You can condemn Hitler. The person you can't condemn is the little german boy who turned in the hiding Jewish family because turning in Jews was what German authorities in the forties expected of him. In general, I'd say that people should only be judged (positively or negatively) for things they did *against* the curve, not things that were just going with the flow of the time.
The problem though is that there are many progressives who go from "we shouldn't idealise" to "we should learn anything from these monsters". I've met many progressives like this and you can't have a conversation with them about anyone or anything from history because if they see some kind of evil doing they just disregard the topic completely. Obviously not all progressives are like this but it's sad to see the same lack of black and white thinking that you normally find amongst conservatives
@@jfm14 It is a great way to teach history, because you can deconstruct WHY positive aspects of a negative thing don't make said negative thing worthwhile. It's critical thinking, a really important part of understanding things. Blindly accepting an idea as bad "because it is bad" is anti-intellectual. I hate Bill Maher btw
No, trying to list the “good” aspects of slavery (especially to younger people) is not a critical thinking task, it is attempting to justify the system of what took place through the lens of the system itself. The human cost of what was done was not offset by some “well at least we were able to do this…”. To truly critically think about slavery is to look at the whole of the system. That can include seeing how specifically things progressed with production, which I believe is your actual point. But it can never be divorced into such a pro/con style thing like that without being seen through the lens that assumes slavery as somehow needed for that progress. It was not the system of slavery that caused good things. Those things could have still happened in a more egalitarian society, because they were done by the people forced to do it, not the slave owners.
This totally ignores the fact that a lot of people DID know better. There were people, a lot of people, who were against slavery and other violations of human rights
The really dumb thing is humans are not functionally different now than even 2000 years ago. We are the same basic animal; evolution has not had enough time to make us some fundamental different animal. And considering slaves are not some abstract thing, but... ya know... people themselves (many of whom i'm going to guess were, ya know... opposed to slavery). There were definitely people, even 5000 years ago, or whenever the first human slave existed, that was opposed to slavery. Definitionally. ---- But even if we're just talking about slavery from the "middle classes and highers" perspective... they, too, had many abolitionists in their ranks. Slavery abolition was part of the original French Revolution reforms. In 1799. Even most of british society was opposed to slavery by this time, as noted by PM Liverpool trying to have discussions of slavery abolition as part of the terms of peace in europe post napoleonic wars. Granted, Liverpool himself didn't seem to care for it. But the vast majority of british people at the time most definitely did. And these ideas didn't just spontaneously erupt in 1799 from nothing. They were, like any social movement, fomenting for *decades* before hand in the lower to middle classes. But just like terrible ideas that exist with us even to this day (drug prohibition, capital punishment, hatred of gay/lesbian people, corporate exploitation, Religion (one for bill maher), etc) - it is a fight between the numerous powerless who oppose bad ideas, and few powerful who benefit from them. But, as usual, it is the powerful who call the shots, write the history, make the laws, and pretend that they didn't know better when they definitely, 100% did. It's mind-bogglingly stupid to suggest people of the before-times were fundamentally different in any way shape or form than people of today. All those founding fathers who owned slaves? They knew that it was wrong. They just didn't care enough to get rid of it. And that's the reality.
Because it also comes from a whitewashed version of history. If people are just taught "they were people of their times" for almost everything with little to no mention of the people of those times that fought against those violations, you get closer to Maher's logic. This logic also seems to frame so many things in the view of white wealthy men or just the powerful of the time/place. It's like the people who didn't/don't have the same rights as everyone else are less a part of the framing.
i like the joels (both the little and the big) but its hard for me to watch his videos because he looks exactly like my brother who moved to another country years ago so we lost contact completely. kinda sounds like him too. really hope joel is not him with a changed name and a philosophy degree cuz that would be embarrassing for me
What I hate most about the "we can't judge people by today's standards" argument is that it assumes everyone in the past had exactly the same opinions. You could argue that Jefferson and Washington owning slaves was just a product of the times, that it was socially acceptable to own humans and so we can't judge them. But that completely ignores that even among their peers, there were people around that time who saw slavery as immoral and wanted it abolished. If those abolitionists had the capacity to understand that slavery was wrong, how is it acceptable that someone else at the time still chose to keep people as property?
This is a great point! Maher and those who think like him talk about applying modern standards to the past, but they treat the past as a monolith in a projection of their own black-and-white thinking. Even looking at the people who wrote in defense of slavery, we might ask, "why would they write in defense of slavery unless they thought slavery needed to be defended from something?" There were critics of slavery in the ancient world!
Even Jefferson knew that the system of slavery was immoral, but having been born and raised in the pit of it, he could not reason his way into how to end it. Washington had some of his slaves freed, after his death. Jefferson did not, which always irked me when watching the film (and Broadway musical) 1776, where Jefferson claims he would do so. The writers knew what happened.
It's interesting too because I feel like I thought of history like this when I was a child. Like, that's sort of how history is taught to children, right? "Once upon a time we were all dumb baby cavemen, then we grew up and learned farming but still had toddler-ideas like Greek gods (we weren't mature enough to discover the real God yet), then we hit puberty and invented democracy and freedom, then we graduated high school when we realized racism was bad. Hitler was a guy who was developmentally delayed but that's fixed now." There's this sense as an American kid in the 20th century that we're living in the best, most advanced time in the best, most advanced place. I guess some people never think about things beyond how they learned it in elementary school. Matt "Basic Biology" Walsh is similar vibes.
For real. We’ve been working with the same hardware for 10 million years, but we have to treat the heirs to the Enlightenment like they couldn’t figure out that slavery was atrocious.
"How could they have possibly known kidnapping, putting people in chains, branding their skin, beating them senseless, separating families, and forced labor were bad!?!?!?!??!?!?"
because the church told them so.. for example. imagine were all vegans in 200 years... how could they possibly think that slaughtering animals, exploiting animals, putting them to work etc. is acceptable? Does that mean that everyone who ever ate meat in the human history is suddenly evil? - and if so... do we have to discard all their achievements?
"How could they have possibly known kidnapping, putting people in chains, branding their skin, beating them senseless, separating families, and forced labor were bad!?!?!?!??!?!?" Well, that's the thing of it - these slavers didn't think about their vocation in the same terms you're thinking about it. It was just another day on the job to them. It was work. And they had most likely long since abandoned the idea that they were even dealing with human beings at all. One would have to tell themselves this and turn themselves to stone in order to function in such a gruesome environment. I'm sure they didn't lose sleep over it, but it seems you have this idea of these slavers being evil purely for the sake of being evil. That's rarely the case with any kind of atrocity. As with the African tribes that sold their own people as well as prisoners of war, this was a pay day for the slave traders. To think of all the people who contributed to the institution of slavery as something akin to the soldiers of Mordor is just plain silly. We can't get to any kind of understanding with such cartoonish oversimplifications. And then there's this thing called cognitive dissonance, where people often bely their own beliefs. I'm sure you do it all of the time by rationalizing your decisions and playing mental gymnastics for the sake of getting what you want or need. Think of child labor and human suffering the next time you purchase something on Amazon or elsewhere. Anyway, learn from the past so you change the present. There's plenty to be done in the here and now. Looking back and conducting these retroactive witch hunts isn't going to serve anyone.
@@lawrencehan7385 "Lmao, They had reasons therefore what they did was just and cannot br condemned. Amazing." Well, no one said they were just, and no one suggested they were exempt from condemnation. But while you continue to take pleasure in roasting the ghosts of the past, be sure to remove the plank from your own eye and examine your own moral failings. By the way, it's hard to take anyone who begins a sentence with "lmao" seriously. And your reading comprehension is in the toilet. Happy holidays, champ.
@@jackmort5015 Your first post justified slavery because they weren't intentionally malicious about it - they had economic incentives to do so. Gee, well if the Nazi soldiers were just doing a job. Can't fault them. Great logic. Then you go on to say that let bygones be bygones and focus on the present - except that their veneration in the past is justification to perpetuate similar actions in the present. If they are venerated as heroes, they are not being condemned; if people are protecting them from criticisms and want people to move on from the past, which has vast material consequences today, then it's clear that they are exempt from condemnation. Things like the Constitution, a horrendously flawed document, are venerated and protected despite its inadequacies and far past its expiration date. Venerating the Founding Fathers a whole bunch of slavers and complicit slavers maintains the validity of such a document into the present day. The past informs and creates the present. And despite how much you say to learn from it, you apparently do not and refuse to let others from doing so. Ending with a non-sequitur and ignoring the crux of the issue to focus on a minor technicality. Stunning. But reading or listening comprehension sure is your strong suit - otherwise you wouldn't have made such a banal defense after watching the video.
I love how “enslaving human beings” is something you can’t expect someone to have known better than doing. Like, when he makes this argument, he’s leaving out the quiet part that he wants you to stop judging the founding fathers for *owning slaves.*
@@szzk7937 Even if that were true (it's not -- a lot of civilizations practiced some form of slavery, but not all of them), we also have accounts of people right across human history who understood that slavery was wrong and opposed it. There was never a time in history when an intellectually curious person couldn't figure out that slavery is wrong.
I mean, Obama did say something along the lines of "don't punish people for their past actions" when asked if he was going to do anything about the war crimes of the prior administration.
@@hrothgr52 no, they dont. cause they are cringy, regressive left drones (unwittingly doing more harm to liberal causes than any far right conservatives EVER could) first of all...ever heard of a thing called statute of limitations? so yeah you LITERALLY (and legally) "can not be judged for crimes that were committed in the past". 2nd of all, YES an individual can not be judged or charged for doing an activity which was not against the law AT THE TIME of doing it. should we retroactively charge your grandfather for smoking on a plane 70 years ago? 3rd, youre completely missing the underlining point and fixating on semantic nonsense (hence the cheap applause line analogy that holds no water but makes your fellow lemmings nod and agree). when something is universally (for the most part) acceptable and condoned (by society at large, the bible AND THE LAW ITSELF) there is less pressure and influence on your morality. and that was the whole point! its easy for YOU in 2022 to champion what is arguably one of the most agreed upon notions in most of the civilized world (lets see you do the same 200 years ago when from the moment you were born you were taught that some people are "less than"). its 2022 and most people are incapable of shaking off the religious indoctrination thats been drilled into them since childhood (i repeat...2022 and grown men and women all over the world are believing in one of the most ridiculous, plothole ridden, transparent works of charlatanry ever written in the history of mankind!!) WHY? cause its an acceptable thing to do in our society! 4th....eh, to hell with it...i could be here all day but its not worth wasting my breath on the left wings version of MAGA). enjoy your 83 genders while trump slithers his way back into the white house (due in no small part to YOU) . history will not be kind to trumpists but believe me, it wont be kind to YOU either! (kinda ironic how you dont have the foresight to see how much your grandchildren will be cringing at you and your microaggressions) . you thought neon spandex, shoulderpads and big hair were bad in the 80s? wait till they get a load of "preferred gender pronouns" and "dragqueen storyhour for toddlers"....
"Let me tell you buddy. Waking up is a damn sight harder than going to sleep, but we'll stay woke up longer." -- United Mine Worker c. 1940. I, too, endeavor to stay woke up longer.
“man, it’s pretty wild how much genocide christopher columbus took part in” bill maher, sprinting towards me from a nearby bush, completely out of breath: REMEMBER THAT MOHAWK YOU HAD IN SECOND GRADE?
when I think about colonialism and slavery I definitely feel exactly the way I do when I think about conversations where I made a risky joke around my peers and no one laughed.
The fact even the audience were silent and obviously not sure what he was getting at says it all, they are there to whoop at everything he says and they are like are you okay bill.
Being the warm-up act to Bill Maher must be the easiest job in comedy. All you have to do is be funnier than Bill Maher, a feat easily accomplished by most funerals.
Yeah, especially with how over half of them are paid actors now. When the guys you pay to laugh and cheer can't make sense of when to do it because the host's monologue stopped making sense is pretty damning.
Great argument. But also just to add to it, this issue really grinds my gears because as someone who’s been in higher education for more than half a decade now, and who has taken many history courses, NO SERIOUS HISTORIAN is arguing for presentism! If anything, they are going out of their way to give students historical context so that we can judge who was a product of their time and who truly deserves ridicule. At best this is an issue on social media, not one educational institutions should be being chastised for
Yes and, even in the general discourse, most people who are criticizing historic figures don't say that they didn't contribute to our society in any way, shape or form, but just that they were complexe human beings who also had bad takes / did bad things (even horrendous for some of them) so idealizing them is not a good idea.
@@tetri90 As a History Major, this is what makes talking about Hitler such an interesting (and controversial) thing for me. I like to point out the good he did for the _country_ of Germany in the early days of his administration not as praise for the man, but as a point to show how effective leaders can utilize their productivity and leadership to insulate or even deaden their constituents response to atrocities they commit. Hitler only got as far as he did because he was wildly and immensely popular for his actions that restored Germany as a world power, which in turn caused Germans across the country to turn a blind eye to The Night of Broken Glass, to ever rising sanctions against Jewish people and other social outliers, to increasing government control in their lives, because they perceived Hitler was looking out for them in the process, and having something to show for it to boot. It reminds me all too much of the Orange Mussolini we had to deal with for four years. However, it is extremely tricky to talk about this kind of extremely pertinent and relevant information. I've gotten more than a few funny looks at the beginning of my talks about Hitler's Germany before I provided further context. You have to walk a very thin line of talking about positives of an otherwise reprehensible monster of a human being to provide context and raise academic questions about modern forms of his beliefs and political system, and that can go very wrong without careful wording and analysis of how we can see continuations of Hitler's Germany in other governments across the world. All to the point that history is complex and even its biggest villains often have undercurrents that can shift your perspective on them and what they represented.
There were people alive when George Washington was alive who knew slavery was wrong, many of his colleagues even. He had no excuse. Unless the idea that what you're doing is morally wrong has literally never been thought of by anybody, or at least anybody you could be aware of. You cannot use ignorance as an excuse. For basically all of human history there have been people who knew slavery was wrong, who believed in democracy, who thought women were equal etc etc. Very few people have a valid claim to have been "of their time" on these issues. Just because they may have been more common in their society doesn't mean they were any less wrong. Anyone who accepts the fact that other people alive today are morally culpable for not agreeing with them on moral issues, must hold historical figures to the same standard. Aka, practically everyone
Thomas Jefferson knew slavery was wrong during the American Revolution. Then ten years later he was passing out personal journals telling his friends that everyone should invest every dollar they have into slaves and land for a guaranteed 5-10% return on their investment. Fun fact: George Washington literally owned way more slaves than Thomas Jefferson but he found Jefferson's obsession with how much money he made on slaves to be repugnant.
There were articles made in England talking about the hypocrisy of these Americsn leaders demanding independence and all men being ewual despite owning slaves....
@@eelvis1674 perhaps, or England as an empire would have been more able to use American resources to colonize the world more effectively, causing a level of harm thwt we could never see coming. England also sucks, they were just right to call out the hipocrisy of America.
Bill Maher is so good at twisting others’ views juuuuust enough so that he’s not outright *lying* about what others believe, but he still gets to look like the Fair And Reasonable one without ever honestly examining the opposing side. I’m glad more people are becoming aware of his shenanigans.
Bill Maher's whole point literally makes presentism seem more reasonable. We as individuals DO often judge our past selves for not knowing better, we criticize our own past actions by the standards of what we know now pretty often. When viewed through that lens it doesn't seem odd at all to point out that people in the past should have done better.
This was what occurred to me as well while watching this - like, dude, I mentally beat the shit out of myself on a regular basis for dumb offhand comments I made two decades ago. I look back on the person I was as a teenager and feel awful for the people who had to put up with me, because my behavior had real consequences and created hardships for others. Like, I'm not losing sleep over that stuff now, but I readily acknowledge that it happened and I should have been better. And that's similar to how anyone who engages in "presentism" probably feels about something like, for example, the genocide of Native Americans enacted by European colonizers - we don't have to spend every waking moment feeling guilty and personally responsible for it, but we should acknowledge how reprehensible it was rather than just shrug and say "meh, whatever, they didn't know any better."
The real problem about his argument and yours is that using a human life as metaphor doesn't really work out to explain history and the sociological context of that time. Judging your own past actions in the context of your personal life, has nothing whatosover to do with judging an entire socio-economic context and history using our current values.
If you do this while claiming to be a (Classical) Liberal, you are pandering to conservatism. Maher wants his audience to believe his takes are common sense, centrist views, and not the reductive nonsense they actually are.
He's definitely become a conservative in the way that all people do if they never readjust their views. Maybe when he was 20 he was progressive, but it's been a *long* time since that's been the case.
nah, this is reductionism borne of frustration. not everyone who doesn’t meet your criteria for being a good progressive is really a conservative in disguise. make no mistake, i find bill maher annoying (sometimes unbearably so) for a number of reasons, but he donates to and votes for democrats, and his positions on social issues and the social safety net are unmistakably left of center. most liberals are simply not woke, for better or worse.
It’s so frustrating because he has a nugget of truth in it: growth is good and if you don’t look back on your younger self and cringe now and then, you haven’t grown. So actually if we don’t look back at history and think “that was fucked up” aren’t we being like, anti societal growth?
yeah, if someone is looking back at slave owners and saying "we shouldnt judge them for having owned slaves" that's a dangerously fine line between giving them the benefit of the doubt and working against societal progress by trying to legitimize and normalize that institution
"Anti-societal growth" pretty well sums up Maher's beliefs. If society imp[roves that means he personally was not the very best boy who ever lived, and that is intolerable.
It's me, the guy who thinks that "I can't believe I wore hypercolor 80s fashion like that" and "I can't believe I thought owning another human being was ok" are the same thing
"We should give historical figures the same benefit of the doubt we give our younger selves." Me: "We'll, I hate my younger self and think they suck, so I guess that's where I'm at."
A pet peeve is people laughing at a comic pause just because they've been conditioned to (or in this case there's a laugh sign), but that was wild even by those standards, there literally wasn't a joke, he just wanted a laugh
@@shytendeakatamanoir9740 And not in a way that's actually funny, a la Tim and Eric. It's like he's doing an intentional mpression of a terrible comedian, but with the impression that it's actually good comedy.
While it's good to acknowledge that morality in the past was way different and it's not always fair to judge people of the past by modern standards, there's a difference between being wrong about something and being a bit of an ass, and commiting A BLOODY GENOCIDE
I refuse to believe that the four people in the audience laughing are laughing. It has to be a laugh track. Thank god I have this tiny little guy talking to me between shots of maher.
When he said that we all have done cringe stuff, that's literal presentism. If you really want to not judge the things you did as a kid, the approach would be something more akin to "I wouldn't do that now, but i do not regret doing it at the time". I once interrupted a live show as a kid, in a kind of hilarious way. Wouldn't do it now, but i accept it as something that a kid did.
"You can't talk about the people of the past's mistakes because those were all of the time but you can talk about their successes because those aren't somehow any different then things now."
His argument feels more like it is geared towards "cancel culture" in general and the history topic is just a gateway to get to the same topic as always.
Maher doesn't know what "woke" means any more than conservatives know what it means. He mixes and matches it w/ cancel culture all the time. It has an actual definition but Maher would be hard pressed to voice it. The term "woke," as used by conservatives and Maher, isn't a thing.
Moment from my past that made me cringe: I used to steal baseball cards from 7/11 Moment from Thomas Jefferson's past that made him cringe: owning and abusing human beings They're basically the same!
"Moment from my past that made me cringe: I used to steal baseball cards from 7/11 Moment from Thomas Jefferson's past that made him cringe: owning and abusing human beings They're basically the same!" So sayeth the simpleton looking for likes.
what's annoying is he has more reason than most to be annoyed at censorship when his show was cancelled by THE US MILITARY, but you won't see him discuss that
The fact you have 65 likes on your comment just shows how many people on here have no clue about Maher at all, including you. He talks about it all the time. But do go on giving us all your opinions on things, I'm sure it will be sooooo fascinating.
What Maher doesn't seem to get, among many other things, is that we probably wouldn't have to judge people in history by today's standards if there weren't so many idiots today who think people had it right in the past and want society to revert to just as it was hundreds of years ago, and have said so in no uncertain terms.
Actually, there are two Mini Joel's per Little Joel, and two Little Joel's per Big Joel. We have no arrived at Mini Joel yet, but we will, mark my words!
It’s the Joelverse with all these Joel’s out there running amok. It’s… Joel’s world and we’re just living in it. We’re living in Joel times out here… Please send help I can’t stop.
He doesn't have "fans" as such. All the people who watch his stuff are conservatives but because they think he is a Liberal for some reason, they will never claim to be a fan, they just comment under every single video "you know you're crazy if even Bill Mahr is calling you out" like they're shocked, and like he has ever been a bastion of progressivism. That's honestly the most frustrating thing about him as a commentator.
His audience seems firmly in the center-right spot of the compass. The sort of people who are like "Well, gay people should probably have the same rights as everyone else, but also I should be allowed to call them slurs because free speech". That, and further right people than him who like to use him for their anti-left talking points by using him as a "see, even this liberal is saying the same things I'm saying, so YOU must be the crazy one!" tool.
I enjoyed, past tense, some of his bits back in the day when he was just kinda abrasive and not a complete wankhead... But yeah, no, the more time goes on the worse his takes seem to become.
What’s the most egregious thing about this is, these people hero worship the founding fathers. They say the constitution is nearly perfect and we should look back at that document as an amazingly good foundation. But yet the founding fathers were so naive they shouldn’t be held to the standards of today. Which is it?
"What’s the most egregious thing about this is, these people hero worship the founding fathers. They say the constitution is nearly perfect and we should look back at that document as an amazingly good foundation. But yet the founding fathers were so naive they shouldn’t be held to the standards of today. Which is it?" Neither. Who said they were naive? They were men of their time. Those are two different things. And there is no universal acclaim for the constitution. There are plenty who consider much of the text to be dated. Look up Originalism or Constitutional Interpretation. Nothing is perfect. Constitutional Law is an entire area of practice.
One of the worst vices of Freedom of Speech Absolutists is that they, without exception, conflate freedom of speech as a civil right with tolerance of speech as a public virtue, and of all the ones who carry on as if these two distinct concepts were the same thing, Bill Maher is the most insufferable. Others do it more egregiously and some do it more disingenuously, but Bill Maher does it more infuriatingly. Thanks, Joel, for helping me see why I have such a visceral reaction to Maher's nonsense.
Maher literally did presentism. "who doesn't have moments from their past that make you cringe". That's literal presentism by his own definition. Are we not cringing at the slave owners of the past? I think we are.
Columbus spent 6 weeks in jail over his treatment of indigenous people. He was tried and acquitted, but the fact that he stood trial at all tells us that he wasn't simply "a man of his time." He was recognized by many at the time as a monster. Unfortunately, King Ferdinand did not agree.
The discovery that killing people is bad was made by Nice A. Goodman in 1673 AD in London. Beforehand, nobody knew that killing people was bad. It was just totally unknown to all of humanity so no one had any reason whatsoever to think killing people was wrong until then, and eventually the knowledge spread throughout the world, and now today everybody knows that killing people is bad. Similar discoveries were made in the coming centuries about theft, sex crimes, racism, slavery, human trafficking, and copyright infringement.
My first thought in response was "But should we not be judging things by our current standards? What harm is done by judging long dead people harshly by today's standards?" It seems more beneficial than anything in that we're looking at different kinds of contexts and judging what we think is right or wrong about them from our present perspective. I see no source of harm besides conservative obsession with the past becoming less popular.
I actually watched Bill Maher religiously up until two or three years ago. He’s become insufferable. But I thought his argument on presentism was on point and I would use it myself until listening to this rebuttal. You are right Joel. It is a bad argument and completely white washes history and treats adults like they have no autonomy for their terrible actions.
A history professor once explained to me that the reason we have statues of the founding fathers but Confederste statues are problematic is that the founding fathers were celebrated for other things and were not entirely defined purely by their complicitness in slavery or participation in it.
I was in the audience for one of bill maher’s dress rehearsals for his show, where he runs through all his half baked material in front of a very small group. It was painful to sit through and I was paid to be there. Worst bit was he barely acknowledged us, it was like the audience wasn’t even there. He just walked on stage, awkwardly fumbled through his jokes for a solid hour, then walked off.
That's literally what a dress rehearsal is.... You don't seem to understand what a rehearsal is... I also don't believe you were there... But cute story
@@cheetahman859 I live in Los Angeles lol, paid audience is just a thing you can do. I’ve literally never heard of a paid audience dress rehearsal or any other show though, Bill is the only one who does it.
@@DaxDives So you're complaining you got paid for a dress rehearsal. Got it... Next time don't go.... That still doesn't negate the fact you don't seem to understand what a dress rehearsal is. It's a rehearsal, things will not be the same as a live on air or taped version for airing. There's always Google or Bing if you're still confused as to the meaning of what a rehearsal is and is for.
I don't think Big Joel is understanding the argument. That or he's is intentionally setting up a straw man argument. "George Washington is a baby??" WTF?
I don't know if you even can cancel dead people. When I think of cancel culture I think of things like: 'not giving your money to someone who you know is going to use it for things you don't agree with', 'a movement that can potentially change the course of a person's career', 'something that would affect the mental health of the person being canceled', How does any of that affect a dead person?
I guess just "talking badly about them" For some reason conservatives think "cancelling" is like a spell you cast on someone and they become "cancelled"
Okay, I've just read James Sweet's column and I can say now that I'm utterly baffled by Bill Maher's comments. The column is about people approaching History with the sole intent of validating their political positions of cultural identities. For example, Sweet criticises conservatives for trying to downplay slavery instead of "challenging the Founders’ position as timeless tribunes of liberty", as well as the tendency in certain African American circles to ignore the role of African slave trading empires for the sake of racial/political unity. Nowhere does it talk about judging historical figures by modern standards, but of people simplifying history to a "zero-sum game of heroes and villains" and a "grab bag to articulate their political positions" The problem isn't judging history by different standards, it's that people IGNORE parts of history for the sake of creating a narrative.
I swear there was a school shooting recently and this Bill Maher guy had a video where he was blaming Hollywood gun violence as a cause of mass shootings. As a Brit, it was so weird to watch; we watch violent movies, play violent video games, listen to angry music, yet we don't have mass shootings like we hear about in America. But alas, America has to blame its woes on something; anything other than the actual cause of the problem, since the truth would get poor Bill less views.
Your underlying point still stands, it's just that since Maher is literally on national tv doing a comedy bit, a little more leeway can be given. If you asked him to give a serious argument, I doubt he'd literally say that we can't judge the people of the past because they were cringe and babies. Maher is just giving an analogy and hyperbolizing a bit for the sake of comedy. It doesn't at all mean he's even remotely correct, but dumbing his argument down like this is not accurate to his actual argument.
Honestly, I think the answer is in-between - and both Bill and Joel make valid arguments. People certainly have some agency to think, but our scope of "what is possible" and "what society will allow" is heavily influenced by our environment - in the same sense that a Burka-clad woman in Saudi Arabia might truly believe the veil was meant to protect her. It's also not fair to judge people for not taking a strong moral stand (even if they know it's right) which would result in injury or ostracization from their community. Moreover, judging historical figures by today's standards is undoubtedly very unfair, and we get Presentism wrong all the time - the most ethical person on Earth in 2000 BC would have probably supported slavery (and might have just treated his slaves better than his neighbors), becauses that was just how society functioned in those days, and his/her "mental scope" was shaped by that society - he/she was probably incapable of imagining a world without it. Deifying any human being is inherently flawed - because we're all inherently flawed, and we should study George Washington as we should any historical figure - a very interesting man and a key figure in our history, who contributed positively to humanity in some ways and negatively in others.
"We can't judge people of the past just like we can't judge the cringey outfits we wore in our youth" *goes on to admit that he judges the cringey outfits he wore in his youth to make his point...somehow*
Slave owners fed the children of slaves to alligators but lets ignore that because you know "presentism". Slave owners also allowed 14 year old slave girls to be operated on without anaesthesia. But there is nothing wrong with that because of present-ism
Your conclusion here really hammers the point home. Even if we avoid contesting the idea that no one else at the time new better or thought it was wrong, the problem is that their virtues are extolled so enthusiastically today. Conservatives want us to overlook the founders' flaws as "just products of their time," but they point to their judgement as infallible when it comes to moral virtuousness, the founding structure of the country, or the wording of documents. Sure, they were right about democracy and a living constitution being good, but if they can be wrong about whether it's okay to own people or not, they can also be wrong about the existence of the electoral college, the senate, lifetime appointments on the Supreme Court, etc
I used to love watching Bill’s show. I haven’t been able to stomach him for the last 2 years or so. His time hanging out with conservatives has really gotten to him. And he’s woefully unprepared for his show, regularly. His interviews are noticeably worse because he makes it obvious he doesn’t know the guests name, didn’t read their book, and couldn’t care to interview them.
@@8BitsOfFun1323 The worst part is his sneering condescension as he rattles off his bad takes and painfully unfunny jokes. If you're going to be smug at least make sure you're right first.
The thing is that some people *did* know better. Going back at least a few hundred years, there have always been people with basically modern ideas calling bullshit on the world’s injustices. You could tell a version of history where *these* are the voices that get centered. That’s not presentism.
Just imagine an exasperated crowd of white people who grew up being told that their ancestors owned slaves and finally being able to breathe now that a rich white guy is telling them that they weren't bad people for doing so. This is basically every laugh at a Bill Maher show.
It also ignores that there were people who recognized the horrific nature of slavery during that time period. The problems with slavery should be obvious to any sensible person, it's not like the horrors of it were less obvious in the past, there was just more incentive to engage in it, since the pre-industrial economy was much more dependent on direct human labor and there was more proganda trying to ease people's consciences.
Maher would sorta have a point if the goal of judging their actions was 'decide who was/wasn't a good person in a vacuum' rather than 'learn from their mistakes.'
(because the first one has a worker baby, second one has paragon of good morals baby, third one has smart baby. and those qualities are important in this order)
I have a half-devil’s advocate for this one. It’s not a particularly unique thought, and I think that makes it worth considering. For the record, I’m not satisfied with this notion but I also feel like there’s something of value in here, so I’m quite interested in bouncing it off of other people to watch them pick it apart and hear what they think. In some respects, this is a springboard off of the (emotionally very sympathizable but morally worthless) non-argument that it can feel quite depressing to say that large swaths of your past was bad. It seems like, by dialing it back a few notches, the argument suddenly sounds a little more valid to me. Here goes: Let’s say we’re looking back at the Olden Time in a given society, where the majority of people popularly believed in bad ideas A, B, and C. (We in our New Better Age can clearly see that A, B, and C were all very very bad.) Then one day, some small number of people (let’s call them the “old progressives”) decide/realize that A is actually quite bad, and they do a lot of difficult work and make a lot of tough sacrifices to convince the rest of their society that A is bad, and they ultimately succeed in their goal, and when the dust has settled, this society no longer believes in A. I think there is something that feels heroic about the good work that those “old progressives” accomplished, something worth celebrating. All the while, however, those same “old progressives” clung to and continued to cling to bad ideas B and C, very much in accordance with the rest of society. That is not good at all, and it was not good of them. (In our Better Age today, we see B and C as so bad that we tend to say that believing in B and C makes you a bad person.) How should we describe this? How do we reconcile those two things? How should we judge them? Should we judge them? Do we invoke relative goodness? Can we say they were good people for their time? Do we say they were bad people trying their best? Do we call them flawed? Of course we don’t need to (read: shouldn’t) reduce a person (past or present) to being all good or all bad, and real events are invariably packed with complexity and nuance. But it’s challenging to encapsulate a memory (to remember as an evolving society) when the contents are so conflicted. Retelling history has a way of reducing things to simpler and simpler forms. It’s challenging to praise for one thing while condemning for another. I’m rambling because I’m having trouble pinning down exactly what this argument is, but hopefully I’ve conveyed enough that you get the idea. Thoughts?
I think simply saying that they did this good thing while acknowledging the societal, structual bad thing they were still part of is enough. Like, we are not cutting them slack this way. We are acknowledging the material reality they lived under and the societal norm they wrongly clung onto while undoing a specific structural evil. I dunno, that's just my gut reaction.
Basically what Joel says between 3:53 and 4:15 ; The reason new progressives are often attacking progressives of the past isn't because they beleive they were fondamentally bad people or to put into question the fact that they improved the world in their times, but because modern culture has specialized in creating myths around those people and presenting them as perfect beacons of social progress, which inherently legitimize ignoring how bad bad idea B and C are and lessen the social importance accorded to the trauma people who suffered from them may still have as adressing that harm is seen as an attack on our culture. Past people were people, not heroes. None of them were perfect and they should be looked at critically (like anybody else) rather than idealized. And that's when we are talking about people who were good on one subject despite being bad about an other, but many of our idealized cultural heros were just plain horrible even for their times (cf Colombus).
You can easily avoid this issue by simply not caring about the feelings of dead people and not caring at all about seeing them as good people, or even in judging whether any individual was good or bad. I mean you still can do that. I'll never stop believing and saying that Thomas Jefferson was a horrible monster. But that's got nothing to do with studying history. What people did and the effects those actions had on the world are what we study history for. We outline the mistakes of the past in hopes of avoiding those mistakes in the present. If what we find is that most people in the past were awful, evil people by the standards we've determined result in the best society possible than so be it. Truth is truth.
thank you, thank you, THANK YOU for this video. my dad plays Bill Maher every week in our house and we have gotten into SO many arguments about every smug misrepresentation of progressives and and social progress he makes, it's SO frustrating.
The fouding fathers were infinitely wise, hyper-prescient gods among men and any laws they handed down on stone tablets should still be rigidly adhered to and defended to the death even hundreds of yearsnlater because they're so applicable to the present day. But anything bad they did is because they were just thoughtless babies, mindless children, just a product of their time that we cannot possibly look at or judge in a modern context.
This is why I like a new historical perspective on history- it's important to hold in regard both the fact that it was at one point socially acceptable to "own" another person, but that there were people who thought that was abhorrent, and of course the often neglected in right-wing circles position that the people who were owned were, in fact, people who, despite the fact that they were being called property, were undeniably people. Obviously in many contexts applying modern developments in philosophy or whatever to the past is deeply flawed, but the idea of "slavery might be bad actually" is Not a particularly modern development. When looking at the past, it's important to remember that the world then was just as varied and vast in perspectives and narratives as it is now, and to research the past in a nuanced way, it's wise to try and take that variability into account. And, of course, the impact of a person doesn't end when that person dies. With people who, in their lives and afterwards, were figureheads who represented more than a mere man, it's especially important to look at how they were flawed and incorrect and how that might problematize what they represent. The idea that this leads to the question of "Should we prosecute Washington for participate in slavery?" is as absurd as the notion of putting a skeleton on trial, but the question of "How much respect should we give to a man who claimed ownership over human beings?" is one with far more of a reason.
There have been peace-loving vegetarian hippies across all eras and peoples. There have always been people who know better than to judge a gay person, a crossdresser, or someone of a different race. Letters and historical texts support this. The only difference is the amount of social/political sway those ideologies had in the context of their times. The idea that historical people had no grasp of the moral consequences of their behavior is absurd. There are people in the modern era who would happily own slaves, just as they still do in many parts of the world, the only difference is that now American society does not permit it. The would-be slave owner and the actual slave owner are both worthy of disdain, but it is much harder to recognize a would-be, therefore we feel inclined to assume some greater shift in society that's worthy of taking into consideration. Certain arguments about cult-ish religious brainwashing aside, it really isn't, in my opinion.
Now that's one hilariously stupid argument. When I was 15, I wore an orange velvet suit with a blue tie with Mickey Mouse on it, and I had long hair and a shadow moustache. If, also when I was 15, I had murdered a bunch of people, it would be a little harder to just laugh, cringe and pretend it didn't happen.
I love that these little joel videos feel like my eccentric cousin is pulling me to the side at a nice family dinner at our grandma's after he's stayed up all night watching TH-cam videos to tell me what's really been grinding his gears about society, or in this case, Bill Marr. Thanks for being you Henry.
I’m not sure that’s a fair reading of the argument. i’d always interpreted it as “you have to judge people within the context of their time” (I acknowledge he doesn’t use these words, but it seems sufficiently implied). So the analogy to different behaviour an individual made in the past does work in a rough way. He’s not saying “these people were babies”, he’s saying “judge them in their context”. I think it’s one of those areas where there’s nuance - you have to consider the issues on a case-by-case basis. Bill doesn’t do this of course, true to form. He doesn’t even acknowledge that “acceptable at the time” does not mean “irrelevant”
I started watching this video 12s after it was uploaded. Just finished it. And there are 3 minute old comments. Are there people out there commenting half way through the video? Is that a thing? Like writing your immediate reaction as the video is happening?
Yeah, you should try it. It's a great way to not get bored after having to listen to someone talk uninterrupted for 30 seconds, or God forbid, four minutes.
This clip is the most “Tell me you’ve never listened to an academic discussion of history without saying it” thing I’ve seen Marh deliver; at least on the academic side, we aren’t judging people by the standards of today, we’re trying to understand the logic, their motives, their thought processes, and their world view, and we are trying to understand it; however, we can’t stop ourselves from judging people for it, or from having opinions on it, but we can and are supposed to stop ourselves from praising glorifying and damning people of the past; the statement “Don’t judge people from the standards of today” is such a non argument, and it’s a cowards way to try to shut down a difficult and uncomfortable conversation; people weren’t stupid in the past, and this argument treats them like they were, and not people with their own thoughts, ideas, worldviews, and thought processes, and understanding those beliefs, not lionizing or damning them is the goal.
I can't condemn Hitler for genocide; have you seen my hair in the eighties?
(Laugh track sounds)
You can condemn Hitler. The person you can't condemn is the little german boy who turned in the hiding Jewish family because turning in Jews was what German authorities in the forties expected of him.
In general, I'd say that people should only be judged (positively or negatively) for things they did *against* the curve, not things that were just going with the flow of the time.
@@maxwessel7786 _[B A Z I N G A]_
You like straws
@@hattorikanzo2793 How is it a strawman when it literally exemplifies the comparison that Bill Maher makes?
Conservatives take “we shouldn’t idealize slave owners” so personally, almost makes me wonder if it’s a self-report
The problem though is that there are many progressives who go from "we shouldn't idealise" to "we should learn anything from these monsters". I've met many progressives like this and you can't have a conversation with them about anyone or anything from history because if they see some kind of evil doing they just disregard the topic completely. Obviously not all progressives are like this but it's sad to see the same lack of black and white thinking that you normally find amongst conservatives
Maher is absolutely the kind of person who thinks asking students to name some positive aspects of slavery is a great way to teach history.
@@jfm14 It is a great way to teach history, because you can deconstruct WHY positive aspects of a negative thing don't make said negative thing worthwhile. It's critical thinking, a really important part of understanding things. Blindly accepting an idea as bad "because it is bad" is anti-intellectual.
I hate Bill Maher btw
No, trying to list the “good” aspects of slavery (especially to younger people) is not a critical thinking task, it is attempting to justify the system of what took place through the lens of the system itself. The human cost of what was done was not offset by some “well at least we were able to do this…”. To truly critically think about slavery is to look at the whole of the system. That can include seeing how specifically things progressed with production, which I believe is your actual point. But it can never be divorced into such a pro/con style thing like that without being seen through the lens that assumes slavery as somehow needed for that progress. It was not the system of slavery that caused good things. Those things could have still happened in a more egalitarian society, because they were done by the people forced to do it, not the slave owners.
is that a mf among us
This totally ignores the fact that a lot of people DID know better. There were people, a lot of people, who were against slavery and other violations of human rights
I'm willing to bet that there have been people against slavery since slavery began, it's just that most of them were slaves.
The really dumb thing is humans are not functionally different now than even 2000 years ago. We are the same basic animal; evolution has not had enough time to make us some fundamental different animal.
And considering slaves are not some abstract thing, but... ya know... people themselves (many of whom i'm going to guess were, ya know... opposed to slavery). There were definitely people, even 5000 years ago, or whenever the first human slave existed, that was opposed to slavery. Definitionally.
----
But even if we're just talking about slavery from the "middle classes and highers" perspective... they, too, had many abolitionists in their ranks.
Slavery abolition was part of the original French Revolution reforms. In 1799.
Even most of british society was opposed to slavery by this time, as noted by PM Liverpool trying to have discussions of slavery abolition as part of the terms of peace in europe post napoleonic wars. Granted, Liverpool himself didn't seem to care for it. But the vast majority of british people at the time most definitely did.
And these ideas didn't just spontaneously erupt in 1799 from nothing. They were, like any social movement, fomenting for *decades* before hand in the lower to middle classes.
But just like terrible ideas that exist with us even to this day (drug prohibition, capital punishment, hatred of gay/lesbian people, corporate exploitation, Religion (one for bill maher), etc) - it is a fight between the numerous powerless who oppose bad ideas, and few powerful who benefit from them.
But, as usual, it is the powerful who call the shots, write the history, make the laws, and pretend that they didn't know better when they definitely, 100% did.
It's mind-bogglingly stupid to suggest people of the before-times were fundamentally different in any way shape or form than people of today.
All those founding fathers who owned slaves? They knew that it was wrong. They just didn't care enough to get rid of it. And that's the reality.
100%. Bartolomé de las Casas comes to mind - he fought the mistreatment of Indigenous people back in the 1500s.
I'm Spartacus.
Because it also comes from a whitewashed version of history. If people are just taught "they were people of their times" for almost everything with little to no mention of the people of those times that fought against those violations, you get closer to Maher's logic. This logic also seems to frame so many things in the view of white wealthy men or just the powerful of the time/place. It's like the people who didn't/don't have the same rights as everyone else are less a part of the framing.
it is a chore to look at Bill Maher but it is a joy to look at Little Joel
i like the joels (both the little and the big) but its hard for me to watch his videos because he looks exactly like my brother who moved to another country years ago so we lost contact completely. kinda sounds like him too. really hope joel is not him with a changed name and a philosophy degree cuz that would be embarrassing for me
@@lergia there is an unlisted video i think you need to see...
@@aarontheperson6867 🤨🤨🤨
SUCH A JOY!!!! He's soooooo handsome!
This new guy isn't too bad.
"hey i think we shouldn't idolize slavers and genociders"
"Well have you considered that you shat your pants when you were 3?"
Meanwhile whenever Bill needs to shit he just finds the nearest microphone.
@@tjenadonn6158 “quick! Put on the cameras! **belch** uh- gen z, amirite?”
Checkmate liberal
No I haven’t! Wow thanks, I’m a conservative now! Whoops, I mean I’m a *CENTRIST* now.
So you want to ignore the postive and negative contributions about history.
What I hate most about the "we can't judge people by today's standards" argument is that it assumes everyone in the past had exactly the same opinions. You could argue that Jefferson and Washington owning slaves was just a product of the times, that it was socially acceptable to own humans and so we can't judge them. But that completely ignores that even among their peers, there were people around that time who saw slavery as immoral and wanted it abolished. If those abolitionists had the capacity to understand that slavery was wrong, how is it acceptable that someone else at the time still chose to keep people as property?
and columbus was actually condemned by most people in his time.
This is a great point! Maher and those who think like him talk about applying modern standards to the past, but they treat the past as a monolith in a projection of their own black-and-white thinking. Even looking at the people who wrote in defense of slavery, we might ask, "why would they write in defense of slavery unless they thought slavery needed to be defended from something?" There were critics of slavery in the ancient world!
They weren't a "product of their time", they were a product of a bigoted culture and privileged circumstances.
very big agree
Even Jefferson knew that the system of slavery was immoral, but having been born and raised in the pit of it, he could not reason his way into how to end it. Washington had some of his slaves freed, after his death. Jefferson did not, which always irked me when watching the film (and Broadway musical) 1776, where Jefferson claims he would do so. The writers knew what happened.
Classic Maher moment, I love that the human race was collectively 5-10 year olds only 70 years ago.
They're just little guys! How were they to know doing a slavery was bad and wrong? They just didn't know any better, cut them some slack!
5-10 years old till the mid 90s (residential schools were still around then). Wow we grew up so fast
Lmao it's boomer mentality. History began with them.
It's interesting too because I feel like I thought of history like this when I was a child.
Like, that's sort of how history is taught to children, right? "Once upon a time we were all dumb baby cavemen, then we grew up and learned farming but still had toddler-ideas like Greek gods (we weren't mature enough to discover the real God yet), then we hit puberty and invented democracy and freedom, then we graduated high school when we realized racism was bad. Hitler was a guy who was developmentally delayed but that's fixed now." There's this sense as an American kid in the 20th century that we're living in the best, most advanced time in the best, most advanced place.
I guess some people never think about things beyond how they learned it in elementary school. Matt "Basic Biology" Walsh is similar vibes.
For real. We’ve been working with the same hardware for 10 million years, but we have to treat the heirs to the Enlightenment like they couldn’t figure out that slavery was atrocious.
"How could they have possibly known kidnapping, putting people in chains, branding their skin, beating them senseless, separating families, and forced labor were bad!?!?!?!??!?!?"
because the church told them so.. for example.
imagine were all vegans in 200 years... how could they possibly think that slaughtering animals, exploiting animals, putting them to work etc. is acceptable?
Does that mean that everyone who ever ate meat in the human history is suddenly evil? - and if so... do we have to discard all their achievements?
"How could they have possibly known kidnapping, putting people in chains, branding their skin, beating them senseless, separating families, and forced labor were bad!?!?!?!??!?!?"
Well, that's the thing of it - these slavers didn't think about their vocation in the same terms you're thinking about it. It was just another day on the job to them. It was work. And they had most likely long since abandoned the idea that they were even dealing with human beings at all. One would have to tell themselves this and turn themselves to stone in order to function in such a gruesome environment. I'm sure they didn't lose sleep over it, but it seems you have this idea of these slavers being evil purely for the sake of being evil. That's rarely the case with any kind of atrocity. As with the African tribes that sold their own people as well as prisoners of war, this was a pay day for the slave traders. To think of all the people who contributed to the institution of slavery as something akin to the soldiers of Mordor is just plain silly. We can't get to any kind of understanding with such cartoonish oversimplifications. And then there's this thing called cognitive dissonance, where people often bely their own beliefs. I'm sure you do it all of the time by rationalizing your decisions and playing mental gymnastics for the sake of getting what you want or need. Think of child labor and human suffering the next time you purchase something on Amazon or elsewhere.
Anyway, learn from the past so you change the present. There's plenty to be done in the here and now. Looking back and conducting these retroactive witch hunts isn't going to serve anyone.
Lmao, They had reasons therefore what they did was just and cannot br condemned. Amazing.
@@lawrencehan7385 "Lmao, They had reasons therefore what they did was just and cannot br condemned. Amazing."
Well, no one said they were just, and no one suggested they were exempt from condemnation. But while you continue to take pleasure in roasting the ghosts of the past, be sure to remove the plank from your own eye and examine your own moral failings. By the way, it's hard to take anyone who begins a sentence with "lmao" seriously. And your reading comprehension is in the toilet. Happy holidays, champ.
@@jackmort5015 Your first post justified slavery because they weren't intentionally malicious about it - they had economic incentives to do so. Gee, well if the Nazi soldiers were just doing a job. Can't fault them. Great logic.
Then you go on to say that let bygones be bygones and focus on the present - except that their veneration in the past is justification to perpetuate similar actions in the present. If they are venerated as heroes, they are not being condemned; if people are protecting them from criticisms and want people to move on from the past, which has vast material consequences today, then it's clear that they are exempt from condemnation.
Things like the Constitution, a horrendously flawed document, are venerated and protected despite its inadequacies and far past its expiration date. Venerating the Founding Fathers a whole bunch of slavers and complicit slavers maintains the validity of such a document into the present day.
The past informs and creates the present. And despite how much you say to learn from it, you apparently do not and refuse to let others from doing so. Ending with a non-sequitur and ignoring the crux of the issue to focus on a minor technicality. Stunning. But reading or listening comprehension sure is your strong suit - otherwise you wouldn't have made such a banal defense after watching the video.
I love how “enslaving human beings” is something you can’t expect someone to have known better than doing. Like, when he makes this argument, he’s leaving out the quiet part that he wants you to stop judging the founding fathers for *owning slaves.*
And ignore there were already abolitionists who did know better.
@@BaronCemetery Same for Columbus. The actual people behind the levers of power thought he was going too far even by their standards.
Yes all civilizations had slaves it was part of life for all people.
@@szzk7937 Ah yes like the Franks. Or the Normans. Or the vikings.
@@szzk7937 Even if that were true (it's not -- a lot of civilizations practiced some form of slavery, but not all of them), we also have accounts of people right across human history who understood that slavery was wrong and opposed it. There was never a time in history when an intellectually curious person couldn't figure out that slavery is wrong.
"Your Honor, I cannot be judged for crimes that were committed in the past. This is the present. Things are completely different now." --Bill Maher
"Your Honor, I was cringe, but I've changed. I would never commit a genocide nowadays."
I mean, Obama did say something along the lines of "don't punish people for their past actions" when asked if he was going to do anything about the war crimes of the prior administration.
@@Aden_Phoenix then he committed some himself lol
I’m curious does anyone here understand why this is a bad comparison?
@@hrothgr52 no, they dont. cause they are cringy, regressive left drones (unwittingly doing more harm to liberal causes than any far right conservatives EVER could)
first of all...ever heard of a thing called statute of limitations? so yeah you LITERALLY (and legally) "can not be judged for crimes that were committed in the past". 2nd of all, YES an individual can not be judged or charged for doing an activity which was not against the law AT THE TIME of doing it. should we retroactively charge your grandfather for smoking on a plane 70 years ago? 3rd, youre completely missing the underlining point and fixating on semantic nonsense (hence the cheap applause line analogy that holds no water but makes your fellow lemmings nod and agree). when something is universally (for the most part) acceptable and condoned (by society at large, the bible AND THE LAW ITSELF) there is less pressure and influence on your morality. and that was the whole point! its easy for YOU in 2022 to champion what is arguably one of the most agreed upon notions in most of the civilized world (lets see you do the same 200 years ago when from the moment you were born you were taught that some people are "less than"). its 2022 and most people are incapable of shaking off the religious indoctrination thats been drilled into them since childhood (i repeat...2022 and grown men and women all over the world are believing in one of the most ridiculous, plothole ridden, transparent works of charlatanry ever written in the history of mankind!!) WHY? cause its an acceptable thing to do in our society! 4th....eh, to hell with it...i could be here all day but its not worth wasting my breath on the left wings version of MAGA). enjoy your 83 genders while trump slithers his way back into the white house (due in no small part to YOU) . history will not be kind to trumpists but believe me, it wont be kind to YOU either! (kinda ironic how you dont have the foresight to see how much your grandchildren will be cringing at you and your microaggressions) . you thought neon spandex, shoulderpads and big hair were bad in the 80s? wait till they get a load of "preferred gender pronouns" and "dragqueen storyhour for toddlers"....
I really think woke culture has gotten out of hand. What about sleep culture? What about sleeping Little Joel!?!?!?
POWER TO THE SLEEPERS!
"Let me tell you buddy. Waking up is a damn sight harder than going to sleep, but we'll stay woke up longer." -- United Mine Worker c. 1940.
I, too, endeavor to stay woke up longer.
im no longer woke; im now sleepy. hoonk mimimimimimimi
This is why woke Sleepy Joe won.
He had all the bases covered.
Really like your avatar. Great video.
I love how popular hardcore cultural relativism becomes among conservatives when the cultures are separated by time instead of distance.
The past is another country, but it's a white one so we won't hold it accountable.
thanks bill. now I feel much better about all the slaves I owned back when I was 10. how was I supposed to have known that was wrong, after all
“man, it’s pretty wild how much genocide christopher columbus took part in”
bill maher, sprinting towards me from a nearby bush, completely out of breath: REMEMBER THAT MOHAWK YOU HAD IN SECOND GRADE?
And the thing about guys like Columbus is it isn't oh but that's how people were back there, what do did so beyond pale back then.
@@stephennootens916 They don't think it be like that but it do
TIL American second graders used to own indigenous people
Yeah even by the standards of Columbus’ time his actions were disturbing to his fellow colonizers
I remember the mohawk I had in 2nd grade and I looked rad as hell
when I think about colonialism and slavery I definitely feel exactly the way I do when I think about conversations where I made a risky joke around my peers and no one laughed.
The fact even the audience were silent and obviously not sure what he was getting at says it all, they are there to whoop at everything he says and they are like are you okay bill.
Being the warm-up act to Bill Maher must be the easiest job in comedy. All you have to do is be funnier than Bill Maher, a feat easily accomplished by most funerals.
Yeah, especially with how over half of them are paid actors now. When the guys you pay to laugh and cheer can't make sense of when to do it because the host's monologue stopped making sense is pretty damning.
His fan base is smug and dumb.
Great argument. But also just to add to it, this issue really grinds my gears because as someone who’s been in higher education for more than half a decade now, and who has taken many history courses, NO SERIOUS HISTORIAN is arguing for presentism! If anything, they are going out of their way to give students historical context so that we can judge who was a product of their time and who truly deserves ridicule. At best this is an issue on social media, not one educational institutions should be being chastised for
@@Tsukiru exactly!
Yes and, even in the general discourse, most people who are criticizing historic figures don't say that they didn't contribute to our society in any way, shape or form, but just that they were complexe human beings who also had bad takes / did bad things (even horrendous for some of them) so idealizing them is not a good idea.
@birds ridicule was the wrong word but yes!
Conservative boomers actually having no idea of what current education and academia are like? Oh my gosh I would never have even expected that...
@@tetri90 As a History Major, this is what makes talking about Hitler such an interesting (and controversial) thing for me. I like to point out the good he did for the _country_ of Germany in the early days of his administration not as praise for the man, but as a point to show how effective leaders can utilize their productivity and leadership to insulate or even deaden their constituents response to atrocities they commit. Hitler only got as far as he did because he was wildly and immensely popular for his actions that restored Germany as a world power, which in turn caused Germans across the country to turn a blind eye to The Night of Broken Glass, to ever rising sanctions against Jewish people and other social outliers, to increasing government control in their lives, because they perceived Hitler was looking out for them in the process, and having something to show for it to boot. It reminds me all too much of the Orange Mussolini we had to deal with for four years.
However, it is extremely tricky to talk about this kind of extremely pertinent and relevant information. I've gotten more than a few funny looks at the beginning of my talks about Hitler's Germany before I provided further context. You have to walk a very thin line of talking about positives of an otherwise reprehensible monster of a human being to provide context and raise academic questions about modern forms of his beliefs and political system, and that can go very wrong without careful wording and analysis of how we can see continuations of Hitler's Germany in other governments across the world.
All to the point that history is complex and even its biggest villains often have undercurrents that can shift your perspective on them and what they represented.
There were people alive when George Washington was alive who knew slavery was wrong, many of his colleagues even. He had no excuse.
Unless the idea that what you're doing is morally wrong has literally never been thought of by anybody, or at least anybody you could be aware of. You cannot use ignorance as an excuse.
For basically all of human history there have been people who knew slavery was wrong, who believed in democracy, who thought women were equal etc etc.
Very few people have a valid claim to have been "of their time" on these issues. Just because they may have been more common in their society doesn't mean they were any less wrong.
Anyone who accepts the fact that other people alive today are morally culpable for not agreeing with them on moral issues, must hold historical figures to the same standard. Aka, practically everyone
Thomas Jefferson knew slavery was wrong during the American Revolution. Then ten years later he was passing out personal journals telling his friends that everyone should invest every dollar they have into slaves and land for a guaranteed 5-10% return on their investment.
Fun fact: George Washington literally owned way more slaves than Thomas Jefferson but he found Jefferson's obsession with how much money he made on slaves to be repugnant.
There were articles made in England talking about the hypocrisy of these Americsn leaders demanding independence and all men being ewual despite owning slaves....
@@raydgreenwald7788 the world would have been a better place if America had been a british subject when the empire outlawed the slave trade
@@eelvis1674 perhaps, or England as an empire would have been more able to use American resources to colonize the world more effectively, causing a level of harm thwt we could never see coming. England also sucks, they were just right to call out the hipocrisy of America.
@@eelvis1674 Maybe for the slaves, but everywhere else in the world would have been screwed by such a powerful Britain. They were horrible as it is.
He's one of the most torturous people out there.
Bill Maher is so good at twisting others’ views juuuuust enough so that he’s not outright *lying* about what others believe, but he still gets to look like the Fair And Reasonable one without ever honestly examining the opposing side. I’m glad more people are becoming aware of his shenanigans.
Hear hear
Bill Maher's whole point literally makes presentism seem more reasonable. We as individuals DO often judge our past selves for not knowing better, we criticize our own past actions by the standards of what we know now pretty often. When viewed through that lens it doesn't seem odd at all to point out that people in the past should have done better.
This was what occurred to me as well while watching this - like, dude, I mentally beat the shit out of myself on a regular basis for dumb offhand comments I made two decades ago. I look back on the person I was as a teenager and feel awful for the people who had to put up with me, because my behavior had real consequences and created hardships for others.
Like, I'm not losing sleep over that stuff now, but I readily acknowledge that it happened and I should have been better. And that's similar to how anyone who engages in "presentism" probably feels about something like, for example, the genocide of Native Americans enacted by European colonizers - we don't have to spend every waking moment feeling guilty and personally responsible for it, but we should acknowledge how reprehensible it was rather than just shrug and say "meh, whatever, they didn't know any better."
@@SadisticBlessings exactly!!!
The real problem about his argument and yours is that using a human life as metaphor doesn't really work out to explain history and the sociological context of that time. Judging your own past actions in the context of your personal life, has nothing whatosover to do with judging an entire socio-economic context and history using our current values.
@@miguelrosado6348 It's literally the same thing just on a macro scale. It's humans judging the actions of humans.
I don't know if I would call it "pandering to conservatives" so much as "is conservative"
If you do this while claiming to be a (Classical) Liberal, you are pandering to conservatism. Maher wants his audience to believe his takes are common sense, centrist views, and not the reductive nonsense they actually are.
He's definitely become a conservative in the way that all people do if they never readjust their views. Maybe when he was 20 he was progressive, but it's been a *long* time since that's been the case.
nah, this is reductionism borne of frustration. not everyone who doesn’t meet your criteria for being a good progressive is really a conservative in disguise.
make no mistake, i find bill maher annoying (sometimes unbearably so) for a number of reasons, but he donates to and votes for democrats, and his positions on social issues and the social safety net are unmistakably left of center. most liberals are simply not woke, for better or worse.
No he's a (right wing) libertarian remember? According to himself lol
@@8BitsOfFun1323 when were those words used? He called himself a Libertine a bunch, but that's a different word with a different meaning
It’s so frustrating because he has a nugget of truth in it: growth is good and if you don’t look back on your younger self and cringe now and then, you haven’t grown.
So actually if we don’t look back at history and think “that was fucked up” aren’t we being like, anti societal growth?
yeah, if someone is looking back at slave owners and saying "we shouldnt judge them for having owned slaves" that's a dangerously fine line between giving them the benefit of the doubt and working against societal progress by trying to legitimize and normalize that institution
Ever wonder why conservatives hate progressives, cause they liked it better back in the day
"Anti-societal growth" pretty well sums up Maher's beliefs. If society imp[roves that means he personally was not the very best boy who ever lived, and that is intolerable.
It's me, the guy who thinks that "I can't believe I wore hypercolor 80s fashion like that" and "I can't believe I thought owning another human being was ok" are the same thing
Hypercolor was and is cool
"We should give historical figures the same benefit of the doubt we give our younger selves."
Me: "We'll, I hate my younger self and think they suck, so I guess that's where I'm at."
@@washada and your younger self didn't even genocide anyone
I like how you can tell the exact moment the audience's 'laugh' sign came on. The hallmark of true comedy.
He really makes sure what he does is as unwatchable as possible, doesn't he?
1:18 It's so obvious, they wait 1 second
To me it sounds like some of the laughs in the audience are so over the top they're actually sarcastic.
A pet peeve is people laughing at a comic pause just because they've been conditioned to (or in this case there's a laugh sign), but that was wild even by those standards, there literally wasn't a joke, he just wanted a laugh
@@shytendeakatamanoir9740 And not in a way that's actually funny, a la Tim and Eric. It's like he's doing an intentional mpression of a terrible comedian, but with the impression that it's actually good comedy.
While it's good to acknowledge that morality in the past was way different and it's not always fair to judge people of the past by modern standards, there's a difference between being wrong about something and being a bit of an ass, and commiting A BLOODY GENOCIDE
I refuse to believe that the four people in the audience laughing are laughing. It has to be a laugh track.
Thank god I have this tiny little guy talking to me between shots of maher.
That or they were laughing at him the same way you'd laugh at the guy ranting about Jewish space lasers on the bus.
"smug intellectual incuriosity" chef's kiss
When he said that we all have done cringe stuff, that's literal presentism. If you really want to not judge the things you did as a kid, the approach would be something more akin to "I wouldn't do that now, but i do not regret doing it at the time". I once interrupted a live show as a kid, in a kind of hilarious way. Wouldn't do it now, but i accept it as something that a kid did.
thats his point.
"You can't talk about the people of the past's mistakes because those were all of the time but you can talk about their successes because those aren't somehow any different then things now."
His argument feels more like it is geared towards "cancel culture" in general and the history topic is just a gateway to get to the same topic as always.
Maher doesn't know what "woke" means any more than conservatives know what it means. He mixes and matches it w/ cancel culture all the time. It has an actual definition but Maher would be hard pressed to voice it. The term "woke," as used by conservatives and Maher, isn't a thing.
Moment from my past that made me cringe: I used to steal baseball cards from 7/11
Moment from Thomas Jefferson's past that made him cringe: owning and abusing human beings
They're basically the same!
"Moment from my past that made me cringe: I used to steal baseball cards from 7/11
Moment from Thomas Jefferson's past that made him cringe: owning and abusing human beings
They're basically the same!"
So sayeth the simpleton looking for likes.
what's annoying is he has more reason than most to be annoyed at censorship when his show was cancelled by THE US MILITARY, but you won't see him discuss that
He talks about that all the time.
Yeah, he brings that up plenty, especially on the topic of "political correctness," for obvious reasons.
He knows who butters his bread.
The fact you have 65 likes on your comment just shows how many people on here have no clue about Maher at all, including you. He talks about it all the time. But do go on giving us all your opinions on things, I'm sure it will be sooooo fascinating.
@@cheetahman859 okay i will
crab > lobster
also, why does this comment have 65 likes?
What Maher doesn't seem to get, among many other things, is that we probably wouldn't have to judge people in history by today's standards if there weren't so many idiots today who think people had it right in the past and want society to revert to just as it was hundreds of years ago, and have said so in no uncertain terms.
I like how Mini Joel will never make a youtube short
Actually, there are two Mini Joel's per Little Joel, and two Little Joel's per Big Joel. We have no arrived at Mini Joel yet, but we will, mark my words!
It’s the Joelverse with all these Joel’s out there running amok.
It’s… Joel’s world and we’re just living in it.
We’re living in Joel times out here…
Please send help I can’t stop.
@@Tsukiru how about micro Joel
JoelJoel’s Little Adventure
Who even likes Bill Maher I've never met a single fan of his
He doesn't have "fans" as such. All the people who watch his stuff are conservatives but because they think he is a Liberal for some reason, they will never claim to be a fan, they just comment under every single video "you know you're crazy if even Bill Mahr is calling you out" like they're shocked, and like he has ever been a bastion of progressivism.
That's honestly the most frustrating thing about him as a commentator.
His audience seems firmly in the center-right spot of the compass. The sort of people who are like "Well, gay people should probably have the same rights as everyone else, but also I should be allowed to call them slurs because free speech". That, and further right people than him who like to use him for their anti-left talking points by using him as a "see, even this liberal is saying the same things I'm saying, so YOU must be the crazy one!" tool.
I enjoyed, past tense, some of his bits back in the day when he was just kinda abrasive and not a complete wankhead...
But yeah, no, the more time goes on the worse his takes seem to become.
I am still a fan. What now?
@@aididdat1749 admitting is the first step towards healing
What’s the most egregious thing about this is, these people hero worship the founding fathers. They say the constitution is nearly perfect and we should look back at that document as an amazingly good foundation. But yet the founding fathers were so naive they shouldn’t be held to the standards of today. Which is it?
"What’s the most egregious thing about this is, these people hero worship the founding fathers. They say the constitution is nearly perfect and we should look back at that document as an amazingly good foundation. But yet the founding fathers were so naive they shouldn’t be held to the standards of today. Which is it?"
Neither. Who said they were naive? They were men of their time. Those are two different things. And there is no universal acclaim for the constitution. There are plenty who consider much of the text to be dated. Look up Originalism or Constitutional Interpretation. Nothing is perfect. Constitutional Law is an entire area of practice.
One of the worst vices of Freedom of Speech Absolutists is that they, without exception, conflate freedom of speech as a civil right with tolerance of speech as a public virtue, and of all the ones who carry on as if these two distinct concepts were the same thing, Bill Maher is the most insufferable. Others do it more egregiously and some do it more disingenuously, but Bill Maher does it more infuriatingly. Thanks, Joel, for helping me see why I have such a visceral reaction to Maher's nonsense.
Jefferson owning slaves isn't even presentism, because owning slaves ran contradictory to Jefferson's own stated ethics.
Maher literally did presentism. "who doesn't have moments from their past that make you cringe".
That's literal presentism by his own definition.
Are we not cringing at the slave owners of the past?
I think we are.
"Man I can't believe I did a slavery, that was so cringe."
-George Washington.
My parents still watch bill maher “out of habit” and I wish there was a way to convince them that it’s just not worth it man
Columbus spent 6 weeks in jail over his treatment of indigenous people. He was tried and acquitted, but the fact that he stood trial at all tells us that he wasn't simply "a man of his time." He was recognized by many at the time as a monster. Unfortunately, King Ferdinand did not agree.
The discovery that killing people is bad was made by Nice A. Goodman in 1673 AD in London. Beforehand, nobody knew that killing people was bad. It was just totally unknown to all of humanity so no one had any reason whatsoever to think killing people was wrong until then, and eventually the knowledge spread throughout the world, and now today everybody knows that killing people is bad. Similar discoveries were made in the coming centuries about theft, sex crimes, racism, slavery, human trafficking, and copyright infringement.
Ah, yes, copyright infringement, the greatest achievement of the 20th century.
Wait is he basically saying that these people from the past are equivalent to a 10 year old. That sounds very weird
No, Little Joel just took his analogy literally.
My first thought in response was "But should we not be judging things by our current standards? What harm is done by judging long dead people harshly by today's standards?"
It seems more beneficial than anything in that we're looking at different kinds of contexts and judging what we think is right or wrong about them from our present perspective. I see no source of harm besides conservative obsession with the past becoming less popular.
I actually watched Bill Maher religiously up until two or three years ago. He’s become insufferable. But I thought his argument on presentism was on point and I would use it myself until listening to this rebuttal. You are right Joel. It is a bad argument and completely white washes history and treats adults like they have no autonomy for their terrible actions.
I'm so glad Joel is going off on this one. When I saw this I realized that it's true, Bill Maher is a full-blown conservative.
A history professor once explained to me that the reason we have statues of the founding fathers but Confederste statues are problematic is that the founding fathers were celebrated for other things and were not entirely defined purely by their complicitness in slavery or participation in it.
I was in the audience for one of bill maher’s dress rehearsals for his show, where he runs through all his half baked material in front of a very small group. It was painful to sit through and I was paid to be there.
Worst bit was he barely acknowledged us, it was like the audience wasn’t even there. He just walked on stage, awkwardly fumbled through his jokes for a solid hour, then walked off.
That's literally what a dress rehearsal is.... You don't seem to understand what a rehearsal is... I also don't believe you were there... But cute story
@@cheetahman859 I live in Los Angeles lol, paid audience is just a thing you can do. I’ve literally never heard of a paid audience dress rehearsal or any other show though, Bill is the only one who does it.
At least you weren't forced there by the lash
@@DaxDives So you're complaining you got paid for a dress rehearsal. Got it... Next time don't go.... That still doesn't negate the fact you don't seem to understand what a dress rehearsal is. It's a rehearsal, things will not be the same as a live on air or taped version for airing. There's always Google or Bing if you're still confused as to the meaning of what a rehearsal is and is for.
@@cheetahman859 She not really complaining about being paid, the point is that Bill Marr is unfunny even when your paid to find him funny.
How could people have known at the time that owning, exploiting ang beating slaves was _evil ?_
🙄
I don't think Big Joel is understanding the argument. That or he's is intentionally setting up a straw man argument. "George Washington is a baby??" WTF?
I don't know if you even can cancel dead people. When I think of cancel culture I think of things like:
'not giving your money to someone who you know is going to use it for things you don't agree with',
'a movement that can potentially change the course of a person's career',
'something that would affect the mental health of the person being canceled',
How does any of that affect a dead person?
I guess just "talking badly about them"
For some reason conservatives think "cancelling" is like a spell you cast on someone and they become "cancelled"
Okay, I've just read James Sweet's column and I can say now that I'm utterly baffled by Bill Maher's comments.
The column is about people approaching History with the sole intent of validating their political positions of cultural identities. For example, Sweet criticises conservatives for trying to downplay slavery instead of "challenging the Founders’ position as timeless tribunes of liberty", as well as the tendency in certain African American circles to ignore the role of African slave trading empires for the sake of racial/political unity. Nowhere does it talk about judging historical figures by modern standards, but of people simplifying history to a "zero-sum game of heroes and villains" and a "grab bag to articulate their political positions"
The problem isn't judging history by different standards, it's that people IGNORE parts of history for the sake of creating a narrative.
I swear there was a school shooting recently and this Bill Maher guy had a video where he was blaming Hollywood gun violence as a cause of mass shootings.
As a Brit, it was so weird to watch; we watch violent movies, play violent video games, listen to angry music, yet we don't have mass shootings like we hear about in America. But alas, America has to blame its woes on something; anything other than the actual cause of the problem, since the truth would get poor Bill less views.
Your underlying point still stands, it's just that since Maher is literally on national tv doing a comedy bit, a little more leeway can be given. If you asked him to give a serious argument, I doubt he'd literally say that we can't judge the people of the past because they were cringe and babies. Maher is just giving an analogy and hyperbolizing a bit for the sake of comedy. It doesn't at all mean he's even remotely correct, but dumbing his argument down like this is not accurate to his actual argument.
My mom likes Bill Maher and we all make a point of leaving the room whenever she puts real time on
"Guys, remember when we used infected blankets to spread deadly disease among people? That was pretty cringe."
Bill is right about one thing: I do cringe at things I used to say or do. For instance, I cringe at the fact I used to watch his show
Honestly, I think the answer is in-between - and both Bill and Joel make valid arguments.
People certainly have some agency to think, but our scope of "what is possible" and "what society will allow" is heavily influenced by our environment - in the same sense that a Burka-clad woman in Saudi Arabia might truly believe the veil was meant to protect her. It's also not fair to judge people for not taking a strong moral stand (even if they know it's right) which would result in injury or ostracization from their community.
Moreover, judging historical figures by today's standards is undoubtedly very unfair, and we get Presentism wrong all the time - the most ethical person on Earth in 2000 BC would have probably supported slavery (and might have just treated his slaves better than his neighbors), becauses that was just how society functioned in those days, and his/her "mental scope" was shaped by that society - he/she was probably incapable of imagining a world without it.
Deifying any human being is inherently flawed - because we're all inherently flawed, and we should study George Washington as we should any historical figure - a very interesting man and a key figure in our history, who contributed positively to humanity in some ways and negatively in others.
"We can't judge people of the past just like we can't judge the cringey outfits we wore in our youth"
*goes on to admit that he judges the cringey outfits he wore in his youth to make his point...somehow*
Most of the people who owned slaves were adults. True story.
I would rather gargle lava than listen to a full show of Bill Maher.
Bill maher: "yeah slavery was kinda cringe, but you cant judge it by the standard of today"
Slave owners fed the children of slaves to alligators but lets ignore that because you know "presentism".
Slave owners also allowed 14 year old slave girls to be operated on without anaesthesia. But there is nothing wrong with that because of present-ism
Your conclusion here really hammers the point home. Even if we avoid contesting the idea that no one else at the time new better or thought it was wrong, the problem is that their virtues are extolled so enthusiastically today. Conservatives want us to overlook the founders' flaws as "just products of their time," but they point to their judgement as infallible when it comes to moral virtuousness, the founding structure of the country, or the wording of documents. Sure, they were right about democracy and a living constitution being good, but if they can be wrong about whether it's okay to own people or not, they can also be wrong about the existence of the electoral college, the senate, lifetime appointments on the Supreme Court, etc
Leaving a comment because this is a great video which deserves engagement and we need more of these videos
I used to love watching Bill’s show. I haven’t been able to stomach him for the last 2 years or so. His time hanging out with conservatives has really gotten to him. And he’s woefully unprepared for his show, regularly. His interviews are noticeably worse because he makes it obvious he doesn’t know the guests name, didn’t read their book, and couldn’t care to interview them.
Gonna be honest, I zoned out for the end of this video because I was busy imagining Jim Henson's Founding Fathers Babies.
Muppet Hamilton
Well it's funnier than anything Bill could come up with lol
@@8BitsOfFun1323 The worst part is his sneering condescension as he rattles off his bad takes and painfully unfunny jokes. If you're going to be smug at least make sure you're right first.
The thing is that some people *did* know better. Going back at least a few hundred years, there have always been people with basically modern ideas calling bullshit on the world’s injustices. You could tell a version of history where *these* are the voices that get centered. That’s not presentism.
the uproarious laughter at 1:19 is so confusing to me. where was the joke
Just imagine an exasperated crowd of white people who grew up being told that their ancestors owned slaves and finally being able to breathe now that a rich white guy is telling them that they weren't bad people for doing so. This is basically every laugh at a Bill Maher show.
It also ignores that there were people who recognized the horrific nature of slavery during that time period. The problems with slavery should be obvious to any sensible person, it's not like the horrors of it were less obvious in the past, there was just more incentive to engage in it, since the pre-industrial economy was much more dependent on direct human labor and there was more proganda trying to ease people's consciences.
classic billy maher moment
Maher would sorta have a point if the goal of judging their actions was 'decide who was/wasn't a good person in a vacuum' rather than 'learn from their mistakes.'
petition for a big baby statue starts here!
We can call it "Big Baby, Little Joel"
Bill Mahrs favourite movies are
1. Boss baby
2. Baby Geniuses 2: Superbabies
3. Baby Geniuses
in that order
(because the first one has a worker baby, second one has paragon of good morals baby, third one has smart baby. and those qualities are important in this order)
bill maher looks like a pixar character came to life
this makes Thomas Jefferson even worse. He knew and admitted slavery was probably wrong and still did it. What’s the excuse for him?
I have a half-devil’s advocate for this one. It’s not a particularly unique thought, and I think that makes it worth considering.
For the record, I’m not satisfied with this notion but I also feel like there’s something of value in here, so I’m quite interested in bouncing it off of other people to watch them pick it apart and hear what they think.
In some respects, this is a springboard off of the (emotionally very sympathizable but morally worthless) non-argument that it can feel quite depressing to say that large swaths of your past was bad. It seems like, by dialing it back a few notches, the argument suddenly sounds a little more valid to me.
Here goes:
Let’s say we’re looking back at the Olden Time in a given society, where the majority of people popularly believed in bad ideas A, B, and C. (We in our New Better Age can clearly see that A, B, and C were all very very bad.)
Then one day, some small number of people (let’s call them the “old progressives”) decide/realize that A is actually quite bad, and they do a lot of difficult work and make a lot of tough sacrifices to convince the rest of their society that A is bad, and they ultimately succeed in their goal, and when the dust has settled, this society no longer believes in A.
I think there is something that feels heroic about the good work that those “old progressives” accomplished, something worth celebrating.
All the while, however, those same “old progressives” clung to and continued to cling to bad ideas B and C, very much in accordance with the rest of society. That is not good at all, and it was not good of them. (In our Better Age today, we see B and C as so bad that we tend to say that believing in B and C makes you a bad person.)
How should we describe this? How do we reconcile those two things? How should we judge them? Should we judge them? Do we invoke relative goodness? Can we say they were good people for their time? Do we say they were bad people trying their best? Do we call them flawed?
Of course we don’t need to (read: shouldn’t) reduce a person (past or present) to being all good or all bad, and real events are invariably packed with complexity and nuance. But it’s challenging to encapsulate a memory (to remember as an evolving society) when the contents are so conflicted. Retelling history has a way of reducing things to simpler and simpler forms. It’s challenging to praise for one thing while condemning for another.
I’m rambling because I’m having trouble pinning down exactly what this argument is, but hopefully I’ve conveyed enough that you get the idea.
Thoughts?
I think simply saying that they did this good thing while acknowledging the societal, structual bad thing they were still part of is enough.
Like, we are not cutting them slack this way. We are acknowledging the material reality they lived under and the societal norm they wrongly clung onto while undoing a specific structural evil.
I dunno, that's just my gut reaction.
Basically what Joel says between 3:53 and 4:15 ; The reason new progressives are often attacking progressives of the past isn't because they beleive they were fondamentally bad people or to put into question the fact that they improved the world in their times, but because modern culture has specialized in creating myths around those people and presenting them as perfect beacons of social progress, which inherently legitimize ignoring how bad bad idea B and C are and lessen the social importance accorded to the trauma people who suffered from them may still have as adressing that harm is seen as an attack on our culture.
Past people were people, not heroes. None of them were perfect and they should be looked at critically (like anybody else) rather than idealized. And that's when we are talking about people who were good on one subject despite being bad about an other, but many of our idealized cultural heros were just plain horrible even for their times (cf Colombus).
I appreciate the replies, you two!
You can easily avoid this issue by simply not caring about the feelings of dead people and not caring at all about seeing them as good people, or even in judging whether any individual was good or bad.
I mean you still can do that. I'll never stop believing and saying that Thomas Jefferson was a horrible monster. But that's got nothing to do with studying history. What people did and the effects those actions had on the world are what we study history for. We outline the mistakes of the past in hopes of avoiding those mistakes in the present. If what we find is that most people in the past were awful, evil people by the standards we've determined result in the best society possible than so be it. Truth is truth.
"We can't judge the past by the standards of today" says man who thinks these people should also be our eternal role models
obsessed with maher calling slavery a cringe moment
thank you, thank you, THANK YOU for this video. my dad plays Bill Maher every week in our house and we have gotten into SO many arguments about every smug misrepresentation of progressives and and social progress he makes, it's SO frustrating.
The fouding fathers were infinitely wise, hyper-prescient gods among men and any laws they handed down on stone tablets should still be rigidly adhered to and defended to the death even hundreds of yearsnlater because they're so applicable to the present day. But anything bad they did is because they were just thoughtless babies, mindless children, just a product of their time that we cannot possibly look at or judge in a modern context.
I always cringe when I thinl about how I commited genocide as a teen
This is why I like a new historical perspective on history- it's important to hold in regard both the fact that it was at one point socially acceptable to "own" another person, but that there were people who thought that was abhorrent, and of course the often neglected in right-wing circles position that the people who were owned were, in fact, people who, despite the fact that they were being called property, were undeniably people. Obviously in many contexts applying modern developments in philosophy or whatever to the past is deeply flawed, but the idea of "slavery might be bad actually" is Not a particularly modern development. When looking at the past, it's important to remember that the world then was just as varied and vast in perspectives and narratives as it is now, and to research the past in a nuanced way, it's wise to try and take that variability into account.
And, of course, the impact of a person doesn't end when that person dies. With people who, in their lives and afterwards, were figureheads who represented more than a mere man, it's especially important to look at how they were flawed and incorrect and how that might problematize what they represent. The idea that this leads to the question of "Should we prosecute Washington for participate in slavery?" is as absurd as the notion of putting a skeleton on trial, but the question of "How much respect should we give to a man who claimed ownership over human beings?" is one with far more of a reason.
Bill Maher be like “oh, Hitler wasn’t that bad, he was just kinda cringy”.
Wow I totally forgot how painful it was to watch Bill, holy fuck.
There have been peace-loving vegetarian hippies across all eras and peoples. There have always been people who know better than to judge a gay person, a crossdresser, or someone of a different race. Letters and historical texts support this. The only difference is the amount of social/political sway those ideologies had in the context of their times. The idea that historical people had no grasp of the moral consequences of their behavior is absurd. There are people in the modern era who would happily own slaves, just as they still do in many parts of the world, the only difference is that now American society does not permit it. The would-be slave owner and the actual slave owner are both worthy of disdain, but it is much harder to recognize a would-be, therefore we feel inclined to assume some greater shift in society that's worthy of taking into consideration. Certain arguments about cult-ish religious brainwashing aside, it really isn't, in my opinion.
Love how Maher can wind up annoying literally almost everyone in the room
Now that's one hilariously stupid argument.
When I was 15, I wore an orange velvet suit with a blue tie with Mickey Mouse on it, and I had long hair and a shadow moustache.
If, also when I was 15, I had murdered a bunch of people, it would be a little harder to just laugh, cringe and pretend it didn't happen.
I love that these little joel videos feel like my eccentric cousin is pulling me to the side at a nice family dinner at our grandma's after he's stayed up all night watching TH-cam videos to tell me what's really been grinding his gears about society, or in this case, Bill Marr. Thanks for being you Henry.
Millenia of slavery is totally the same as that one time you wore a denim shirt with jeans.
Next they will to go after baby Hitler! 😮
I’m not sure that’s a fair reading of the argument. i’d always interpreted it as “you have to judge people within the context of their time” (I acknowledge he doesn’t use these words, but it seems sufficiently implied).
So the analogy to different behaviour an individual made in the past does work in a rough way. He’s not saying “these people were babies”, he’s saying “judge them in their context”.
I think it’s one of those areas where there’s nuance - you have to consider the issues on a case-by-case basis. Bill doesn’t do this of course, true to form. He doesn’t even acknowledge that “acceptable at the time” does not mean “irrelevant”
People should like John Adams instead of Washington cause he didn't have slaves
I started watching this video 12s after it was uploaded. Just finished it. And there are 3 minute old comments. Are there people out there commenting half way through the video? Is that a thing?
Like writing your immediate reaction as the video is happening?
Yeah, you should try it. It's a great way to not get bored after having to listen to someone talk uninterrupted for 30 seconds, or God forbid, four minutes.
Its because woke culture is getting out of hand.
Bill Maher has turned into a angry old man, screaming at the kids to get off my lawn.
This clip is the most “Tell me you’ve never listened to an academic discussion of history without saying it” thing I’ve seen Marh deliver; at least on the academic side, we aren’t judging people by the standards of today, we’re trying to understand the logic, their motives, their thought processes, and their world view, and we are trying to understand it; however, we can’t stop ourselves from judging people for it, or from having opinions on it, but we can and are supposed to stop ourselves from praising glorifying and damning people of the past; the statement “Don’t judge people from the standards of today” is such a non argument, and it’s a cowards way to try to shut down a difficult and uncomfortable conversation; people weren’t stupid in the past, and this argument treats them like they were, and not people with their own thoughts, ideas, worldviews, and thought processes, and understanding those beliefs, not lionizing or damning them is the goal.
Little Joel didn’t say little kiss at all in this video, my day is ruined.