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The difference is, "woke" history is "whig" history - trying to read back present day moral notions and fashions back into the past as if they were objective (they're not). Actual good history doesn't sugarcoat the past; it immerses you in it so you can understand the actual norms and mores of the time and thus figure out for yourself who was being a giant piece of shit given the society they were in.
It's like trying to have a conversation across a language barrier. Woke history assumes that the phonemes " /ˈnɪɡə(ɹ)/" are always and forever a fighting-words-tier slur, because they are in standard contemporary American english...but doesn't bother to figure out whether or not the person they're talking to in fact speaking chinese or korean.
I think that some moral notions are close enough to being objective that only a genuine psychopath would seriously question them. For example, all else being equal, it is more moral to not torture people for fun than it is to torture people for fun. This was as true 2000 years ago as it is now.
That said, I agree that history is best when it is amoral. It is interesting to study the history of morality, but high-quality history does not base itself on moral arguments. It should be the study of what happened, not whether what happened is right or wrong.
Would an aztec have agreed? Would a mongol? An Iroquois? Any random european who went to a public breaking on the wheel?
It does not matter whether they would have agreed or not. Morality is not a democracy.
I think this gets a lot easier when you use virtue ethics. In general, humans have almost always been in favour of courage, wisdom, having an appropriate attitude to one's station in life, religious devotion, and generosity to whatever sized circle is considered appropriate (family, tribe, village, ..., species, universe). They have generally been against cowardice, selfishness, stupidity, arrogance, etc.
What changes between societies is how these things manifest and how they are weighted in the case of trade-offs.
(Sorry, this should really be a much longer and more detailed post but I didn't want to let the point escape).
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But wait, you said that "only genuine psychopaths" would question these ideas. Are you claiming that just about everyone was psychopathic back then?
Everyone who thought it was ok to torture people purely for fun certainly was. The ones who believed that it had to be done to appease the gods at least have an excuse. But anyone back then who was doing it purely because they enjoyed it was psychopathic by my standards.
Yes, and I'm sure you and I are pathologically weak and squeamish by theirs. Great, now there's mutual excommunications on both sides and still nothing other than everyone's own entirely subjective ipse dixit to say who's allegedly "objective."
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I think you've assumed that I think that critical theory is the only type of academic history? It's part of this "overcorrection" that I see that whenever a historical figure is pointed out as being not worthy of our praise, it must be "woke".
This is pretty much explicitly what I did not mean when I said "academic history". Academic history is digging up primary texts, learning obscure languages and scripts, and doing a lot of the dirty work that others may consider unimportant because it represents a fraction of a fraction of the story of human history.
I find actual "good" history to be incredibly boring. It's basically translating and regurgitating primary texts (as previously mentioned). There's very little immersion. Primary texts are awful - humans were not particularly great at forming narratives before Gutenberg. Some of my shopping lists have more narrative complexity than some of the primary texts I've been exposed to.
I think Columbus would be my pet example of anti-woke overcorrection. His contemporaries found him to be a giant piece of shit. Lots of people around him were saying, "Damn, Columbus, slow the fuck down with the atrocities." But he did something notable - he dug up the funding for a moonshot project for which many sponsors doubted the ROI. So his name got slapped on everything. Pop history (grade school-level history) gave a very uncritical treatment of him for decades. But his shittiness, even for his times, is pretty obvious in the primary texts - one does not need to use critical theory or employ "whig" history to figure that out.
(Tangential hot take: give Italian Americans their own holiday worthy of their community's cultural spirit, and Columbus will disappear.)
I appreciate your comment though, because this line did really make me give pause while writing my reply. Personally, I do think there are some universal morals that do transcend time, but at times throughout history it was simply not feasible to act in accordance with those universal morals: there's only enough food for 3 families to survive the winter but there are 4 families in the village. Should we judge people who were otherwise great, except for "universal moral" failings that were simply a product of their time?
I'm totally fine with future generations being appalled at me for continuing to consume factory-farmed meat even though I know the immense suffering that it causes near-human-level intelligence animals, so I guess I will continue judging people of the past because I have a feeling that deep down, they knew better.
You gave them the whole continent - it's named after Amerigo Vespucci. It isn't clear whether John Cabot, who was an Italian living in England, or Vespucci, who actually discovered America. But both reached the main continental landmass before Columbus did.
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Too late. This might have been true in 1900 but it's too late for that.
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I don't know what you think; I gave a proposed definition for how to determine whether academic history is "woke" or not.
The "overcorrection" isn't happening in the academy; it's happening in public, who as I'm sure you know by and large don't really do actual history. Instead, pop history is a sort of secular cultural catechesis and mythopoetics; pulling together a narrative for the in-group to anchor its sense of identity to, and affirming the moral worth of that narrative.
The really good ones manage to piece together narratives from those primary documents. Like, no-one ever accused Ferdinand Braudel of being compulsively readible, but he manages to take all the grain prices and trader's manifests and censuses of windmills and meld all of it into fascinating insights into every day life in historical Europe. Biography can be similar, getting you in the subject's head and humanizing them across the centuries and gulfs of cultural differences.
Agreed, but it needs to be a catholic too.
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