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Comment by olivermarks | Hacker News Reader

'Those who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future.' - George Orwell

We need to have a serious think about the value of erasing historical figures based on their actions in a very different past.

I know people who were bigots in the past but have substantially changed their perspective, and I also know people who have become more rigid and bigoted in their views over time. One of those people is gay fwiw.

Why is it that perceived character flaws based on current social mores result in historical people being cancelled in our current climate? Rinsing out perceived offensive behaviors from history will surely lead to a future featuring a bland lack of knowledge and no real world behavioral social frameworks

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There is a big difference between erasing someone from history and not naming something in someone's honor. It isn't like nasa is now going to scrub all the history books of the name James Webb or outlaw mentioning his name. I would think there are enough people worth naming a telescope after after.

The suggestion mentioned in the article, Harriet Tubman, might not be the most appropriate name for a space telescope, and if that's really what's being suggested it sounds a little pandering, almost to the point of being constructed.

Aye, it would be better to name it after an astronomer, even if you would want a women there are enough names to choose from.

for example: https://youtu.be/damkjiFNn5E

Caroline Herschel Telescope would be cool, she mapped the skies so it feels appropriate

I wonder, if one dig through her private journals or songs, could a person find an view or opinion that in modern standards would not be acceptable to have? If so, should we then erase her name from the telescope and try again with a new candidate?

Sure, if you want to spend your time/effort on that and are able to mobilize and convince enough people to get it changed then you can do that. Im convinced there are enough good candidates that ~didn't actively participate in rooting out queer people from NASA~ [not accurate, read thread], which is kind of a low bar. Nobody (I think) is saying that everyone that gets something named after them must have been perfectly 'woke' by todays standards, but when you are naming something and you have the entirety of history to choose from, maybe don't pick James Webb.

Interesting. You say he "rooting out queer people from NASA", but that is not what is found in the article. The question is not about James Webb time in the NASA, but rather during his time in the State Department as an undersecretary. He became an undersecretary in 1949, and started to work in NASA in 1961. The Lavender scare occurred between 1947 and "ended" around 1973. In particular it was the 1953 law signed by Eisenhower which barred homosexuals from working in the federal government.

The four astronomers leading the renaming petition say that when Webb worked for the state department in the high-ranking position of undersecretary from 1949 to 1952, he passed a set of memos discussing what was described as “the problem of homosexuals and sex perverts” to a senator who was leading the persecution.

I'm very tired and I misread it, I recently watched For All Mankind (a solid series if you like space stuff), where the looking for gay people in NASA (by the state department I think?) is a big plotpoint, I think that is the origin of the mental image I had while reading it.

will edit it, thanks for the correction

what will happen when someone finds something they don't like? because they will

The problem is not the lack of spotless characters. There is no such thing. The problem is the permanently outraged.

olivermarks is talking about an Orwellian kind of erasing, where a person's existence is forgotten or minimized. Putting a bigot's name on a big project and then asking people not to think about their bigotry would be editing history.

> We need to have a serious think about the value of erasing historical figures based on their actions in a very different past.

It’s like we assume that whatever they died believing they’d still believe today. I’m highly skeptical of that. Culture changes over time and people along with it. Except these people don’t have that opportunity to clarify or revisit their views because they’re dead.

Exactly. I wrote the parent comment and recall a pretty senior Australian medical specialist friend of my wife visiting us in San Francisco at the height of the aids crisis. He was embarrassingly, virulently anti homosexual. Today the same guy has totally different views as society has evolved and probably doesn't even remember his former perspective.

He's alive and when he dies will have his reputation intact. Had he died while being negative about gay people by current social mores he would have his views frozen for all time.

Separately, also never underestimate people's life experiences shaping their views. We can all learn from events in other people's lives that shaped their perspective. Not healthy to rinse that away.

Given the extremely short supply of telescopes deserving naming, it’s absurd to think that anyone who doesn’t have a telescope named after themselves has been erased from history.

What you’re defending is James Webb’s immaculate memory. Please think long and hard about whether it’s worth defending the immaculate memory of anyone.

I think there is one group of people who are assuming that because it's a diversity thing it's justified, and another group that thinks that because it's a diversity thing it's unjustified, whereas it may be that NASA is right and that it depends on some old documents that they have to get out of the files, none of which we have seen.

You're probably right on that mark, but on the other hand it is weird that it's not named after an astronomer. Of course, Harriet Tubman isn't much better on that score.

There is a difference between not celebrating and erasing. I agree with some of what you say here but I think asserting that not naming a telescope after somebody is erasing them from history is an unsupported leap - most people don't get their names on space telescopes and we don't think of them as having been erased.

>most people don't get their names on space telescopes and we don't think of them as having been erased.

Erasing is when there's something written somewhere, and then it's erased. So if you started with your name on something and ended without your name on something, that'd be an example of erasing your name.

No. The incorrect statement was about erasing people from history books, not from a telescope.

> Why is it that perceived character flaws based on current social mores result in historical people being cancelled in our current climate?

Additionally, think of some currently-benign things you regularly do today, that will be taboo in 30 years (hint: There's no way to know). All a future canceler has to do is trawl through your history and find all the things that you did or said today that are considered offensive in 2041.

While I agree with your comment, the decision to rename the telescope would make sense, since it was not named after an actual scientist like Hubble but after a former NASA manager.

Refraining from honoring someone is not the same as erasing them.

When you're quite literally erasing James Webb from the name, that seems like erasing and supports olivermark's point entirely.

History isn't about who has their names on objects, that's just window dressing. Taking his name off an object when it was put there to honor him is clearly not that same as erasing his history.

Asking people to forget his bigotry would be erasing everything but his name. Removing his name from the project is a potential result of a more complete knowledge of history, pending this investigation.

> the value of erasing historical figures based on their actions in a very different past

You are trying to conflate not glorifying someone with erasing them from history.

They two completely different things.

If anything, glorification of individuals blurs the lines between objective historical memory and moral judgement.

Maybe we should stop using people names altogether and forget them when they die? It's not like they're relevant anymore. A Soylent Green fate for everyone -- into the memory hole!

I'm LGBT and I'm not impacted by whether or not James Webb had straight Christian biases. Everyone of that era did.

Galileo and Newton would have been pretty trash by today's standards. I'd even bet Einstein might've harbored prejudices despite going through what he did. It was the zeitgeist.

Apollo and the old gods were pretty devious. Orion, who we're still naming things after, was a rapist in some stories. Where's the outrage for these cartoon characters?

If we keep doing this, we need to rename America itself. Because Amerigo Vespucci isn't clean. And then where does it stop?

History is fucked up. 20,000 years ago we all ate one another, and I'm not going to cry about it. Looking at the animal kingdom, we've come a long way. I'd hate to be game for a lion on the savannah. Or a Neanderthal snack. Past mistakes and evolution made us stronger, and there are too many problems on the horizon to fixate on trying to clean up and play pretend. Forgetting our past also weakens the muscles we had to develop in the first place.

Are we going to strip George Washington from all the monuments, too? I think the better idea is to teach the history so that we're kinder and more mindful. This project has been known as James Webb since its inception, and it's busywork and posturing to change it.

I'm LGBT, and frankly, I'm mad at this. I overwhelmingly get the sense that a group of people that I don't relate to very well are looking for targets to blame that conflict with their identity. I increasingly find myself less and less tied to a shared identity with these people and compelled to strong sense of individualism.

James Webb doesn't exist anymore. The language token embeddings of his name call back history and the role he had in early NASA. I'm not going to blame him for anything. In fact, now I want to know more about him to enrich my understanding.

I'm usually pretty liberal. I know my opinion on this issue isn't popular, but this is something that directly touches me. I'm an individual and I'm interested more in history than empty placating.

I'm sure whatever LGBT person we rename the telescope after will be culturally significant. Maybe my problem is just that _I_ want to be the LGBT person that people in the future look up to for my hopefully future merits and accomplishments. I don't need to be told to look up to some dug up idol. I'm too busy looking forward instead of behind.

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