have been so unenlightened. This is the mindset underlying the actions of protesters who pull down statues of historical figures for the crime of slavery while wearing runners made in Asian sweatshops whose protests are organised on laptops containing metals mined by children working for local African despots.
It is the mentality that ignores the fact that many great social reforms were achieved by thinkers and moralists working inside the system. It ignores that while Copernicus recanted his heliocentric beliefs in public, the truth about the solar system came out not long after, and that while some of the prominent anti-slavery figures in the United States were slave owners, slavery came to an end as a result of their efforts.
This kind of presentism replaces why with should – or shouldn’t. Things shouldn’t have been that way. The transatlantic save trade was bad, they were bad people, and these bad people shouldn’t have done it.
This thinking is facile. It gives a distorted picture because it draws attention away from the larger context; that slavery was almost universal in human history and that no civilization has a monopoly on its cruelty. It also draws attention away from the fact that an absence of slavery is a rarity in human history. The important question isn’t, how could they? But, why did they stop? What were the ideas and conditions which led to these brief periods of slavery’s cessation? There are two examples of the abolition or amelioration of slavery in the ancient world that I know of – there may be more. The first is the increasing liberality towards slaves in the later part of the Roman empire. The second is Cyrus the Great of Persia who freed the slaves of Babylon in 539 BC and established a basic charter of human rights.
Presentism is anti-intellectual and opposes enquiry and curiosity. There is an enormous body of fascinating literature on the underlying psychological significance of the folk tale archetypes – beginning with Freud and Jung – the ones that my lecturer wanted to “get rid of”. At a stroke the label of sexism – or any other “ism” – suffocates curiosity about this.
My ‘Obergruppentutor’ from the children’s literature unit did speak truth about one thing. The idea that gender stereotypes are harmful is certainly believed “around here”. Once you cross the boundary of the university, things become a little more ambiguous. The belief that women cannot occupy certain roles is dead – or on life support. But try walking into a mosque or a country pub and proclaiming that motherhood is a social construct created by the White Western Christian Patriarchy to oppress women and see how far you get.
Of course, the objection is made by some historians – correctly – that our view of the past is always coloured by the present. John Dewey wrote that, “all history … is, in an inescapable sense, the history not only of the present but of that which is contemporaneously judged to be important in the present,” and British historian E. H. Carr agreed; “we can view the past, and achieve our understanding of the past, only through the eyes of the present.”
But surely, we can do better than laughing at the “ridiculousness” of Robinson Crusoe’s self-importance or casting aside the fruit of folk wisdom because it doesn’t accord with academic fashion that came down in the last rain.
Are these isolated examples? There is a rising tide of voices in academia that say no. David Davenport a fellow at the Hoover Institution writes,
American college campuses are apparently natural hosts for a variety of intellectual viruses.
Now comes the latest: presentism, the idea that we should apply the modern world’s moral
sensibilities to judge people and practices of the past. And, if historical characters are found
wanting in the judgment of the present, the virus should eradicate their names from the
campus.
Presentism of this kind assumes everyone thinks like us, or if they don’t, they should, or they soon will if we have anything to say about it. And maybe they should. But we won’t know while we are living in an academic bubble where unexamined assumptions about “social justice” are presented as gospel.