We know what happened in the past, but we don’t really know why. We can’t actually put ourselves into the heads of people from other times; not even our own parents. The ideas, spirit, beliefs and assumptions of any earlier age are never fully captured by history, or family stories. The Germans have a word for this impenetrable complexity: “zeitgeist”. It refers to the whole of any particular culture or time. The cliché, “You had to be there”, is mostly true.
Like every generation before us anachronism confuses
our understanding. We judge the past through the lens of now.
A current example is the puffing indignation cast at our Founding Father’s toleration of slavery. Oh, the horror! What despicable people they must have been.
In 1776, slavery was a worldwide practice, it had been so since well beyond historical times. Previous generations didn’t think about it much, for the same reason fish don’t think about water; it’s was the everyday reality of the world they swam in. However, many of the Founding Fathers did, in fact, think about it. They wanted to abolish slavery in their bold new nation of America. They were outvoted by the pragmatists. Finally, 85 years later, the dreamers prevailed, at the cost of 620,000 American lives.
I wonder how many of today’s self-righteous scolds would be willing to lay down their lives for the sake of moral principle. What will future generations think of this generation. Likely, not much. Too many of them are reckless iconoclasts due to the false ideology they’ve swallowed from the leftist swill they have swam in their entire life. The little history they know is mostly wrong, or tortured into chimeras of current political correctness.
Curiously, these modern moralists don’t seem too concerned about modern slavery. Maybe they don’t know that there are now more slaves than have ever existed – nearly all of them in the Muslim Middle East, Southeast Asia, and North Africa. The same cultures that have always produced slaves are still in business.
Slavery, Women’s Rights, Imperialism, Environmentalism, etc. – these are all current constructs uninformed by actual historic perspective. The people enthused by these concerns are impatient with historical realities. But, but, but… they sputter.
I guess it’s more fun to be outraged than accurate - especially when you aren’t the one being blamed.
Anachronistic distortion is the result of historical ignorance coupled to undeserved confidence in the modern point-of-view. It may be worse now than ever, but it has been a problem through the ages.
Renaissance paintings of biblical scenes typically depicted Renaissance clothing and other stylings set against Renaissance backgrounds. The painters weren’t ignorant of historical reality. They were just more comfortable with their own time. It felt better. They may even have thought it looked better.
Movies do the same thing. Every movie about a previous era looks more like the period of the filming than it does the era it’s intended to portray. The speech of Victorian ladies in films seem to assume that the ladies of those times spoke no differently than 21st. century girls. And, apparently, they had the same snotty attitudes. Hollywood has a long record of dismissing historical verisimilitude.
Historical ignorance can be corrected. Indifference cannot.
It’s hard to get outside your own time. Very few even try. But there is a benefit to exploring times beyond your own. Your narrow world widens. You discover new ways of seeing, new considerations, new information – all of it very old – dust covered treasure waiting to be recovered.
Most of it can be found no further away than your local library.