Shoe on the Other Foot

I love talking about history and society. The two are so interconnected with each other, and I can’t help but be impressed with how different the morals and morays different societies have and how arbitrary these differences are.

Recently, a friend of mine asked me an important question: what would someone who came from another time think of our society?

This idea struck me like a lightning bolt. We tend to judge other points in history by the standards of our time, and we usually conclude that our time is the best of times. But what would someone from the past say if they were to judge our time by their own standards? I suppose turnabout would be fair play. I suppose we ought to give them their dues.

The tricky part is that, in order to learn what they’d say about our time, we’d have to look at what they believed, and this isn’t something that can be mapped onto a spreadsheet. This isn’t something that can be fully captured with data. It’s only by reading the words of the people themselves that we can get a full picture of what they believed.

Pictures of what people were like can be found in what we history students call “primary sources” – artifacts, documents, diaries, manuscripts, autobiographies, recordings, or any other source of information that were created at the time under study. These things contain a lot of information that you wouldn’t know from abstractions like statistics (not that these things aren’t good too!).

To give an example of how primary sources can shed light on previous times in history, I refer to a paper I did during my final semester of college before I graduated. As an assignment, I had to research some part of American history. I chose to write a paper on Manifest Destiny in the Antebellum era.

Now, a common theme in historical works on this period is the ever-looming threat of “slave power.” Many historians give the impression that Antebellum America was controlled by a powerful conspiracy of pro-slavery forces with imperialistic designs for the rest of North America. Manifest Destiny was the propaganda this group used to justify their plan of conquering not just what we now know as the continental United States, but also Cuba, Mexico, and Central America, and turn America into a powerful slave-based empire.

Looking at the newspapers of the time period, however, tells a very different story. Chauncey S. Boucher does a good job elaborating on this. Southern newspapers talked of a South that was divided along party lines, and those that called for unity like John C. Calhoun were seen as controversial. And the issue of slavery, far from spurring on the annexation of new lands like Texas, actually delayed them by bogging down what would have been something all Americans, North and South, could agree on (adding more land) with an incredibly divisive political conflict. And it was often the aggressiveness of the abolitionists in forwarding their cause that led Southerners to double down on their pro-slavery stance, which eventually led to the Civil War.

What would these people think if they were to look at our times? We would undoubtedly find them morally reprehensible for defending slavery. But look at the world through their eyes. Would they find things to be better or worse? Why or why not?

As I’ve argued before, our customs and beliefs are often arbitrary. Products of chance that come and go as the years wear on. It’d be best, then, that we show a bit of humility. After all, we’d probably agree with their assessment had we been raised in the Antebellum South.