Statues
Some say that toppling statues according to the person’s moral badness is ‘rational’ — hence the approval of Julian Baggini’s supposedly measured take on the issue in the Times Literary Supplement. Here’s what he comes up with. It’s a good way to see why the moralising approach is bankrupt.
I’ve suggested three questions that we need to ask of the people standing on our public plinths. Is the achievement for which they are being celebrated intimately or causally tied to their sins? Were they significantly worse than others of their time? How recent was the offence? These questions do not add up to a complete and rigorous set of tests. Issues are too complicated to be settled by any moral algorithm. It could be, for example, that there is a statue to someone who is being remembered for the good things they did, not the bad, who erred not more than anyone of their age did, and all in the distant past, yet which should still come down. Perhaps the legacy of the wrongdoing they are implicated in is such that the monument is a living offence. This is what makes slavery such a powerful vector in this debate. Nelson’s crimes may be more than two hundred years in the past but the consequences of the slave trade he fought to preserve are still being played out.
These are criteria whose application apparently involves silliness. No one lionizes Nelson for anything related to the slavery. That’s because while Nelson made some nasty remarks, he made no substantial contribution to perpetuating the slave trade. When his statue was erected in 1835, no one venerated him for his opposition to abolitionism. No one holds that he pushed back abolition to 1833. But Baginni wants Nelson to be accounted among the specially bad because that means statue activists have it at least partially right.
As for the criteria themselves: ok, so if you were all about being bad, topple the statue. And if you were super-bad, belonging to the distant past doesn’t get you off. Why? Is this some vision of post-mortem punishment? Or it is about causing outcomes that have already occurred, like going back in time and abolishing slavery all over again? Or is it because toppling the statue shows proper respect for the new leftist vanguard, in which case why draw nice distinctions about which statue to topple in the first place? The rationality of this approach is evanescent.
If the criteria are enforced, all that happens is that the evil is consigned to virtually unread history books, not to daily reminders of what happened. It’s objected that some statues glorify or ignore some evil. But that glorification or obliviousness is itself an important historical fact. Removing the statue removes any memory of that fact, of how an evildoer was regarded in the past. So the whole statue-removal exercise is itself and obliteration of history. This obliteration — no different to the passer-by than denial — is advocated on the grounds that a corrective plaque on or by the statue is politically wimpy. And of course removal helps no one, past, present or future.
To see what to do about statues, you have to look at the circumstances of their removal, not of their erection. And here, past practice provides a better guide than attempts at moral excellence.
Before the woke era, statues and symbols were removed according to their contemporary political role.
When a country frees itself from tyranny, it topples statues of the tyrant as part of the process of liberation. Typically there is an old guard or a remnant who still worships the tyrant, and that worship is part of a political cult still capable of doing mischief. Syrian rebels topple statues of Assad to show defiance at Assadists, and signal readiness to defend against his rule. When the US overthrew Saddam Hussein, toppling his statue sent a similar message to the substantial number of his supporters. In Russia, Stalin’s statues were removed to counteract a real fear that reached beyond the grave, not least because Stalin still had many admirers. When the Berlin Wall was attacked, it was to cement the liberation of Berlin from Communist rule. But when that rule was thoroughly defeated, portions of the wall were preserved, as a memorial. No one lusts to tear that memorial down, even though the wall is held to represent something morally bad. That’s because its representation of something morally bad is kind of the point. One needn’t be a fervid pro- or anti-communist to appreciate the rationale.
This works well with, for example, monuments and symbols of the Confederacy. The presence of the Confederate flag on government property cannot ever be merely memorial, because it associates state power with the cause that flag represents, even today. The Confederate logo on the Mississippi state flag has, willy-nilly, the same function. But statues of Confederate generals in public places, away from the seat of power, have no political function: they do not associate the Confederate cause with contemporary state authority. They have historical importance only: these generals will not rise from the dead to lead a new Confederate army. In this they are quite unlike representations of Assad or Saddam Hussein, figures who at the time were very much alive and not an obviously spent force. In the same vein, Nazi images and artefacts are taken seriously in Germany, were they are associated with Nazi survival. They are not taken so seriously elsewhere, where they have no association with a former government and represent no political threat. Were the Nazi party to rise again, those statues might well need to come down.
Statues shouldn’t topple as part of some futile attempt to right the past or send a fleeting reproach: better to make the reproach permanent and explicit in a plaque. They should, perhaps, come down when the person represented plays a role in some contemporary political struggle, when the representation still has teeth today. Anything else is a celebration, not of liberation, but of ignorance.