Universal, Ancient and Respected Are Not Evidence That a Thing Was Good
Should we respect the past? Let me take an institution that everyone agrees is at least defensible, and see how the defence holds up.
The Case for Monarchy
Here is the argument, made as well as I can make it.
Monarchy was probably a net saver of lives. Before there were kings there were warlords, and a single king who monopolises violence is better than twenty who compete for it. Monarchy let people unite, pool resources, build roads and granaries and walls. It appeared independently in almost every civilisation on earth, and lasted for thousands of years. Something that universal and that durable must have been doing something right, or it would have been replaced.
That is a respectable argument. It is the argument you will hear from thoughtful conservatives, and it is the reason we still put crowns on stamps and speak of the "great" kings with a straight face.
Now I want to test it against something we have all agreed to stop respecting.
The Case of Medicine
Until roughly the twentieth century, medicine was a fraud. Not a partial success, not an early draft of something good: a fraud.
Physicians did not know what caused disease. They bled people, purged them, dosed them with mercury, and poked unsterilised instruments into their bodies. The historians of medicine who have tried to estimate the effect generally conclude that for most of history a visit to a doctor made you more likely to die, not less, and that this remained true long after the Enlightenment. The profession was learned, prestigious, expensive, licensed, and useless at best.
And it was everywhere. Every civilisation had healers. The institution was universal, it endured for millennia, it promoted itself vigorously, and it was held in the highest respect. Every single property the monarchist points to in defence of kings, pre-scientific medicine also had.
Do we say pre-modern medicine was good? We do not. We say it was a catastrophe that wore the costume of a profession, and we are right.
The General Point
So a solution to a human problem can be:
- universal, adopted independently everywhere,
- long enduring, lasting thousands of years,
- self-promoting, with an establishment that lives off it and praises it,
- and historically respected, taught to children as an achievement,
and still be rubbish. Slavery ticks all four boxes as well. So does astrology. So does the belief that the mentally ill are possessed. Universality and duration tell you that a thing was stable, not that it was good, and stability is exactly what you would expect from an arrangement that benefits the people in a position to keep it going.
This is worth stating as a rule because we so consistently violate it. The argument "it lasted, therefore it worked" is treated as strong evidence in history and politics, and it is nearly worthless. The evidence that would count is a comparison: how did people fare under the institution against how they would have fared without it, or under an alternative. For medicine we eventually got that comparison, and it was damning. For monarchy we mostly have not bothered to ask.
Back to the Kings
How do we know monarchy is not in the same category as pre-scientific medicine? We do not. Nobody has done the accounting, and the people who could have done it were, for most of history, employed by kings.
My own guess is that it belongs there. The argument from the warlords proves only that one warlord is better than twenty, which is a very low bar, and it says nothing about whether one warlord was better than the alternatives that were never allowed to be tried. The pooling of resources happened, and most of the pool went to the palace. The roads were built by people who were not asked. And every one of the "great" kings is great in the way that a hurricane is great: memorable, and expensive for everyone underneath.
What Respect for the Past Should Mean
I am not arguing for ignorance of history. The opposite: I am arguing that respect for the past should mean the respect we show a patient's chart, not the respect we show a monument.
Read it carefully. Notice what was tried and what happened. Refuse to be impressed by longevity, because longevity is what bad arrangements achieve when they capture the institutions that could have ended them. And when someone defends a practice on the grounds that everyone did it for a very long time, remember the doctors, who did it for a very long time too, and killed their patients the whole way through.
I have argued elsewhere that we should learn to disrespect what cost us the most to learn. The same discipline applies to what cost our ancestors the most. The past is a record of experiments, most of which failed, and reverence is the wrong way to read a lab notebook.