I’ve written a few times about the great debate involving controversial historical monuments in this country.  The two sides in the matter are deeply dug into their positions.  One group yells, “No, you can’t take them down—it’s history,” and the other screams, “Yes, you must take them down because they’re hateful.”  In my opinion, the dialogue never became much more sophisticated than this—one side simply tries to scream louder than the other.

My last blog on the topic, “The Difference Between Celebrating and Not Forgetting,” which I posted on May 30th and reposted on August 18th, was an effort to provide a nuance to the discussion.  I suggested that it was appropriate to “not forget” something that was bad through a monument (e.g. the 9/11 Monuments in NY) but it was not okay to celebrate something that is hateful (e.g. a statue of an individual who fought for a cause or principle that was evil).  My blog reached over 21,000 people on Facebook and received almost 400 posted comments, but very few addressed my nuance and most simply continued screaming either a loud “No” or “Yes.”

Today, I read an interesting article in the NY Post, entitled, “Public Chimes in on Monumental Debate.”  The piece describes a meeting of Mayor Bill DeBlasio’s Commission on City Art, Monuments, and Markers—a group that was established to provide recommendations about what to do with potentially offensive statues and monuments.  One commenter spoke of Christopher Columbus and suggested that the good he did as an explorer outweighed the bad he did in annihilating the Taino and other indigenous peoples in the Caribbean.  This to me is a twist to the dialogue, and while I won’t choose to discuss the merits of statues celebrating Columbus, I would like to explore the concept of this argument further.

The logic of this approach is to consider the benefit of an individual’s positive achievements against any negative deeds or positions associated with them.  Let’s start with an extreme, and perhaps absurd, example of this approach—just to make a point.  Imagine that Adolf Hitler was associated with a significant scientific achievement before coming to power in Germany.   It would be hard to fathom how any achievement could outweigh the evil associated with his later deeds—clearly, there would be no justification for any monuments in this case.