When the MeToo movement took off across the globe in 2017, it changed how we think about artists and their art.
As victims of sexual harassment and assault spoke out, the public became more aware of the behaviour of well-known people, including successful artists. Audiences immediately began to view these artists’ work through the lens of their actions.
As a result, many of our favourite books, songs and art works became irrevocably tainted by the transgressions of their creators.
Admiring the work of Pablo Picasso — the cubist artist who burned his partner Françoise Gilot’s face with a cigarette (and painted it) — or Alfred Hitchcock — the film director who tried to destroy actress Tippi Hedren’s career when she rebuffed his advances — became a less straightforward proposition.
“In the aftermath [of MeToo], people were left wondering what to do about their heroes,” US critic Claire Dederer writes in her new book, Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma.
Now this is a good debate.
Personally, my view is that it is inappropriate to hold people from past generations to modern value systems, as the rational basis of those modern values did not exist yet.
We only expect human rights because we have ancestors that fought for them. Before the conflicts became commonplace, part of being a “good” person was to behave differently. We should not think that we are somehow special and would behave any differently than our ancestors, had we been nurtured in that time, surrounded by only those antiquated ideas.
This is why Genghis Khan and Hitler should be seen in a different light. They were both butchers, but the Khan was a butcher in a time of butchers. Where Hitler did it in a time of industrialization and the rise of globalization. One of the men is a respected historical figure of great relevance, the other is despised as one of the most evil men in history. Not for different actions, though, but for doing the same actions in different contexts, in worlds of different expectations.
We also need to note the time difference. Khan lived 8 centuries ago and hitler only 1. Hitler is more fresh in our minds and his memory will fade like Khan and the many others before him. How many people know of the atrocities that Assyria committed thousands of years ago? Hitler won’t be seen as nearly as evil in say 3500 because they will most likely have someone from the 3300s or 3400s who they see as evil and want to not repeat the actions of. Khan may have lived in “a time of butchers” but people then also saw his actions as atrocities. We aren’t that much better than other periods of history really we just see our selves that way because that’s where we live and we don’t see the day to day experiences of people hundreds or even thousands of years ago and only hear about wars and battles and what empire raped the other worse.
I would argue that while yes, they were recognized as atrocities, there was still a common expectation that massacres could and would happen during wartime. As a result of this general expectation, the Khan was never really looked at in any different light from those Assyrians you mentioned.
Hitler, however, behaved quite differently from his contemporaries. Only Stalin was quite that bloody. This illustrates a clear difference of the changing standards of the time, further reinforced by things like mass literacy and rapid communication of news.
To say that humans haven’t changed requires ignoring a great deal of relative peace and prosperity. While we will likely never be done 100% completely with atrocities of different natures, simply reducing how common they are is an accomplishment that should not be ignored.