Oh, boy, books get written on this. It's a big deal.

There is a thing called Presentism. Those people, back then, were not like us in many ways, had different cultures, societies, were raised in different values, and expecting them to somehow just decide to act like us is not reasonable. A good example is George Washington. He was raised in an elite Virginia white society where the pinnacle of achievement was to be a successful , wealthy planter, with lots of land and lots of enslaved people to work it, and as an ambitious man, that's what he was able to be, in the end. He was pretty universally regarded as a great man in his day, and even after slavery was at last abolished , historians praised him and shrugged at his owning slaves. Now there is a counter-reaction, and a lot of people would like to remove his name from everything named after him in the US ( which would take a very long time). But condemning him does not help you actually understand him- and understanding is, really the most important goal, and there's now been more attention paid to what Washington himself thought about slavery. We don't like Washington's use of the enslaved- and we're trying to understand it ( and , by the way, if you look at their website, you'll see Mount Vernon are indeed trying).

Likewise, there's been a tendency to look at Washington's military career as though he could foresee the next hundred years of the Untied States, and wanted to create it. But if we just try to praise him, assume Washington was omniscient, we also don't fully understand him. In 1775. Washington was also an ambitious military officer who had spent years leading troops in the French and Indian War ( which he triggered) and who saw the new conflict with England as another step up in his career, who campaigned for the job of leading the Continental Army.

In searching for greater comprehension, we run counter to the most typical use of history, that of providing role models and heroes. We're making things complicated, and heroes aren't supposed to be complicated. Making heroes for our time out of people of the past usually requires simplification, and too much of the time, simplification turns historical writing into a team sport, with one team running around with pots of tar, the other with books of gold leaf, alternately tarring and gilding the portraits of all the famous people in the gallery ( Robert E Lee's portrait looks pretty strange, right now...) . That's a shame: I don't like Washington's use of enslaved humans, on his farm. But if he had been a caudillo, decided he wanted to keep being president forever, the US could have had a history of dictatorships, instead of presidencies. And we really need to remember that.

This is not just a problem for all those dead white males: as more communities have stepped up with their own role models, they are also running into this tar-and-gold-leaf problem. Margaret Sanger makes a very good feminist hero. But she also fell into the belief , common to many scientists and doctors of her time, of the need for eugenics. Elizabeth Blackwell became the first woman doctor in the US- but she also didn't want women to be able to vote.

And in case you are thinking that we are so smart, have it all figured out: consider vegetarians. For a very long time, humans have raised animals for the purpose of killing and eating them. Vegans and animal-rights activists have questioned the morality of this. In a hundred years, will our descendants be questioning our morality in continuing to eat hamburgers for lunch, when it seems so obvious to them it's wrong?