Presentism and Cultural Bias

Abstract

In the social sciences and humanities, presentism is the process of taking a view of the past that is shaped by present-day perspectives, whether that means making moral judgments based on present-day cultural norms, treating the present as the inevitable outcome or goal of the past, or treating history as determinist in such a way that individual agency is diminished. Presentism is a bias that mischaracterizes the past rather than treating it objectively, and overcoming it has been a perennial problem in the discipline of history as well as other areas.

Overview

In sociology, history, and in most contexts in the humanities and social sciences as a whole, presentism is the anachronistic intersection of present-day perspectives with interpretations or framings of the historical past. This takes a variety of forms and must be distinguished from framings of the past that are simply informed by information or perspective that is available in the present and was not available in the past; for example, framing a historical event as part of a larger trend that is discernible only in hindsight is usually not a case of presentism. Interpreting the marriage of a sixteen-year-old in ancient Mesopotamia as child abuse or human trafficking is more clearly a case of presentism. Applying a modern understanding of adolescence ignores the social norms of the time, when teenagers were commonly considered adults, and assesses a moral judgment no one at the time would have made.

Similarly, depicting pre-modern scientific thinkers like Newton or Galileo as primitives because of their many erroneous conclusions treats them unfairly. It is important to the history of science to point out that the geniuses best known for their successes were also wrong about much of their view of the world, but our ability to perceive many of their errors is due only to the accumulation of knowledge that came after them; we see those errors using tools unavailable to them.

One view associated with presentism holds that history is a sequence of inevitable outcomes. This perspective gives rise to important questions in the social sciences. If, for example, every event is the inevitable consequence of the events that came before it, the implications about our own agency in the present are difficult to escape. Furthermore, if every event is inevitable, the inequities and injustices both of the past and the present are by implication justified. Presentism, even critics freely admit, is difficult to avoid. Modern sensibilities and frame of reference cannot be abandoned, and serious engagement with history requires grounding in modern framings and methodologies. This is why thinking of it as a bias is useful, rather than an "ism" in the familiar sense. In other words, presentism is a bias to be aware of and on guard against.

This sense of presentism is sometimes called the historiographic sense of presentism, to distinguish it from the usage of the word in philosophy. In philosophy, presentism is the view that only the present (and possibly timeless objects, like numbers) exists; while there is conceptual overlap, the terms developed and are applied separately. The historiographic sense of presentism has been used since the early twentieth century; cautions against presentism in the writing of history, without using that specific word, extend at least to the previous century.

Further Insights

Although accounts of history have been written down for virtually as long as narratives of any sort have been written down, history in the sense of the modern scholarly discipline is a relatively recent thing. Ancient histories blended mythology with their accounts; in the West, the fifth century BCE historian Thucydides first made a study of history that examined both immediate and long-term causes of historical events. Throughout the ancient era and subsequent centuries, history was rarely an endeavor that strove to be objective, and objectivity is the characteristic feature of the discipline of history. Histories were written to justify or challenge the status quo, to create or add to the origin myths of a culture or state, or to paint the events of the mortal world in ways that highlighted religious lessons or seemed to fulfill divine prophecies.

This began to change in the eighteenth century, as part of larger Age of Enlightenment changes in Western thought and the academicization of scholarship. One of the great works of history from this period is Edward Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published in 1776. A monumental work of thousands of pages, Gibbon's real work was in the secularization of western history-writing, the focus on rational causes and a detached approach to depictions informed by evidence rather than theology. Gibbon's approach did not become the default mode of history for another century; in the meantime, many histories, while continuing with Gibbon's secularization, focused on conveying mood and engaging the reader, rather than strictly sticking to fact.

Thomas Carlyle's 1837 history of the French Revolution is one of the better-known examples, written in the present-tense and employing poetic modes that made it read more like an epic novel than like modern history. It was the German historian, Leopold von Ranke, who pioneered modern evidence-based history in the mid-nineteenth century, with the explicit goal of wie es eigentlich gewesen (show what actually happened). While many movements in history have broken with von Ranke's specific claims (most importantly, the extent to which it is possible to be certain "what actually happened"), his influence is inescapable. His work professionalizing the field was invaluable, and almost every modern historian trained in the West can trace their intellectual lineage back to him.

In a sense, the modern discipline of history begins with historians' adopting an approach that considers history as the objective and evidence-based study of the past, often but not always with an emphasis on causes and effects. Many subdisciplines of history have little interest in causation as such, but this formulation is useful when considering what is meant by "a history of the French Revolution" or "a history of abolitionism," for instance. This requires understanding how to use evidence from the past; that is, understanding that because people of the past had access to different information than the historian does, and operated from a different framework and with different agendas than the historian does, that the contemporary accounts they left cannot be read only at face value. Objectivity means knowing what to make of attitudes recorded and reflected in the past, whether explicit or implicit.

A reasonable analogy is considering the work of a court of law in sorting out what really happened at the scene of an accident, based on the testimony of two drivers involved in it (whose interests are mutually exclusive), witnesses, experts' examination of the accident site, and police reports: while every party's statements are useful, their motivation and access to information must be considered, as must the judge or jury's own relevant knowledge of the world.

Von Ranke himself identified presentism—for which there wasn't yet a name—as one of the problems with doing history. When he first coined his famous phrase, wie es eigentlich gewesen, it was specifically to eschew the aspiration of "judging the past." Withholding judgment does not, however, mean refusing to interpret the past, though the line between interpretation and judgment can be unclear. Van Ranke was hostile to two strains of thought common in historians and philosophers of his century: the transposition of modern modes of thought to the past (presentism), and views of history that marginalize human agency in favor of irrevocable cultural or spiritual forces that drive events.

The latter strain has taken many forms: Christian and Muslim historians commonly wrote histories in which the will of God or the culmination of prophecy was the real agentic force of historical events, with humans' roles reduced to playing out what had been assigned to them. Even in and after the Enlightenment, some historians and philosophers treated history as the product of ideas more than the work of individuals. The "Great Man" school of history dominated American history in the nineteenth century, and constructed history as principally the work of specific individuals of heroic stature.

A more recent development in history, beginning immediately after World War II but especially coming to the fore in the 1970s, is the "cultural turn," a new emphasis in the social sciences on the study of culture. In history, for instance, this meant not simply looking at either historical events or historical trends, but the ways that cultural forces in various times shaped things like perceptions of gender, race, or emotion. The cultural turn has been instrumental both in highlighting the problems of presentism and, paradoxically, inviting presentist views, as discussions of how cultures of the past handled gender, for example, are often explicitly or unconsciously discussions of what the past did wrong.

Issues

One form of presentism is the approach to history that is sometimes called Whig history or triumphalism. This is the view of history as not only a series of inevitable developments, but also of inevitable improvements. The present day, barring the effects of short-term developments, is by definition the ideal era and history consists of a continual process of improvements leading to this moment. The term "Whig history" comes from British historian Herbert Butterfield's 1931 book The Whig Interpretation of History, in which he condemned this view because it distorted the past, emphasizing those elements that seemed to foreshadow the present while dismissing other elements as irrelevant or aberrant. He chose the term because of the historians who were affiliated with the Whig Party of Britain, making it less than ideal as a general term, but it is still frequently found over its more neutral alternative triumphalism.

While bias has been a problem in historiography from the beginning, one reason presentism has become such an issue in history is because the idea of "the modern" was invented around the same time that history became secularized. As a result, as historians moved away from writing history with prophecy and other religious concepts as a guide, it was easy for them to move toward "the modern" as the standard by which to measure the past. This idea of the modern, and its inklings of triumphalism, is so ingrained that the layperson often does not realize that it is not simply an aspect of human experience. The idea of history as a succession of fundamental changes—specifically, as more than just a list of events, but as a list of periods, each denoted by different technological, cultural, and economic realities—is relatively new, and owes much to the rapid technological changes of the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Before that, the average person—and many scholars, including historians—did not really understand that people of the historical past had led drastically different lives from their own. Shakespeare's historical plays, for instance, depict an ancient Rome that is indistinguishable from Elizabethan England except in the structure of its government. The rate of scientific and cultural change had been slow enough that it was rarely observed in a person's lifetime; for that matter, the stories people would hear from their grandparents did not reflect an experience of the world so different from their own. The idea that the overall trend of history had been one of technological or social improvements over a long timeline would have been foreign to the overwhelming majority of citizens of the past; if anything, most held to the opposite idea, that there had once been a Golden Age and history had been a process of degradation over time. Cultural myths are steeped in Golden Age thinking, from the legend of lost Atlantis to the treatment of the united monarchy period of Israel in the Hebrew Bible.

Presentism is also sometimes used to refer to the tendency since about the 1990s to direct more attention in history classes to recent history. While the general device of examining the recent antecedents to current events has long been a way to interest students in history or to introduce them to in-depth historical analysis that requires little in the way of prerequisite knowledge, the study of the twentieth century had become significantly more in vogue by the turn of the century. The primary sources available for the twentieth century are much more varied, due to technological innovations that make, for instance, audio recordings available, whereas they are not in studies of the Renaissance. More care has been taken in the twentieth century to preserve materials for the historical record, even materials like popular culture and personal letters that previous generations considered disposable; authors and scholars regularly donate their notes and letters to universities or libraries for cataloguing and safe-keeping. There are also advantages such as the relative lack of a language barrier in studying the recent past. The post-World War II interest in colonialism and imperialism drives history as much as it did political science and economics.

However, some historians have suggested that another factor in this shift of focus to the recent past is that the recent past is more relatable, both for students and for historians. There is a sense in which the recent past is "our" past to a degree that is not true of the Vedic period of India, Roman Britain, or pre-Columbian America. The way in which the recent past resonates with present day experiences may feed into the presentist bias—that is, that relatability makes it easy to see the past as setting the table for our experience of the present.

Presentism is also connected to the idea of technological determinism, a framework associated with sociologists like Thorstein Veblen, Clarence Ayres, and Karl Marx. Technological determinism views the technology of a given society as the factor that determines its values and structure. This in turn can easily lead to a presentist bias, whereby because the technology of the past was less advanced than that of the present, certain flaws must result in the culture of the past as well.

Terms & Concepts

Anachronistic: Belonging to a different time; in written works or film, the presence or mention of something that in reality post-dated the time period in which it is portrayed.

Cultural Turn: A phenomenon in the humanities and social sciences from the 1970s through the 1990s in which focus was shifted to culture, however that was appropriate for a given discipline; in history this meant a new interest in exploring the cultures of the past rather than just (but not to the exclusion of) the causes and effects of events of the past.

Historiography: The study of the work of historians, including the "history of history," which is to say, the development over time of the scholarly approach to history; also used to refer to a body of historians' work on a given area of study, such as "the historiography of the Maritime Provinces" or "the historiography of ancient Rome."

Triumphalism: The idea that a particular system or idea eventually triumphs over alternatives for reasons of innate superiority; the triumphalist view of history is in essence that of Whig history.

Whig History: An approach to history that treats it as a constant process of progressive improvement, so-named for the British Whig political party.

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Suggested Reading

Ingram, D. (2016). The virtues of thisness presentism. Philosophical Studies, 173(11), 2867–2888.

Osborne, R. (2017). Classical presentism. Past & Present, 234(1), 217–226. Retrieved November 1, 2017, from EBSCO Sociology Source Ultimate http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=121171654&site=ehost-live

Steffen, M. (2017). Willful times: Unpredictability, planning, and presentism among entrepreneurs in a central Chinese city. Economic Anthropology, 4(2), 251–262. Retrieved January 1, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=124032041&site=ehost-live

Thompson, D. F. (2010). Representing future generations: Political presentism and democratic trusteeship. Critical Review of International Social & Political Philosophy, 13(1), 17–37. Retrieved November 1, 2017, from EBSCO Sociology Source Ultimate http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=48794936&site=ehost-live

Walsham, A. (2017). Viewpoints: Presentism introduction: Past and . . . presentism. Past & Present, 234(1), 213–217. Retrieved January 1, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=121171653&site=ehost-live