Should we judge historical figures by the morals of today?
Andrew Roberts
“If we topple Nelson, what do we do about the pyramids, built at least in part by slave labour?”
Although it is completely illogical, ahistorical and unfair to natural justice to judge the people of the past by today’s morals, it is also very hard not to. If we merely judge them by the morals of their own times, that doesn’t tell us very much. If we don’t judge them morally at all, we let off the likes of Hitler and Stalin in a welter of moral relativism. Yet because Oliver Cromwell might not have believed in socialised medicine, say, but did believe in slaughtering Roman Catholics in Drogheda at a time when that religion was widely thought to pose an existential threat to Britain, what does that really tell us about him – or them, or us?
The way to approach this minefield is not to assume that our morals are superior to those of the people of the past, because we will indubitably be judged in our turn by our descendants – who will think it truly abhorrent that we allowed children to have mobile phones, or opposed multi-sex lavatories, or appeased Kim Jong-Un when he was so clearly about to incinerate Chicago. Just as we cannot know what we will be indicted for, so Nelson could hardly have known that, two centuries after Trafalgar, there would be calls for
