Studying History While Ignoring Zeitgeist
Studying History While Ignoring Zeitgeist
Also known as "presentism"
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I riffed this from a Mark Lewis article. With apologies…
The word comes from German.
The term drives from two German words: zeit-time, and Geist-ghost or spirit. It means the spirit or mood, the accepted ideas and beliefs of a particular period of history. The term suggests every human and their actions are products of their times, their present culture, the way they see the world…then.
The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
LP Hartley
In every period of history, a certain model of thinking influences the age. It's impossible to separate ourselves from our zeitgeist because it surrounds us every day. We grow up learning it and absorbing it. It is the inescapable environment universally acknowledged and rarely questioned—even if it’s “wrong” in a later time.
Christopher Columbus lived in a very different time.
We don’t approve of many things Columbus and his fellow New World explorers did, but that’s not relevant to the study of the past. Some in our time are especially vocal and demonstrative in their condemnation of the Columbus generations. But their zeitgeist differed completely from ours; people in his time wouldn’t approve of much of what we do, either. They saw no dichotomy between converting the heathen and taking their gold. Such a dichotomy is abhorrent to us, but we didn’t grow up with their zeitgeist. The people of Columbus’s age “sinned” and knew they were doing so, just as we do (or we should, anyway).
To understand the past, we must understand their zeitgeist.
The Aztecs whom the Spaniards conquered were hardly exemplary; human sacrifices instead of a communion and all that. We should learn from, but not simply condemn, them because their culture, education, and surroundings—zeitgeist—were completely unlike ours. Failing to even attempt to comprehend previous people’s thoughts is unjustified, pointless and little more than annoying to those of us studying the past. Reading modern viewpoints and opinions back into history is presentism, and doing so helps or changes nothing other than to confirm ignorance of zeitgeist and historical thinking.
I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races...I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races from living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be a position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.
Abraham Lincoln, 1858
While repulsive today, this was the zeitgeist of Lincoln’s time. In Lincoln’s day, Harvard University had done a study of human skull sizes in his time, and discovered that the average skull size of a black person was smaller than that of a white person. People in Lincoln’s era (and even into the early 20th Century) believed that the bigger your brain, the smarter you were. Whites are superior to blacks because they have larger brains! Science proved it in the 19th Century! Now we know that brain size has nothing to do with intelligence, but that was the science of Lincoln’s day, and he would have been unscientific of him to reject it. How can we condemn him if that was the zeitgeist of his age? What we should do is try to understand and learn from that zeitgeist. Before learning anything else, historians should undergo training to recognize zeitgeist.
Rising above our zeitgeist is challenging.
If we had lived in Columbus’s Spain (or Italy) in 1492, or Lincoln’s Illinois in 1858, we would surely have believed the same things they did. Not even historians can get over it perfectly, though we mightily try. Some of us can see the past from the perspective of the past, but it takes a great deal of work. Many Americans’ thinking has become dominated by “progressive” ideology. A hypocrisy inherent in that thinking is to condemn anyone who lived before who might foil their “progressive” project—Columbus, America’s Founding Fathers, though rarely Lincoln, for rather obvious reasons.
People study history for one of two reasons: to understand the present and guide the future, or to punish the present with the “sins” of the past.
John D. Beatty
Zeitgeist arises out of our past and is built into our present. It’s a process, not just an event, and takes time to develop. It’s infrequently imposed on us, and when it is, it’s pretty obvious and often rejected. Columbus and Cortez did not invent the dichotomy they lived in regarding converting the heathen and stealing their gold. We haven’t arrived at our present zeitgeist overnight, either.
Different cultures had/have different zeitgeists.
Human or child sacrifice was an acceptable zeitgeist among the Aztecs and many other ancient civilizations, as was slavery, polygamy, war, and a few other currently frowned-upon customs. Hatred of human inequality and racism are zeitgeists of nearly every culture in history and are clear today in DEI ideology, but is conditional about which identity or discrimination is “wrong,” something hard to verify in the past as anything but hypocrisy. Columbus’s and Lincoln’s zeitgeist accepted a world created by God, something modern sophisticate’s zeitgeist rejects in favor of Darwinian-based naturalism. Middle Eastern Muslim fundamentalists reject most of our zeitgeist and would throw Gays for Palestine off a roof. Does that make them somehow “wrong?” Wait…that’s Islamophobia…if you bring that up in the wrong circles. Zeitgeist haunts us yet again.
Thinking of zeitgeist as only a benign spirit is also probably wrong.
Think of zeitgeist as a malignant ghost, too, that haunts the record of the past and hates how those who condemn Columbus and Lincoln later because they didn’t think in “modern” terms, and share our “modern” sensibilities. After all, doesn’t everybody have their own versions of “truth” nowadays? But that “truth” is more visceral and personal than interpretations of the past that some vocal moderns don’t understand and want to condemn, if for no other reason than to visit the sins of the fathers upon their sons.
The Past Not Taken: Three Novellas
Working historians have to work against their current zeitgeist constantly. Where they see it most is when they’re trying to teach it, and clean out old archives.
In classes, in papers, in books and articles, zeitgeist is the eternal enemy of historical analysis and description. But what if the record is wrong? Available at your favorite bookseller or from me if you want an autograph.
Coming Up…
When Philosophy Meets History, History Wins
World War I Reconsidered
And Finally...
On 20 July:
1911: The first around-the-world telegram is sent and received at the offices of the New York Times in New York, New York via commercial wires. The message was “This message sent around the world,” and took 16 and a half minutes from the first key to last tap.
1988: An Iran/Iraq cease-fire goes into effect in the Persian Gulf, ending a cross-border conflict that had lasted for eight years. Ostensively fought over access to the Shat-el-Arab waterway and the Al-Faw Peninsula between them, the casualty count is to this day unclear, but probably well over a million on both sides. At one point, unarmed school children were being used to sweep mines by marching over them.
And today is INTERNATIONAL DAY OF MEDICAL TRANSPORTERS. These intrepid and quiet heroes take you where their charges need to go in as much comfort as they can manage.
Lincoln is a bit of an enigma. We have to remember he was walking a tightrope concerning slavery. We can't presume he was saying precisely what he was thinking.