“By the standards of their time…” A valid defence?

They were different times. Everybody used to say that kind of thing. We can’t impose modern standards on the past.

Such remarks form part of a now well-known set of platitudes, frequently deployed to explain, justify and defend the attitudes, statements and actions of historical figures, be it Winston Churchill’s views on Indians or Sean Connery’s comments on the occasional need for a ‘good slap’ if a woman appears to want more than the last word in an argument. Each of these platitudes, like most, has a grain of truth to it, sometimes even more. But platitudes, I would suggest, are an inadequate means of addressing what are often deeply sensitive, traumatic and most importantly complex questions of retrospective, and sometimes not so retrospective, morality.

In order to assess whether the line in question constitutes a valid defence, several premises need first to be addressed and qualified. One, can we reduce the multiplicity of values in an age to one standard? Two, were the views, statements, and actions of the individual concerned actually in accordance with those of the majority? Three, what is the object of the defence? Are we defending somebody’s right to be worshipped, or to be protected from outright cancellation? All of these questions are in themselves deeply complex, and this article cannot hope to do them much justice. But gaining at the very least a superficial sense of these questions, and how to answer them, is essential for achieving something of a resolution to this most pressing of issues.

Establishing what the standards of a time and place were is no facile task. As today, there have always been an endless range of views on any given topic, be it race, empire, gender, religion or any other number of potentially contentious issues. We can become too easily fooled by the language of rebellion adopted by those seeking to raise awareness for social causes – by the language that implies that everyone used to think and act in one way, before the brave rebels broke down the barriers of static, regressive traditionalism. No one time and no one place has ever yielded uniform belief.

It is common for defenders of Winston Churchill against charges of racism to assert that everyone in 1930s thought like he did about Indians, about the superiority of the white race and the British Empire. Certainly, we may safely assume that more did then than do today. But this claim paints an inaccurate picture of early 20th century Britain – one where, quite contrary to Churchill being on the far-right of British politics on the subject of India, the whole country assumed that position. As John Charmley, author of Churchill: The End of Glory, reminds us, “Even to most Conservatives, let alone Liberals and Labour, Churchill’s views on India between 1929 and 1939 were quite abhorrent”. Churchill’s views on race, according to which it was reportedly right for “a stronger race, a higher-grade race” to displace indigenous peoples and that in 1937 he could “not admit” that “a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia”, certainly fit within a certain Edwardian, imperialist framework of belief, undoubtedly shared by many. But the idea that this framework extended in its entirety to the British population at large is too simplistic.

Another historical phenomenon often the subject of considerable retrospective moralising is the transatlantic slave trade. One would hope, and I would suspect, that the vast majority of Britons today would reject the industrial enslavement of Africans, and all of the casualties that went along with it, as among the most abhorrent imaginable. Yet over several centuries in Britain and across what was becoming its empire, the practice persisted and adopted a yet more pervasive position in the nation’s economy. However, we have to acknowledge the vast diversity of opinion both between and among supporters and opponents of the slave trade. Especially striking is the inadequacy of any model of interpretation that neatly aligns racist views with support of the slave trade.

As historian Adam Hochschild has persuasively argued, transatlantic slavery in the eighteenth century was at once “intellectually weak” and “politically strong”, so much so that it was perfectly possible, perhaps instinctive, to support and even profit from the trade, yet not to take the time to consider its intellectual and moral implications. Lord Mansfield, England’s deeply conservative Lord Chief Justice, who tried repeatedly to keep the case of Stewart vs Somerset out of court and then to avoid a ruling that saw the liberation of the enslaved James Somerset provide a precedent for automatically freeing other slaves, also housed a black woman, Dido Elizabeth Lindsay, in his home from her infancy, even leaving her £500 and a £100 annuity for life in his will.

On the anti-slavery side, William Wilberforce, for 40 years the champion of the anti-slavery cause in Parliament, saw as “the greatest of all causes” he had served not his campaigning against slavery, but rather the work of Christian missionaries to Christianise and civilise the Indians. When Wilberforce chaired a public dinner at the Freemasons’ Tavern for the African and Asiatic Society in 1816, he insisted that the Africans and Asians present should sit behind a screen. They should, he felt, know their place in the social order and would, he hoped, be “[t]aught by Christianity” to become a “grateful peasantry”. On the one hand, these apparent contradictions seem to confirm the absence of any one standard of belief against which to compare, or with which to defend, the attitudes of historical actors. On the other, they reveal the all too real disconnect between individuals’ private views and and the benefit, certainly applicable to the case of Wilberforce, derived from their public actions. This revelation renders praise, in spite of private vice, not just realistic, but defensible, though crucially not as a result of the argument with which we are in this article concerned.

We have seen, then, that the relativist argument, if we may call it that, is simply inapplicable to some of history’s most controversial figures and events. But our dissection should not end there. To assess the validity of any defensive argument, we have to determine quite what we mean by ‘defence’ and why we are doing it. We can use the relativist defence to refute accusations we deem slanderous or unfair. Such is the case of those who might suggest that Churchill is somehow absolved of racist views he held because they allege, inaccurately, that the vast majority of his contemporaries held them too. As we have seen, such a defence is fundamentally flawed.

We can also employ the defence for less extreme and, I would argue, more justified means. That is, we can call upon the gift of contextualisation not to exonerate, but to retrieve the possibility of nuanced, fact-based inquiry into historical individuals from the equally extreme and equally simplistic treatment frequently dubbed ‘cancellation’. The greatest casualties of attempts by the zealous to rescue their heroes from infamy by lazily invoking “by the standards of their time”, or some other such banality, tend to be those same heroes, whose reputations suffer even further by association with unreflective hero-worshippers.

However, I have very little concern for heroes, for villains, and for reputation in general. It seems to me that the relativist defence is valid only in a specific and considerably limited way. Valid insofar as the key premise of the defence is actually applicable, which it so often is not, given the multiplicity of views on any given subject in virtually any era of history. Valid insofar as the defence is intended not to justify simple hero worship, but to offer contextualisation in the service of qualifying appellations, both approbatory and pejorative, that have been attributed to historical figures or events. It is on these terms alone that a defence on the basis of “the standards of their time” can be employed to at once protect historical individuals from restrictive idealisation and cancellation alike, and help us, as humans who are never free of our history, to understand and tolerate complexity.