On Historical Empathy

October 31, 2022 timothywstanley@me.com

Well, to think responsibly about the past requires thinking oneself into the minds of people who no longer exist, who lived in a world that neither you nor I have ever visited, and who inherited assumptions from their predecessors that are quite different from what we have inherited from ours. What is sometimes called the historical imagination is required to set aside one’s own assumptions about what’s right and wrong—or at least explicitly to acknowledge those assumptions—and to try to see the world through the eyes of people whose attitudes one might find loathsome. That’s not easy to do, but every good historian makes an effort to do that. Now, that doesn’t mean that one suspends judgment and comes away without any preference for one point of view or another. What I’m trying to say is that we can be critical and even ashamed of much of our history and, at the same time, accept that it’s our history rather than to say, you know, this has nothing to do with me because I am indignant or outraged by it. I think it helps to acknowledge that posterity is likely to judge us as fallible or foolish or worse, just as we are inclined to judge our predecessors.

Andrew Delbanco - https://www.neh.gov/article/open-questions-andrew-delbanco