Within pretty broad limits[1], I’m an advocate of historical ‘presentism’, that is, assessing past events and actions in the same way as those in the present, and considering history in relation to our present concerns. In particular, that implies viewing enslavers, racists and warmongers in the same light, whether they are active today or died hundreds of years ago.
Protesters pulling down a statue of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol, England, during a demonstration organized to show solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement on June 7, 2020.
William Want/Twitter/AFP
A common objection to this position runs along the lines:
Suppose that at some point in the future, the vast majority of people are vegans. They will judge you in the same way as you judge past enslavers, racists and warmongers. In anticipation of this, you should suspend judgement on people in the past.
I don’t buy this. There are plenty of vegans around today and I have heard and rejected their arguments. While I condemn cruel farming practices, and try to avoid buying food produced with such practices, I don’t accept that there is anything inherently wrong with killing animals for food. Animals raised for food live longer and, with humane farming practices, happier, lives than their wild counterparts [2]. They aren’t aware of their own mortality, and have no life projects that are foreclosed when they die.
Vegans reject these arguments and judge me and others harshly for making them. Perhaps they are right. And they might, in the future, convince a majority of people. But if so, members of the future vegan majority would be just as entitled to condemn my views as are vegans alive today, and to view me in the same light as they would the remaining minority of non-vegans. The fact that I would by then be a “person of my own time” is neither here nor there.
I’ll qualify this a bit. No one can think deeply about everything so, most of the time, most of us go along with whatever people around us think. So, it’s unfair to pass judgement on ordinary Confederate (or Nazi) soldiers for fighting for a cause everyone around them said was right.
But that doesn’t excuse Calhoun, or Jefferson, or Locke, any more than it excuses Hitler. These are people who had been made aware of the evil they were promoting and profiting from, and promoted it anyway. And, if the ethical case for veganism is correct, then I am wrong, regardless of the fact that, at present, most people agree with me.
fn1. As examples of those limits, I don’t want to criticise people who failed to support equal marriage at a time when hardly anyone thought about it. And going back before the modern era (say pre-1600) the difference in world views is so great that it’s hard to make any kind of judgement on most issues.
fn2. Not to mention, happier than the lives of most people.
More discussion at Substack. Based on that, I expect most of the comments here to be about the merits or otherwise of veganism, and only a few to address presentism. This reinforces the point that veganism is not an example on which anti-presentists can lean to support their case. Feel free to provide better examples.
John Quiggin 
John
I think animals (cattle horses pigs etc) are aware of their own mortality. Go to an abattoir and judge for yourself.
David
…. and quite apart from animal welfare concerns a vegetarian diet is a good strategy to reduce your carbon footprint.
By referring to a pre-1600 cutoff and contemporary western vegan disputation the argument presented seems limited to a contemporary white western (man?) (supremacist/chauvinist??) frame applied universally and holding from back to around 1600 and forward to an unspecified (unlimited?) time into the future (1).
If it’s hard to make any kind of critical presentism judgement of world views held pre-1600 the same shall likely hold for future views of the past, ie future presentism judgements made of views held now. Maybe viewing 700 year periods backwards and forwards from a given present can hold (as, say, for significant historic jumps in Abrahamic religious developments and world views of the afflicted? (1)), but as well as time there is space to consider. Over time peoples are seen separated by long term differences in geographic and head space. Different peoples of the same period in different places evidently always have held and likely shall hold different world views due to different civilizational, historical, cultural, psychosocial, and etc provenance.
Presentism applied beyond anything close to a present time and jet age geographic space is highly suspect due to framing, whatever the frame. Which frame is correct? Can that be determined by unequivocal fact, free of subjective framing? Or is it only a matter of various divergent lumps of heritage and opinion? Is presentism able to argue one true view – one truth – applicable across periods much less even than 700 years and across the spatial divides? (1)
If the past is another country where they validly do things differently, so similarly another country can be validly in a present. We can’t play ethical value winners and losers with the past beyond some certain period. We ought play win-win in the present for a future.
(1) Observing big religion, spread over comparatively deep time and geographic/head space as it is, may be instructive with respect to presentism and ethical values.
For example, in the long past Abrahamic descended scriptures changed from time to time with contemporary values, or to create new contemporary values. Adherents, largely ignorant of any changes, were caused to think the scriptures were universally applicable in time and space, and some that lasted through it all are still held to be so.
In later times the troglodyte world religions allow themselves to squib on this by convoluted reinterpretation or by crafty change in emphasis to accord with changing values across time and space, but without ever changing scripture and any contemporary or future value threats therein. Latterly the different stripes have mostly dropped their internal winner take all strategy. They now increasingly adopt an insiders to win-win strategy and gang up in their losing winner take all contest with the outsider mortal threat.
Svante
The framing here is that we should approach the past like the present with Dumbledore’s moral sorting hat that divides actions and actors into good, bad, or indifferent. That’s not right, as we cannot affect the past whatever we do or think. Practical morality is about the future, which we can change. In a sense the present is an infinitely thin dividing line, and all perception lies in the past, but we reasonably expect that most of our contemporaries will still be around tomorrow, so that practical action has to be based on judgements about a loose present.
I suggest that the moral challenge of the past is less about judgement and more about empathy and reflective equilibrium. JQ puts 1600 AD as a limit to retrospective judgement. But think about the founding tragedy of Western theatre, Aeschylus’ Oresteia, set in the Bronze Age Greece of Homer. One of the key McGuffins of the action is the warlord Agamemnon’s past sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia to secure safe passage of the Greek fleet to Troy. In revenge, his wife Clytemnaestra ceremonially murders him when he returns in triumph from the war. This creates an appalling dilemma for their son Orestes: he must avenge his father, but this means killing his mother.
The dilemma assumes an honour code that is entirely plausible historically in its setting of Bronze Age warlords, but is very remote from us. More to the point, it was remote to Aeschylus’ audience and actors in urban Athens half a millennium later. Nevertheless, he makes it all work. The trilogy won the festival prize, so we know it worked then: and it still does. Playgoers are moved by Orestes’ dilemma, or Hamlet’s, without sharing its premises. We can even join the old Athenians in the great catharsis of the final trial and procession, in which the warlord honour code is replaced by the rule of law – not a Pollyanna one, the Furies are tamed and given their own shrine, not banished.
Curiously, in one respect we are closer to Homeric warlords than classical Athenians: on the status of women. In 5th-century Athens, they lived practically in purdah, or as lower-class menials, and were excluded from the public sphere, even acting. But in the Bronze Age Greece presented to us by its literature, very plausibly from what we know of more recent societies of the same general type like the feudal France of the troubadours, upper-class women are protagonists. As in our own society, they are not equal to men but far from absent. Clytemnaestra first appears as the conscientious and competent regent of Argos, carrying out a required sacrifice before dawn. Cassandra arrives as a pitiable captive of Agamemnon’s, a piece of war booty and sex object. At the same time she is a princess of Troy and prophet – fated not to be heard at the time, but immortalised in memory.
The deepest problem of ethics is that we share the world not only with bad people who break a shared code, but with people who have a different one. Art and history are the two main ways we can develop empathy and learn to coxeist with difference (headscarves), or maybe fight it (slavery).
Cross-posted at Substack.
The framing here is that we should approach the past like the present with Dumbledore’s moral sorting hat that divides actions and actors into good, bad, or indifferent. That’s not right, as we cannot affect the past whatever we do or think. Practical morality is about the future, which we can change. In a sense the present is an infinitely thin dividing line, and all perception lies in the past, but we reasonably expect that most of our contemporaries will still be around tomorrow, so that practical action has to be based on judgements about a loose present.
I suggest that the moral challenge of the past is less about judgement and more about empathy and reflective equilibrium. JQ puts 1600 AD as a limit to retrospective judgement. But think about the founding tragedy of Western theatre, Aeschylus’ Oresteia, set in the Bronze Age Greece of Homer. One of the key McGuffins of the action is the warlord Agamemnon’s past sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia to secure safe passage of the Greek fleet to Troy. In revenge, his wife Clytemnaestra ceremonially murders him when he returns in triumph from the war. This creates an appalling dilemma for their son Orestes: he must avenge his father, but this means killing his mother.
The dilemma assumes an honour code that is entirely plausible historically in its setting of Bronze Age warlords, but is very remote from us. More to the point, it was remote to Aeschylus’ audience and actors in urban Athens half a millennium later. Nevertheless, he makes it all work. The trilogy won the festival prize, so we know it worked then: and it still does. Playgoers are moved by Orestes’ dilemma, or Hamlet’s, without sharing its premises. We can even join the old Athenians in the great catharsis of the final trial and procession, in which the warlord honour code is replaced by the rule of law – not a Pollyanna one, the Furies are tamed and given their own shrine, not banished.
Curiously, in one respect we are closer to Homeric warlords than classical Athenians: on the status of women. In 5th-century Athens, they lived practically in purdah, or as lower-class menials, and were excluded from the public sphere, even acting. But in the Bronze Age Greece presented to us by its literature, very plausibly from what we know of more recent societies of the same general type like the feudal France of the troubadours, upper-class women are protagonists. As in our own society, they are not equal to men but far from absent. Clytemnaestra first appears as the conscientious and competent regent of Argos, carrying out a required sacrifice before dawn. Cassandra arrives as a pitiable captive of Agamemnon’s, a piece of war booty and sex object. At the same time she is a princess of Troy and prophet – fated not to be heard at the time, but immortalised i memory.
The deepest problem of ethics is that we share the world not only with bad people who break a shared code, but with people who have a different one. Art and history are the two main ways we can develop empathy and learn to coxeist with difference (headscarves), or maybe fight it (slavery).
– James Wimberley. Cross-posted at Substack.
On veganism, obligatory reference to Damon Knight’s famous SF story “To Serve Man”.
Click to access To-Serve-Man.pdf
Yikes! (And I already knew the ending.)
I don’t have a fully worked out understanding of food and ethics, and of course, I also have a short attention span for it! One of my current mini projects is to look for D3 supplements that are animal-free but not expensive. I hear it is hard to get enough from food if like me, you don’t tend to eat the ones that are fortified. Though, perhaps if I ate more mushrooms. There is a rumor that you can put them in the sun and they make more of it. No idea if it’s true.
My simple comment is this: to eat meat is to make a decision about the relative importance of that animal to us. It is a difficult situation for meat eaters, and fish are meat in this sense of the word. I love Robert Blake’s poem, “Tygr, Tygr”, for it in a perhaps unintended way exemplifies the principal issue, I.e., should we kill and eat the flesh of other animals, including those that are nearly as smart as us? Is it a moral matter, or should we just say it is how “God” created us? If so, why would any moral God want a world in which it was good to kill other animals, including some as intelligent as to be amazing? Okay, that’s not exactly what Blake’s was driving at, but I believe he would have agreed . I do eat meat, and I include seafood in that, but I do think about just what that means. I have no good answer to that, except to say I eat the vegetarian alternative as much as I can.
I have an issue with this whole statue business. I agree with pulling down a statue of someone who owned slaves – slavery is and was a great evil. But I think the statue should just be placed on the ground, not melted down or put in storage. And have a welder come and take the person off their horse. (Although, that presents artist rights problems, I guess.)
In the US, hardly any of us remember our history – and instead of just hiding it, once we change our minds about something, I think we could make comments on it, in physical ways. We could even leave up the pedestal, and just deal with the questions. When children ask, why is the pedestal empty, we could then explain to them that our ideas have changed. “See that figure? We took him down off of it.”
And the other problem I have is, a lot of this current impulse isn’t exactly proportionate. You can be a person who *did* a bunch of great things, but maybe you merely said a bunch of bad ones. You’ll get axed too! I find this somewhat unfair. Our discourse here is not very sophisticated, and I think it’s a problem.
And another thing – after the tear-down energy dissipates, there isn’t always the effort and focus to put up new statues. We neglect our outstanding women and inventors of color, f.e.
Ah, which brings up though, the issue of public art. Why is so much of it bad?
but it is almost impossible to not ingest animal matter.
i think i’ve mentioned it before.
get a close close-up of vegetable matter, and animals however small, are there.
chew it up, yum yum, you don’t know if it contributes to the flavor or not.
but it’s there.