eli5: what do people mean when they say we should not judge historical figures by modern standards?
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When we talk about a historical figure, especially one who lived hundreds of years ago, being “good” or “bad,” we need to keep in mind that they lived in a society that may have had very different conceptions of what right and wrong were.
Take, for example, Abraham Lincoln. He felt that racial equality and harmony between white and black people could never be achieved, and he felt that the best solution should probably be to send the freed slaves back to Africa. Nowadays, “Black people can never be real Americans, they should go back to where they came from” is unequivocally seen as a racist opinion. However, Lincoln was also very progressive for his time—he was a staunch abolitionist, despaired at the horrible conditions black slaves lived in, and was noted for treating black people far more respectfully than many of his peers. By the standards of his time, he was incredibly forward-thinking.
It would be easy to write about Lincoln’s racial beliefs and paint him as a white supremacist who was little better than the Confederates he fought. This is what’s often referred to as “presentism”—the idea that people back then behaved and believed the same we do today. And that is a fundamentally inaccurate reading of history. Should we base our actions today based on what we speculate future moral standards may be 400 years from now? If we don’t, why should we expect that of the people of the past?
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