Please specify exactly what sentences from my posts proves I know feck all about what history is (and I do not mean just the facts) . The argument “based on your posts” does not hold up as somebody with a PhD should well know. And you just keep making it personal whilst you’re at it, cos I’m not falling for that trap.
I'm not sure what you feel is personal here, Rams. But fine, I'll repeat the points I've already made. I said this half of your post recent post is impossible:
"And trust me, I’m well aware of just how fluid and abstract history is, hence why I’m emphasizing to be careful not to judge history or historical figures from our current values and perceptions.'
Why is it impossible? Well for two reasons, firstly, we're products of our time and fundamentally incapable of putting aside our biases – biases which we should not put aside either. And secondly, because the 'values of their time' that you would judge historical figures by instead did not exist either and are, instead, a construct of previous generations of society's own biases. As well meaning as your statement sounds, all you're doing is reifying a constructed version of the past which didn't exist as equally as much as the version of the past that you're railing against.
What do I mean? Well let me give you an example. I think you're a good person, so I'm going to assume you are in this example, but it somewhat falls down if you aren't.
It is often said by the defenders of these monuments that it was ok that they owned slaves because it was deemed acceptable 'by the standards of their time'. But what do we really mean by that? Certainly, for those trafficked and sold in to slavery, slavery was not acceptable or ok, so what we really mean is that pre-dominantly white, western men thought it was ok (pre-dominantly used here so some clever clogs doesn't feel the need to point out that it wasn't exclusively white folk). Why did they think it was ok? Because they thought so little of black men and women that they willing to sell their lives in order to make a quick buck. The word sub-human's been used a lot on this page, but it's literally relevant here. When we say that it was acceptable 'by the standards of their time' what we mean, then, is that we're ignoring the voices of those slaves themselves, who we deem not worthy of having a voice and we're accepting the arguments of those that enslaved them, who knew – but didn't care – that they were holding human beings against their will.
And why do we know it's ok? Because the generations before us studied the slavers, they wrote histories and biographies of them, and they sought to absolve (often literally) their ancestors of their involvement with a trade that was, eventually abolished. They, too, did not care for the black voices trafficked in the trade, however, who were similarly treated as if their own opinions on whether or not it was 'acceptable' for them to be sold into slavery were irrelevant because white taste makers had deemed that it was. The past you're holding sacrosanct is a past that takes the opinion of 5 white people and 5 black people and believes the white people. Now I don't think you would do that in real life, and I strongly believe you'd reckon it very racist if someone did, but that's what the argument implicitly boils down to. If you were to do that you would not beholding on to an objective truth, but one version of a constructed past which is rooted in white supremacy and centres white voices over black.
Alternatively, we could approach the problem with what is clearly a modern bias and argue that black voices should be heard, we can even argue that the experience of slaves should loom larger in the history than the opinions of slavers, and we can construct a version of the past where we see the practice as throughly unacceptable and the people involved in it as reprehensible because we listen to the voices of the slaves as much as we can. That new construct's not a fiction, it's not mendacious or duplicitous, nor is it an erasure of the construct that had come before it, but it's a reflection of the values of our society just as assuredly as the previous constructs it challenges are a reflection of the values of that society.
I know 'let's not judge people by modern standards' sounds sensible, and I can see why it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking it, but it fails to realise that history has
always been judged by modern standards and that it is literally impossible to do anything but that; every decision we both do and don't make is applying modern standards to it. It doesn't mean you're seeking to alter the past, but that our interpretations of the events and the actors within it, even the ideals and ideas we think that society's of the past held, simply change according to what we're looking for.
None of this is to dig you out personally and as I said to 2cents in his post previous generations of historians failed to realise this point too, the whole formal academic discipline of history is built on the shoulders of victorian empiricists who failed to realise they were constructing their 'objective' versions of the past with the cultural values and assumptions of their time, but it is nonetheless true and makes appeals to 'protecting history' somewhat silly in this entire debate.
