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Let's not generalize "people like yourself", when people like myself hold a much more nuanced view of U.S. history and progress than your post suggests.

Yes, we have made a lot of progress over time and will continue to do so. However, I think you need to read my comment in the context of the original post, which was "do Americans even know why the country was even founded anymore?". I think a perfectly reasonable response to a question like that is to put the founding of the country into perspective.

Not sure how you can compare something to the past, but only look at the positive sides instead of the negative. Or at the very least, not provide just a understanding of an interpretation as you have done, except towards the present.

Gp was refuting a claim that the American State was formed on an "anti state oppression" platform. He is not claiming the people were bad, but that their ideals were not what was being claimed of them

> Tom Holland... argues the separation of church and state can be traced back to the Bible and it been a steady progression to secularism from there

This is basically what's known as survivor bias. I think if you look at history you will find that power shifted to and from faith (and the church) in many waves. But true secularism was not, to my knowledge, seriously suggested for the first thousand years or more of Christian history. In a way this view of theological history suggests that there is a "true meaning" of the Bible that people didn't happen to notice for over a millennium - that the principles of modern society was always there in waiting, waiting for us to understand it. What this Tom Holland might refer to are sayings such as the phrase "Render unto Cesar the things that are Cesar's, and unto God the things that are God's", which does sound like advocating some form of secularism - to modern ears! But of course these verses had many different interpretations over the years.

Personally, I think a much better explanation is that the interpretation of religious texts always happen in a context. Like any text, I don't think it makes sense to claim that there is an interpretation of any religious text that could be called its true meaning, because meaning always arises as a dialogue between the text and its reader, which happens in a certain context, a certain point in material history. You might be able to say that there is the original intention of the authors, but this is not accessible to us. "Render unto Cesar" can perhaps easily be used as an argument for secularism in a Christian context, but I don't believe the phrase can fully explain its inception.

The Bible, like any religious text, contains the blueprint for an infinity of societies. This idea that any part of modern American society, or Hegel's 19th century Prussian society, for that matter, is the natural consequence of what's in the Bible is very strange when you look, both at everything that came before, and also the fact that a very different progression happened in many parts of the Christian world, like Ethiopia or Coptic villages in Egypt. I don't think the theory of "steady progression" holds much water unless you're extremely selective about your facts and perspective.

> This is basically what's known as survivor bias.

The number of times this comes up on here it is a bit of a meme. So I will counter with the maxim of "If all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail".

I don't think that's a very good counter, and I don't think it addresses the substance of my post at all. I'd say the term comes up often because it's a very common phenomenon - much like the one about hammers and nails. I'm sure there are many other terms for it - the idea that "history is written by the victors" It's certainly older than the concept of cognitive biaess, and I could as easily have invoked that.

Yes it does. It isn't survivorship bias if the process has been going on centuries. Whenever people bring up "X has worked" you will have someone on this site say "survivorship bias".

It has become such a trope of this site I have heard other people mention it on discord discussions and I haven't brought the subject up.

If you start with a faulty premise we can just stop there (and one that is a complete trope).

I don't think the argument I was addressing can be summed up as "X has worked". It's more like "X has happened, therefore X is an inevitable consequence of Y which preceded it."

Also, tropes are often tropes for a reason. You can't dismiss something just because it comes up often.

> I don't think the argument I was addressing can be summed up as "X has worked". It's more like "X has happened, therefore X is an inevitable consequence of Y which preceded it."

You are splitting hairs now. The point I am making is that frequently on this site observations are discounted immediately as survorship bias. It almost as if it the only one people know.

It simply isn't survorship bias if something been going on for hundreds of years in a particular direction.

> Also, tropes are often tropes for a reason. You can't dismiss something just because it comes up often.

I am dismissing it because it doesn't make sense and it is frequently overused. Thus the hammer and nail analogy.

In any event it pointless continuing this discussion further. So lets just leave it.

> It simply isn't survorship bias if something been going on for hundreds of years in a particular direction.

I'm not saying secularization is survivorship bias, that seems like a category error (if I may be allowed another HN trope).

I'm saying the idea that secularization "can be traced back to the Bible" because it arose in a society inspired by the Bible betrays a view on history that seems akin to what's sometimes called survivorship bias. But I'm not very attached to the word, we can leave it out if you like! The point would stand, however: the Bible is an inspiration to many societies, very few of which have become secular, and the ones that did became secular only did so long after introduction of the Bible. Therefore it does not seem very obvious to posit a link between the two.

I didn't read it as character assassination. I read it as a reminder that we're should not romanticize and fill in details that were not there.

People interpret history differently, and it is a problem when those interpretations differ too much and lead to fundamentally different expectations.

> People like yourself

You mean people who are interested in analysis of history? You don't want to consider it. That's fine...oh wait...what about:

> Some argue the separation of church and state can be traced back to the bible

Some people argue people rode Dinosaurs. That's about as compelling, as well. For the most of the cultures that contributed to writing portions of the Bible, religious text was law.

> remind people that things were less than perfect in the past

The point is about intent, which is relevant. "less perfect" or whatever that's supposed to mean to you, is irrelevant. This is history, not a relative comparison of ideals.

> You cannot judge people of the past by the standards of today.

Sure you can. Confusing Moral analysis and Contextual analysis is noise.

> the need to character assasinate

Characters are caricatures (incomplete) if you ignore known qualities. Interestingly enough, while you are objecting strongly to the characterization you could have noted that bladegash might have been wrong about the Patrick Henry quote.

Maybe spend more time researching, instead of emotionally posting.

You are 100% correct on your last comment and thank you for correcting me. Patrick Henry's comments were related to the absence of the Bill of Rights and was an Anti-Federalist. Not sure how I conflated the two, but apologies to anyone that feels misled.

> You mean people who are interested in analysis of history? You don't want to consider it. That's fine...oh wait...what about:

I never said that. I was criticisng how he was analysing it. Today there is a habit of denouncing all the progress someone did in the past because their attitudes and actions at the time weren't up today's standards.

> Some people argue people rode Dinosaurs. That's about as compelling, as well. For the most of the cultures that contributed to writing portions of the Bible, religious text was law.

The point is that a combination of things that culminated in Europe (partly because of Christianity but not wholly) resulted in the secular societies we have in the Western world today. I will remind you just because you don't find it compelling doens't mean that it isn't valid. I think there is little bit of truth to it, but I don't think it tells nearly the whole story.

I know that many people seem to think that Christians are fundamentalist lunatics like Ken Ham, but most aren't.

> The point is about intent, which is relevant. "less perfect" or whatever that's supposed to mean to you, is irrelevant. This is history, not a relative comparison of ideals.

Less perfect means that "It was a step in the right direction". This isn't really difficult to grok.

> Sure you can. Confusing Moral analysis and Contextual analysis is noise.

You really shouldn't. It distorts people's view of history.

> Characters are caricatures (incomplete) if you ignore known qualities. Interestingly enough, while you are objecting strongly to the characterization you could have noted that bladegash might have been wrong about the Patrick Henry quote.

I am not an American, I don't know anything about the people involved and don't claim to. I was simply commenting on the fact that people seem to view history through the standards of today.

> Maybe spend more time researching, instead of emotionally posting.

I did no such thing.

To be fair, the person you're responding to only brought up this viewpoint in response to another poster who seems to hold the view that the founding fathers were just as progressive as we are today.

I've already addressed why that is in all likelihood incorrect.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25245794

A lot of these "wrongs" are not really as far in the past as you imply there.

For example the political landscape in the US, is still very much dominated by economic elite interest groups. [0]

People are still actively disfranchised from participating in the democratic process, having their right to vote taken from them over a criminal history. After they came out of the literally largest incarceration system of the planet. Locking people up under circumstances that in most of the developed "Western world" are bluntly considered torture [1].

But torture is apparently a-okay as long as it's described in euphemisms like "enhanced interrogation", just like assassinating US citizens is a-okay [2] as long as it allegedly keeps the "homeland safe".

Just like involuntary servitude, aka slavery, is still very much a thing in the US, it the race based variant of that may have been abolished as an "institution" but the practice still very much exists as punishment for crime.

That's just domestic, that whole can of worms only gets nastier foreign policy wise with wars of aggression and the casual and regular disregard for other countries sovereignty.

As such, these are not events from some far-flung past we judge with completely different standards, these are very current and still on-going events being judged with the current standards.

[0] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-rights-un-usa-torture-idU...

[2] https://theintercept.com/2017/01/30/obama-killed-a-16-year-o...

Whether wrongs are happening today is irrelevant to my point. People try to reframe history in the poliics of today and it cheapens any discission of the topic as everything is seen through a modern lens.

As for societies domninated by "elite". If you read any Pareto all societies have been dominated by elite interest groups. It is called "Elite Theory". It is nothing unique to America or the Anglosphere.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/elite-theory

> At the bottom of the Wealth curve, he wrote, Men and Women starve and children die young. In the broad middle of the curve all is turmoil and motion: people rising and falling, climbing by talent or luck and falling by alcoholism, tuberculosis and other kinds of unfitness. At the very top sit the elite of the elite, who control wealth and power for a time – until they are unseated through revolution or upheaval by a new aristocratic class. There is no progress in human history. Democracy is a fraud. Human nature is primitive, emotional, unyielding. The smarter, abler, stronger, and shrewder take the lion's share. The weak starve, lest society become degenerate: One can, Pareto wrote, 'compare the social body to the human body, which will promptly perish if prevented from eliminating toxins.' Inflammatory stuff – and it burned Pareto's reputation.

Unfortunately it is the basis of fascism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vilfredo_Pareto#Fascism_and_po...

This is true, but you need to consider the context of the debate. The problem with political discussions is that every person (or every side) is actually debating something else.

That said, there are three common contexts to "bringing up the wrongs of the past:"

1 - It's a counter to traditionalist/revivalist/restorationist sentiment and/or mythology. In this case, the myth is that all freedoms come from and are rooted in the infallible founding. Any change is a corruption or a regression and reduces freedom.

The true history is that abolition happened first in the empire. The moral change which made the term "freedom" applicable in any meaningful sense came from outside the empire. The conclusion (should be) exactly what you laid out. Freedom, and a lot of other things we value are really the result of societal progression.

IMO, it's essential to make this argument.

2 - To make analogies to the present.

"In the past, people thought it was OK to X. Today, we don't."

3 - It's a baid faith argument. China suppressing traditional minorities because "the americans did it." This context is just a character assassination attempt and it's bad.

> Much like many things society progresses, generally in the western world that progression has tended towards greater liberty (in most respects) of its citizens

There is no natural trend in history towards any cultural viewpoint, much less towards modern progressivism. And honestly, the very notion that there is such a trend is almost inevitably followed by an attack on opponents by casting them as, well, barbaric.

To pick one obvious example, consider the democratic-autocratic scale. In Western history, the first (recorded) height of democracy was in Classical Antiquity, with Rome and the Greek city states being democratic. But by Late Antiquity (around the AD/BC changeover), these democratic states changed into autocratic states, and they remained as such for nearly 2000 years. Even in the past 100-200 years, when Europe has been "generally" democratic, there has been some dramatic see-saws between democracy and autocracy of various flavors.

> I don't know the history of the events or the characters that led to American indepedence (I am not an American) but what I do find when people feel the need to character assasinate important figures of the past is that they do massively over simplify events and the people involved.

Judging from your choice of words here, I suspect that you are equally as guilty of oversimplification as the people you criticize. People are complicated; motivations are complex and interrelated; trying to understand the motivations of people through evidence that is deliberately deceptive is frustrating. But putting people in the past on pedestals and worshiping them is as destructive as vilifying them is.

Again, an example; this time, the role of slavery in colonial and early US. It is definitely a mistake to consider slavery to be the primary motivation for American independence, as the 1619 Project did (for starters, it begs the question as to why the more-intensive slave Caribbean colonies explicitly rejected succession at the same time). But the cognitive dissonance of combining slavery with appeals for universal liberty needs to be noted, even if you're judging from the standards of the time. Contemporary British opponents to American independence castigated the Americans for preaching liberty yet owning slaves. Some states and individuals did emancipate slaves during the revolutionary period, so we can fairly judge their contemporaries (like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson) for failing to do so.

Bringing up "the wrongs of the past" is entirely appropriate in response to a comment asking about why America was founded.

No. It is largely irrelevant to what the person's point was because they weren't really asking why America was founded. I am sure you will quote it verbatim and say "it says exactly those words" while ignoring the actual intent.

How else am I to interpret this, then?

> Absolutely ridiculous - do Americans even know why the country was even founded anymore?

This statement was made to suggest that America has gotten away from the reasons it was founded. It is entirely reasonable to discuss the historical reasons for the founding of America, which included the desire of white property owners to be guaranteed "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," without interference from their government. Oh, and they kinda didn't want to pay taxes without representation, either.

Yes, I am massively oversimplifying it here. But, I don't want to sit here and write a draft of the book that it would take to actually cover the subject with sufficient detail and nuance.

> How else am I to interpret this, then?

People are simply expressing that a police state is scary and those that work for the police state are working against the interests of their citizens and the ethos of the nation. Whether or not that was the original intention of your founders is irrelevant.

The point is that the “ethos of the nation” is, and has always been, authoritarian hegemony — and the intent of the founders in particular was one of the more totalitarian versions of it.

As an American, I would consider that highly relevant. Since you use the phrasing "your founders," I would suggest you have no standing to say otherwise.

Firstly you don't get to tell me what I can and can't consider and what I happen to think is relevant. As for what is relevant, I was talking about the relevance to this particular discussion nor the wider implications.

It was pretty obvious to me what was meant, but at this point it is pretty obvious people want to make it about something else.

Unless you live in America, yes, I do. Stick to your own house. And, maybe learn to read what people actually write, rather than putting your own spin on it. It was clear to me what was meant as well, and you didn't get it.

There is no such thing as progress, just shifting societal norms. This cannot be seen as “progress” except retrospectively.