David Weber’s science fiction novel, The Honor of the Queen, takes place thousands of years in the future, and humans have journeyed to the stars. Honor Harrington, a Captain of the Royal Manticoran Space Navy, is dispatched with a diplomatic envoy named Reginald Houseman to a neighboring star nation. The planets Grayson and Masada have endured a bitter holy war for hundreds of years.
“Once they discover the advantages of peaceful trade—once they each realize their prosperity depends on the other’s—the situation will defuse itself without all this saber rattling.”
“They’ve been enemies for more than six hundred T-years,” she pointed out as gently as she could, “and religious hatreds are among the most virulent known to man.”
“That’s why they need a fresh viewpoint, a third party from outside the basic equation who can bring them together.”
- David Weber, The Honor of the Queen
Harrington understands war. By this point, she has led men and women into brutal combat in the dark cold vastness of space. She has written letters to the widows and widowers they left behind. She is a student of art, and beauty, and “Old Earth history”, and respects the people who lived there.
Houseman doesn’t understand war. He plays with power and life like a game of chess, without ever having to see the cost in blood. He doesn’t understand people beyond how he can use them. It would be easy to dismiss as narcissism, and it is that. But more deeply, it is his failure to perceive the depth of the human person.
Historiography
If history is the story of Mankind through time, historiography is the study of how that story is written. Historians have to do the difficult work of piecing together both the facts and the people who live in history. Not only what happened, but to whom? And what were they thinking? And why did they think that?
A shallow history tells what happened, and that can still be useful. But a deeper history dives into the people who really lived it.
Presentism
Presentism is the practice of judging the past by present standards. Even if something isn’t important to us, it may have been important to our ancestors. Consider religion and spirituality: the thing that has become the least important (from a modern analytical frame) was actually the most important to them.
The anthropological exceptionalism of a human person was a consensus among premodern people. In the Christian tradition, we call this Imago Dei: made in the image of God. There’s a “spark of divinity” in every human person that makes each of us a being of special dignity and agency. Then, the sciences emerged, and prioritized certain modes of thinking at the expense of others. Ontological divinity doesn’t work in these new powerful ways of thinking, so the ideas built on it collapse (the Death of God).
Given a materialist starting point, the syllogism is reasonable. Treat social sciences and philosophical conclusions about human nature like physical laws of nature, then apply them backwards. The progression of the sciences indicates that economics, biology, and power are among the discernible forces that influence people. Without metaphysical scaffolding, those same forces must be the motive ones.
“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”
- L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between
Our ancestors did things differently: religion and spirituality formed the foundation of life, not the wallpaper. It’s not wrong to point out the effects of economics, biology, and power on the flow of history; it’s wrong to reduce history to those forces. The greatest manifestation of presentism in historiography is ignoring religion, but it’s not the only one.
The moral travesties of racism, sexism, xenophobia, etc. invite a dark acknowledgement: nearly all of our ancestors are despicable in these frames. While the “spark of divinity” is a cross-cultural consensus, so too are slavery, rape, and pillage.
This is where vanity enters the picture: we assume we ourselves aren’t also despicable. The Christian intellectual tradition has always integrated this assumption: human beings are sinful. We share in the moral fruits of our ancestors; can we be so sure we lack their sins?
Presentism is the historiographic fallacy of vanity.
The Antidote
In C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, a demon in the “lowerarchy” of Hell writes to his nephew to give him advice on tempting “the patient” (his human victim) to sin.
You must therefore conceal from the patient the true end of Humility. Let him think of it not as self-forgetfulness but as a certain kind of opinion (namely, a low opinion) of his own talents and character… By this method thousands of humans have been brought to think that humility means pretty women trying to believe that they are ugly and clever men trying to believe they are fools.
The humility that cures presentism isn’t pretending we don’t know what we know about their evil; it’s accepting that our evil is continuous with theirs, just as our triumph is. In a few thousand years, perhaps our children’s children’s children will look back on the stories of our time. Would you prefer your actions to be judged by Harrington, or Houseman?
I became a father a few years ago. The stereotypes about the lessons fatherhood teaches are true, for good reason. Never before in my life had I taken personal responsibility for the safety and wellbeing of another.
My Lord gives me a great and terrible calling, as he called my forefathers. So too their mothers, and the fathers and mothers of the other great nations and traditions of the world. And however much better I might understand the sciences and churning patterns of history, when I rock my baby to sleep she still cries. And when I hurt, I sometimes curse God. And when I cry, I close my eyes, just like they did.
Life is hard. People are complicated. And we owe our ancestors the respect of meeting them on their own terms. And let us meet them; they’re interesting people.