People Telling You, “It Was Different Back Then” Are Not Talking About the Past

Image; Photo by Ron Dauphin on Unsplash

There’s a familiar rebuttal that happens whenever talking about the problematic attitudes of the past: “Things were different then. We all know it wasn’t right, and didn’t agree with it, but we need to move on to a better future.” (note: that’s a word-for-word comment from an article about Songs of the South).

Proponents of this mindset argue that we need to recognize that the values of the past were different from today, and therefore, we shouldn’t judge such people by more modern standards.

We can talk in circles about the accuracy of this statement — and we will — and yet I also want to focus on how these counters are not really about the past at all. I assert that many of these people are using such statements as deflections to reinforce the unfairness of the status quo.

Let’s talk about the people back then

The conversation over the “things were different back then” debate usually begins and ends with its veracity. People will argue this point, and then you will engage in the long and drawn-out process of pointing out the various points in history where people didn’t align with the dominant hierarchy’s beliefs.

My favorite example of this is the debate about slavery in ancient Greece. The historical record is pretty consistent that slavery was ubiquitous across the Greek city-states. This does not mean that slavery was accepted everywhere in the world. Even the nearby Achaemenid Empire, aka the Persian Empire, had banned some (though not all instances) of it. Still, it is true that whether traveling to the democratic Athens or the authoritarian Sparta, enslaved people were a common sight.

We don’t have much evidence in the surviving record that there were many anti-slavery victories during this time — i.e., the number of slave revolts during Greek antiquity we have proof of are few and far between— but we do have evidence that some people were definitely against slavery. And we know this because a famous conservative wrote against the anti-slavery viewpoint. You may have heard of him. His name was Aristotle. As he laments in his work Politics:

“For some thinkers hold the function of the master to be a definite science, and moreover think that household management, mastership, statesmanship and monarchy are the same thing…

…others however maintain that for one man to be another man’s master is contrary to nature, because it is only convention that makes the one a slave and the other a freeman and there is no difference between them by nature, and that therefore it is unjust, for it is based on force.”

That latter point sounds like the modern position on slavery, only spoken about thousands of years ago.

Ironically, our most substantial evidence for anti-slavery sentiment in Ancient Greece is Aristotle’s passing efforts to discredit it. We might not even have this much evidence if this work had not survived the ravages of time. It’s hard to ascertain the scope of these activities, and we might never know for sure.

People will argue that such uncertainty proves that these viewpoints were the minority, and you can certainly assert that, but it also proves that despite an overwhelmingly hostile environment where scholars were claiming that slavery was a “science,” some people could see through their indoctrination and resist it. There were those who hated slavery and shockingly (or not so shockingly if you have any understanding of history) appeared to have had “modern” sensibilities “back then.”

In fact, history is littered with counterexamples of people who have surprisingly contemporary values and then do something about it, such as John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, Huey P. Newton’s founding and organizing with the Black Panthers, or the radical “terrorism” of British suffragettes such as Christabel Pankhurst.

People resist bad things all the time, even when they are unpopular, even when they are killed for doing so.

The “things were different back then” line ignores these contributions and asks us to retell a monolithic version of history that lacks such nuances — one where history’s messy complications don’t have to be wrestled with. And left unstated, where we only focus on the “winners” of history and never its dissidents.

And to me, that viewpoint says more about how people want us to treat the present than the past.

It’s about the present, too

This argument being applied to the past (e.g., that things were different back then) is a roundabout way of saying that we shouldn’t judge a status quo by our own ethics, and it’s a criticism that applies to the present as well.

If people are merely a product of their supremacist conditioning, then they do not need to be held accountable for the bad things that they do. They are simply doing the behaviors that they were taught to do.

It is what it is.

We also have injustices that many of us are trained from an early age to accept (or, at the very least, tolerate). Our supply chains rely on the violent exploitation of the Global South. From the horrifying extraction of cobalt in the Congo to the “sweatshops” assembling the “stuff” of modern-day economies, slavery and other forms of worker exploitation are a surprisingly common occurrence in our society.

And yet, we largely do not hold the people responsible for these conditions to account. Companies such as Apple and Tesla (which rely on materials such as cobalt for their many battery-driven products) are purchasing labor from firms that then contract other firms that use slavery, and there is no accountability there.

Just this year, a US Court of Appeals ruled that this degree of separation was enough to ensure that large tech companies were not legally liable for these abuses. As the court judges ruled:

“…there is no shared enterprise between the Companies and the suppliers who facilitate forced labor. The Tech Companies own no interest in their suppliers. Nor do the Tech Companies share in the suppliers’ profits and risks. Although a formal business relationship is not necessary to be a participant in a venture, something more than engaging in an ordinary buyer-seller transaction is required to establish “participation” in an unlawful venture.”

The logic here is that the “traditional” buyer-seller relationship is outside the scope of such scrutiny.

Companies like Apple may benefit from slavery, but they cannot be held responsible for it because they are not directly facilitating that enterprise. Apple merely profits from the materials enslaved people mine. Apple only established such a significant demand for said materials that it will ensure their continued mining by enslaved persons in the future.

The logic of the marketplace allows that kind of behavior because those are the values of our time, and if your ethics disagree with that — well, tough shit.

A different conclusion

I don’t believe the future will look kindly on this market-based reasoning for allowing slavery in the twenty-first century any more than we think that the philosophies of Greek antiquity successfully justified it back then. It sure will make those doing awful things feel better about the atrocities they are committing in the moment, though.

“It was different back then” is an argument that is more about assuaging the moral righteousness of those living in the here and now than it really is about the past.

Aristotle is dead. The slave traffickers of ancient Greece are all dead. It’s of no consequence to those corpses whether we speak ill of them or not. But for the people who do the same shit as them — those profiting from the exploitation of their fellow humans — they care how we talk about those who commit awful deeds.

They care because such talk would allow for calls for accountability, restitution, and redistribution. If people are responsible for the bad things they do in the moment. If your conditioning is not a justification for them but merely a pretext, then the wealth and privileges accrued from doing those bad things can and should be taken away.

And that conclusion has profound implications for how we structure our society: not just in the past but in the present.