In this year’s edition of the Casanova-dedicated journal Casanoviana is an article put together by Dave on the dangers of presentism in history and which is reproduced below.
Dave Thompson
Casanova and The Presentism Trap
‘Abuse was and is abuse – always.’ This was the response of one academic upon reading my recent book on Giacomo Casanova, Casanova’s Life & Times (2023). What’s more, this is an academic who works in a history-related field. The book seeks to open a window into Casanova’s life and into eighteenth-century Europe generally. In the first chapter, which is the book’s longest, I go to some pains to give the reader an idea of how the lived experience of eighteenth-century Europeans differed from those of modern Europeans, including aspects of their moral outlook. I draw attention to the levels of poverty, the impact of debt, the scarcity of food, the prevalence of violence and the arbitrary nature of justice. I touch on their understanding of medicine and their attitudes towards sexuality. And I discuss issues such as consent, paedophilia and incest, and how their moral significance was regarded in some ways very differently compared to today. Despite me having written that ‘today, Casanova’s behaviour would be seriously criminal,’ the same academic remarks that I may be perceived as ‘seemingly excusing abuse.’ Rather like light pollution interfering with the measurements of earthbound astronomical observatories, presentism has a habit of distorting our understanding of the past in ways that are profoundly unhelpful.
Twenty-two years ago Lynn Hunt, president of the American Historical Association, warned against the dangers of presentism – the urge to judge the past through modern tinted spectacles.1 Two decades later, that warning having seemingly gone unheeded, another president of the AHA, James H Sweet, decided it was time to repeat the message. Alas for Sweet, we are living in a less straightforward and forgiving age. A fulsome apology to the membership swiftly followed, along with a resolution ‘to redeem myself in future conversations with you all.’2 The beads of perspiration dripping from the president’s brow are evident in every syllable, dash, dot and comma.
I find this all very baffling. Imagine disinterring the three-centuries old corpse of a parent accused of neglect for having sent their young child off to work bird scaring. Then the cadaver is hauled before a modern-day court for trial and sentencing. That, for me, is presentism: anachronistic and pointless. And yet…and yet…it’s a trap into which so many people not only fall but seemingly rush to embrace.
I had an exchange with a recently published historian of the British Empire. They were clear that the Empire was bad, and that they were going to set about showing it. This was the moral filter through which they described the past and which was happily in accord with their own belief system. They were completely open about it. In fact, they didn’t believe it was possible to examine the past in any other way. Moral preconceptions, for them, were built into any historian’s analysis of the past. If you were unaware of it or believed otherwise, then the more fool you. The danger of such a mindset, of course, is the temptation to adopt the Procrustean method of historical investigation – the bed has been made and, by God, the past is going to lie on it. Bits of the past at any rate. Another danger is that for such history influencers the ante for them has now been significantly upped. It’s not only their reading of the past which has been staked but their worldview. If their interpretation of the past is discredited then what does that say about their understanding of the here and now? Presentism becomes a sword that cuts both ways. As past and present blur into each other, with so much skin in the game academics morph into political activists.
Feeding into presentism, I suspect, is the fashion for claiming that it is ‘impossible to be objective’. It is an assertion which one can hear being made by academics across the humanities and social sciences. It seemingly endorses subjectivity. This is rather peculiar, based, as it appears to be, on an interpretation of the word ‘objective’ which is at odds with the morphology of the word itself. The ‘-ive’ suffix means ‘tending to’. In this sense, to be ‘objective’ is to ‘tend towards the object.’ The suggested meaning is relative, not absolute. Now words are flexible, and if a particular speech community wants to insist on interpreting ‘objective’ to be absolute then so be it. But even in that case, what is the point of such a disclaimer? Who in their right mind would harbour the belief that academics of empirical disciplines had access to ‘objective’ knowledge in an absolute sense? In reality, the declaration that it is ‘impossible to be objective’ strikes me as little more than a disingenuous virtue signal to demonstrate the intellectual modesty of the speaker. Unfortunately, it has the side effect of devaluing the importance of dispassionate analysis, and gives license to those whose primary desire is to ride their hobbyhorse.
Now let’s try and think through the implications of this impulse to project one’s own attitudes on to the lives of our forebears. One question to ask is how reliable are our moral intuitions? Can we assume the existence of underlying moral absolutes or, if we don’t want to go that far, at least ethical assumptions that have stood the test of time? Are the principles of right and wrong that guide our behaviours almost unthinkingly a sufficient basis upon which to pass judgement about the behaviours of our ancestors. The answer, at least in the West, is probably not. True, there are many similarities and consistencies as you would expect. But there are also significant differences. Plenty of the beliefs of eighteenth-century Europeans and earlier have more in common with antiquity than they do with the modern day. Here are a few examples of the ways in which their understanding of the world diverges from ours: individual status and rights; people as property; hierarchical violence; the roles of men and women; the importance of the household relative to the family; conceptions of childhood and adulthood; how the human body works; the nature and origin of the universe; political and domestic sovereignty; and the ubiquity of supernatural beings and forces. The notions underpinning all of these and more played out in the warp and weft of daily life. They shaped people’s actions and their beliefs about how things ought to be or ought not to be. Familiarity with modern codes of morality has a habit of breeding contempt for the past. Instead of recognising the challenges faced by those who came before us we have a tendency to view them as inferior versions of ourselves, rather in the way that children were once viewed by some as essentially diminutive adults.
Then there is the added complication of who or what we are judging: the individual or the period in which they lived. How many people, respected as exemplary members of their communities, have been censured for failing to measure up, in the eyes of some, to the standards of today? And what sense does it make to attempt to judge a whole society or historical age or movement – even if we’re capable of defining it? In the past, as now, and as always will be, the moral battleground has been a fiercely contested space. Should Jesuits, Jansenists, Libertines and Masons all be tarred with the same brush or should we take into account their own sets of values?
What seems so normal and ‘right’ to us, axiomatic even, only a few generations ago was anything but. Consider homosexuality, so present in Casanova’s memoirs. In the 1950s in much of the West, homosexuality was illegal and deemed by many to be depraved. Today that is a minority view and the law has changed. Would it have been legitimate for an historian of the time to have used such unexceptional, contemporary moral norms as the foundation for their history of, say, ancient Athens, where homosexuality carried little stigma? Would such an historian be seeking to explain how such self-evident depravity could flourish amongst these Greeks? Afterall, ‘Abuse was and is abuse – always.’ Would they go on to demonstrate the broader pernicious effects of such moral deviancy upon the society as a whole? Of course, they would be left to reconcile how the Athens of Pericles and Plato attained such astonishing political and cultural pre-eminence. But where’s there a will…
What about today? How far should we let our present ethical concerns guide our judgements about the past? Casanova makes a number of references to sexual relationships involving both others and himself with girls from the age of eleven to mid-teens. He mentions the 13-year-old mistress of the Duke of Albermarle and the 13-year-old wife of Yusuf Ali. Typically, the age of consent across Europe and the US into the nineteenth century was from 10 to 12 years of age. In Delaware in the US, it was 7. In 1800, 63-year-old Sir John Acton married his 13-year-old niece Mary-Ann. What’s more, he obtained a dispensation to do so from Europe’s highest moral authority – the pope. In England and Wales incest between a parent and child was not a secular offence until 1908. It was a matter that was left to the ecclesiastical courts, and those who were convicted were treated leniently. Casanova himself had sexual relations with his 26-year-old daughter and his 13-year-old niece. On several occasions Casanova mentions castrati, male singers who were castrated before puberty to preserve the unique qualities of their singing voice. Hierarchical violence and vigilante justice are a commonplace in Casanova’s narratives. Do we need to bother ourselves with the reasons why societies at times tolerated and even encouraged such behaviour? Or is it sufficient to conclude that the world prior to the twentieth century was composed of moral monsters?
This raises another question. Whose morality are we using? What moral framework do we adopt – that of the Marxist, the Muslim, the Catholic, the Christian fundamentalist, the atheist, the capitalist, the liberal, the critical social justice advocate, the boomer, the centrist? Who gets to choose which is the legitimate moral lens through which to filter and arrange our understanding of the past? Does each group have their own catalogue of history books, tuned to reflect their particular outlook? And will all these bespoke histories have to be re-written each generation or so as attitudes and laws change? Will we have the noughties vegan’s history of Athens updated with the 2020 vegan’s history of Athens? Does history become a free-for-all?
There is no reason why a Marxist or Catholic or any of the others in the above list cannot interrogate the past to consider aspects of history that are of particular importance to them, using their own ideological or cultural interests as a guide. And there’s no reason why they shouldn’t draw on their present-day moral frameworks as starting points for their enquiry as long as they are willing to rethink them in the light of the incongruities they will almost inevitably encounter. It may be that some kind of bias does inadvertently creep in. Data has to be edited, selected and assessed after all. Decisions have to be taken on some basis. Significance, or lack of, has to be weighed. But that is not the same as explicitly making judgements about the past based on a group’s present-day values, and wilfully ignoring the inconsistencies that arise as a consequence. Intent is important.
The treatment of Casanova provides a good illustration of how mistrust fuelled by modern expectations can lead people to gloss over discrepancies in the evidence. His relationship with women has been described as manipulative. Now that might seem plausible if we isolate certain aspects of his behaviour and consider them in the light of attitudes today. But we now have to explain the fact that he possessed a strong duty of care towards women, even women with whom he was not romantically involved, that he was willing to take considerable personal risks to help them, that on the whole he very much admired women, that when he met up with ex-lovers and their husbands he appears to have been received very warmly, and that the charge of manipulating women would seem to contradict some of his clearly held beliefs and principles. Now you might be able to explain all of that and stick to your claim, but you cannot ignore it.
Once upon a time the moral-bunfight approach to history was the norm. The past was a pick-and-mix buffet to be drawn upon, or even made up, in the service of narratives that favoured this or that religion, state or leader: ‘They invented descriptions of battles, and inserted direct speeches which gave moral lessons to the reader and many other things which are unacceptable in modern critical history.’3 From the Renaissance and into the Enlightenment such practices began to change as scholars made genuine attempts to understand the past, gradually freeing themselves from the shackles of extraneous agendas, especially religious ones. For religion, God is the imperturbable answer and the questions follow. For history, questions come first and the answers are often uncertain. When historians prioritise their personal morality, history becomes religion and the truth becomes little more than an article of faith. Public trust in institutions has already taken a battering, and confidence is unlikely to return anytime soon if academics continue to leave themselves open to the charge of ideological bias.
Presentism threatens to submerge the past beneath the preoccupations of sensitivity readers and authorised discourse. It is a form of narcissism that over-simplifies and obscures. It dulls an open-minded engagement with human complexity. The past is filled with societies that we have an opportunity to explore and discover. Making ahistorical judgements about them isn’t going to bring you one step closer to understanding them. More likely you will go backwards. Unquestioned moral assumptions will become a barrier to thinking, and productive of little more than condescension. Inconsistencies will be papered over with dead-eyed, dead-end cynicism and conspiracy-style theorising. Instead of a window into the past, history becomes a mirror on the present, the writer full square and centre.
Notes
- Hunt, Lyn, ‘Against Presentism’, Perspectives on History, Vol 40, Issue 5, May 2002
- Sweet, James H, Author’s note to ‘Is History History?’, Perspectives on History, Vol 60, Issue 6, September 2022
- Cerman, Ivo, Casanova: Enlightenment Philosopher, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016, p. 43
