i can’t remember who pointed it out to me, but whenever somebody tries the whole “[heinous social institution] wasn’t seen as bad back then, so we shouldn’t judge it by today’s standards”, they’re consistently justifying elite behavior as “normal” for the time by only considering the values and principles of elites at the time. i.e. “the power structure back then thought its crimes against humanity were ok, so who are we to judge in hindsight?”
like, they’ll say that slavery was legal and not seen as scandalous. of course, they mean it didn’t scandalize the courts, the aristocrats, the slaver owners, the overseers, or the capitalist investors. there were absolutely abolitionists in every age, but besides that, there were slaves. judging from the numbers of those punished, maimed, murdered, and the widespread effort to stop/pursue/capture runaways and general background fear of insurrection, it sure as shit seems like the slaves objected to slavery.
there are geographies of the slave states and islands where enslaved outnumbered free peoples by a huge margin, but for some crazy reason these people would never even consider that means MOST people in these places at these exact times were against slavery.
I’ve been told Michael Parenti made that argument in his book on Roman history, although I haven’t read that book personally. I think it’s a pretty common leftist take when the subject comes up, to the point that it’s even penetrated into liberal historian spheres to an extent too.
It’s what happens when you don’t understand history in terms of material interests and class struggle. “This is what the society practiced and none of the writing and art we’ve seen portrayed it negatively so none of them wanted anything different” vs. “this is how the society’s ruling class shaped its structure to support their interests and used their control over the means to propagate culture to legitimize that structure.”
i can’t remember who pointed it out to me, but whenever somebody tries the whole “[heinous social institution] wasn’t seen as bad back then, so we shouldn’t judge it by today’s standards”, they’re consistently justifying elite behavior as “normal” for the time by only considering the values and principles of elites at the time. i.e. “the power structure back then thought its crimes against humanity were ok, so who are we to judge in hindsight?”
like, they’ll say that slavery was legal and not seen as scandalous. of course, they mean it didn’t scandalize the courts, the aristocrats, the slaver owners, the overseers, or the capitalist investors. there were absolutely abolitionists in every age, but besides that, there were slaves. judging from the numbers of those punished, maimed, murdered, and the widespread effort to stop/pursue/capture runaways and general background fear of insurrection, it sure as shit seems like the slaves objected to slavery.
there are geographies of the slave states and islands where enslaved outnumbered free peoples by a huge margin, but for some crazy reason these people would never even consider that means MOST people in these places at these exact times were against slavery.
I’ve been told Michael Parenti made that argument in his book on Roman history, although I haven’t read that book personally. I think it’s a pretty common leftist take when the subject comes up, to the point that it’s even penetrated into liberal historian spheres to an extent too.
It’s what happens when you don’t understand history in terms of material interests and class struggle. “This is what the society practiced and none of the writing and art we’ve seen portrayed it negatively so none of them wanted anything different” vs. “this is how the society’s ruling class shaped its structure to support their interests and used their control over the means to propagate culture to legitimize that structure.”