Like many others, I found President Bush's speech at Goree Island off the coast of Senegal to be truly remarkable. It is exceedingly rare that a public figure so clearly articulates a condemning judgment of prior generations, and so clearly refutes the claim that it is unfair and anachronistic to judge past generations by today's standards:

At every turn, the struggle for equality was resisted by many of the powerful. And some have said we should not judge their failures by the standards of a later time, yet in every time there were men and women who clearly saw this sin and called it by name.

I am writing an essay this summer on this very problem--how we in the present should assess the wrongdoing of prior generations--and I have concluded that the point on which President Bush focused is key: Was there, in that prior generation, a sizeable group of people who parted company with the wrongdoers and resisted, condemned, or protested it? If so, then the wrongdoers' acts look a lot more like choices, and a lot less like unreflective conformity with the unquestioned standards of a given time.

The counter to the argument for condemning the wrongdoing of past generations was eloquently stated by the nineteenth century historian and legislator Lord Macaulay, who wrote:

the very considerations which lead us to look forward with sanguine hope to the future prevent us from looking back with contempt on the past. We do not flatter ourselves with the notion that we have attained perfection, that we are wiser than our ancestors. We believe, also, that our posterity will be wiser than we. It would be gross injustice in our grandchildren to talk of us with contempt, merely because they may have surpassed us . . . . As we would have our descendants judge us, so ought we to judge our fathers. In order to form a correct estimate of their merits, we ought to place ourselves in their situation, to put out of our minds, for a time, all that knowledge which they, however eager in the pursuit of truth, could not have, and which we, however negligent we may have been, could not help having. It was not merely difficult, but absolutely impossible, for the best and greatest of men, two hundred years ago, to be what a very commonplace person in our days may easily be, and indeed must necessarily be. But it is too much that the benefactors of mankind, after having been reviled by the dunces of their own generation for going too far, should be reviled by the dunces of the next generation for not going far enough.

Yesterday the president called slaveowners criminals. ("One of the largest migrations of history," said Bush, referring to the slave trade, "was also one of the greatest crimes of history.") It would be a stunning thing for a reporter to ask the President whether he really meant that Thomas Jefferson and George Washington--and even his own great- great- great-grandfather--were criminals, "[s]mall men" who "took on the powers and airs of tyrants and masters," and practicioners of "hypocrisy" and "injustice."