There are countless philosophers we could consult when thinking about the past and how to make judgments about it. None of them is 1990s supermodel-turned-ice-cream-entrepreneur Tyra Banks.
Yet it is Banks who has prompted some unexpected philosophical questions for me and many others, if my social media feed is anything to go by.
She wasn’t really trying to, but then I suppose that’s part of the brilliance of philosophy. It’s inescapably present in every idea we express and every judgment we make.
Netflix has launched a three-part docuseries revisiting America’s Next Top Model, the hugely successful reality show that was broadcast from 2003 and helped capture the aesthetic mood of the early 2000s.
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The horrors of low-rise jeans. The consumption of a can of diet cola in lieu of a meal. Anyone who watched at the time will remember visibly underweight, often vulnerable teenage girls and young women being evaluated and told they look paunchy, drab or old.
Millennial women will recognise the TV show and the cultural moment, when thinness was everything and aesthetic judgment was moral judgment.
As someone whose cripplingly uncomfortable girlhood unfolded at that time, I watched the Netflix docuseries with a combination of nostalgia and rising unease.
With hindsight, the harm the original show perpetuated seems quite obvious. Bad and prejudiced ideas were presented as facts. Exploitation was cynically disguised as giving young women a chance at life-changing success and, as was so often the case at that time, cruelty was marketed as a valid form of entertainment.
En masse, young women around the world watched girls far closer to the beauty standard than themselves being mercilessly denigrated for their imperfections. It was compelling. It was poisonous.
Several of those involved in the original show now express discomfort or regret about how it treated its contestants and the attitudes it proliferated. We didn’t know then what we know now is the general sentiment. But, then, it was a different time. Watching the docuseries, I was struck by the ease with which so many people said something along these lines. The same reactive confidence that fuelled the original show animates these people’s condemnation of it now.
Back in the early 2000s, Banks and her fellow judges expressed certainty that they were just upholding legitimate standards.
After all, the modelling industry is known for its brutality and prioritisation of the superficial. Harshness, cruelty, “truth”-telling were all defended as responsible preparation for the realities of working in that industry.
Now, these commenters have condemned the standards they once defended. They are as certain today as they were then.
Presentism is our tendency to treat the present as morally superior – and it is perennial. People have confidently made this lazy assumption at every point in human history, including the people making an exploitative and ethically grubby TV show in the early 2000s.
At every time, we make the mistake of presuming that the moral clarity we feel comes from having more information than we had in the past. We didn’t know then what we know now. Our confidence in our judgment remains the same. Only the object of that judgment changes.
We tend to believe what we know now is all we need to know, forgetting that poor judgments in the past were based on the same assumption. The same mechanism by which someone such as Banks diminished young women in the name of helping them in the early 2000s is the one by which she now determines her previous behaviour wrong.
We rarely question the mechanism by which we make these kinds of judgments – the assumption that consensus dictates what is true, the perpetual moral certainty, the belief that we currently have all the information needed. We condemn the past with all the unexamined confidence that characterised it and, in that way, we repeat our mistakes.
It seems clear enough that shows like America’s Next Top Model did exploit and harm people in the name of entertainment. Yet we don’t get better at thinking or forming good judgments by condemning the past with the same blind, righteous certainty that created it.
Epistemic humility doesn’t demand that we excuse the past, but it does call on us to recognise that the moral certainty of the present is equally shaped by assumptions we’re usually not looking closely at.
We can identify past blind spots. And it makes us feel good about ourselves to do that. It makes us feel insulated from choices that reflect poorly on us now standards have shifted.
But it doesn’t necessarily make us any better at seeing our current blind spots or at recognising that we are often still reproducing a standard we aren’t thinking critically about.
It’s unsettling to look back on the early 2000s through the lens of pop culture and see not just how wrong people were, but how sure they were. We don’t seem any less sure now.
