Over-Examining the Past Through Present Eyes

The most recent Review section of the Wall Street Journal's weekend edition has a piece titled "An American Icon the Almost Wasn't" -- dealing with the Lincoln Memorial and its famous statue.

I found much of it interesting, while other parts bothered me.  Its writer, Harold Holzer, who works at New York City's Hunter College, spent far too much space regarding the lack of reference to Blacks and slavery in the quotations chiseled on the structure's walls.  Had he mentioned it once and let it go at that, it would have been fine in my opinion: his point would have been made.

These days the political left -- including most of non-science academia such as Holzer -- strikes me as being obsessed with race.  I suspect the overly-done virtue signaling Holzer did might have a means of self-protection from potential wrath from his peer group.  That is, Holzer was doing his best to demonstrate that he wasn't a racist to the detriment of what otherwise was a nice article.

Shifter to a broader perspective, it's probably nearly impossible to view the past free of current experience and points of view.  I think it's perfectly fine when a writer's stated goal is to compare and contrast, say, daily life in early Imperial Rome with daily life in today's San Francisco.  Also fine is placing a past case in the perspective of its history and its future.

What increasingly bothers me is when writers fail to try to place themselves in the context of their subject's times.  Which is not to say that Vlad the Impaler's or Those Jefferson's contexts justified all that they did.  But some care should be taken to explain those contexts that, just like present contexts, greatly influenced their attitudes and deeds.

After all, those in the future might well consider academic and political belief systems in present-day America as being being ridiculous or perhaps even ghastly.