patrick.net

Imagine if in one or two centuries, the killing of animals and the consumption of their muscle and organs is outlawed across the planet. This behavior is universally condemned and severely punished in every country on this and other planets. Every sports hero, including the greatest basketball player of all time, Larry Byrd, the greatest QB of all time, Terry Bradshaw, every movie star including Clint Eastwood and Harrison Ford, every US president, including George Washington and Ivanka Trump, brilliant entrepreneurs including Elon Musk and Henry Ford, large bottomed ethnic celebrities including Oprah Winfrey and Lizzo, everyone you've ever known or admired are vilified as cannibals, and everything they had ever accomplished completely discredited. That is the sophistry of presentism.
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In literary and historical analysis, presentism is the anachronistic introduction of present-day ideas and perspectives into depictions or interpretations of the past. Modern historians seek to avoid presentism in their work because they consider it a form of cultural bias, and believe it creates a distorted understanding of their subject matter.[1] The practice of presentism is regarded by some as a common fallacy when writing about the past.

Presentism is also a factor in the problematic question of history and moral judgments. Among historians, the orthodox view may be that reading modern notions of morality into the past is to commit the error of presentism. To avoid this, historians restrict themselves to describing what happened and attempt to refrain from using language that passes judgment. For example, when writing history about slavery in an era when the practice was widely accepted, letting that fact influence judgment about a group or individual would be presentist and thus should be avoided.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presentism_(literary_and_historical_analysis)

American college campuses are apparently natural hosts for a variety of intellectual viruses. Now comes the latest: presentism, the idea that we should apply the modern world’s moral sensibilities to judge people and practices of the past. And, if historical characters are found wanting in the judgment of the present, the virus should eradicate their names from the campus.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/daviddavenport/2015/12/01/presentism-the-dangerous-virus-spreading-across-college-campuses/#726fb4bb2dcb

Presentism, at its worst, encourages a kind of moral complacency and self-congratulation. Interpreting the past in terms of present concerns usually leads us to find ourselves morally superior; the Greeks had slavery, even David Hume was a racist, and European women endorsed imperial ventures. Our forbears constantly fail to measure up to our present-day standards. This is not to say that any of these findings are irrelevant or that we should endorse an entirely relativist point of view. It is to say that we must question the stance of temporal superiority that is implicit in the Western (and now probably worldwide) historical discipline. In some ways, now that we have become very sensitive about Western interpretations of the non-Western past, this temporal feeling of superiority applies more to the Western past than it does to the non-Western one. We more easily accept the existence and tolerate the moral ambiguities of eunuchs and harems, for example, than of witches. Because they found a place in a non-Western society, eunuchs and harems seem strange to us but they do not reflect badly on our own past. Witches, in contrast, seem to challenge the very basis of modern historical understanding and have therefore provoked immense controversy as well as many fine historical studies.
https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/may-2002/against-presentism