Theories of relativity

Is there a moral to this story?

Hello and welcome (back),

It is good to be home for a few weeks. The Italian rail network has once again proven itself to be amazing and the Amalfi Coast is just a memory. But it posed a bunch of questions, some new and some that I’ve thought about before, that are still going round and round in my head.

One of them is: should we, or can we, make moral judgements about the past?

When I was twenty, I’d have given you a militant ‘no’, with an explanation to go with it that I still think makes sense. I was a thinking twenty-year-old but still afflicted with the youthful confidence that, however complicated things were, I’d got the ability, experience and know-how to make my mind up about them. We live, we learn, we grow up, and sometimes perhaps we miss that self-assurance a tiny bit. Mostly, though, I’m happy knowing that reality is a lot more contingent and tangly than it seemed back then.

The confidence of youth

Trying to recall that much younger me, my argument went something like this:

1. It isn’t the historian’s job to judge, only to understand. People do things for all kinds of reasons and their circumstances are all different. Those reasons and circumstances are what we’re looking for. Also, history is full of societies with different logics, morals and structures than ours, so judging by our own moral frameworks is going to make it harder rather than easier to understand how those societies worked.

2. There has definitely been bad history written as a result of people looking to make moral points rooted in the present. Whenever somebody says that ‘history proves’ that something they think is good or bad ALWAYS works/doesn’t work or leads to good/bad results, and especially if they have written a book or a blogpost about how this is always true, they are probably doing bad history.

3. If people really need historians to make moral judgements for them, particularly about really big stuff - massacres, dehumanising and abuse of groups within society, etc. - then our problems are already bigger than history can help with. Surely, I argued, anybody reading about the Holocaust or the Rwanda genocide or racialised slavery should be able to see the horror without needing a historian to spell out that they were terrible?

Looking over them so many years later, I don’t think these are dreadful arguments and I respect the position of fellow historians who believe that moral judgement just isn’t part of our job. But…

There’s always a ‘but’

…I’ve met more people, seen more places and had a lot more time to think since those heady days of unshakable confidence. Taking my arguments in reverse order, it is now impossible to deny that some people do, indeed, need telling that some things were awful. I’ve been in conversations with people who have tried to minimise or even deny the horror of all sorts of things for all sorts of reasons, from the downright malicious (of which Holocaust denial is the most obvious) to the woefully misinformed to a trenchant desire only to see ‘nice’ things in the world.

And in any case, my older arguments tended to focus on the most egregiously terrible things people can do to one another. Since then I’ve realised that part of the historian’s job is explaining why and how things might have been worse for people in the past than we might think. Understanding how a historical society conceived of things like honour, duty, social care or reputation or what its penalties were for specific infractions can transform how bad we think something was for somebody. Being accused of adultery for a woman was much worse in many historic socities than it is now because of penalties that could include death, physical abuse, social ostracism or complete loss of economic support. That isn’t a moral judgement, either on adultery or on past social norms, but is it really a stretch to say that those consequences were worse than the ones people face now? And if so, then might that change what moral judgements we might make if we choose to make them?

On point number 2, yes there have been terrible books and blogposts written to make moral points with history but I see in that argument now a lot of the absolutism of youth. There have also been horrendous films and books made about people falling in love or teenagers finding their feet. That doesn’t mean that every rom-com or coming-of-age movie is necessarily terrible. I’ve since read inspiring pieces of historical work that also have a point to make about the present. The issue, I now think, is not whether a work has a moral point to make but whether it does its history well. By that I mean, does it consider the fullest range of sources it can? Does it examine them carefully and critically? And does it try to tell the story that those sources reveal rather than the one the author wishes they had?

If the answer is ‘yes’ to all of those questions, I think it can be good history and have a moral point to make. And, for what it is worth, I now know that there is plenty of pretty bad history that doesn’t try to make any points at all about the present!

And finally we get to argument number one, which is where my views have probably changed most.

The standards of the time

I was brought up with the maxim that you can’t judge other people by your own standards and I think it remains a good rule of thumb: before you can judge anybody it helps to try to understand where they’re coming from. Often, after that, judging seems a bit redundant.

In the case of historical societies that can mean trying to unpick moral codes, figuring out what was scarce and plentiful, or identifying what challenges and goals would have confronted somebody in a specific situation. Sometimes it can mean really digging into an individual’s choices and personality, seeing how they personally responded to the general conditions of the world around them.

Over the years, though, I noticed two things that kept happening in discussions about not judging people by the standards of now (even if we all agreed about what those are!).

1. There never seemed to come a moment when we could judge people by the standards of their own times either.

2. More and more, a lot of historical research has become precisely about judging people in the past by modern standards, as long as the judgement is positive.

There are now innumerable studies taking individuals or events that have long been treated as ‘bad’ and rehabilitating them. Many of these are very sensible: historical judgement is not an objective thing. It is not a court of law, especially when the judgements don’t come from historians working carefully with sources but from popular myth and legend, passed down over generations.

That kind of collective memory, because it also reflects the world that creates it, has tended not to be kind to (among others) women, people with disabilities, LBGTQ people, people from the margins of society in class, economic or regional terms, and I could go on. For centuries it was easiest to write about a woman or a eunuch who used their talents and opportunities to gain advantage in life as ‘scheming’, ‘cunning’, ‘manipulative’ and ‘corrupt’. This isn’t some careful evaluation of a specific person’s actual behaviour. It is just a grab bag of negative stereotypes combined with the fact that people who were excluded from traditional opportunities often needed to use other methods, that could then be branded ‘corrupt’ or ‘scheming’ because the public routes were not available to them. New studies exploring what such figures actually did and how and why, and trying to see them as people, making their own way in a hostile world, are welcome and important.

As long as we are ferreting out stories of people in the past who did good things by our standards (like following their dreams or refusing to bend to inequality), that is mostly considered okay. But we are a lot more uncomfortable about saying that people in the past did bad things. That’s when the ‘you can’t judge people by the standards of today’ comes out of the drawer.

Still, what about when people really did do bad things?

What about when the people in our sources, the people who judged by the standards of their time, say that people did bad things and… we agree?

What about when we have understood how and why and when they did it and we still think it was wrong?

Seeing the people of the past as real, genuinely encountering them as individuals with lives as full and complex and meaningful as our own, means not putting them in some emotionless vacuum. That would mean treating them in a way that I would never treat somebody in the present. Generally, I try to reserve judgement here too. There’s always stuff we don’t know about why anybody does anything. People all have their own stories, their own fears and their own peculiarities. But reserving judgement isn’t the same as having none. Saying that somebody did a bad thing isn’t the same as saying they were a bad person. Why should the past be different?

I’ve also become suspicious of the way that ‘we must judge people by the standards of their time’ often means that we should excuse the unacceptable in order to raise up heroes or preserve myths. A figure we have traditionally admired did a dreadful thing?! Well, that’s okay, because we can’t judge somebody by our standards! (Of course, the fact that we think they’re awesome and heroic is also kinda judging by our standards, but let’s not look too closely at that!)

It is an approach that doesn’t help us to understand the past and can easily be misused in the present. Instead, it becomes a naive exercise in circularity: whatever people in the past did must have been acceptable by the standards of the time or they wouldn’t have done it > therefore whatever people did in the past tells us what was acceptable by the standards of the time > therefore we can conclude that this thing somebody did was acceptable by the standards of the time.

This is absurd. People do things that are unacceptable all the time. We always have and we probably always will. The idea that nobody had views on what others did, that there were no differences of opinion or conflicted compromises, reduces the past to a kind of utopian theme park. Popular representations of the past (or fantasy versions of it) that wallow in violence and squalor get my goat for devaluing people’s efforts to live their lives, just as we do. The alternative is no better: to take away people’s right to have made mistakes or just done downright awful things and to be recognised for that.

That was bad, really

What might judging people’s actions by the standards of the time look like, then, if it isn’t just an excuse to keep our heroes?

One way of doing this is to look at what people at the time said. Of course, this has to be done with care. People in the past didn’t agree with one another any more than we do and one person telling us that they thought such-and-such was a terrible person might tell us more about the views of our sources than about the collective morals of a society. Even setting aside political disputes or people just not liking each other, morality is never simple.

Still, if lots of different sources by different people, and different kinds of people, all suggest that people thought something was wrong we might be on safe ground thinking that this was a general opinion.

Here, as historians, we have a choice about how we combine this information with our own morals to decide if something might just have been bad. Societies can and do have radically different moral ideas. We might decide that something was wrong by the standards of the time and place it happened but that we don’t, from our time and place, think it was a problem. We might even think the person in question, by our standards, was pretty fantastic. I don’t think that’s a problem as long as we’re clear and honest about which parts are our views and which are the testimony of historical sources. We don’t have to share the views of a past soecity to understand it and to recognise people’s efforts to live in it as well as they could.

To determine what those standards of the time were, we might look at laws, morality tales, prayer and penintence books, works on good behaviour and depictions of the opposite. Images of the sins that might send somebody to hell in medieval Christian contexts, for example, can all tell us how people thought they should act, even if we know full well they often didn’t. Another thing to look out for is what people hid: what didn’t they want people to know they were doing? What did they try to present in one way, not another?

There is too often a tendency to suggest that people in the past didn’t really believe the things they said they did, especially if those things aren’t what we believe, but is this realistic? If we believe in things, hold principles sacred, feel ourselves moved by hope and hate, love and anger, shouldn’t we assume that the people of the past did too?

A question of heaven and hell

I’ve written here before about how I think it is reasonable to consider the Romans particualrly brutal empire builders, even by the standards of their time. I think it is fair to infer from efforts to keep it secret that rulers in the past knew that debasing their coinage was widely considered A Bad Thing. And I hope that when historians of the future look back they will believe that many people thought Apartheid was wrong by the standards of our time.

As a medievalist, though, I don’t know a better treatment of ‘the standards of the time’ problem than this one:

Koziol, Geoffrey, ‘Is Robert I in Hell? The Diploma for Saint-Denis and the Mind of a Rebel King (Jan. 25, 923)’, Early Medieval Europe, 14.3 (2006), pp. 233–67, doi:10.1111/j.1468-0254.2006.00182.x

It deals with an obscure source: a record of a grant made by a king, Robert I, in 923 to the monastery of Saint-Denis, in modern France.

It deals with an obscure place: West Frankia, a kingdom that, as Koziol points out, wasn’t even called that by people at the time and is now part of France.

It deals with an obscure time and place: the tenth century in large parts of western Europe is not particularly well-known or well-studied and can read like a succession of rebellions, assasinations, battles and kings called Robert and Charles.

Yet Koziol shows what can be done with careful reading of sources and a conviction that the people of the past were real.

His title, ‘Is Robert I in Hell?’ poses a question that would have been very real to Robert himself. He had become king by usurping the throne from another king called Charles, who had a better hereditary claim but was, at the time, not managing to hold his territories very successfully. There is some indication that the men had historic beef. Maybe they had always hated one another. Whatever the immeidate and longer-term reasons, Robert was anointed king even though Charles was already king. Unusually for a medieval usurpation, though, he didn’t capture or kill Charles. Charles carried on being king in a smaller neighbouring territory and, over a couple of years, regained his strength.

The document Koziol examines dates from a time when it had become clear to Robert that he and Charles were going to have to decide this duplication of kings on the field of battle. Koziol argues, I think very convincingly, that Robert’s gift to Saint-Denis, the traditional favourite abbey of the kings of Frankia, tells us a lot about how he felt about his situation and the coming fight. He points out several things:

1. Charles is hardly mentioned at all. Robert says he became king at a time of extreme necessity but doesn’t talk about what that necessity was and spends no time at all on his relationship with Charles or even the quality of Charles’s kingship. Koziol suggests that perhaps there was no way Robert could find to describe the specifics of what he had done that didn’t sound too much like treachery. Perhaps we see somebody hiding at least some of what they have done for fear that it would not be seen as right.

2. Robert emphasises that he became king by the election of the secular lords of West Frankia and was annointed with the approval of the highest personages in the land. He avoids suggesting that he sought the throne out of personal ambition or that he gained it by personal violence. Again, we are maybe seeing in what is not said the ‘wrong’ ways to become king.

3. As justification for his kingship, Robert says that he believes that all of the good fortune he’d had in his life, rising gradually in status and rank over time, showed that God had great plans for him and wanted him, ultimately, to be king.

4. And as proof of this divine favour - as proof that him becoming king was not wrong in the eyes of God and therefore, by the standards of the time, was right - he asks three patron saints, including Denis, and God, to give him victory in the battle that was surely coming.

5. Koziol argues, finally, that the sheer size of the gift Robert gave to the abbey is another indication of how seriously Robert was taking all of this. It was ten villages and their revenues at a time when some counts might not have much more than that under their control. Robert was not just any count, even before he became king, but even so, it was a significant donation.

So what do we have at the end of all of this? A king, in a near-universally Christian cultural context, who says that he believes that God wants him to be king and that he is so sure of this that he is making a large spiritual donation to ask that the Powers that Be show the world this truth by giving him victory when the time comes to fight Charles.

All of this makes sense in terms of what we know about Christian theology and belief at the time. And at its heart, as with any statement of faith, is a scintilla of doubt: Robert believed these things to be true but couldn’t know them for certain.

The Abbey of Saint-Denis would come to be known as the burial place of the Kings of France but by the 10th century it was already the preferred burial place of many of the Kings of the Franks. That is one reason why Robert donating to it, as king, was important.

Eventually, around 6 months later, in June 923, the battle came. For Robert it was short and fatal. Later accounts say that he was impaled by seven lances, with one claiming that Charles himself wielded one of them. So, Koziol asks, as Robert lay on the ground, feeling the fourth or fifth mortal wound to his body, knowing that this was the end, did he think he was going to hell? Did he face a terrible realisation that God did not want him to be king and that he was, therefore, nothing more than a usurper, a traitor?

We can’t know, as Koziol freely admits. There is a limit on how far any of us as historians can walk with the people we study. There are some things, indeed, that no human being can ever know about another. But I do think Koziol is absolutely right that asking the question is useful. Taking seriously the beliefs and principles by which people claim to have lived is fundamental in respecting and understanding them and offers us a much richer glimpse into the past than maintaining the sterile fiction that whatever happened in the past was simply ‘the way it was’. By the standards of his own time, it is hard not to think that Robert might have been wrong, and known it.