“Lest we forget” is carved into stone in village squares, town halls and city monuments up and down the country: a warning that disregarding our history is a betrayal of those who made the ultimate sacrifice in war.
Remembering is one thing. Learning is entirely another. One of our most pernicious social diseases is our stubborn refusal to learn from past mistakes. Central to this is a single dangerous idea: that we should not judge the past by the moral standards of the present. Two thirds of people are said to believe this. It’s the response rolled out to criticisms of British elites throughout history, from Cromwell to Churchill and beyond. It’s the immediate put-down to any suggestion that we should stop celebrating Britain’s darkest moments by filling our public spaces with statues of slavers and colonists, or that teachers should be allowed to tell kids about the darker aspects of our past.
No one has ever suggested studying history entirely from the modern context. But eliminating the modern standpoint is both bad history and foolish policy.
First, it’s (ironically) ahistorical. The “modern morals” argument implies practices like slavery or colonialism were justifiable by the standards of the time. This treats the (often self-serving) norms of elites as a general moral code and erases dissenters and liberation movements. In reality, practices like slavery and colonialism were highly controversial in their own time. Speaking at the trial of Warren Hastings, a colonial administrator accused of committing atrocities in India in 1788, Lord Erskine (the Prince of Wales’ Attorney General – hardly a “fringe” figure) argued that colonialism was, in and of itself, barbaric and would inevitably produce barbaric acts. Churchill’s racist views about Indian Hindus (“a beastly people with a beastly religion”) met widespread condemnation at the time, as did Cromwell’s massacres in Ireland. When the statue of Edward Colston was thrown into Bristol Harbour, the slaver’s defenders claimed it had been “erected by the people of Bristol”. In fact, the people of Bristol had refused to donate money for the statue. It was paid for by a small group of Colston’s wealthy friends.
If we don’t critically analyse historical decisions, it becomes impossible to learn from history
Second, eliminating the modern view from historical analysis prevents us from understanding the historical roots of modern injustice. Chaos in the Middle East, for example, has roots in colonialism. Palestine was governed (effectively occupied) by Britain until 1955. In 1927 the British Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, promised a Jewish “homeland” in Palestine without a worked-out strategy of how this could be achieved. Ultimately, British and Zionist forces forcibly removed thousands of Palestinians from their homes and massacred any who refused (and many who didn’t). This “Nakba” (“catastrophe”) forms an indelible part of the folk memory of the Palestinian people in much the same way the Holocaust does for their Israeli neighbours. It provides a bedrock of internal legitimacy for terrorist groups like Hamas. Balfour’s decision: to promise a land, already occupied by one people, to another, is crucial to understanding the modern political context in the Middle East. Recognising that it was imbued with the arrogance of an imperial Britain, which thought it had the right to hand out other nation’s homelands, would be a valuable exercise for both Western and Arab states which, today, are trying to do the same thing.
Third, judging people and decisions purely by the standards of their time is simply impossible. As the great historian E H Carr wrote, every historian is invariably a product of their own historical context. History tells us as much about the historian as the subject. Commentators who deploy the “standards of the time” argument tend to project their own politics back into history. Colonialism’s “standards of the time” defenders often seek to paint imperial Britain as a golden age, uncontaminated by modern decadence or wokeness.
If we don’t critically analyse historical decisions from our modern perspective, it becomes impossible to learn from history. “Learning” inevitably means making value judgments about what produces a “good”/“useful”/”positive” result and what doesn’t. The catastrophic Battle of the Somme tactic of walking slowly towards enemy machine guns, for example, was in line with the prevailing military tactics of the time. As the names carved into those stones attest, that didn’t make it a good idea. Witch burning, marital rape and piracy were all endorsed by the “standards of the time” at one point or another. Recognising these practices as barbaric is a necessary step in the progress of our social norms.
Perhaps the most important lesson we can learn from history is that history itself is a battleground. Experience, norms, memory, institutions and historical analysis indelibly shape the present. The only question is whether we recognise, and choose to depart from, the mistakes of the past.
Sam Fowles is a barrister, Director of the ICDR, and a lecturer at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. He tweets at @SamFowles
