Not Everyone Who Lived the Day before Yesterday Was ‘Evil’

By Wifred Reilly

Friday, August 04, 2023

 

People alive today can’t simply pretend that everyone who lived before us was evil.

 

This point, and the ancient academic debate about how to avoid “presentism” when engaging the past, attracted some unexpected mainstream attention last week. It came to light that down in Florida (i.e., political DeSantisLand), a line in the African-American-history teaching standards noted that some enslaved Africans learned useful skills during their time in American bondage. Verbatim, the standards state: “Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”

 

Objectively speaking, this point is completely noncontroversial. Much of coastal west Africa — from whence were shipped the slaves — was far more sophisticated than most Americans probably think. Dahomey, Ashanti, and Benin, among others, were civilized if often brutal nation-states. The United States of the 1800s, however, was more developed still and — at some level — it is just clearly true that many captured Africans learned skills such as cowboying, New World farming, and modern blacksmithing and boatbuilding that they simply would not have in the motherland.

 

As Michael Johnson and James Roark explain in their book Black Masters, many slaves plied these trades on weekends or across long evenings to save the money with which they eventually bought their freedom. In one of the dark ironies that make the serious study of history so intriguing, perhaps the very first slave master in America, Anthony Johnson, was a black man from Angola. After learning a series of mercantile and agricultural skills during his tenure as a bond servant (not quite a slave) in Virginia, he wrapped up that indenture and promptly started buying other humans and not letting them go.

 

The real issue with teaching basically uncontested facts of this kind — that black slaves were sold almost entirely by brutal same-race peers and that they did pick up some things from equally abusive but more technologically advanced whites — is that doing so is seen as rude. Virtually all modern Americans view slavery as an evil, and an obvious moral question is: “Why teach anything about such an evil other than the fact that it was evil, or ever qualify the evil of those who practiced it?” Would we today, one might ask, discuss “the upside of 9/11 for NATO” or write about how our terrorist attackers personally felt on that fateful morning?

 

The sincere force of the question is obvious, but — leaving aside the fact that any good military-science journal would do exactly that concerning 9/11 — there is a simple historical response to it. Morals change across eras, and countless things that happened in the past were evil according to conventional moral standards today. Some version of the right of conquest existed in “international law” until after World War II, and aggressive war was the recognized norm across human races and nations until roughly 1949.

 

With a few scattered exceptions such as Christian and Buddhist saints, virtually any male human hero from any era much before that — e.g., Caesar, Iskander, Shaka, Mansa Musa, Charlemagne, Genghis, Sun Tzu, Hiawatha, Moctezuma, Cortés, Achilles, and Hector — would have been among other things a brutal war-leader. Slavery was a profitable sideline to the primary summertime occupation of butchery: Everyone just mentioned would have taken the Peculiar Institution wholly for granted, as did even famous ethicists such as Aristotle (who argued for the existence of “natural slaves”). And, it should be noted, the Western-run Atlantic slave trade was only one of many centuries-long historical slave trades — including the Arab slave trade in Africans and Slavs, the “Barbary” slave trade in whites sold to Muslim and black masters, and the Roman slave trade made vivid in Ridley Scott’s Gladiator.

 

The huge majority of Americans today think of conquests and predatory wars, like Caesar’s or Shaka’s, as generally bad — or at the very least politely pretend to for the cameras. But they were an absolute human norm from the first Olduvai Gorge flint-throwing fight against Australopithecus boisei until roughly 1950, and each conflict of this kind has to be described in detail rather than as “very bad” in order for us to speak coherently about history. A textbook description of (say) the Crusades cannot just read “The bad white people fought the bad brown and black people for bad reasons.” How, we have to ask, did the Crusades affect the world (for example, beginning the early modern spice trade) for ill . . . and for good? The same holds true for any analysis of the conquest of the New World, the Vikings, the heyday of the sea pirates — and the era of slavery.

 

Human beings like to think of morality as being set and ultimate, and this may well be true inside the mind of God. But, far south of that, normative rules are obviously very much socially constructed. “Good,” church-going Aztec taxpayers ate people, and their modern American equivalents don’t. When we moderns discuss once-universal practices that we no longer engage in — clan feuds and border raids, say — scholars and others need to describe the world in which these occurred, why they began, and how they largely ended, and sometimes (yes) the arguments of their defenders and any unintentional positive side effects they may have had.

 

Two final points here strike me as worth making. First, as to how serious people should and do present them, I find that there is a legitimate difference between truly aberrational events such as the Holocaust or Shaka Zulu’s Mfecane genocide in the 19th century and (say) conquests or colonialist exploits. The first were atrocities by the legal and ethical standards of their time, while the latter, though disturbing to us today, were rule-regulated human normals during earlier and harder eras.

 

In the case of Jews taken from a ghetto in Poland and forced into a German extermination camp, there is no doubt at all what the answer would be to the most basic question of (good vs. evil) moral analysis: Did this make the world, or their world, better or worse? The answer is clearly “worse.” However, it can fairly be asked whether vaishya-class Indian craftsmen were generally better off under the rule of British colonizers than under Moghul conquerors — or even whether enslaved black battle captives were more abused by American “masters” (not infrequently black ones) than by the Ashanti. It may, and perhaps should, make us feel awkward to ask such things — but they are valid questions for scholarly inquiry.

 

Second, it would be wise for those alive today not to be too arrogant and smirky about the denizens of the past. Contra the good Dr. Fukuyama, history never ended: We Western democratic late capitalists will be judged in turn by snarky descendants. And it does not take a Nostradamus to predict that those fine folks will view many aspects of modern society — perhaps factory farming, commercialized abortion, our casual approach to sun-bomb weapons that could destroy the planet many times over, the current obsession with “gender” surgeries for children, or the plain fact that roughly 10 percent of our internet consists of hard-core pornography — with the same jaundiced eye we now turn toward faded daguerreotypes of chain gangs and Uncle Serpentine’s Down Home Medicine Show.

 

But, to say the unbelievably obvious, the fact that imperfections exist in this society today — your iPhone was made by slaves — does not mean that we are all evil. The things that I just outlined arose for understandable reasons (far fewer humans starve, in our world of abundant meat and grains), are in fact critiqued quite often by contemporary citizens of goodwill, and are frankly a lot harder to get rid of than they will be in a hypothetical future world of lab-grown meat and fusion power. Let us hope that the scholars of the future recognize all of this and are a bit kinder to Mr. Reagan and Mr. Obama than many of their peers today are to Honest Abe Lincoln.

 

We can perhaps set them an example, by analyzing honestly and in context when we look at the past.