Grading Life on a Curve
A temporal one
Trigger Warning — This article contains historical information and perspective that may cause extreme discomfort to the modern reader. Bringing a device containing this article into a designated safe space may violate local traditions and regulations. Proceed at your own risk both with this article and any serious study of history.
I have always thought that grading classes on a curve was dumb. Bad for cooperation. And even if there is a pack of idiots some year there are still people getting A’s who think that know something, etc., etc.,
But that rant would be a different article.
In Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History series, he (wisely) often speaks of the need to grade historical figures “on a curve.”
If the standard practice in ancient times was to burn alive all captured prisoners, we shouldn’t be judging an individual leader from that time period harshly if just killed all his captured prisoners.
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Perhaps we would judge the society or times harshly, but it is neither fair nor sensible to judge a particular leader without regard to then contemporary local standard.
How far into the past can we look useful look with current standards in terms of various sexual improprieties?
If we go far enough back, can we justly criticize any particular individual for practicing child marriage? Hard to imagine that we would have to back quite that far before our current standard for much or all of “sexual harassment” wouldn’t be intelligible as a concept.
I fear that we may be judging some actions of 30–50 years ago in as silly as manner. And while I don’t like the “everyone else was doing” type of defense, there is probably some version of “back then we didn’t understand it was wrong” that is justified.
Perhaps there is a wide swath of cases where we should be asking for heartfelt apologies and leaving at that.
For perspective there is evidence (presented nicely in Dan Carlin’s The Celtic Holocaust) that many Romans in the era of Julius Caesar were genuinely mystified that Celtic women objected strongly to being raped. Not something that they had ever come across any before or could even have imagined.
I don’t think we have to go back 2100 years to find nations who would find our current standard inconceivable at best. I bet it is less than 50 years in the United States. And perhaps zero years for some surprisingly with a long wait into the future.
We need to separate individual bad actors from societal stupidities. They are different problems in need of different solutions.
