We would like to think our ancestors were fair-minded, and harbored none of the out of favor biases of our age. That is the bias of our age. I believe our modern rejection of many of the sins of the past- racism, sexism, etc- are justifiable and noble in spirit, but they cannot change the fact that they were evolutions in thought from mindsets that were not free of these prejudices.
The tendency among some educators is to try and smooth these things over, conceal the extent to which western culture and our nation in particular once had these qualities. Frankly, I think that's a mistake.
This is especially true when dealing with the books of the past. Some folks commenting on The Chronicles of Narnia noted the sexism and the occasional racism dealing with the Arab/Muslim analogues known as the Calormenes, and held it rather harshly to task.
Were this a modern book, I could see where the criticism would be just. This is The Chronicles of Narnia, though, and it is representative of its times, not ours. It is the product of Mid-20th Century England, and all the attendant prejudices and values. Not all of these beliefs are alien to our own, but quite a few are guaranteed to be, because of the source of this work.
It's important that we recognize two things:
1)the intentions of authors in the past were like ours: good bad and indifferent.
and
2)That we ourselves are not perfect.
Our values didn't spring from nowhere. They are the result of how people thought and lived before us. We have the tendency as human beings to view the past through the lense of the present sometimes, and that is to some extent unavoidable. That said, we can be conscious of this tendency and take a compensatory approach in our analysis, or we can leave the numerous errors in that, and suffer the consequences of having such a distorted picture of things.
One such consequence is that we do not recognize these prejudices in ourselves. We assume the irrationality of racism, and forget that there are often very rational ways of justifying the bigoted and the unfair, traps for the unwary thinker. We ourselves probably hold such prejudices without even realizing it. Another consequence is that we will often shape our attitudes toward such groups in ways that allow us to believe that we are without blemish, but which nonetheless allow some form of uninformed belief through. Witness the blandly uncritical way some multiculturalist have of examining foreign societies, neglecting their darker sides, even while their opponents focus on nothing else.
The important thing to learn here is critical thought, and an appreciation for not just truth about how things are, but also about other's viewpoints. In trying to push toward a better and more just society, it is insufficient to understand one's own viewpoint alone. We need to understand what we we are persuading people from, as well as to. The thing is, it is difficult enough to understand other folk's points of view, if we fail to withold judgment until we understand their thinking in their own terms.
