A pretty good segment on Bill Maher’s show last night where he criticizes a view of history called presentism. That term made news last month when the current president of the American Historical Association, James H. Sweet, wrote a column for the group’s magazine criticizing presentism. Here’s a bit of what he said:
Our interpretations of the recent past collapse into the familiar terms of contemporary debates, leaving little room for the innovative, counterintuitive interpretations.
This trend toward presentism is not confined to historians of the recent past; the entire discipline is lurching in this direction, including a shrinking minority working in premodern fields. If we don’t read the past through the prism of contemporary social justice issues—race, gender, sexuality, nationalism, capitalism—are we doing history that matters? This new history often ignores the values and mores of people in their own times, as well as change over time, neutralizing the expertise that separates historians from those in other disciplines.
Sweet also criticized the 1619 Project:
When I first read the newspaper series that preceded the book, I thought of it as a synthesis of a tradition of Black nationalist historiography dating to the 19th century with Ta-Nehisi Coates’s recent call for reparations. The project spoke to the political moment, but I never thought of it primarily as a work of history.
A subset of historians had a full freak out over the essay:
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Cate Denial, a professor of history at Knox College, led the charge with a widely-retweeted thread calling on colleagues to bombard the AHA’s Executive Board with emails protesting Sweet’s column. “We cannot let this fizzle,” she declared before posting a list of about 20 email addresses.
Other activist historians joined in, flooding the thread with profanity-laced attacks on Sweet’s race and gender as well as calls for his resignation over a disliked opinion column. The responses were almost universally devoid of any substance. None challenged Sweet’s argument in any meaningful way.
And in entirely predictable fashion, Sweet apologized and the apology was added to the top of his essay. So that’s the backstory for Maher’s rant about presentism last night. He mentions Sweet in passing but most of this is a comedian’s take connecting this idea to wokeism. Maher says at one point, “Being woke is like a magic moral time machine where you judge everybody against what you would have done in 1066 and you always win.” He continued,” Presentism. Yeah this professor is right. It’s just a way to congratulate yourself about being better than George Washington because you have a gay friend and he didn’t. But if he was alive today he would too. And if you were alive then, you wouldn’t.”
Maher does take some shots at the right including calling the Bible a manual for slavery, but 95% of this is clearly aimed at the woke left. He has some good lines in this.
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