We cant really judge people in the past They had different Values. We are projecting our own values on them. Really?
There is an argument that we cant possibly judge historical figures of the 17th ,18th and 19th centuries and their actions by todays standards and values. They were of their time . They had different values. It was a very different context . We need to understand this. Except, of course, todays values were around in those days . They are the values of the enlightenment . And even before the enlightenment, as early as the 17th Century, Quakers and other evangelical groups were , for example, preaching against the sin of slavery .
The American Declaration of Independence (1776) states: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Similar too ,was the French Revolution’s 1791 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen .
True some of those who signed the Declaration of Independence were slave owners, and didn’t quite understand the consequences of what they were signing up to But the values in the Declaration are unambiguous .
Of course, to many at the time, it wasn’t a self-evident truth that all men were equal. Not to a slave owner, nor trader. But it was to an educated few. The man most associated with ending the slave trade was William Wilberforce ,in the late 1700s and early 1800s. He was old, a white male, for sure, a member of the patriarchy even, or at least on its fringes, but he was also ,along with all this , humane and enlightened , informed by the values of the enlightenment . He understood that all men are equal. More important, unlike some of those who earlier had signed the declaration of independence, he understood what this meant for how people should conduct their lives, relate to others and manage their politics. He had a vision of what a more civilised and just society looked like. In this he was not alone. So, don’t make the mistake of assuming that people then didn’t share the values we do today. Some, clearly did. But not enough
Montrose42 Blog 