Historical relativism

When I got to the end of this article on the Naomi Wolf "scandal" (?), I couldn't help groaning when I hit the "things were different then" excuse. Allow me to engage in a semi-rant here. This type of relativism--we object to these things now, but the standards were all different then--rarely seems accompanied by any awareness of historical complexity. For example. Nineteenth-century Britain may have been rife with anti-Jewish (religious) and anti-Semitic (racial) prejudices, but it was also rife with harsh attacks on those who beat up Jews or even insulted them; for that matter, many evangelicals supported the Jewish Emancipation Act. (Of course, they also wanted the Jews to convert, but you can't have everything.) Similarly, anti-Catholicism was a key "Victorian value"--it helped define Victorian conceptions of political liberty, religious freedom, even the nature of the family--but that didn't stop Anthony Trollope from painting remarkably positive portraits of Irish Catholics, or the Athenaeum from dragging an anti-Catholic novelist over the coals for whipping up hysterical sentiments. Thomas Carlyle's racial attitudes horrified a lot of his contemporaries. One could go on. Now, most of these counter-opinions would not be "ours," either: almost nobody thought Jews as a group were morally equal to Christians; even the most pro-Catholic Protestants still tended to be awfully condescending about the Roman Catholic Church as a whole; Victorian anti-racism can be a pretty awkward business. But you cannot simply say "They were different; we can let X off the hook." It may not be appropriate to bring our own moral standards to bear, but neither is it appropriate to simply erase any sign of earlier dissent. All the more so when the "earlier age" is only about twenty years ago!

Comments

[Beth]

If, as I have read, it was common at Yale in Naomi Wolf's time for faculty and students to establish intimate relationships, I have a hard time accepting Wolf's claim. She was no innocent by her own admission. But in the end, what is most extraordinary about Wolf is the way in which she has voluntarily stripped herself of her achievements and her status and reduced herself to a victim, nothing more. The implication here is that women are psychologically weak: One hand on the thigh, and they never get over it.

He made a pass. Big deal.

[Annam]

Excellent post, and a point that occurred to me many times during the scandal over Trent Lott's remarks.

I only wish to add that the sorts of people indulging in historical relativism in both cases are otherwise -- like Harold Bloom for that matter -- fulsomely committed to universal values and opposed to cultural relativism.

[Katie]

What disturbs me--and has, as far as I can tell, gone unmentioned in the media response to Wolf's article so far--is that it remains an open secret at Yale that Harold Bloom continues to make passes at female students. That is, I graduated from Yale less than a year ago, and I had classmates who had been the object of Bloom's efforts of seduction--and this after sexual liaisons between faculty and students have been banned for more than 20 years.

Of course, my acquaintances, like the 20-year-old Naomi Wolf, also chose not to press charges. Whether this was because they felt that "He made a pass. Big deal," to quote the poster above, or because they felt that they had little to gain personally by engaging in a lengthy "he said, she said" sexual harassment hearing process and antagonizing this intellectual giant, I'm not sure.

[Mr Ripley]

Indeed, there's this weird academic analog to the Glass Closet when it comes to abusive profs. As Katie says, everybody knows what it's like to be a woman alone in an elevator with Bloom, and everybody over fifty has heard stories of Bloom having been a guest-lecturer at this or that venue and expected his hosts to line up "co-eds" for him to amuse himself with. Where Paglia and Wurtzel were on this one I dunno; but my guess is that they're not the kind of people sexually-harrassed students tend to confide in.

But the topic at hand is the "things were different" excuse, which made me physically ill to read. Thanks for calling b.s. on that one.