Why do we see ourselves as morally superior to other historical eras?

In recent times, we’ve witnessed the energetic rise of the idea of a new dignity of history, one that requires us to make a clean break with a past that imperfectly aligns with the moral standards of the present. It is an angry way of thinking that has spread worldwide with the aim of deconstructing our flawed past, highlighting abuses that were committed, and invalidating the past as an intellectual reference, based either on the white supremacy evident in its decisions and behavior, or the problematic practices that were embraced.

The same rage is applied to the moral judgements of historical figures, who are mercilessly scrutinized over their failure to conform to this new dignity of history. We want to hastily leave the past behind, as one would rush from a burning house, abandoning its racism, genocide, patriarchy, colonialism, homophobia, misogyny, and transphobia. We want to jettison the excesses once committed and embrace diversity, that fetishized word, the key to opening all doors in this day and age.

In theory, this sounds good. Who doesn’t want an end to injustice and inequality? But in practice, it’s not so easy. To begin with, disagreement with the past, disagreement between the ancient and the modern, is part of any cultural tradition and historical moment, the consequence of inevitable generational conflict. Sometimes, such disagreements have gone further than others, and have proven more transcendent, as pointed out by historian Mauricio Tenorio in his magnificent book La historia en ruinas (History in ruins). The cult of monuments and their destruction, the work of building up and tearing down the past according to the parameters that guide the operation of any present, has been a constant. Lenin was once God in the Soviet world. By the winter of 1989, his effigy was the subject of scorn in Berlin.

But maybe this time it’s different, that the hour has arrived of definitive liberation from our abject past — or at least, from how that past has been documented and remembered. Perhaps as a result of this cultural dismantling, which extends to universities, museums, and cultural institutions of all kinds, we will emerge as pure and noble beings free of moral debt, prejudice, guilt, ready for universal love. We might become beings capable of looking back and beholding the past as a blank sheet, clean of atrocities and violations, politically correct. In reality, no one knows on which scales the future will rest, but in the bewildered present mindset, voices are being raised to demand that we get rid of the past, as if the past, immovable as the lived reality it was, should be our top priority.

There are reasons to believe that we are living in an era different from all those that came before. What is striking about our current time is its transversality. The same conceptual debates, the same accusations, are arising simultaneously in different places around the world, places that share no common history. And yet, the same decolonized language standardizes these reproaches, crossing all borders to destroy the reputation of once-prominent figures. Their prior renown alone is enough to render them suspects of having committed tyranny and exploitation. Antonio López (the first Marquess of Comillas), Hernán Cortés, Admiral Nelson, President Jefferson, the Marquess of Pombal — all have been subjected to the same reckoning based on agency, social inclusion, systematic racism, and trauma.

The demand is that “nations and peoples face up to their criminal histories,” according to Susan Neiman in her book Left Is Not Woke (2023, Polity), and it has spread like an oily stain, becoming the central point of debate. Have we considered the consequences of the gaps we are creating? The rise of the ultra-right cannot be explained without delving into the intellectual bewilderment that has been caused by the rejection of that “criminal” history from which, regardless, we all come.

Such an attitude includes surprising arrogance, to which the best corrective, I believe, has been provided by the philosopher Francis Bacon. At the beginning of the 17th century, he observed in his work Novum Organum that “truth is the daughter of time, not of authority,” that it emerges gradually as a result of advances in human comprehension. If we are now more sensitive to suffering and inequalities than the men and women of the 16th century, it is not because we are better in absolute terms, but because we have advanced in the idea of the Other, that is to say, in the consideration of people whose minds are organized differently by language, belief, experience, or culture, who resist understanding and interpretation based on different parameters.

When Hernán Cortés was marching across the interior of Mexico, bound for Tenochtitlán, he was in no condition to assimilate the countless oddities he encountered in the form of men and women wearing unfamiliar kinds of clothing, animals, vegetation, architecture, language, gods, food. It wasn’t until some time later that these oddities ceased to be oddities and began to make sense. Action took place long before this knowledge arrived.

There is an angry way of thinking that seeks to deconstruct the past, highlighting its abuses and invalidating it as an intellectual reference”

We have now incorporated the animal world into the primitive anthropological conception of the Other, becoming aware of our shared roots, of animal suffering and need. These are surely exponential advances for humanity, although they do not prevent social inequality, hostility, extractive selfishness and war from existing. What I want to say is that the smug way of thinking seems to me to be an error of perception, because it implies the belief that the evolution of humanity is like an arrow pointing in the direction of unstoppable progress. Only, we know that both human life and all the knowledge of which it is capable are nothing more than attempts, rehearsals, intents of shedding light on the darkness through which we move.

And so arises the question, impossible to contain: why do we now believe ourselves to be morally superior to other historical eras? Why do we arrogantly assume ourselves able to judge the behaviors of the past, stigmatizing them? What is the reason for this arrogance, its insistence on our incorruptible modern ethic? Taking on a historical perspective, it is urgent to qualify the morality of the present in order to open up to the intellectual complexity that arises from other moralities, those of the past and of course, those of the future. Do we not then have the right to intervene in history? Of course we do, and Nietzsche put it clearly: historiography must be critical, must strive to settle its accounts with the truth of what has taken place, in the aim of generating new spaces for dialogue. So it has been with women’s history, a field of study that was nonexistent 100 years ago and is now a discipline that is essential to the restitution of a past that has been illuminated by a new, eye-opening light. The goal should be the deepest and most critical understanding of history of which we are capable. Condemnation leads us nowhere. There is no one on the other side to receive it. Is coexistence that hard?

To the extent that we who live in the present are the only source of existence, we must be the ones who travel to the past in order to keep it alive. We are the ones who give or do not give life to history, which would disappear if we were not inclined to revisit it again and again with our gaze. And our gaze, in fact, is further-reaching than it was in the 16th century. We are capable of seeing and understanding so much more. Our intellectual and moral horizon has broadened enormously. But all this should be cause for humility, because the truth is, we remain where we have always been: obliged to hope so that it may continue to provide the strength required by our fragility. For it, too, has always been with us.

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