A panel of three professional historians debated Monday night on how the past should dictate actions in the present.
The lecture featured W. Robert Connor, Greek historian and director of the National Humanities Center as well as Northwestern professors Sarah Maza and Garry Wills. The Classical Traditions Initiative (CTI) hosted “Does the Past have Moral Authority?,” their first of several panel discussions at Harris Hall.
Graduate students, as well as nearly seventy professors hailing from various NU departments, attended the debate, which focused on the value and interpretation of history’s lessons.
For historians, the moral implications of the past is a question “like a tune that gets stuck in your head,” Connor said.
Connor asked his fellow panelists to consider this hypothetical: “Under what circumstances do specific pasts gain moral authority for a specific group?”
He said the best way to teach or share history is to separate the fiction from the fact without making history boring. Connor said he reached these conclusions after discussing moral authority with scholars around the world via e-mail.
Another panelist held a different view from Connor. Maza said history cannot serve as a definite justification of actions and should remain “morally neutral.” People should not use past events as means to validate evil or good because present circumstances are always different from those of the past, she said.
Maza added that history has a moral dimension that cannot be ignored.
The final argument of the debate was made by Wills, who said that there must be a separation between “good history” and “bad history.” Good history can be defined as accurate, revisionist history, Wills said.
For example, Wills noted the Spartans from ancient Greece “were not that great” and bad history would say they were “good.”
Sara Monoson, an assistant professor of political science at NU and a member of the steering committee for CTI said the organization was created last spring “to foster research, teaching and public discussion of classical antiquity and its traditions in their full diversity.”
“This is an important question and this was a great panel,” said Christopher Ruggles, an adjunct lecturer in the Classics department. “They did a great job discussing how history is used and misused. I’m glad to see the relevance of history represented.”
