Presentism does not facilitate or encourage an answer to (one of) the main historical question(s): "Why did these people do what they did?... what led them to that train of thought and chain of actions?"

History seeks understanding and comprehension, and that is best achieved in many cases by viewing the world not through the hind-sight of 21st century righteousness, but by trying to view and understand people and events in the contexts of their own times, places, and actions.

Sure, it's easy enough to say, "but Naziism was bad." Pretty low fruit, that. But what about... other historical questions? What happens if and when we start breaking off from the Modern Western morality spectrum altogether?

What happens when we start asking why Genghis Khan felt justified in doing what he did? Is a 21st Century "well, killing is bad and inhumane" presentist viewpoint going to help or hinder that answer? Or how about if we ask into An Lushan's justifications for killing 2/3 of the Chinese population in the 8th century? Or Alexander the Great's justifications for invading half of Asia?

Presentism isn't helpful because it is essentially a moral judgement. That's not helpful to history because history seeks to understand how andwhy, rather than seeking to place arbitrary blame against those who are no longer capable of explaining or defending themselves or their actions, in many cases.

Judging an ancient battlefield or political tangle from a modern perspective will render judgement, to be sure... but in doing so it will warp what actually happened and why it happened beyond any actual comprehension or meaning.

Something to keep in mind is that's a bit of an older post, and one that was written when the rules of the subreddit were still being hashed out. But that said, I would offer the simplest explanation that I can:

What's the point of passing moral judgment on past societies? And how much time do we have to waste on doing it? To quote a professor of mine from a historiography class, "if I'm writing a book about the Holocaust, how many pages do I have to spend detailing how awful it was? Don't the facts of the Holocaust speak for themselves?"

That's not a morally nihilistic stance, it's a pragmatic one that allows us to present events in their context without getting bogged down in determining the relative moral scale of past tragedies. We have a rueful term for questions that get asked here along the lines of "was genocide X worse than ethnic cleansing Y," -- we call it playing genocide Olympics, because it's an exercise that's fruitless, and to be frank somewhat masturbatory. The point of writing history, after all, is to explain events and ground them in their contemporary context, not pass judgment on how good or bad past events were.

I don't think that historians in general (or in this sub specifically) actually do embrace moral relativism or nihilism. The OP of that thread, who you're quoting there, is not a flaired user, nor do they seem to be particularly qualified to discuss the subject. For comparison, here is a user flaired in Spanish colonialism discussing Columbus and arguing that his actions are "absolutely indefensible" due to his violence, slaving, and genocide. This does not seem relativistic or nihilistic to me. For another example, look at the posts by users who study slavery in this subreddit, who are some of our best and most erudite flairs. People like /u/freedmenspatrol, /u/sowser, /u/dubstripsquads, and others do an excellent job of understanding the ideology, culture, and mentality of antebellum southern slaveowners, but understanding the mindset of American slaveowners does not equate to rationalizing away the abhorrent system of slavery.

Although historians are capable of and sometimes do make moral judgements on their subjects, there's also a limit to the utility of doing so. For a much more trite example than slavery or imperialism, the killing of the French prisoners at Agincourt is an infamous episode in medieval history. When discussing this event, does it actually add to our understanding of medieval combat and of the Hundred Years War to insert a footnote saying that stabbing wounded and disarmed prisoners is, in fact, a Bad Thing? The most interesting aspect of that event is that it was specifically not condemned by its contemporaries and was considered an acceptable part of warfare. Is it "morally nihilistic" to point out that medieval soldiers in 1415 would sometimes kill their prisoners without it being considered a war crime? I don't think we need an addendum to every book on premodern warfare explicitly stating that the murder, sexual violence, and theft that occurred during the sack of a city were morally bad things.

Given my specialty, I can share some thoughts on my approach to the subject:

I hope it is pretty obvious from my work in general and my posts here that I absolutely abhor the Nazis and what they did. They were criminals who committed horrible deeds by any moral standard. And they knew it, which is why they went to great lengths to hide it. And yet, on some level they did what they taught was right and necessary. That doesn't mean that it was objectively necessary and right when in fact it was the very opposite of that, but my job as a historian is to explore what factors lead to them thinking they were right and necessary. In my opinion my explaining of these factors does not portray that as right but rather is a contribution to how we can on some level recognize the factors leading to people thinking that doing something obviously wrong by any standard, i.e. committing genocide, in order to prevent similar factors and tendencies growing strong in contemporary society.

Taking one concrete and slightly different example from my line of work, I hope I can also show some problems that are associated with making moral judgement calls: The Judenräte. I describe them here but in essence, the Jewish councils were set-up by the Nazis to help them administer the Ghettos. On a regular basis, they had to make-up the lists of people who were to be deported to their deaths. Different Jewish councils approach this in different ways but here the perfidy of the Nazi system becomes obvious: They forced their victims to assist in their own murder. After the war was over, many members of these Jewish Councils, provided they had survived as well as those who didn't, were called traitors and collaborators. As were the Jewish members of the Sonderkommandos in the Camps, i.e. the people who had to clean the gas chambers of bodies and burn them.

The thing is, in 99.9% of all cases, I am confident in my moral judgement of the Nazi perpetrators. In the case of the Jewish councils however, I am entering a massive grey area morally where I feel confident in describing the moral dilemmas they faced but less confident in making a moral judgement call on their actions. They were people put in a morally impossible situation by genocidal maniacs and making a definitive moral judgment call on them is something that I don't feel I am able to do. I can describe the circumstances, I can analyze the historical factors and describe the dilemma they faced but I don't think that it is my place to morally condemn them. I can emphasize what could have been done differently in certain cases based on what others in the same situation historically did but that also is not the same as making a moral judgement.

I also don't think that qualifies as moral nihilism or relativism. It's merely that sometimes historians need to acknowledge that some historical situations were so impossible or difficult that it is best not to make the definitive judgement on morally correct actions.

Presentism imo is related but something different: Presentism is the projection of current concepts in way that makes historically little sense. To exemplify: When ratheists try to portray certain of their scientific heroes as atheists beacons or reason and rationality but fail to acknowledge that for someone like Galileo a world view without God would simply be unthinkable. Or to pick an example of a discussion recently in the area of studies of Nazi Germany: There was recent discussion whether in an effort to make German language more gender neutral, if it is necessary to write not of Wehrmachtsoldaten but of Wehrmachtsoldat_innen. The _ and female word ending usually used to signifying that peoples' gender identities are open to their own definition. Using both male and female endings to describe them as well as the _ to leave open an empty space for those who either reject male and female as identities or see themselves somewhere in between. While generally a nifty concept if you are into that, in the case of the German Wehrmacht it makes no sense because by its very organizational ethic, it was a very very male organization that instilled its members with values and ethos that was in gender terms codified as male. Thus, leaving room for alternate identities without empirical evidence that they existed and with an organization whose ethos is strongly codified as male makes imo little sense and obscures an important factor in why they did what they did rather than clearing it up.

Additionally and in connection to some of the examples you mentioned: As historians frequently do in this sub in connection to slavery, we as historians are absolutely entitled to making moral judgement calls. We can also go a step further even: We can show that not only was it wrong what historical actors did at the time but also show that it was understood as wrong at the time. There were actors who justified slavery in many places of the world,but there were also actors who from the very beginning of the system of slavery objected to it on the grounds that owning other people is wrong.

Similar to the Nazis who were obviously aware that murder was wrong, they too had the perspective of what they did was wrong as we can infer from their arguments and the arguments of their opponents. Why they were not convinced by these arguments is an interesting historical question. I mean, concerning the so-called New World, we have the writings of Bartolomé de las Casas pretty much right after the Spanish incursions start, who strongly objects – with different justifications and different system of thinking – to the system the Spanish established there. As historians, we also have the duty to emphasize these arguments and point at them in order to be able to fully appreciate and portray actors' contingency.

I draw a line between methodological neutrality / relativism (I prefer the word 'symmetry'), and moral judgement. When I study the past, I must keep an open mind and suppress my modern preconceptions if I hope to understand why people in the past acted the way they did. This is in some ways a hopeless cause - I can never fully escape my own prejudices - but there is value in entering as much as possible into the experiences, perceptions, and values of people in the past to try to see things from something close to their own perspectives.

But that doesn't mean I leave my moral judgement behind. The ability to judge and learn from events in the past and present is an important part of being human, especially when used alongside openminded credulity. The important skill historians train ourselves to develop is to hold that judgment back until we've given the data / facts / sources a chance to speak, as much as they can, for themselves. Then we insert ourselves, and start making sense of things, and this often includes our own moral prejudices.

I study human burials in the early middle ages, and one grave in particular sticks in my mind. A young girl, maybe 16, was buried face-down, perhaps with her hands and feet tied together. Her thigh bones were scarred from her muscle's tearing, the kind of injury women receive when they try, and fail, to fight off a rapist. And one of her legs had a healed knife wound from where someone had pressed a blade into her thigh to make her cooperate. Her wounds suggest multiple assailants: she was gang raped. And about six months later (judging from the healing of her injuries), she was dead and dumped, face forward, into a grave. There's no evidence she was wear any clothes when she was buried.

Part of my job as a historian is trying to enter into the minds of the people who did this to her: her rapists, the people who buried her, the possible causes of her death. One theory is that she became pregnant, and her community killed her out of shame. Perhaps she was a slave, raped after she was captured, and buried once she was used up. Maybe she killed herself, in response to the trauma. Maybe her community starved after losing a war, and she was one of the casualties. We can keep going, and imagine the kind of mentality that would normalize these behaviors, where rape is a normal part of war, or where women can be enslaved and killed with so little seeming compassion. A society where shame killings are considered good and honorable, something that earned her father or brother respect. And so on.

All of that can help me, dispassionately, understand her world. And I try my best to leave my modern assumptions about rape, violence, and the value of human life behind me when I do this, because I want to understand what happened in the past on its own terms, and not merely interject my own prejudices into the sixth century.

But none of that for one minute makes me feel that her rape and death was ok. And I dearly hope that whoever did this to her died with a spear in his belly. My methodological scholarly dispassion helps me understand the past, but it doesn't keep me from judging it.

And just as there's value in understanding the past from its own moral perspective, seeing questions of right, wrong, and normalcy through other people's and culture's eyes, there's also value in allowing the past to shape our own understanding of the moral world of the present. This young woman reminds me that rape and violence against women continues to be a horror of the present, that war continues to hurt women and children more than anyone else, that sex slavery is still a great struggle, and I need to open my eyes to these tings and fight against them now, for people who haven't yet become a footnote in an archaeologist's report.

So methodologically, I try to keep my morals to myself. I need to understand before I can judge. But once I understand the past, I lift that barrier and let it interact with my present values, because if the past cannot help us learn to be better humans in the present, history has very little value.

Just to tack on small addendum to other responses: relativism can be a methodology even if you don't embrace it as a philosophy. That is, one can say, "you do better history if you adopt a relativist stance in your relationship to the past (with regards to writing history), but you can believe whatever you want with regards to the rest of your life." This is a way that historians of science, for example, deal with epistemological relativism — we tend to write histories of debates over truth without trying to over-privilege the side that we now believe is correct, because that ends up being a very impoverished account (it becomes the scientific equivalent of "history written by the victors"). But in our private lives very few of us as probably truly epistemological relativists — I do believe that many scientific claims are to some degree essentially true, and lead my life as such.

(To make it concrete: one might write about the dispute between Boyle and Hobbes over the existence of a vacuum or not without taking the stance that Boyle was "right" and Hobbes was "wrong," instead looking at the different ways in which they marshal different types of logic and evidence and rhetorical techniques to make their points. But outside of that specific mode, I do believe vacuums exist.)

Personally with regards to moral relativism I make a distinction between "historian mode" (I am talking about people in the past on their own terms) and "today mode" (where I am really trying to engage with something in the present), even if they are muddled. If I was in pure historian mode talking about slavery I wouldn't bother condemning it as evil because it's not really here or there. But if I'm talking to people who believe that the Constitution was a totally perfect document and are using that to justify certain policies over others I might bring up that it had slavery baked into its DNA, and I would happily explain why slavery was an evil thing if I were pressed. (Though to be honest, I'd also mention that its evils were in fact recognized in its time, as well, so to say it is an awful institution is not merely passing a present-day judgment on it. Maybe that is my historian instinct, but I generally find that if you want to find someone condemning something awful in the past, you can usually find that person, even if their opinion isn't the one that was the most dominant.)

Hi Historian in training and longtime lurker here,

From what I was taught it is because otherwise we would judge everyone to be bad in some sense of the word. For example, Thomas Jefferson is idolized in the United States,but he also owned slaves. He wrote the American constitution and is considered a great man. Does the fact that we owned slaves factor in if he was a good person or not? In our modern view we say that this is morally reprehensible and that it makes people immoral, but at time it was more than standard, his handling was even considered radical.

Take for example Gay marriage today. It would absolutely not have been allowed one or two hundred years ago, but today we are for it. Are we better than those of a hundred years ago? You cannot judge the people of the past by the ideals of the present. Our ideals and morals are not universal nor are they native to our species. They are a learned experience and if those in the past did not grow up exactly as we did, maybe something we consider obvious would never occur to them. If you are taught all your life that blacks are evil, you will think that. Does that make you intrinsically evil? No it just means you were raised with different morals.

That is why as historians we cannot judge the past by our morals because it would alter our perception of the past and undermine the deeds of the past. One day something we consider normal may be looked down on as evil.

Hopefully I understood your question and answered it well. Apologies if my English is less than stellar, I'm not a native speaker.

Follow-up question:

I think /u/jschootiger gets to the nub of the issue

The point of writing history, after all, is to explain events and ground them in their contemporary context, not pass judgement on how good or bad past events were.

I'd largely agree with that, however I wonder if there are uses of history that do involve passing this kind of judgement. For example, if we want to hold up a historical figure as an inspiration or an exemplar, does this require some judgement of them by contemporary standards?

If so, are invocations against presentism also linked to a decline in this sort of history? (If it is declining - "great man" history is, but maybe other figures are now exemplars.) Or are the warnings simply about making sure you pay attention to context? ie. it took a much stronger character to condemn slavery in the 18th century US than it does today, so we should make allowances for people.