{"id":6651,"date":"2026-02-20T15:01:38","date_gmt":"2026-02-20T22:01:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/?p=6651"},"modified":"2026-02-26T21:34:17","modified_gmt":"2026-02-27T04:34:17","slug":"bill-maher-nails-it-again-the-woke-moral-time-machine-is-running-on-empty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/2026\/02\/20\/bill-maher-nails-it-again-the-woke-moral-time-machine-is-running-on-empty\/","title":{"rendered":"Bill Maher Nails It Again: The Woke Moral Time Machine Is Running on Empty"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Weight of the Past:<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

Presentism, History, and the Danger of Judging<\/b><\/span>
\nThe Dead by the Standards of the Living<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

A Historical and Cultural Analysis<\/i><\/p>\n

There is an old Latin legal phrase\u2014nunc pro tunc<\/strong><\/a>\u2014that translates roughly as \u201cnow for then.\u201d<\/em> In courtrooms, it describes the retroactive application of a ruling. In the study of history, it has been identified by the scholar David Hackett Fischer as the engine of one of the most persistent and damaging fallacies in modern intellectual life: presentism. And in the summer of 2022, that obscure academic term erupted into a full-scale culture war<\/strong><\/a> when James Sweet<\/strong><\/a>, the sitting president of the American Historical Association, dared to use it in public.<\/p>\n

What followed was a revealing episode in the ongoing collision between scholarship and ideology. Sweet\u2019s mild-mannered column\u2014which questioned the tendency of modern historians to interpret the past through the political priorities of the present\u2014was met with a firestorm of denunciation on social media. Colleagues called the piece \u201ctrash,\u201d<\/em><\/span><\/strong> others demanded his resignation, and within 48 hours, the president of the nation\u2019s most prestigious historical organization had issued a groveling public apology. He had dared to suggest that history should be written honestly\u2014and the establishment could not allow it.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

The comedian Bill Maher, a man not known for academic restraint, captured the absurdity with his trademark bluntness. \u201cBeing woke is like a magic moral time machine,\u201d<\/em> he observed, \u201cwhere you judge everybody against what you imagine you would have done in 1066, and you always win.\u201d<\/em> Strip away the comedy, and that sentence contains a kernel of historical truth that scholars from Augustine of Hippo to Lynn Hunt have spent careers trying to articulate.<\/p>\n

This article takes Maher\u2019s cultural critique seriously\u2014not as comedy, but as a sociological observation\u2014and tests it against the historical record. What the record shows is more unsettling than comfortable, more complex than the tidy narratives of either political party, and more honest than either side of the culture war typically allows.<\/p>\n

https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/Bill-Maher-video.mp4<\/a><\/video><\/div>\n

–<\/span><\/p>\n

I. The Fallacy That Has a Name<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

The Oxford English Dictionary first recorded the word \u201cpresentism\u201d<\/em> in its historical sense in 1916, though its use may go back to the 1870s. The OED defines it as \u201ca bias towards the present or present-day attitudes, especially in the interpretation of history.\u201d<\/em> David Hackett Fischer, in his landmark 1970 work Historians\u2019 Fallacies, called it the fallacy of \u201cnunc pro tunc\u201d<\/em>: the mistaken idea that the proper way to do history is to prune away the dead branches of the past and preserve only what grows into the present.<\/p>\n

\u201cInterpreting the past in terms of present concerns usually leads us to find ourselves morally superior; the Greeks had slavery, even David Hume was a racist, and European women endorsed imperial ventures. Our forbears constantly fail to measure up to our present-day standards\u2026 Presentism, at its worst, encourages a kind of moral complacency and self-congratulation.\u201d<\/i> \u2014 Lynn Hunt, \u201cAgainst Presentism,\u201d Perspectives on History, American Historical Association, May 2002<\/b><\/p>\n

Source:<\/strong><\/a> Historians.org: “Against Presentism.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Hunt\u2019s warning, written twenty years before Sweet\u2019s column ignited the firestorm, was itself a call for intellectual honesty. The past was not a staging ground for the present\u2019s moral victories. People who lived in other times operated within radically different knowledge frameworks, social structures, economic pressures, and theological worldviews. To ignore all of that\u2014to simply transplant a 21st-century progressive sensibility into the 12th century and demand that its inhabitants comply\u2014is not history. It is, as Napoleon reportedly observed (with some self-interest), \u201ca fable we all agree on.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Yet Sweet paid dearly for saying so. His column, titled \u201cIs History History? Identity Politics and Teleologies of the Present,\u201d<\/em> argued that too many historians were allowing their political commitments to shape their interpretations. He offered the New York Times\u2019 1619 Project<\/strong><\/a> as a case study. The backlash was swift, organized, and largely devoid of substantive argument.<\/p>\n

\u201cAccording to Sweet, an unsettling number of academic historians have allowed their political views in the present to shape and distort their interpretations of the past\u2026 None [of the critics] challenged Sweet\u2019s argument in any meaningful way. It was sufficient enough for him to have harbored the \u201cwrong\u201d thoughts.\u201d<\/i> \u2014 The Daily Economy, \u201cThe Suicide of the American Historical Association\u201d<\/b><\/p>\n

Source: The Daily Economy<\/strong><\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Sweet eventually capitulated and apologized\u2014a capitulation that the World Socialist Web Site, not exactly a right-wing publication, described as resembling \u201ca forced confession statement.\u201d<\/em> The episode was a textbook illustration of Maher\u2019s observation that \u201cin today\u2019s world, when truth conflicts with narrative, it\u2019s the truth that has to apologize.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

II. Slavery: A Universal Institution the Modern World Has Conveniently Forgotten<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

Perhaps no subject better illustrates the distorting power of presentism than slavery. The modern American cultural conversation frequently treats the Atlantic slave trade\u2014and particularly American chattel slavery\u2014as the defining and nearly singular instance of this evil. The 1619 Project famously proposed that American slavery was not merely a feature of early American society but its very founding purpose.<\/p>\n

The historical record tells a far more complicated and far less nationally convenient story.<\/p>\n

The oldest known written reference to slavery appears in the Hammurabi Code of 1754 BCE, which regulated the buying and selling of slaves in Mesopotamian civilization. The Sumerians, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Persians, and virtually every other organized civilization of the ancient world practiced slavery as a normal economic institution. It was not an aberration. It was, as historians have documented at length, the default condition of human economic organization across most of recorded history.<\/p>\n

\u201cSlavery dates to prehistoric times and was apparently modeled on the domestication of animals. From the earliest periods of recorded history, slavery was found in the world\u2019s most advanced regions. The first civilizations\u2014along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Mesopotamia, the Nile in Egypt, the Indus Valley of India, and China\u2019s Yangtze River Valley\u2014all had slavery.\u201d<\/i> \u2014 Digital History, University of Houston, \u201cSlavery in the Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern Worlds\u201d<\/b><\/p>\n

Source: Digital History<\/strong><\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The historian David Eltis has noted that \u201calmost all peoples have been both slaves and slaveholders at some point in their histories.\u201d<\/em> African states played an active and documented role in the trans-Atlantic trade, capturing and selling prisoners of war and rival ethnic groups to European buyers. Writing in 1984, French historian Fernand Braudel noted that slavery had been endemic in Africa itself for centuries before European contact. The Arab slave trade flourished as early as the 8th century, remained active across Arabia, East Africa, and the Indian Ocean, and in some regions of Africa persisted into the 20th century. Ethiopia did not formally abolish slavery until 1942.<\/p>\n

The very word \u201cslave\u201d<\/em> tells the story. It derives from the Latin word Sclavus\u2014meaning Slav\u2014because so many Eastern European peoples were enslaved by the Arab world and later by Viking traders that their ethnic name became synonymous with the condition of bondage. The Slavic peoples were, by skin color and ancestry, as European as the English or the French. Race had nothing to do with it. Availability and military advantage had everything to do with it.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis \u201ccaptives of war\u201d slavery had nothing to do with race or color. It was an \u201cequal opportunity\u201d enslavement. When the Greek city states of Athens and Sparta fought, the losers suffered enslavement. The Romans might take captives from whatever population they defeated: Egyptians, Judeans, Greeks, Britons, Gauls, Carthaginians, Germans, it made no difference.\u201d<\/i> \u2014 Rutgers University, \u201cSlavery in the Ancient World\u201d<\/b><\/p>\n

Source: Rutgers University<\/strong><\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

At the height of the Roman Empire, scholars estimate that slaves comprised somewhere between 30 and 50 percent of the population in major cities. In ancient Athens during the classical period, roughly one-third of the population was enslaved. These were not the descendants of sub-Saharan Africans brought across the Atlantic. They were Greeks, Macedonians, Gauls, Britons, Persians\u2014people of every complexion and background.<\/p>\n

This historical reality does not excuse American chattel slavery\u2014one of the most brutal and racially codified slave systems in human history. But it does obliterate the narrative that slavery was a uniquely Western, uniquely white, or uniquely American invention. It was a human invention, practiced by humans across every continent, every race, and virtually every civilization until the abolitionist movement\u2014largely driven by Christian theology in Britain and America\u2014succeeded in making it morally and legally unacceptable.<\/p>\n

It is worth pausing on that last point. The abolition of slavery was not the inevitable product of secular progress. It was, historically, the product of a theological conviction: that all human beings bear the image of God\u2014the imago Dei\u2014and therefore cannot be treated as property. William Wilberforce in Britain and Frederick Douglass in America both grounded their abolitionism explicitly in the Bible.<\/p>\n

III. What the Bible Actually Says About Slavery\u2014And What It Does Not<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

Maher\u2019s quip that \u201cthe Holy Bible is practically an owner\u2019s manual for slaveholders\u201d<\/em> is a piece of rhetorical provocation that, while colorful, requires a far more nuanced examination. The Bible is neither a pro-slavery manifesto nor a collection of simple moral platitudes easily harmonized with the 21st century\u2019s social priorities. It is a collection of ancient texts that bear witness to the social conditions of their time while simultaneously introducing transformative theological principles that, historically, proved to be slavery\u2019s most effective enemies.<\/p>\n

The Old Testament does indeed regulate slavery, particularly in Exodus 21, Leviticus 25, and Deuteronomy 15. But these regulations\u2014read carefully and in historical context\u2014bear almost no resemblance to American chattel slavery. Biblical slavery in ancient Israel was largely a debt-relief mechanism.<\/strong><\/span> It had time limits (the Year of Jubilee set a maximum of six years). It prohibited the abduction of human beings for enslavement (Exodus 21:16 explicitly condemns man-stealing as a capital offense\u2014the very method on which the Atlantic slave trade depended). It required the release and provision for freed slaves. And it forbade the abuse of foreign slaves who had sought refuge in Israel (Deuteronomy 23:15-16).<\/p>\n

In the New Testament, the picture grows even more complex. Paul\u2019s famous letter to Philemon is the most personal and theologically charged document on slavery in the entire biblical canon. Onesimus, a runaway slave belonging to the Christian leader Philemon, had come to faith through Paul\u2019s ministry. Paul sends him back, but with a letter that subverts the entire social logic of the master-slave relationship.<\/p>\n

\u201cPaul is concerned for Philemon to receive Onesimus back \u201cno longer as a slave but more than a slave, as a beloved brother\u201d (16), and even exhorts him to \u201creceive him as you would receive me\u201d (17). In his day this is shockingly progressive\u2014Paul wants the slave-master relationship between Philemon and Onesimus to be dissolved, and a new one to be erected in its place: a brother-brother relationship, in which the former slave is treated as the apostle himself would be treated.\u201d<\/i> \u2014 Truth Unites, \u201cPhilemon and Slavery\u201d<\/span><\/b><\/p>\n

Source: Truth Unites<\/strong><\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Paul\u2019s declaration in Galatians 3:28\u2014\u201cThere is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus\u201d<\/em>\u2014introduced into the ancient world a radical egalitarianism that had no secular parallel. It did not immediately dismantle the institution of slavery, for the same reason that antibiotics do not instantly cure an infection. But it introduced the theological DNA that, over seventeen centuries, eventually produced the abolitionist movement.<\/p>\n

Pope Benedict XVI, in his encyclical Spe Salvi, described the letter to Philemon precisely in these terms: those who \u201cstand in relation to one another as masters and slaves, since they are members of the one Church, have become brothers and sisters.\u201d<\/em> The Gospel was not a political program. It was a transformation of persons\u2014and transformed persons, over time, transform institutions.<\/p>\n

The theological tension in the New Testament\u2019s treatment of slavery is not a flaw. It is a reflection of the pastoral wisdom of working within existing social structures while planting seeds of transformation that would eventually uproot those structures. Demanding that first-century Christians immediately dismantle the economic foundation of the Roman Empire is\u2014to use the technical term\u2014presentism.<\/p>\n

IV. The Moral Universality of Human Cruelty<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

Maher\u2019s most provocative observation\u2014one that will offend nearly everyone, which is probably why it is true\u2014is that \u201cthe capacity for cruelty is a human thing, not a white thing.\u201d<\/em> He is correct, and the historical record is unambiguous on this point.<\/p>\n

Every major civilization that achieved sufficient military and economic power to enslave others did so. The Aztecs practiced human sacrifice and ritual warfare to capture slaves. The Arab caliphates enslaved sub-Saharan Africans, Slavs, and Europeans for over a millennium. African kingdoms from Ashanti to Dahomey enriched themselves by capturing and selling their African neighbors to European and Arab buyers. The Mongols depopulated entire cities. The Ottoman Empire ran a sophisticated slave market for centuries. Indigenous peoples in the Americas enslaved their rivals long before European contact.<\/p>\n

This is not a \u201cbothsidesism\u201d<\/em> <\/strong><\/span>argument. It is an argument for historical accuracy. The distinctive evil of American chattel slavery was its racial codification\u2014the legal and philosophical transformation of Africans into non-persons, into property. That was a specific and monstrous innovation. But the underlying human capacity to dominate, exploit, and brutalize other human beings is not a racial characteristic. It is, as Augustine of Hippo recognized in the fifth century, a feature of the fallen human condition.<\/p>\n

Augustine, writing in the City of God, argued that slavery was a consequence not of racial inferiority but of sin\u2014the moral disorder of the human soul manifested in social oppression. The Apostle Paul made a parallel observation in Romans 3:23: \u201call have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.\u201d<\/em> The capacity for moral failure is not distributed unevenly across racial lines. It is the universal inheritance of humanity.<\/p>\n

The presentist narrative that locates evil primarily in white Western civilization\u2014while treating non-Western peoples as passive victims rather than historical actors with their own moral agency\u2014is itself a form of condescension. It denies full humanity, including the full moral capacity for both virtue and vice, to people outside the Western tradition. It is, ironically, a mirror image of the colonial attitude it claims to critique.<\/p>\n

V. Joan of Arc, the Play, and the Falsification of the Historical Record<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

Of all the case studies Maher touches on, few illustrate the dangers of presentism more sharply than the 2022 London production of I, Joan<\/strong><\/em><\/a>, written by Charlie Josephine and performed at Shakespeare\u2019s Globe Theatre. The play portrayed Joan of Arc as a non-binary individual who uses they\/them pronouns\u2014an anachronistic reimagining that, whatever its artistic intentions, collides directly with the historical documentation.<\/p>\n

Joan of Arc\u2019s trial is, as Maher accurately noted, one of the best-documented legal proceedings of the 15th century. The original trial transcript\u2014the Condemnation transcript of 1431<\/strong><\/a>\u2014was supplemented by the Rehabilitation trial conducted by the Inquisitor-General in 1455-1456, which included extensive eyewitness testimony. Together, they constitute several hundred pages of detailed record. Not once, in any of that documentation, does Joan describe her identity in terms that correspond to modern non-binary gender categories.<\/p>\n

Joan did wear men\u2019s clothing\u2014a fact seized upon by modern interpreters. But the historical record explains why with considerable clarity. The chief notary at her trial, Guillaume Manchon, testified under oath that Joan wore soldiers\u2019 clothing in prison because her English guards had attempted to rape her on multiple occasions. The clothing, specifically designed with numerous cords lacing the garments tightly together, offered a physical barrier against assault that a dress could not provide.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is both more seemly and proper to dress like this when surrounded by men, than wearing a woman\u2019s clothes. While I have been in prison, the English have molested me when I was dressed as a woman. I have done this to defend my modesty.\u201d<\/i> \u2014 Joan of Arc, from the trial transcript, as cited by History.com<\/b><\/p>\n

Source: History.com<\/strong><\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Joan\u2019s cross-dressing was a survival strategy in a violent military and prison environment, not a declaration of gender identity. She asked repeatedly to be housed in a Church prison guarded by women\u2014the standard Inquisitorial practice for female defendants. She reportedly asked to be buried in a woman\u2019s gown if she died in prison. She identified herself consistently as \u201cthe Maid\u201d<\/em>\u2014a title invoking her female identity and virginity as central to her divine mission.<\/p>\n

The Catholic record is even more pointed. Joan was canonized as a saint in 1920\u2014not as a gender-nonconforming revolutionary, but as a young woman of extraordinary faith and courage who submitted her will to God. The last word she screamed as she was burned at the stake in 1431 was not a protest against misgendering. It was the name of Jesus.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

To assign a modern non-binary identity to Joan of Arc is not progressive scholarship. It is, as the American Historical Association\u2019s own definition of presentism would recognize, the uncritical application of present-day attitudes to a historical figure who cannot speak for herself. It substitutes the interpreter\u2019s ideological agenda for the historical record. And it dishonors the actual Joan\u2014a real person, not a symbol to be repurposed.<\/p>\n

VI. History Is Not Infinitely Plastic<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

One response to the presentism critique is the postmodern argument that all history is interpretation, all interpretation is political, and therefore, there is no neutral ground from which to object to politicized history. This argument has a kernel of truth\u2014historians do make choices about what to emphasize, and those choices are never entirely value-free. But the argument proves too much.<\/p>\n

As Maher observed, history is not entirely \u201cup in the air to change or delete or make up based on what makes you feel better today.\u201d<\/em> Artifacts exist. Coins exist. Census records exist. Trial transcripts exist. Grain inventories from ancient Mesopotamia exist. Archaeology exists. The historian\u2019s task is to interrogate these sources honestly, acknowledge their limitations, and resist the temptation to make them say what the historian wishes they said.<\/p>\n

Napoleon\u2019s famous remark that history is \u201ca fable we all agree on\u201d<\/em> was the self-serving observation of a man who rewrote his own story at every turn. It should not be treated as a serious epistemological principle. The fact that interpretation is involved in historical writing does not mean that facts are absent or that all interpretations are equally valid.<\/p>\n

The AHA president\u2019s 2022 controversy is instructive precisely because the outrage it generated revealed the stakes. James Sweet was not arguing that slavery was good or that the history of racial oppression should be minimized. He was arguing that historians have a professional obligation to understand historical actors within their own contexts before judging them by ours. He was arguing, in the terminology of the discipline, for the most basic principle of responsible scholarship.<\/p>\n

\u201cDoing history with integrity requires us to interpret elements of the past not through the optics of the present but within the worlds of our historical actors.\u201d<\/i> \u2014 James H. Sweet, \u201cIs History History? Identity Politics and Teleologies of the Present,\u201d AHA Perspectives on History, August 2022<\/b><\/p>\n

Source: Historians.org<\/strong><\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That this mild and widely accepted principle provoked an organized campaign for his resignation speaks less to any flaw in Sweet\u2019s argument than to the ideological climate that has captured significant portions of the historical profession.<\/p>\n

VII. What a Biblical Anthropology Actually Teaches About Human Nature<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

Perhaps the most enduring insight in Maher\u2019s cultural commentary is the one he states most baldly: that human beings are not fundamentally good people, and that the capacity for cruelty is not the property of any particular group. This is deeply uncomfortable for a culture that has built its ethical infrastructure on the premise of human progress and the perfectibility of social institutions.<\/p>\n

It is, however, the consistent teaching of Christian Scripture.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Genesis 6:5 records that \u201cthe Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.\u201d<\/em> The prophet Jeremiah wrote that \u201cthe heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?\u201d<\/em> (Jeremiah 17:9). Paul synthesized the entire biblical tradition in Romans 3:10-12, quoting the Psalms: \u201cNone is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God. All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

This is not pessimism for its own sake. It is a sober and historically-validated account of the human condition that generates profound practical wisdom: that no civilization, no race, no class, and no political movement has a monopoly on virtue, and that the impulse to assign all virtue to one group and all vice to another is itself one of the most reliable signs of moral corruption.<\/p>\n

The theological tradition has always understood that the recognition of universal human sinfulness is the precondition for genuine moral seriousness. You cannot build a just society on a false anthropology. And an anthropology that locates evil primarily in the past, primarily in the West, primarily in white men, is as empirically indefensible as it is theologically illiterate.<\/p>\n

Augustine put it this way in the City of God: \u201cOur heart is restless, until it repose in Thee.\u201d<\/em> The human capacity for cruelty is the underside of the human hunger for meaning, belonging, power, and security\u2014a hunger that, without the moral formation provided by genuine faith and genuine community, routinely produces domination and exploitation across every culture, every era, and every demographic.<\/p>\n

VIII. The Courage to Teach History Honestly<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

The ultimate argument of this article is simple: honest history requires moral courage. It requires the willingness to say that slavery was practiced by virtually every civilization in human history, not to excuse American slavery but to understand it. It requires the willingness to say that Joan of Arc was a French Catholic woman of the 15th century who wore soldiers\u2019 clothing to protect herself from rape, not to deny the genuine complexity of her story but to honor the actual historical record. It requires the willingness to say that the capacity for cruelty is distributed equally across humanity, not to deny the specific evils perpetrated by specific groups, but to insist on a truthful account of the human condition.<\/p>\n

James Sweet paid professionally for saying these things in public. Bill Maher says them on television to a politically progressive audience and absorbs the backlash with a comedian\u2019s armor. Both are, in the end, making the same argument: that a civilization which cannot look at its past honestly is a civilization that cannot navigate its present wisely.<\/p>\n

The biblical tradition would add a final note. The prophet Isaiah warned: \u201cWoe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!\u201d<\/em> (Isaiah 5:20). The falsification of history\u2014whether to flatter the present by condemning the past, or to protect the present by sanitizing the past\u2014is a species of this ancient vice. It calls the complex \u201csimple,\u201d<\/em> the ambiguous \u201cclear,\u201d<\/em> and the human \u201cdemonic\u201d or \u201cangelic\u201d<\/em> depending on which narrative is currently ascendant.<\/p>\n

History, practiced honestly, refuses these simplifications. It insists instead on the full complexity of human experience: that people in the past were neither monsters nor saints, but human beings navigating the moral landscape available to them with the knowledge, the values, and the social structures they had inherited. Judging them by ours is not justice. It is a fantasy of superiority that tells us far more about ourselves than about them.<\/p>\n

Conclusion<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

The controversy ignited by James Sweet\u2019s 2022 essay was, in the end, a proxy battle for something much larger: the question of whether Western civilization retains the intellectual honesty to examine itself truthfully, without either the self-flagellation of presentist guilt or the self-congratulation of nationalist myth. Both distort. Both are forms of narcissism\u2014one collective, one individual.<\/p>\n

Bill Maher, whatever his other positions, stumbled onto something the historical profession has been arguing for decades: that the past was different, that difference requires understanding rather than condemnation, and that a \u201cmoral time machine\u201d<\/em> that always renders the operator virtuous and the dead guilty is a machine for producing arrogance, not wisdom.<\/p>\n

The oldest continuous tradition of moral philosophy in the Western world\u2014the biblical tradition\u2014has always known this. It begins with the confession of universal human fallenness and ends with the promise of universal redemption. Neither the confident condemnation of the dead nor the comfortable exculpation of the living belongs in that story. What belongs there is the harder, slower, more honest work of understanding\u2014and the humility to know that we, too, will one day be judged by those who come after us, with knowledge we do not yet possess and standards we have not yet imagined.<\/p>\n

They will, if history is any guide, find us wanting.<\/p>\n

Sources and Further Reading<\/b><\/span><\/h3>\n

\u2022 Lynn Hunt, \u201cAgainst Presentism,\u201d American Historical Association Perspectives on History (2002) \u2014 https:\/\/www.historians.org\/research-and-publications\/perspectives-on-history\/may-2002\/against-presentism<\/p>\n

\u2022 James H. Sweet, \u201cIs History History? Identity Politics and Teleologies of the Present\u201d (AHA Perspectives on History, 2022) \u2014 https:\/\/davidlabaree.com\/2022\/08\/29\/james-sweet-is-history-history-identity-politics-and-teleologies-of-the-present\/<\/p>\n

\u2022 The Daily Economy, \u201cThe Suicide of the American Historical Association\u201d \u2014 https:\/\/thedailyeconomy.org\/article\/the-suicide-of-the-american-historical-association\/<\/p>\n

\u2022 David Hackett Fischer, Historians\u2019 Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought (Harper & Row, 1970) \u2014 https:\/\/www.voicesandimages.com\/presentism-dont-judge-ancestors-actions-by-todays-standards\/<\/p>\n

\u2022 Wikipedia, \u201cPresentism (Historical Analysis)\u201d \u2014 https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Presentism_(historical_analysis)<\/p>\n

\u2022 EBSCO Research Starters, \u201cPresentism and Cultural Bias\u201d \u2014 https:\/\/www.ebsco.com\/research-starters\/sociology\/presentism-and-cultural-bias<\/p>\n

\u2022 Digital History (University of Houston), \u201cSlavery in the Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern Worlds\u201d \u2014 https:\/\/www.digitalhistory.uh.edu\/disp_textbook.cfm?smtid=2&psid=440<\/p>\n

\u2022 Wikipedia, \u201cHistory of Slavery\u201d \u2014 https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/History_of_slavery<\/p>\n

\u2022 Rutgers University, \u201cSlavery in the Ancient World\u201d \u2014 https:\/\/crab.rutgers.edu\/users\/glasker\/SLAVERYANCIENT.htm<\/p>\n

\u2022 Lowcountry Digital History Initiative, \u201cSlavery Before the Trans-Atlantic Trade\u201d \u2014 https:\/\/ldhi.library.cofc.edu\/exhibits\/show\/africanpassageslowcountryadapt\/introductionatlanticworld\/slaverybeforetrade<\/p>\n

\u2022 Wikipedia, \u201cThe Bible and Slavery\u201d \u2014 https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/The_Bible_and_slavery<\/p>\n

\u2022 Truth Unites, \u201cPhilemon and Slavery\u201d \u2014 https:\/\/truthunites.org\/2011\/12\/19\/philemon-and-slavery\/<\/p>\n

\u2022 Bible.org, \u201cSubmission and Slavery (Ephesians 6:5\u20139)\u201d \u2014 https:\/\/bible.org\/seriespage\/25-submission-and-slavery-ephesians-65-9<\/p>\n

\u2022 Wikipedia, \u201cCross-Dressing, Gender Identity, and Sexuality of Joan of Arc\u201d \u2014 https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Cross-dressing,_gender_identity,_and_sexuality_of_Joan_of_Arc<\/p>\n

\u2022 HISTORY.com, \u201cWhy Was Joan of Arc Burned at the Stake?\u201d \u2014 https:\/\/www.history.com\/articles\/joan-arc-burned-stake<\/p>\n

\u2022 Joan of Arc Archive, \u201cThe Issue of Joan of Arc\u2019s Cross-Dressing\u201d \u2014 https:\/\/archive.joan-of-arc.org\/joanofarc_male_clothing.html<\/p>\n

\u2022 HowStuffWorks History, \u201cWhy Was Cross-Dressing the Only Crime Joan of Arc Was Charged With?\u201d \u2014 https:\/\/history.howstuffworks.com\/history-vs-myth\/joan-of-arc-trial.htm<\/p>\n

\u2022 Catholic Stand, \u201cSt. Joan of Arc\u201d \u2014 https:\/\/catholicstand.com\/st-joan-of-arc\/<\/p>\n

\u2022 World Socialist Web Site, \u201cAmerican Historical Association President Issues Groveling Apology\u201d \u2014 https:\/\/www.wsws.org\/en\/articles\/2022\/08\/24\/ogzj-a24.html<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Weight of the Past: Presentism, History, and the Danger of Judging The Dead by the Standards of the Living A Historical and Cultural Analysis There is an old Latin legal phrase\u2014nunc pro tunc\u2014that translates roughly as \u201cnow for then.\u201d In courtrooms, it describes the retroactive application of a ruling. In the study of history,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6653,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[61,181,137],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6651","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture","category-history","category-liberalism"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/back-in-time.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6651","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6651"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6651\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6820,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6651\/revisions\/6820"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6653"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6651"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6651"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6651"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}