R: Judge Your Grandfather by the Standard of His Day

One of the greatest archaeologists in history was Sir John Eric Sidney Thompson. Although Thompson was a leading expert on the ancient Mayan culture and by all accounts a decent man, the prejudices of his day led him to a lapse in academic judgment that set back his field by decades. In 1951, the Soviet press claimed that an obscure Russian scholar had succeeded in cracking the code of the Maya script, a writing system that had baffled European scholars for hundreds of years. Thompson responded with snark and vitriol, attacking the scholar’s Communist ideology and refusing to even engage with his research. Though the Soviet decipherment soon proved to be correct, Western academics, led by Thompson, refused to admit its veracity until Thompson died in 1975.

During the Cold War, Thompson’s stridently anti-Communist approach to scholarship was praised on all sides–he was even granted a knighthood by Queen Elizabeth. But more recently, Thompson’s legacy has been gutted in view of his blatant ideological bias. This week’s debate would ask: how should we judge Thompson? Should we view his situation through a 2025 lens that only regards scholarly objectivity? Perhaps then Thompson’s legacy would be seriously tarnished, if not dismissed out of hand. Or should we contextualize Thompson’s decisions, reminding ourselves that he and his contemporaries saw any propagandistic victory for the Soviet Union as a threat to freedom and democracy? Perhaps then his decisions, though unsavory, are understandable.

This example is a low-stakes instance of a problem that has increasingly high stakes in our world, namely, how much should historical and cultural context inform our judgments of the past? The way we represent the past in our schools, books, and public places depends on how much context we want to provide. Were the US soldiers who fought at Wounded Knee simply following orders, or should they be regarded as murderers? Should Yale have a college named after John C. Calhoun, a flagrant racist? How should we justify and present history’s checkered characters and controversial episodes? Even the ways we interact with our own family members depends on contextualization. When Grandma tells an off-color story at Thanksgiving dinner or Uncle Steve uncorks a sobriquet he really shouldn’t be saying anymore, what is one to do?

The affirmative will argue for greater contextualization. Empathy is an important part of love, and to be empathetic we must put aside our presuppositions and enter into a new and different context. It is deeply problematic to apply our own modern hermeneutics to complex cultures and situations. We mustnot be in thrall to any single hermeneutic by which we can make claims about the past, whether it is seeing America’s history as a continuation of the “Western heritage” or seeing the world’s history as class conflict. People in the past experienced pressures and received educations that go a long way toward explaining their actions, and which should temper our judgment of their actions and attitudes. Furthermore, any critique of the past must be matched by a radical critique of the present. Our great-grandparents believed things that sound distasteful to us today, and our great-grandchildren will surely find many of our attitudes equally abhorrent. Who are we to claim perfect knowledge about the nature of history, to be able to color our past in black and white, good and bad?

The negative will argue that while we may not have all the answers, that is no reason to hold our grandfathers to a lesser standard. Bad actions are bad regardless of time and place. It is unjust to dismiss racist remarks within Lincoln’s speeches as products of his time; we should instead call a spade a spade and confront Lincoln’s racism. Leviticus 5:17 establishes the principle that ignorance is no excuse for wrongdoing. Aristotle would later bring this idea into Greco-Roman jurisprudence, while Paul applied it to moral law in Romans 2. Ignorance is a feeble plea; justice and injustice are the same yesterday, today, and forever. Really, our grandfathers did know better than to vote for a bad candidate, accept racial and ethnic prejudices, or hold to regressive gender roles. They simply lacked the courage to stand up for what was right and contradict social norms. Furthermore, excusing the evils of past generations is the first step toward repeating them, just as anti-semites deny the Holocaust or Lost Cause sympathizers glamorize Robert E. Lee. The sins of the father, if left unchecked, will crop up once more in the son.