Cancel culture and liberal presentism is going too far

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Exactly. ^

Further, I hope everyone acknowledges that no one is necessarily "great people" -- not even the activists of today.

We're all human and fallible.

Exactly. ^

Further, I hope everyone acknowledges that no one is necessarily "great people" -- not even the activists of today.

We're all human and fallible.

On top of that even if you were a public figure of today who is both "great" (in the sense of being a mover and shaker), and "great" in the value judgement sense of the word ( "great" as in "extremely good"), and were somekind of impossible paragon of virtue, future generations would still probably have different notions from us today as to what "virtue" is. Posterity would still find fault with you (Naturalplastic saved America, but he had his pic taken in front of a cow turning on a spit at a company picnic! I know that upsets you children because we all now get our protein from soy, and are disgusted by any kind of killing of animals, but...you cant judge NP by the standards of our 23rd century time!).

I hope the other actors can still earn royalties in that regard. I also wish profits from his shows could go toward victims' rights organisations, or to the victims themselves in civil suits. It's such a complicated issue. I actually have a Bill Cosby LP from the 80s where he's just telling jokes. I should sell it and send the money to a local victims' group.

Presentism and cancel culture demands and tries to enforce the impossible - perfection.
Judgement of people should not be a game of gotcha. People that do great things often are horrible people. One should judge the whole person and yes that should take into account context the times they lived in.

For some reason most humans can't handle moral ambiguity and want to desperately read into the past our present moral standards and assume everyone from that time thought like we do. It sucks that people in the past were more racist, sexist and violent, but it was a different time than ours and rather than fixating on the fallibility of our ancestors it's better to learn from their mistakes and build upon their achievements.

This gotcha stuff is recent. When I grew up flaws of historical figures deemed icons were whitewashed. Cancel Culture is a massive overcorrection. Your generation gets blamed but the fault lies with the people in authority who enable this.

You're 62, which means that when you grew up racism, sexism and other forms of bigotry weren't as frowned upon then as they are today. That's why when you grew up the icons of the past were revered because most of society didn't have such a dramatic shift in their perceptions of racism and sexism that led to the society im living in right now. different Gallup polls and pew research polls demonstrate this, such as a poll asked back in the 50s and again 50 years later where Americans in both times were asked to give their opinions on interracial marriage. in the 50s when the question was 1st asked 96% were AGAINST it, but years later that same question asked had the near opposite results: 89% were OK with it. society has changed so exponentially and dramatically since the turbulent 60s that many attitudes and beliefs underwent a complete paradigm shift such that a demarcation line separates old and new moral values.

Every so often I hear from the descendants of Adelbert Ames, a Union general during the Civil War and then the governor of Mississippi during Reconstruction, objecting to a paragraph about him in John F. Kennedy’s book “Profiles in Courage,” from 1956. “No state suffered more from carpetbag rule than Mississippi,” Kennedy wrote, about Ames’s governorship. Corruption was rampant. Taxes rose by a factor of fourteen. “Vast areas of northern Mississippi lay in ruins.” None of this is true, and the Ames family has been lobbying the Kennedy family to change the offending paragraph pretty much continuously for more than sixty years—including an in-person discussion with J.F.K., in 1963, conducted in the White House by Ames’s great-grandson George Plimpton, the writer and editor of The Paris Review. Nothing has worked. But maybe now, at this moment of a great national reconsideration of our history and our monuments, especially on racial grounds, it might be different?

I’m getting these entreaties, most recently a couple of weeks ago, because I wrote a book about the bloody overthrow of Reconstruction by white terrorists in Mississippi in 1875. Ames is a leading character, presented far more positively than he is in “Profiles in Courage.” Since what happened during the Reconstruction period has never been very firmly fixed in American memory, some explanation is probably required. What was Ames doing in “Profiles in Courage” in the first place, and why was he—a white politician elected by an overwhelmingly Black constituency—offered up by Kennedy as a villain?

“Profiles in Courage” was published when Kennedy was thirty-eight years old. He was the junior senator from Massachusetts, in the early stages of planning his campaign for President in 1960. The main body of the book is eight profiles of United States senators whom Kennedy considered to have been extraordinarily courageous, starting chronologically with John Quincy Adams, in the early nineteenth century, and ending with Robert A. Taft, in the mid-twentieth century. It’s irresistible to think about the book in the light of Kennedy’s political ambitions. Thanks to his heroic and well-publicized exploits as a Navy officer in the South Pacific during the Second World War, courage was already identified as one of Kennedy’s salient qualities, and the framing device for the book underscored that. The courageous subjects were distributed pragmatically, considering that Kennedy was a regional politician preparing to go national. Two were from the Northeast, two from the South, and four from the Midwest. Three were Republicans. They stood for a broad range of political causes.

For many years, “Profiles in Courage” has been controversial for one reason: it isn’t clear that Kennedy wrote it himself, even though he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for biography for it, in 1957, and the book continues to be an important part of his reputation. (For the past thirty years, the Kennedy family has conferred an annual John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award on a prominent politician or group.) At least among historians, the consensus is that his aide Theodore Sorensen was the principal author, acting at Kennedy’s direction. What’s amazing, though, is that there hasn’t been more controversy, aside from the Ames family’s crusade against that one paragraph, about the content of “Profiles in Courage.” It must be one of those books that everybody has heard of but not many people have read lately.

Three of Kennedy’s eight Senate heroes were slaveholders. None won inclusion in the pantheon for having taken what we’d now think of as a lonely liberal stand. Taft’s courageous act was opposing the Nuremberg trials for the members of the Nazi high command, because they had not broken any German law; he preferred that they be put in a Napoleon-like exile in some remote place. “These conclusions are shared, I believe, by a substantial number of American citizens today,” Kennedy asserted. Daniel Webster’s was breaking with anti-slavery opinion in his home state of Massachusetts to support the Compromise of 1850, which included the Fugitive Slave Act, making it a federal crime for Northerners to give shelter to escaped slaves. For Webster, Kennedy noted admiringly, “the preservation of the Union was far dearer to his heart than his opposition to slavery.” John C. Calhoun, the most influential pro-slavery politician of the nineteenth century, didn’t get a full-dress profile, but Kennedy included him in a chapter devoted to senators who almost made the cut, and mentioned him throughout the book, always with the greatest respect, as, for example, “that revered sage of the South.” Not long after “Profiles in Courage” was published, Kennedy chaired a committee charged with choosing five outstanding senators in American history. Calhoun, Taft, and Webster were all on the list. One can guess from this sentence where the Kennedy of that moment would have stood on the question of the South’s continuing to honor the Confederate flag: “Surely in the United States of America, where brother once fought against brother, we did not judge a man’s bravery under fire by examining the banner under which he fought.”

Courage is a quality that can be deployed toward many different ends. Kennedy defined courage in a U.S. senator as a willingness to take a stand that is unpopular with one’s constituents and the leadership of one’s party, in service of a larger, higher cause. But what cause? For Kennedy in the mid-nineteen-fifties, it wasn’t anything in the range of what we’d now regard as social justice, especially racial justice. Something else was at the top of the list of moral absolutes for him: maximizing the national power, wealth, and influence of the United States. In the early nineteenth century, it was crucial to expand the territory under American control. Then it became necessary to postpone the Civil War, through compromises like the one Webster supported, until the North became populous and economically powerful enough to defeat the South. After 1865, reconciliation between the former Confederacy and the Union was essential. At the moment when Kennedy was writing, the height of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, he claimed, “only the very courageous will be able to take the hard and unpopular decisions necessary for our survival in the struggle with a powerful enemy.” Kennedy consistently dismissed political reformers who, by his lights, failed to understand the primacy of the national interest. Abolitionists were an example. “Compromise need not mean cowardice,” Kennedy declared, as long as it served what he—wholly in accord with the liberal-centrist conventional wisdom of the time—considered to be a higher purpose. That was why he chose so many compromisers on racial justice as his exemplars of courage.

The paragraph at the heart of the Ames family’s quarrel with “Profiles in Courage” is in the profile of Senator Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar, the most prominent Mississippi politician of the late nineteenth century. Lamar, an especially militant secessionist and defender of slavery, won inclusion because of a counterintuitively warm eulogy he gave on the Senate floor, in 1874, for Charles Sumner, the radical Republican senator from Massachusetts, who had been a leading abolitionist and had been subjected to a brutal beating in the chamber, in 1856, by a South Carolina congressman. Kennedy endowed all his subjects with a general-purpose magnificence—Lamar more than most. He wrote, “No petty issues, no political trivia, not even private affairs, were permitted to clutter up his intellect. No partisan, personal, or sectional considerations could outweigh his devotion to the national interest and to the truth.” Lamar decided to give his eulogy for Sumner, even though it would be unpopular back home, because “he came to believe that the future happiness of the country could only lie in a spirit of mutual conciliation and cooperation between the people of all sections and all states.” During Lamar’s speech itself, “his full, rich voice touched the hearts of every listener with its simple plea for amity and justice between North and South.”

What should we do about “Profiles in Courage”? It isn’t as if the paragraph about Adelbert Ames—who, according to Kennedy, was “chosen Governor by a majority composed of freed slaves and Radical Republicans, sustained and nourished by Federal bayonets”—is the only one that is problematic today. A comprehensive revision to meet contemporary standards would be just about impossible, or would have to resemble the Talmud, with each page of the original text surrounded by a thick doughnut of emendations and arguments. Still, the book makes for an excellent example of a number of important points. It is perilous to try to understand history as a procession of heroes. Imposing the prevailing moral certainties of a moment backward through time insures perishability. Assuming that texts should be exemplary, and that if they’re not they shouldn’t be read, is foolhardy. People are smart enough to be able to disassemble, reconsider, and reject, rather than simply imbibe uncritically, the message of a book like “Profiles in Courage,” as a lesson in the dangers of historical misunderstanding. And that’s what they should do now.

In January 2021, a committee appointed by San Francisco’s school board will vote on whether to remove 44 names from public schools of men and women they’ve deemed guilty of racism. This list ranges from Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) to none other than Abraham Lincoln.

Ironically, the indictment against Lincoln emphasizes not his alleged failure to recognize that “Black lives matter,” but his treatment of Native Americans during the Civil War. After 1862’s Sioux Uprising in Minnesota, caused by white encroachment on Dakota lands, a military tribunal sentenced 303 warriors to death. Lincoln personally reviewed the sentences, commuting the sentences of 265 but permitting 38 to be hanged.

African Americans freed from slavery were almost unanimous in holding out Lincoln as a latter-day savior until around 1900, when W. E. B. Du Bois, a founder of the NAACP, pivoted away from sainthood, yet acknowledged that Lincoln was “a big, inconsistent, brave man.”

Still, Lincoln’s near-immaculate reputation continued with the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial in 1922 in our nation’s capital and with the completion of the Mount Rushmore Memorial in 1941. His image in Hollywood’s Civil War epics also was that of a martyred saint. Born in 1950, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. recalls: “When I was growing up, his picture was in nearly every Black home I can recall, the only white man other than Jesus himself to grace Black family walls. Lincoln was a hero to us.”

By the 1960s, young Black militants were not so kind to Lincoln, whom they sometimes called “a white honky,“

In 2005, another senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, said, “I cannot swallow the whole view of Lincoln as the Great Emancipator.” By 2009, however, Obama chose to use Lincoln’s Bible to be sworn in as the first African American president of the United States.

A core takeaway from our Torah (the Five Books of Moses) is that Judaism does not believe in saints, only in flesh-and-blood human beings striving to do the right thing, some even trying to do saintly things.

Simply put, there are no perfect specimens — no saints, but amazing heroes. They may be flawed, but they are heroes nonetheless. The Hebrew Bible goes to great pains to expose the flaws of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, their wives, and children. Even Moses — liberator, teacher and lawgiver — had his doubts, his anger, his familial failures on full display. From Sarah to Rebecca, to Joseph, to Kings David and Solomon, their narratives depict them — warts and all.

It is perfectly correct to review and revise our opinions of past American heroes — from George Washington to Franklin Roosevelt to John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Martin Luther King Jr., and Barack Obama. We do not serve them, or ourselves, well by making them out to have been more than human in their political lives.

But a word of advice and caution to those who would cancel all of yesteryear’s heroes. Be sure you aren’t removing something even more precious than old textbooks and weather-beaten statues. Do not cancel the very concept of memory. Without it, we have no collective future. There is an old Jewish saying: “In remembrance lies the roots of redemption; in forgetfulness, the roots of destruction.”