By Assemblyman Gerry Scharfenberger
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There is a dangerous tendency in today’s world to impose our norms and worldview onto figures in history. Practices and ideas embraced by society 50, 100, 200 years or more could well be frowned upon by people in the present time. Conversely, many things we find acceptable today may be derided or even scorned by future generations. This has been the case since the beginning of civilization, and is a normal and even healthy evolution of the culture when it changes society for the better.
However, it is patently unfair and even dangerous to judge people who lived during times that were radically different than our own and hold them to standards crafted by generations of which they were never a part.
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For example, cannibalism is an unthinkable practice in today’s world, yet was an acceptable part of warfare among Southwest peoples during the 12th century. Bloodletting, often times with leeches was state of the art medical treatment until the late 19th century, but is now looked upon as a quaint, if not chilling example of a discipline still in its infancy.
Feeding Christians to the lions in ancient Rome was a popular sporting event in ancient Rome enjoyed by throngs of cheering onlookers, but is unequaled in its barbarity to us in the 21st century.
Does this make people who lived during those times wholly bad? Not at all, it makes them products of the times in which they lived.
The dangerous practice of holding historical figures to today’s worldview standards has resulted in a move to obliterate large parts of our history from the public sphere. This is manifested by removing statues, destroying memorials, renaming buildings – even banning certain books lest someone be offended.
In New Jersey, the latest crusade is to remove the statues of General Philip Kearny and Richard Stockton from the Capitol rotunda in Washington D.C. These important figures have been derisively referred to as examples of “white male oppressors” who deserve to be punished for the offense of simply being born in a vastly different time period. Never mind that one was a general fighting for the emancipation of people held in bondage, and the other a founding father and signer of the Declaration of Independence who was part of the creation of the greatest nation in the history of the planet.
Historical retribution is the order of the day.
The proposed replacements for the Kearny and Stockton statues are suffragist Alice Paul and abolitionist Harriet Tubman, both giants in our history deserving of a visible place in the public arena. This can be done without erasing parts of our history to accommodate them.
History should be a big tent with room for all of the figures who played a role in shaping the world in which we now live.
It is perhaps a truism that history is a palimpsest whereby the cultural features of one era obscures, but never quite erases those of earlier periods. It is also an inescapable fact that there is no group or nation that has a history without blemish. To try and remove vestiges of our past to create a narrative that makes us comfortable in the present does a disservice not only to those who came before us, but to future generations deserving of a complete historical picture of what and most importantly, who brought us to where we are today.
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Gerry Scharfenberger, PhD. is a New Jersey Assemblyman representing the State’s 13thLegislative District.
