Q1. Should we judge those from the past by the standards of today? How will historians in the future judge us?
An Essay Submitted to The John Locke Essay Competition 2021
Summer 2021Waking up on an early Monday morning for the market in Hangzhou, Chunfang packed up all the textiles she had woven last week. Her younger brother Yixuan would carry them to the crowded marketplace and sell them in exchange for food. She was only ten years old, both of her parents had passed away, and it had been well over 8 months since she first started working in her room. Why did Chungfang, the older sister, not travel to the market herself? She could not walk because her feet were bound and every step caused her excruciating pain. This answer flagrantly contradicts modern-day morality and values and can become a fertile ground for judgment because of people’s tendency to bring their own biases into their perception of history. Depending on one’s predisposition, a reader might judge Chungfang’s parents, the society in which she was raised, the men who came up with this cruel tradition, and maybe even the little girl herself. These judgments stem from the changes that have taken place throughout the years that have passed. Modern-day people connect to the past by evaluating such changes in terms of improvement or regression, and this requires applying our present standards to the past. It is therefore inevitable that people will judge the past by today’s standards, but such subjectivity should be a tool of comparison and evaluation. Rather than despising our past or building moral high grounds for ourselves, we should focus primarily on evaluating how society has progressed through the lens of culture and technology, with good intention.
Past historians tended to treat history with prejudice in pursuit of their own interests. In China, this can be traced back to as early as Sima Qian, a famous historian from the Han Dynasty in 145 BC. Loyal to the Han dynasty, he crafted the historic masterpiece Shiji, still known today in China as the hallmark of monarchic Chinese historiography. As the successor of the Qin dynasty after a brutal period of civil war, the Han Empire desired to record history in a way that rendered them superior to their predecessors. While the Qin Empire demonstrated its superb administrative system of imperial provinces, a powerful military, and its advantageous geographic location, Sima attributed their success to nothing but “heaven’s intervention on its behalf.” He has also portrayed the Qin dynasty as a barbaric state by saying that, to him, the Qin was “even worse than the previous tyrants from the country of Lu and Wei.” He also asserted that its location, Yongzhou, was a remote and barbarous area, while in reality, it was exactly where the previous Zhou Dynasty founded its glorious capital and where Han’s capital was eventually located. The success of the Han dynasty has also partly stemmed from the Qin, as the Han inherited the imperial institutions and “partly owed its initial legitimacy to the success of the dynastic founder, Liu Bang, to secure Qin’s surrender.” Contrary to Sima Qian’s portrayal, Qin has manifested itself as a country of manners with the implementation of the Lieding system and the Mingqi ceramic imitations, both being continuations of Zhou’s cultural traditions rather than a sign of barbarity. The vast difference between the reality and Sima Qian’s documentation was fueled by the historian’s need to serve his state, which in turn required him to assume this biased stance when chronicling the histories of the previous dynasty. By depicting the Qin as inferior and inhumane, Sima Qian attempted to reattribute Qin’s success to his employer, the Han dynasty, and to put the Han on a high ground for future generations to admire.
Historians such as Livy and Machiavelli, on the other hand, could be considered as exemplary in using history to evaluate the progress or regression. In his Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli saw the history presented to people as incomplete because “most writers conceal what would be infamous and magnify what brings glory.” Instead of continuing this trend, Machiavelli examines the works of Livy, who compared the Rome of his present to Rome of his past to illustrate the increased desire for freedom. Livy cited the murder of Hieronymus, grandson of Hiero the Syracusan, and an act of revenge in Corcyra, a city in Greece, during the Peloponnesian War, to demonstrate this pursuit of freedom. It is through the contrast between the past and the contemporary Roman Empire that Livy allows his contemporary Roman audience to appreciate the origins of their Roman custom of yearning for freedom, looking at the past with the intention of evaluating progress and appreciating consistency in culture and traditions. Machiavelli points out that Livy did not restrain himself from pure praise for the advancements made by the Roman Empire, but, at the same time, also brought in his contemporary standards and compared them with those of his past to expose the decreased interest in pursuing power. Interestingly, Machiavelli’s own writing is an equally good example of a historian using the past to reflect on the present, as the crux of Machiavelli’s Discourse on Livy involves using his contemporary standards on history to evaluate the works of Livy, and in turn enabling himself to better understand the discipline. Future historians should follow Machiavelli’s and Livy’s examples and approach the current period of human history through the lens of their era. This method, when applied without moral judgment, would allow them to not only evaluate the degree of development society would have undergone by then but also to highlight potential areas of regression.
When history is being judged without moral comparisons, one can appreciate humanity's path of improvement. In order to evaluate how much society has progressed in different areas, people have to contrast their current standards with those of the past. Being one of the most important human technological advancements, steamboats rapidly transformed maritime transportation, replacing their much less efficient predecessors. Over half a decade, the tonnage of steamboats increased from 110 tons to 630 tons. Such technological advancement marked an increase in the capability of transporting not only cargoes but also passengers over much longer distances in much shorter time periods, bringing forth opportunities for not only traders but also governments as well as immigrants. From a commercial standpoint, steamboats now became “the principal vehicle of transportation on the main channels of inland commerce.” As a major product in the 1800s U.S., the cotton industry was “entirely dependent on the meandering rivers of the Mississippi Basin,” employing the service of thousands of steamboats. The increased commerce that brought more cotton to houses and factories was made possible by this revolution. As mentioned above, steamboats also fostered the growth of migration, tourism, and traveling in general. From 1820 to 1850, Cincinnati’s (9600 to 11500) and Louisville’s population (4000 to 43000) both increased tenfold due to migration from both within and outside the U.S. Instead of feeling trapped in the same town forever, one could then find new opportunities in a formerly inaccessible city. People also anticipated a higher standard of living as they could purchase a broader variety of products that arrived from a much wider area through more advanced methods of transportation. By assessing the changes brought about by the steamboat from a modern perspective - that is, from the perspective of someone accustomed to easy travel and diverse markets - present and future historians can better evaluate the importance of the progress achieved by the invention of the steamboat.
The same method of evaluating the past with today’s standards also offers an insight into controversial cultural traditions. Footbinding, a horrendous traditional practice common through most of China’s dynastic period, began as a means of imitating the beauty of the prominent 10th-century dancer Yaoniang, which slowly developed into a beauty standard for all Chinese women. Suffering from the foot binding process at the age of five to seven, women were destined to be crippled and had to spend most of their time in their homes, since bound feet were too disfigured to allow sufficient physical support of a human body. Because they could not work in the fields or in artisan workshops, women performed activities such as producing textile. Economic historian Li Bozhong has argued that daughters from the Jiangnan countryside could earn 70 to 80 percent of the daily wages of a male hired hand. In contrast, women in China today, though still suffering from gender discrimination in their choice of professions, made up 43.7% of the total labor force in 2019. Women’s expectations for life have progressed significantly over the past centuries: from being physically forced to stay at home to actively making a living by working alongside men in all trades. By understanding their current position in society and their present expectations, historians of the current and future generations can recognize and appreciate the improvement of women’s social status.
In recent years, we have witnessed raging crowds tearing down statues of prominent military masterminds of the Confederate States of America, the portrait of Andrew Jackson being removed from the $20 dollar bills. Instead of examining history as an evaluation of progress, we sought to avoid discussing what we should have; instead of remembering and reflecting, we sought to conceal and forget. Rather, we should judge the past by today’s standards to have a better understanding of ourselves, and to steer the future onto the right track guided by our reflections. It is through this process that history creates a bridge connecting the past, the present, and the future. With this recognition of the role of history, we, in turn, hope that historians of the future also seek to apply the standards of their own days when they evaluate our era in order to maintain and reinforce this bridge between generations.
Bibliography
Hunter, Louis C. "The Invention of the Western Steamboat." The Journal of Economic History 3, no. 2 (1943): 201-20. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2113497.
Kane, Adam I. The Western River Steamboat. College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 2004.
Ko, Dorothy. Cinderella's Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding. N.p.: University of California Press, 2007.
Machiavelli, Niccolò, Harvey C. Mansfield, and Nathan Tarcov. Discourses on Livy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Pines, Yuri. "Biases and Their Sources: Qin History in the 'Shiji.'" Oriens Extremus 45 (2005): 10-34. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24047638.
The World Bank, "Labor Force, Female (% of Total Labor Force), China, 2019," The World Bank Databank (2019).
Version:0.9 StartHTML:0000000105 EndHTML:0000002293 StartFragment:0000000141 EndFragment:0000002253