{"id":17117,"date":"2019-06-08T01:17:27","date_gmt":"2019-06-08T08:17:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/?p=17117"},"modified":"2024-06-08T10:14:11","modified_gmt":"2024-06-08T17:14:11","slug":"of-his-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2019\/06\/08\/of-his-time\/","title":{"rendered":"Of his time"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p>When I criticize someone in the past for having done something that I consider bad by my own modern standards, I often get pushback from friends who say things like: \u201cHe was just a man of his time. [Alternative phrasing: a product of his time.] You can\u2019t\/shouldn\u2019t judge him by modern standards!\u201d (I\u2019m using <i>he<\/i> here because usually the person who I\u2019m criticizing in such contexts was male.)<\/p>\r\n<p>So here are some responses to that argument.<\/p>\r\n<ul>\r\n  <li>I\u2019m not saying that the person\u2019s work is of no value. I\u2019m saying that by my standards, something the person did or something about some of their work has some problematic aspects. We can simultaneously recognize that the person\u2019s beliefs were common at the time, and recognize that by our own standards, those beliefs were wrong.<\/li>\r\n  <li>In most cases, lots of people who lived in that same time period didn\u2019t behave as badly as the person I\u2019m criticizing. Therefore, it was possible to do better, even in that time period. Therefore, it seems reasonable to me to criticize the person.<\/li>\r\n  <li>Slaveholders were people of their time. Should we say that it\u2019s therefore okay that they owned slaves? Is it inappropriate for us to criticize them? By the standards of their society, what they were doing was fine; but that doesn\u2019t mean that I\u2019m required to approve of it.<\/li>\r\n  <li>Corollary to those last two points above: At any given time, different people have different standards. Why should we judge the person by the standards they agreed with, rather than the standards of other people of the same period? For example, why should we judge slaveholders by the standards of slaveholding society rather than the standards of the enslaved people? (This item added in 2020, inspired by comments that Mark made in comments on this post.)<\/li>\r\n  <li>Okay, I might as well go full Godwin\u2019s Law: Hitler was a man of his time. Are we required to avoid criticizing him? (Clarification borrowed from my comment on this post: The person who Hitler ended up being was shaped in part by his experience and the culture around him. His behavior wasn\u2019t \u201ctypical,\u201d but his attitudes were shared by a lot of people.)<\/li>\r\n  <li>Trump is also a man of his time. Does that mean we should excuse him, because by his own standards and the standards of his supporters, his behavior isn\u2019t bad?<\/li>\r\n  <li>Often, part of the \u201cof his time\u201d argument notes that in the future, people may criticize me, and I wouldn\u2019t want them to do that, would I? Well, I certainly agree that people in the future may well judge our actions and beliefs by their own standards, and some of what I believe may well be repugnant to some people in the future. In that case, I expect that they will criticize me. I might disagree with some of their criticism, or I might realize that I\u2019ve made mistakes too. Either way, I don\u2019t think it will be inherently morally wrong of them to judge me by their standards.<\/li>\r\n  <li>Meta-argument: If none of the above points are convincing to you, then note that I too am a man of my time. So by the \u201cyou can\u2019t judge a man of his time by your own standards\u201d argument, <em>you<\/em> can\u2019t judge <em>me<\/em> by your standards; you have to judge me by my standards, and my standards say that it\u2019s okay to criticize past people. Therefore, you shouldn\u2019t criticize me, and you should excuse my willingness to criticize people of the past. :)<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<p>See also <a href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/ktempestbradford\/posts\/10208310334975207\">Tempest\u2019s post from 2015 about Lovecraft<\/a>, which makes some of the same points.<\/p>\r\n<hr width=\"25%\" \/>\r\n<p>(I wrote most of this post in early 2018, but didn\u2019t finish and post it until mid-2019.)<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[119,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17117","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-favorite-entries","category-improving-society"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17117","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17117"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17117\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18726,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17117\/revisions\/18726"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17117"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17117"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}