At the first meeting of a class I teach about the causes and consequences of World War I, each student is assigned a seat at a table with the flag of one of the combatant countries in the center. We spend a part of the first class discussing the fallacy of “presentism,” through which the values, mores and conventions of the present day are used to judge, almost always harshly and sanctimoniously, our predecessors. It is presentism’s smug folly to assume that we in the present day are superior intellectually and morally and that the past has nothing to teach us. The list of basic facts today’s Americans don’t know is too embarrassing and discouraging to repeat. And so a world of freedom, justice and equality was brought much nearer by their heroic efforts.

Source: Washington Post April 20, 2018 23:26 UTC