Brad Bowers
I'll Lock Up
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Marc,Marc Chevalier said:Well, how about judging the actions of, say, certain bigoted 1930s Christians by the values of the New Testament? Certainly those values were around in the '30s.
For better or worse, your professor was a moral relativist.
As a trained historian and college instructor, I have to offer up a correction to what I perceive to be a misconception.
The professor may or may not be a relativist, but that's not the point he was trying to get across. He was talking to his students about avoiding "Presentism," which is a term historians use to describe the act of judging the past through the prism of our modern values. Presentism is not part of the methodology that historians use. As a human being, it's fine to say that those people were racist, but historians are social scientists, and try to adhere, as much as possible, to scientific practices.
In the study of history, historian judge others in the past within the context of the time and society in which they lived. It does no good to judge others in the past within the context of today, because that's like equating apples and oranges.
For instance, historians aren't saying that the Eugenics movement of the '20s and '30s was okay because those folks in the past were okay with it. It's about understanding the context in which these people lived that enabled these ideas to become as prevalent as they did.
Yes, I've been one to say I hate the Sixties, but that's not the historian in me speaking, it's the conservative.
Brad