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Asklemmy @lemmy.ml
Konis @sh.itjust.works

Why do we glorify horrible people from the distant past?

Julius Ceasar, Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan and many more...

These people had beliefs and worldviews that were so horribly, by today's standards, that calling them fascist would be huge understatement. And they followed through by committing a lot of evil.

Aren't we basically glorifying the Hitlers of centuries past?

I know, historians always say that one should not judge historical figures by contemporary moral standards. But there's a difference between objectively studying history and actually glorifying these figures.

118 comments

  • What do you mean "objectively studying history", what is objective about History? What you're studying is a narrative, that has been put together by experts, based of what remains from that past. There is nothing "objective" about History, it is an educated guess. Even written records are narratives told from the perspective and culture of the ancient writer.

    This is to say that, the reason we don't judge historical figures through a modern lens is that to do so is to ignore history. It doesn't matter what your think about Alexander the Great, it matters what his contemporaries (both friends and enemies) had to say about him (objectively biased narratices). For another example think about what the Greeks wrote about the Persians during their many wars, and vice versa. They are conflicrive accounts. Both biased and political. So again, what history is correct, objective?

    • There is nothing “objective” about History, it is an educated guess.

      A lack of absolute certainty does not equate to a lack of objectivity. You're right that history is necessarily written by individuals who have biases. But it is also written by many individuals from different perspectives and correlated with a variety of other sources of knowledge, such as archeology, geology, etc.

      For another example think about what the Greeks wrote about the Persians during their many wars, and vice versa. They are conflicrive accounts. Both biased and political. So again, what history is correct, objective?

      They are conflicting on some things, but they also agree on many things. For instance, I'm sure we can agree that the Greeks and Persians existed, controlled large empires, fought wars against each other, etc. Historians are trained to analyze all of the documents available from all perspectives and arrive at the most objective conclusion that they can muster.

      I strongly oppose the postmodern attitude that everything is subjective. It's good to remember the limits of our knowledge, but to completely discard an academic field such as history as entirely subjective is quite absurd.

    • Not OP, but this sounds exactly like what I'd call objective history. Non-objective history is when people simp, say, Alexander the Great as some sort of political-national hero and say we ought to be more like him, he was a genius, he brought glorious Western civilisation and so on. That typically comes with minimising the whole slave empire thing, aristocrat nepobaby thing, and any other unsavoury details there might be about him by modern standards.

      Sometimes it doesn't even make sense, it's just someone important seeming who can't object to being misused. Conservative MLK is a a particularly irksome one I see a lot, given that his body is barely cold in historical terms, and there's a very direct line between modern conservatives and the guys that put up sprinklers on their lawn next to the March's route.

  • The source of this quote is generally attributed to George W. Bush aide Karl Rove:

    The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [...] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do'.

    I fucking loathe how right Rove was and is.

  • I mean, the hitler comparison falls off with those specific examples, but I get that you're saying.

    First, they were successful for the most part.

    Second, it is the far past. The distance in time means that most people will only ever know about the biggest brush strokes of their biography and actions. The records of the eras aren't exactly rife with full detail for every bit of their lives. And what is there, most people encounter at the superficial level of a high school world history class.

    That kind of class isn't geared towards detail, nuance, or moral judgement. It's about the overview.

    Since all of the ones you listed are also pretty damn interesting, and made major impacts to human society (for good or ill, that's not the point of the answer to the question as asked). This in turn means that they're memorable compared to some random king or emperor that was just doing their job and running their nation without trouble.

    In other words, they aren't boring. And, tbh, they weren't fascists. They never had that level of complexity to their goals. Fascist != dictator by default. That part means that until and unless you start looking at the horrible things they did, there's no convenient modern label to apply to them in a general history class to point to them not being good people.

    Remember, most entry level history classes might have a week to cover the entirety of the Roman Empire; devoting time to Caesar's nastiness just isn't relevant to the goal of that kind of class. The only reason he's worth going into any detail about at all is that he changed Rome to such a degree that it's a pivot point, and cant be entirely skipped like the majority of historical roman leaders.

    From there to "glorification" is a matter of fiction. We don't have the kind of detail that allows for interesting documentaries, so what we get outside of advanced history classes (which people won't likely take unless they're intending to be historians) is infotainment and outright fiction using the names of people. Once you start making books and shows and movies, entertainment and profit are the goals, not historical accuracy or even adhering to actual facts at all. Most of what people think of about Caesar is from Shakespeare.

    So you then have people with disjointed and filtered ideas about historical figures, mashed together from a few facts and a lot of fiction.

    Honestly, even with more recent figures, you run into the same thing. How many people do you think could give a detailed and accurate biography of either president Roosevelt? Or JFK? Or Regan? Man, there's people that couldn't tell you anything about the current world leaders beyond their name.

  • Actions we condemn today were often considered acceptable, even heroic, in their era. Many figures are celebrated for their accomplishments in fields like military leadership, politics, philosophy, or art.

    Also national pride, these people become symbols of a nation's identity and history, youre always taught they're heroes. They also leave a lasting impact on culture, shaping the art of their era and therefore beyond. Look no further than Napoleon for this one. Or the Mughals.

    Power and influence can be awe-inspiring, even if their methods are questionable. These are traits that have throughout history been associated with being morally good in a way. Fame, power, money makes you 'good' in many cultures over history. Kings are looked up to, they are seen as people with noble blood. Their actions are inherently correct. I genuinely believe our morality as a society has grown more stringent over time.

    Sometimes, people are presented in a simplified, heroic manner without acknowledging their flaws. That's just the nature of storytelling imo. They aren't being critically analysed because they are stories. And we make art based on the stories and art that survive. We base stories of Alexander the Great on the art he allowed in his time.

    This is brief, I have a lot of opinions on this matter lol.

  • Imagine it's 7500bce... Most humans are still hunter gatherers but in a few places people have started banding together to form cities. The world is savage, hard, and dangerous. Life is short and cheap, and just like chimpanzees today don't feel any moral qualms about murdering rival troop members, humans hadn't really evolved socially to the point of thinking of all humans as inherently "special" or worthy of life... Some could say we still haven't all evolved to this point.

    In that context what we were left with was a bunch of sociopaths. And no wonder. Most people would be somewhat sociopathic if their siblings died in infancy or were carried off to be slaves or eaten by wolves, their parents were murdered in front of them, their village was slaughtered and burned, etc. So these city people, and soon the surrounding people's, saw sociopathic behavior as normal and even something to be worshipped. (Again, some of us still do)

    Sociopaths don't hesitate to harm other people to increase their own power and wealth, even when they don't really need anything more to live comfortably. In a world where might makes right, this was a huge advantage and the most horrible and brutal sociopaths rose to become kings of their city states.

    There is some evidence that hunter gatherers groups would occasionally get a sociopath among them, but more often than not that person would be shunned and banished from the family. It was only when cities became a thing that there were tons of people from many families, so even if you're family kicked you out, you could just find other sociopaths who had been kicked out, and together you could just kill anyone who denied you.

    There's also the fact that as soon as people started settling down and using agriculture to create excess food, the hunter gatherers around them started trying to take that food because hey, free food. So then you need to start defending your food stores, and again sociopaths rise to the top because they are the most ruthless "defenders".

    Those sociopathic traits continued in the ruling class throughout all of human pre history and history. Right down to today where people continue to worship the sociopaths like Musk, Trump, or even Hillary. It's a childish thought process of "my dad can beat up your dad", which makes me feel safer, even if sometimes my dad also beats me.

    Edit: just to add that the only reason we can even have this conversation is because, for the first time in human history, large swaths of the human population HAVE socially evolved to the point of recognizing innate human value, and thus can also recognize sociopathic behavior

  • Curious to hear from more people on whether any of these were portrayed positively in their schooling. My memory of grade school history was that none of these were praised, just noted that they had a huge impact.

    Heck, strongest memory of Genghis Khan from grade school is the factoid that 1 in 200 people are descended from him because he raped so many women as he slaughtered his way around Eurasia.

    Julius Caesar? Dictator that became so hated by his own political allies, they assassinated him.

    Alexander, titled "the Great" for his military prowess, nothing more. Known in my grade school history curriculum for being way ahead of his peers in military strategy. And the whole probably gay by today's understanding but they probably didn't have the same words and ideas about sexuality back then.

    Edit: I also learned that Hitler was a hell of a politician. Lots of people in Germany at the time struggling in a post WWI mess, Hitler out-manuevered all other politicians to get to where he did with a substantial power base supporting him.

  • Mentioning those three names isn't "glorifying" them any more than saying who was in charge of a country during a war was.

  • The people whose deeds reverberate through history are the powerful. The powerful are almost always evil, it's just how humans work.

    Neuroscience shows that as humans get power, our brain's ability to perform empathy is damaged. So as an organism, a human's capacity and willingness to inflict misery on others tend to increase in lock step with each other.

  • There is a strong argument that but for the existence of tyrants humankind would have gone extinct before written history. They allowed humanity to evolve and flourish as the social creatures we are today.

    While a tyrant does suppress freedoms, and costs lives (in both subjects and opponents) what they provided was stability and strength for the community. This stability enabled ALL discoveries up until, and including democracy. Set aside the luxury of contemporary morality when examining history to understand all its complexities.

  • I think the question really is, why do we glorify people at all? I know that the type of people you mention exist, but I hold them in no high regard. What causes people to admire and even worship others? Why don’t we as a species realize that we all meet the same end, and what causes people to believe that we somehow transcend the inevitable extinction of our species?

    Answer these questions, and perhaps you answer your own.

  • Julius Ceasar wasn't so bad. Parenti's book The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People's History of Ancient Rome is an interesting read, looking at his assassination as a reaction from the ruling class who felt threatened by his reformist policies that benefited the lower classes.

    In general though we do seem to value the lives and experiences of people in even recent history as lesser. I don't know why, it's a good question.

    • I think you have to ignore large parts of his legacy to consider a genocidal warlord like Caesar "not so bad".

      Pursuing the agenda of the populares may have made him less domestically odious than some of his fellow patricians from the optimates, but he was still a member of the ruling class monopolizing power in his person. On top of the whole brutal genocidal warlord thing.

  • Probably for the same reasons Benjamin Netanyahu was glorified in U.S.A. Congress a few weeks ago.

118 comments