Attempting to debunk "man / product of his time" argument

[sasha_feather]

Saving my tweets on this as I think it through.

The "Man of his time" argument assumes that everyone in that time period felt the same way. Erases nuance and difference.

It also erases experiences of dissents and marginalized people. Those people existed even if history has forgotten them. (For example: I learned from Rachel Maddow tonight that Vince Lombardi was pro-gay and had a gay brother. He was a famous football coach that lived from 1913-1970).

Me and my friends don't hold the prevailing views of mainstream society. I don't think of us as "products of our time."

This argument also assumes that society progresses forward thru time, that people in the past were worse. Which is not true. (History does not go forward in a upward line. It's more like a sine wave maybe.)

We are all influenced by our time and society, but we can all think critically and listen to our consciences re right and wrong.

Saying that someone was "a product of their time" is usually just apologism for their bad behaviors.

If something is wrong today, it was wrong 100 years ago. (Ethical behaviors, possibly, have some standards across societies and times, even if morals are relative. Have to think on this more.)

Just because people in power endorsed it, doesn't make it OK for everyone else in society to do so.

Comments

[naraht]

Hmmm. I would prefer to say that all of us, you and I included, are products of our time - the culture of social justice activism via social media seems distinctively twenty-first century to me, even though it's hardly what you might call "mainstream culture."

The argument "he was a product of his time" is toxic 95% of the time, but I would say it's equally wrong (if not perhaps equally toxic) to judge people in the past as having been bad people if their views didn't match up to the yardstick of twenty-first century progressivism. Because I for one doubt that my views would have been exactly the same if I had lived a hundred years ago, to say nothing of further in the past.

It seems to me that you have to view an individual person's ideology within the context of the range of ideologies and mental models available to them in their period. So I'm not particularly surprised that someone born in 1913 could be pro-gay - history hasn't forgotten people like that at all, although popular knowledge of that history may not be up to scratch. I wouldn't be surprised to find British people arguing for women's suffrage in 1850, but if that's your definition of critical thinking and conscience then you're going to be very disappointed in 1750, or even in 1800 with the possible exception of Mary Wollstonecraft. There's a danger in holding out a very groundbreaking thinker like Wollstonecraft and saying "see, someone thought this, therefore everyone in the period could/would have thought this if they were ethical or conscientious people." I think of myself as a decently progressive person and my views are certainly "ahead" of mainstream society in most areas, but I don't flatter myself that I have the personal strength and distinctive thinking of a Wollstonecraft. I would have been a suffragette and a socialist in 1900, absolutely - maybe even in 1850. But there's really very little chance that I would have been waving those banners in 1750, and I don't find it problematic to accept that.

[oursin]

(Via dwcircle) And sometimes there's the Wilberforce Problem of contradictions: yay for his efforts antislavery, boo for his record on UK working class suffering the Industrial Revolution (and people pointed that disjunct at the time).

[spiralsheep]

(Also here via dwircle) Wilberforce wasn't as "anti-slavery" as you might have been taught. Let's hear it for the women, such as Elizabeth Heyrick:

http://spartacus-educational.com/REheyrick.htm

/it's always more complicated

[oursin]

Well, yes, plus the way individuals of that era could be antislavery but still racist in their basic assumptions.