to think "everyone did it back then" isn't an excuse?

[taaay]

This comes up quite a lot whenever people discuss things that were commonplace in the past.

People say husbands beating their wives was normal, children were routinely smacked or caned, racism was widespread, homophobia was accepted, and so on. Often the defence is that people were simply products of their time and didn't know any better.

But were they really?

Not that long ago, police often treated violence against wives as a private domestic matter and were reluctant to get involved. Marital rape wasn't even recognised in law. Racist attitudes were commonplace and children could be hit in ways that would be completely unacceptable today.

Yet even then there were people saying these things were wrong. Women campaigned against domestic violence, people fought against racism and discrimination, and some parents chose not to hit their children despite it being socially accepted.

I sometimes wonder whether too much emphasis is placed on "that's just how things were". Were people really incapable of thinking for themselves? Did they lack an internal moral compass? If your neighbour was regularly beating his wife, or a child was being routinely thrashed, did it genuinely not occur to people that this was cruel and wrong simply because society tolerated it?

I understand that social norms are powerful and that people are influenced by the world around them. But surely "everyone else was doing it" can explain behaviour without excusing it.

Ok, which particular outdated practice to you want to blame on one of your parents for not objecting at the time? It's clearly personal for you.

When I first suffered depression and was hospitalised, GPs would lie on sick notes to help prevent people losing their jobs and family members would lie about what was wrong because it was so shameful.

I don't blame them. There wasn't nearly as much information and understanding back then. Everyone was doing the best they could in challenging circumstances, and consumed with the minutiae of their own lives and experiences.

When my mum pushed me to lose weight from age 8, it was because her experience was that a woman's worth was in her attractiveness. She honestly thought she was helping me.

In her family women weren't educated beyond the minimum "because some daft sod will marry you anyway." She rebelled against that by pushing me relentlessly in school. I rebelled against the pressure by not pushing my kids as hard.

Everyone is a product of their circumstances and it's unreasonable to judge them by today's mores, just as it's unreasonable to judge modern people by the standards of previous times.

Life moves on. The past was how it was. You can't change the past, so no need for a drama.

We are still living in a society that is morally wrong. I think we always will. It's just human nature.

Nobody is is saying that an ordinary child in the 1960s or 1970s was personally responsible for changing society.

The point is more that "it was normal at the time" doesn't automatically make something right.

Most people aren't activists and don't spend their lives campaigning for change. That's true now as well. But there is a difference between not leading a movement and simply accepting something without question.

Also, social change doesn't just come from voting or campaigning. It comes from millions of small individual choices. Parents deciding not to hit their children. Neighbours refusing to turn a blind eye to domestic violence. People challenging racist comments rather than laughing along. Those things matter too.

As for voting, I agree that nobody agrees with every policy of the party they vote for. But that's slightly beside the point. The discussion isn't really about whether individuals had the power to transform society single-handedly. It's about whether people had the ability to recognise that some things were unfair or harmful.

Plenty did recognise it. That's why there were campaigns against domestic violence, racism and corporal punishment long before attitudes changed more widely.

I think "what could I have done?" and "there was nothing wrong with it because everyone did it" are two very different arguments

Nobody is trying to change the past. That's impossible.

But understanding and discussing the past isn't drama. We do it all the time. We look back at wars, discrimination, political decisions and social attitudes to understand what happened and what we can learn from it.

By that logic, there would be no point talking about anything that has already happened because it's over and done with.

Also, recognising that something was wrong isn't the same as demanding everyone spend their lives feeling guilty about it. It's simply being honest about history. We can acknowledge that some things were harmful without pretending they were fine just because they happened a long time ago.

Life moves on, but society only moves on because people are willing to reflect on the past rather than shrugging and saying that's just how it was.

I think you're framing this as a choice between blaming people and excusing everything, when there is quite a lot of ground in the middle.

I can understand why people acted as they did without concluding that their actions were therefore beyond criticism. Your mum may genuinely have believed she was helping by pushing you to lose weight, but that doesn't mean the impact on you was necessarily positive. Good intentions and harmful consequences can exist at the same time.

Likewise, I can understand why people hid mental illness when there was huge stigma attached to it. That explains the behaviour. It doesn't mean the stigma itself wasn't damaging or wrong.

I also don't think acknowledging that someone was a product of their circumstances means we have to abandon all moral judgement. If we did, we could never say that any past attitude or behaviour was wrong because there would always be a social context explaining it.

The fact that people were shaped by their circumstances is true. The fact that some people challenged those same circumstances is also true. Every generation contains people who accept the norms around them and people who question them.

For me, understanding why people behaved in a certain way and recognising that some of those behaviours caused harm are not mutually exclusive.

I don't think "everybody" in the past did think that those things society considers unacceptable nowadays were okay but the difference is that it was not until the law changed that there was much could be done to stop it. Even now, in spite of being illegal and wholly unacceptable, there are many occurrences of such behavours every day. You can't really say it's down to people knowing better nowadays, there were good and bad people then just as there are now....it's just not so easy to get away with it nowadays but sadly it still happens.

So you want to "hold people accountable" and "make them reflect on the past". How? Some sort of mass struggle session?

The point is more that "it was normal at the time" doesn't automatically make something right.

I don't think anyone would disagree with that. Slavery is a good example.

However, we still have ongoing slavery here right now in our society. That's not right.

We are destroying the plant going about our normal daily life. That's not right.

Women losing their right to their own sex class, separate to men. That's not right.

There are people doing things, campaigning, raising awareness and some things will change as a result and some won't.

Why do you think the past is any different to right now in terms of how society behaved then and how they behave now?

I'm really not sure what the purpose of this thread is....even if everyone agrees with the OP (currently only 55% in agreement) what would the end point be?
'Yes, everyone born pre 1980 wouldn't think for themselves so therefore we demonise them all'?

I was thinking this too!

Discussing whether something was right or wrong isn't the same as wanting to put people on trial for it.

People reflect on the past all the time. We do it with politics, education, healthcare, wars, treatment of minorities, attitudes to mental health and countless other things. Nobody calls that a struggle session.

I don't think anyone is suggesting that pensioners should be hauled into a village hall and forced to confess to holding outdated views. It's perfectly possible to acknowledge that some attitudes and behaviours were harmful without demanding punishment for everyone who lived through that era.

The irony is that people often seem more uncomfortable with discussing the past than with the past itself. Recognising that something was wrong isn't an attack on every individual who happened to be alive at the time.

Sometimes it's just an honest assessment of what happened and why.

The problem is that you've turned the argument into something nobody actually said.

The choice isn't between everyone before 1980 being evil and everyone before 1980 being blameless. There's a lot of space in between.

I don't think anyone is suggesting that everyone born before 1980 failed to think for themselves. In fact, the whole point is that plenty of people did think for themselves. That's why there were people challenging racism, sexism, domestic violence and corporal punishment long before attitudes changed more widely.

As for the purpose of the thread, discussions don't always need an end point. Are you new to MN? People discuss history, social attitudes and moral responsibility because they're interesting topics. Nobody asks what the end point is when people discuss the World Wars, the treatment of unmarried mothers or historical injustices more generally.

It feels as though some posters hear that some things that were normal in the past were wrong and translate it into all older people are terrible. That's not the same argument at all.

If anything, saying everyone was simply a product of their time does a disservice to those people who did question the norms around them and chose a different path. It ignores the fact that alternatives existed and that some people were willing to stand up for them.

I would love to know what we think of as normal now, but will be looked back on with horror in 200 years.

But there's no point in asking that on MN as someone will be along in a minute to tell me that it will be trans and only trans, because that's all that matters.

We’ve just been through a few years in this country whereby some people said that they believed that men could become women and denounced anyone that disagreed as a bigot. Thankfully a lot of these people have shaken off the collective madness and we can again believe in biological sex.

But for a while, otherwise sane people were spouting nonsense, and may have even thought that they believed it at the time. Many people didn’t challenge it at all.

So as a PP said, what is going on around us in society can impact on our beliefs.

Same in the 1970s and 1980s. People hadn’t thought to openly challenge casual racism and homophobia. It didn’t mean that everyone was racist and homophobic, they just didn’t challenge.

I’m less concerned about ‘excuses’ for behaviour in the past, as I am about people pretending we’re still living in the past. Or using events in (really quite distant) history to support claims of oppression today.

I seriously think some MNetters think we live in the 1970s when it comes to women, children and feminism, especially.

“Women are SO hard done by. My grandmother had to give up work to look after children because there were no childcare provisions” What, 60 years ago, you mean?

My favourite was a claim that “all doctors are married to a SAHM” when in actual fact, female doctors outnumber male doctors in the UK… 🤦‍♀️

Totally agree. I do think these days people are less tolerant of others’ opinions and take offence where none is intended.

Plenty of men weren't beating their wives and kids, and plenty of people knew gay men/couples and kept schtum - it was illegal until the ~1960s.
"Casual racism" would have been fairly normal (using un-PC terms for example) but most people were horrified by racist attacks etc. At the same time, lots of Brits didn't see any non-white people in their local area until the 90s or later.
But a lot of what you mention is still happening - lots of men (it is mostly men) are violent and an unfortunate mix of thick and uneducated.

And you think this thread will achieve that how?

The difference is that you're actually proving the opposite point. If social norms are so powerful that otherwise decent people can go along with ideas they later reject, then surely that means people should take some responsibility for questioning what is considered normal.

Also, there were people challenging racism and homophobia in the 1970s and 1980s. That's precisely why attitudes eventually changed. The fact that many people didn't challenge those attitudes doesn't mean they couldn't have done. It means they chose not to.

You're not wrong. I grew up in the 70s and managed to never use the N or P word. I also was never homophobic and nor were my parents.

My Dad never had hit my mum or used terms like slut/slag/bitch etc though both do swear.

My in laws on the other hand still use bigoted language. Once a cunt always a cunt.

OP, autre temps, autres moeurs - or other days, other ways. Take illegitimate children - it was considered that you had brought shame on the household, which was why girls ended up in awful mother and baby homes with their babies forcibly adopted - no-one would think that was acceptable now, but times were very different. There weren’t the welfare payments, either. You really can’t judge the past by the standards of the present.

But why focus so much on the past OP and not what is happening in society right now?

I used to get smacked,by my parents and I don't think they were awful people.
When I started at school the headmaster showed me his cane and told me what he used it for.
I don't really think wife beating, and getting a smack as a child is really comparable personally.
Surely the whole thing of homosexuality being illegal was influenced by christianity.The church had a massive sway still in our society, you couldn't play football on Sundays in the 1950s, still.
It was a different world, you do seem a bit naive I agree with the previous poster.

Times were different, but that doesn't mean people were incapable of recognising cruelty when they saw it.

The women and girls sent to mother and baby homes weren't all quietly accepting their fate. Many were distressed, many families objected, and there were people at the time who criticised how they were treated. The fact that a practice was common doesn't mean nobody knew it was harmful.

I also don't think acknowledging that something was wrong is the same as judging the past by modern standards. Often people at the time were already saying it was wrong. That's why attitudes eventually changed. If nobody had questioned it, nothing would ever have improved.