Hey what’s up Thinkers! Kathy Gibbens here…
Let’s start off today with a quick review. This review was left by Shanda Fulbright, who has a podcast called Her Faith Inspires, and she recently interviewed me on her podcast, which was awesome! She’s great & I’ve loved the podcast episodes I’ve listened to on her show. Shanda is a lover of truth, which I appreciate so much! Here’s what she said: “This is a wonderful educational podcast. She takes the fancy named fallacies and makes them relatable and bite-sized with real life examples and ways to respond to bad reasoning. Listen with your kids!” Thank you, Shanda, for listening to the podcast, for having me on, and for helping me to share the message of how we can love God with our minds! Can I ask you a favor? Would you take just a quick minute and share this podcast with a friend who you think would enjoy it? Sharing helps us to continue to grow the show and it helps us spread the words about good thinking.
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Ok, today’s new fallacy is very similar to the one we discussed in the last episode, the Historian's Fallacy….it’s actually a nuance of that one. Today’s fallacy is called Presentism. Presentism is a way of analyzing history where the past is interpreted through present-day attitudes & moral standards. Where The Historian’s Fallacy was judging past decisions & actions based on their knowledge, Presentism is judging past actions by today’s standards & attitudes.
Presentism can happen in two ways: It can take the form of harshly judging historical figures b/c things that were acceptable then aren’t acceptable anymore. Or, it could also take the form of wanting to ignore or cover up past decisions & actions b/c people feel shame over them, since the attitude around those actions have changed.
Here’s an example: Someone who currently lives in New York City and is a vegan, meaning they don’t eat or use anything that comes from animals, goes on a rant talking about how cruel & horrible the Eskimos are b/c they have historically worn fur coats. Ok, so this New York vegan has a certain cultural belief that using anything from animals is wrong and they’re now applying it to a totally different cultural group, the eskimos, who don’t share that belief. For the Eskimos, it’s a total matter of survival & necessity. They don’t view it as animal cruelty, they view it as survival & have for thousands of years. Is it really fair for the vegan to judge them as being cruel & abusive?
Another place Presentism could show up is in reading parts of the Bible. For example, in the Old Testament, it talks of men having more than one wife and to our minds today, we can’t imagine that and would be quick to condemn it based on the societal standards that we have now. This is why it’s important to spend the time to dig into Biblical history and really work to understand what the cultural norms & attitudes were of the time the people were living. We still may not think that it’s the right thing to do, but it will absolutely help us to better understand what was going on.
What’s wrong with Presentism is that it’s a form of cultural bias, where we think our present, modern-day culture is the BEST and the RIGHT culture and that all other cultural attitudes are wrong. This creates a distorted understanding of the people you’re reading or learning about. It can also create a false sense of moral self-righteousness b/c we think, “well, I’d never do that!” while ignoring all the things we’re doing today that are just as bad. We all too often view history through the lens of our current prejudices, beliefs & ideas…and of course that would be easy to do - our current lens is the only one we have! It takes work to set our own cultural biases aside and try to understand the cultural norms from another time that are so foreign to us. But we have to remember, attitudes and cultural values have changed over time. We really need to try not to make excuses for the past, but just let it be what it was so we can learn from it.
Here’s another example where we see Presentism in play as it relates to history. There is and has been a concerted effort to re-write our American history and to make negative judgements about the decisions that our Founding Fathers made in regards to issues like slavery & women’s rights, among others. And while, of course, no Founding Father is perfect, we can’t look back in judgment at their actions & decisions based on what we think & believe today. We have to take the time to understand what was happening in the world at THAT time and see what the attitudes were of the people in the time they were living. We will never get a good, complete understanding of their mindset and why they did what they did if we don’t first try to understand what was happening in society when they were alive and creating a new country..
Question to ask yourself: “What were the cultural beliefs & norms of that time? How are they different than ours today?” *repeat*
Remember: When you learn HOW to think, you will no longer fall prey to those who are trying to tell you what THEY want you to think and it all starts with asking one simple question: “Is that really true?”
