Longstanding listeners know that I have two related guiding principles behind this podcast — we do our best to avoid “presentism,” and we do not weaponize history by connecting it to today’s political arguments and alignments. As with all other sin, it is virtually impossible to avoid these offenses to historical thinking completely, but it is important to try to avoid them. Listen to my episode 25, “Sidebar: Taking Stock,” to hear me declaim on the topic.
“Presentism” and weaponization are related, but they are not the same. Presentism is “the uncritical adherence to present-day attitudes, especially the tendency to interpret past events in terms of modern values and concepts.” Presentism damages the practice of history because the application of today’s values and morality to the interpretation of the past blinds us to understanding why people in the “other country” of the past did as they did in any given situation.
“Weaponization” of history, as I use the term, involves the mining of history for facts to wield in support of one’s political opinions today. In this regard, history is like religious scripture — it is always possible to find a moment or a sentence or even lots of moments and sentences that, shorn of context, purport to prove the truth of one’s political opinions today. It is normal and commonplace for untrained people to weaponize historical facts or religious texts. It is intellectually dishonest, in my opinion, for trained people — historians or religious thinkers — to do it. We rely on such people precisely to supply the missing context, and if they do not do that they are betraying the standards of their profession. Presentism and weaponization of history interfere with our quest for the truth, an objective we will never attain, but the honest pursuit of which will always make us wiser.
Against that backdrop, I commend to you an article titled “The 1619 Project and Living in Truth” by Princeton’s Professor Sean Wilentz. I have not studied the 1619 Project and the issues around it well enough to express my own opinion of the substance of the controversy — we haven’t even gotten to Jamestown yet! — but the account of Professor Wilentz’s various interactions with The New York Times contains important lessons and should not be missed.
Oh. One other thing. Wilentz is manifestly of the political left, and writes plenty that will irritate political partisans on both sides. That is why everybody interested in history should read his piece.
