Judge not, lest we be judged?
Common sense and common courtesy
Welcome (back) to another ‘Coffee with Clio’. This week’s issue combines two milestones. It is my 50th post (not counting a couple right at the beginning just saying, ‘hey, I’m going to be doing this newsletter thing…). It is also going out to 100 subscribers!
When I started this, I thought my mom might read it. As it happens, she doesn’t, because she’s decided that email is too much faff (which is fine, I tell her the good bits over the phone). But my expectations were modest.
My first subscribers, I was so happy to see you, especially those of you whom I have taught in the past. To now be having these conversations with you in a different setting is a real privilege.
To my new subscribers, welcome and thank you. Every new person who signs up is a huge encouragement but also a wonderful confirmation that the people who have gone before us still matter and have the power to shape our future, if we take a moment to reflect.
Over those 50 posts, I’ve found it so enriching to pause and think each week about something a little different. Often, I talk about things I’m exploring for teaching or other projects, but this is a place where I can look at the bigger picture or join things up across different parts of my life.
(Winning a prize for one of those posts was also lovely: if you haven’t read it, you can find it here!)
I’ve also had a chance to think more about what a history newsletter might be for. I’d got a few ideas when I started, but there is nothing like doing to work out details. I hope you won’t mind me setting those details out here, as a work in progress, and very much open to suggestions:
I want it to be fun. History is something that excites me endlessly and I hope to bring you something each week that just makes you smile or look at something differently, that shines a light on some sparkly corner of the world that might have gone unnoticed or unknown.
I want it to be slow. What do I mean by that? We’re bombarded all the time with news and calls to action and emotion. History, for me, is a place of perspective, somewhere to step away and think from. In Coffee with Clio, I will rarely react to the news of the day. You won’t find me telling you to take up a cause or tear down a monument. That isn’t because I don’t care about things. I assume that you care about things, too. It is because I think we all need spaces to recharge and reflect.
I want it to be live. This isn’t a place for finished ideas. When my publications come out, with polished pieces all wrapped up and tidy, I’ll tell you about them. (You can find things I’ve already written here.) I’m here, taking coffee with Clio, for the messy, backstage bit of history: trying things out, diving down rabbit holes, changing my mind.
My weekly posts will always be free and will be the backbone of Coffee with Clio. I will also keep updating my reading suggestions (I’ve added another one this week, which I’d forgotten: the utterly brilliant Abraham’s Luggage).1
Over the coming year, though, I’ll also be experimenting with paid content. It is a way of saying thank you to my wonderful paid subscribers and perhaps a chance to do things that might not be possible otherwise. Current ideas include:
a reading group
live Q and As and discussion groups
recorded talks
actually running that course on basket weaving (it only takes 14 of us)!
If you have ideas, let me know.
But now, forward to the past…
Judge not…
Since I was a child interested in history, through school and university and now that being a historian is my day job, I’ve heard various versions of ‘you can’t judge the past by today’s standards’.
It often gets whipped out of the bag when somebody uses a historical example in a debate.
Historically speaking, for example, identifying parts of a community as different, isolating and marking them as distinct, popularising ideas about how inferior or weird they are and encouraging jokes that belittle or demonise them ends in some quite predictable ways.
Oh, but that doesn’t count, because you can’t judge the past by today’s standards: that was just the way they looked at the world!
Therefore, this argument goes, the predictable ways those situations developed doesn’t mean that [insert modern example here] will, because we aren’t them.
Another context for the ‘judge not’ mandate is when people draw attention to the less attractive aspects of historical moments, individuals or cultures that have traditionally been celebrated.
Well, yes, maybe they did do that/that did happen, but you can’t hold that against them because you can’t judge them by today’s standards.
We were also taught a version of ‘judge not’ in school and university and I still teach it now: the past is not simply a mirror where we look for our own beauty spots and blemishes.
History is the study of real worlds, full of real people, who had their own chaotic, sometimes incoherent ideas about life and the world and got by, just like us, or, as L.P. Hartley famously declared in his novel, The Go-Between,
‘The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there’
I love this line because for me it captures the essential tension in the ‘judge not’ view of history: the past is a foreign country, not an alien planet.
…lest we be judged?
When we visit a foreign country, we mostly try to understand the local culture. We do not, generally, refuse to draw any comparisons with our own life. We see difference within shared humanity.
In doing so, I wonder if we recognise that our own lives might also one day be looked at by others. (As a historian, I think quite a lot about how the future might look at our present.) Is a degree of reserved judgement, or careful relativism, a courtesy we extend to others because, like most courtesy, we hope it will be returned?
When people look at our lives, with all their mess and baggage and personal and cultural contingency, do we hope that they too will think, ‘I’m sure there’s a whole bunch of stuff going on here that I don’t know about?’ Do we hope they will give us the benefit of the doubt that we are trying our best with what we’ve got?
Certainly, we might feel aggrieved if some future human were to dismiss our efforts because we haven’t yet invented whatever it is we haven’t yet invented that we all hope will one day fix some of the problems that we face.
As a medievalist, I bristle when people dismiss the centuries I study because ‘everyone just died young’.
First, no they didn’t. Plenty of people died young, but lots of people lived into old age and early death was grieved, then as now.
Second, that comparison sets up as a false contrast: it implies that, more recently, people have stopped dying young. Tragically, people do, all the time. In fact, certain points in the recent past were far more dangerous from the perspective of a person trying to make it past 40 than the Middle Ages.
Recently, I visited the National Slate Museum in Llanberis, Wales, where research into workers’ life expectancies in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries has come up with the horrifying figure of 34, mainly because of slate dust settling on the lungs.2
There is a place for common sense
Third, dismissing the Middle Ages over life expectancy feels like setting up a test with failure as the only result. People, on average, live longer today mainly because of medical science, especially the discovery of germs, vaccines and antibiotics.
I hope one day soon, people live to be 250. I hope it gives them time to study all kinds of things and that when they look back to us, they don’t dismiss everything we think and feel and do because ‘people barely even lived to 80!’
Finally, and most importantly, the length of a life does not define its value. Choosing any arbitrary measure and saying ‘people were less [interesting/worthy] then because they had not achieved [thing]’ is choosing not to look at all of choices people make, the ways they shape their world.
So, there are good, sensible reasons for reserving or suspending some kinds of judgement. Some of it is just common sense. I’ve talked here before about the problem with assuming that ‘common sense’ is all that common. Still, if we want to understand the past, it doesn’t help all that much just to say, ‘well, they didn’t have these things’.
Nevertheless, most of the time when people crack out the ‘we can’t judge the past by today’s standards’, I don’t agree.
What about courtesy and contempt?
What are ‘today’s standards,’ anyway? Or, indeed, ‘their standards’? Can we really say that today, people have an agreed set of standards that we live by? Can we even say we have an agreed set of standards that we try to live by? And if we don’t, then why would people in the past?
The refusal to ‘judge by today’s standards’ often isn’t about contrasting then and now, but assuming that ‘the past’ was simply an inversion of ‘the now’. It stereotypes both.
An example: we can’t judge people in the past for torturing people to extract a confession. That wouldn’t be fair because they weren’t us. A person making this argument really means: ‘today, we don’t torture people to extract a confession and that makes us better than people in the past, because they did.’
Except that most people in any period of the past did not torture other people.
The ‘judge not’ argument is very, very rarely (possibly even, never) made on the basis of a seriously researched, rigorous knowledge of what people in the past actually thought.
Let’s take a look at people in the parts of the Middle Ages that I know. They did not take it for granted that torturing people was okay. It was allowed, legally, in some situations.
Under Roman law, which operated at least in theory in much of the medieval world, slaves could (and, indeed, should) be tortured for evidence in a criminal trial to make sure they were telling the truth.
We can (and I assume, do) disagree with that, but it does not mean that people in the past thought torture was fine. It means that lawyers had considered the range of circumstances in which torture might be possible and had decided that it was not allowed in most of them. In the much more recent past, such debates have very publicly taken place about the use of torture in custody, for example to prevent further terror attacks, with the Pew Research Center concluding that opinions vary widely.
Again, that does not mean people now think torture is fine. It means that there is a general perception that it is definitely not okay, which runs up against specific fears, exigencies and particular kinds of pragmatism.
Give me a moral condemnation levelled at the Middle Ages and I can almost guarantee you that I can find an ancient or medieval thinker or law maker or political radical who disagreed.
I can also guarantee you that, somewhere in the vast, wonderful world of the internet, there is somebody (and probably a whole community) that does not hold the prescribed ‘now’ point of view. they are not ‘like us’, except that they are ‘us’ - we are all the people of now.
That is the biggest reason I usually don’t agree with the idea of refusing to judge the past: it often hides a contempt that we aren’t even consciously aware of. We can’t judge the past by our standards, not because our standards are different, but because they are better. After all, when was the last time you heard anybody say, ‘You can’t judge us by the standards of the past!’
When we back away from the shared humanity of the past, refuse to recognise its diversity and complexity, we suggest that people’s ideas and experiences were so completely different that we can only look at them through an impenetrable screen, instead of trying our best to be visitors in that foreign land, with people just like us.
Renouncing judgement is nearly as easy as judging out of hand. The tricky bit is always the balance, but luckily, there are voices from the past to encourage us to keep trying:3
A hermit said, ‘We do not make progress because we do not realise how much we can do. We lose interest in the work we have begun, and we want to be good without even trying.’
Lambourn, Elizabeth A., Abraham’s Luggage: A Social Life of Things in the Medieval Indian Ocean World, Asian Connections (Cambridge University Press, 2018), doi:10.1017/9781316795453
This is a fantastic, free museum, which I strongly recommend if you are visiting North Wales! I am a bit of a connoisseur of industrial museums, having grown up in the English ‘Black Country’, or the old coal belt, and this one is a stunning example, not least because it was turned into a museum not long after the works closed down, so much of the original equipment is still there and in working order.
Ward, Benedicta, The Desert Fathers: Sayings of the Early Christian Monks, trans. by Ward, Benedicta (Penguin Classics, 2003), p. 66.