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Today I read that Rudyard Kipling’s “If” was erased from a student center wall at Manchester University on the grounds that he was a racist, an imperialist, a colonial apologist, etc. etc. I’m not going to refute any of it.  Kipling was, no doubt, a man of his time and place. In the light of 2018 values, a poem like “White Man’s Burden” certainly qualifies (if taken unironically) as a credo of white (or British, or European) supremacy. My reading of that poem suggests the narrative voice has distinct dubiousness about Colonialism, asking rather more than implicitly whether occupying other lands and territories and trying to “civilize” them doesn’t make the colonizer as much a prisoner as the colonized. Orwell, who was critical of Kipling’s colonialism, rather dramatized this selfsame idea in his famous essay “Shooting an Elephant.” In any event,  Kipling was living and writing at a time when it was often said “The sun never sets on the British Empire.” That was the norm.  I won’t argue for Colonialism, or that he was right, nor sit in judgment of his choices; it was a different time, a different culture, and a different world. Whatever my opinions they are, at least partially, informed by my own time and place in history. That understanding appears to be absent in those who would pull down writers, soldiers, leaders, and works from the past that do not conform to current ideas. I think that pulling down artists and historical figures is a dangerous business because not all examples are or should be taken as positive examples (we don’t have monuments to the Holocaust to glorify the Holocaust, but to remember what happened and how), because anyone can be wrong about some things (or hold unpopular opinions) and right or incisive where other matters are concerned (the expectation that if we dislike something about someone we expect to dislike everything about them and vice versa is called “The Halo Effect” and it’s a cognitive bias) , and finally because art can be and should be separate from the artist (I don’t have to approve of or condone or even have an opinion on alleged Hemingway’s sexual history to recognize the beauty and human truth in The Old Man and the Sea, for example).

Even if the original intent of those who raised a particular monument, book, poem, or idea was the glorification of a leader or idea no longer regarded as worthy of praise (Robert E. Lee and Andrew Jackson come to mind) that initial intention by those earlier people need not trouble contemporary encounters with that monument: history and our understanding of it necessarily inflects our experiences. What was once a positive example may now carry negative connotations and be an instance of remembering history so as not to repeat it. Therein, however, lies the trouble; I think the people who want Lee’s statues pulled down, Kipling’s poems erased from public spaces, and who generally criticize the Western Canon for being full of “Dead White Males” aren’t merely interested in removing monuments and painting over poems and replacing old books with newer ones for the sake of protecting the public from what is semiotically complex, ambiguous, and uncomfortable, but rather that they want no interpretation of history but their own to dominate the public life. They want no one to glorify Lee or Jackson ever again for anything worthy they ever did– because they transgressed in unacceptable ways by the lights of 2018 morality. That impulse is profoundly moralistic and totalitarian. That you feel Lee was wrong because slavery is wrong is one position, but to feel everyone must agree with you that his fighting on the wrong side overrides anything we might learn from the man, or anything admirable about him, or even his worthiness to occupy a physical space in the culture is Orwellian in its authoritarian control of narrative.

One may look at Lee’s statue and see an example not to follow (one who chooses the side that defends slavery), and others may see one of the most honorable, most skilled generals America ever produced  whose principles would not allow him to raise his sword against the men of his own state at a time when one’s state was a mark of identity far more than being generally American was.  Both of those are reasonable positions rooted in history.  In fact, history and its interpretation is a complex business with very few outright black hats and white hats. That’s not to say slavery wasn’t evil, it was; but the tragedy of life is that sometimes good men do troubling, even morally repugnant things. Milan Kundera said “Man proceeds in a fog. But when he looks back to judge people of the past, he sees no fog on their path. From his present, which was their far-away future, their path looks perfectly clear to him, good visibility all the way. Looking back he sees the path, he sees the people proceeding, he sees their mistakes, but not the fog.” So it is. We can only judge to the extent that we imagine we would have done “better,” but this is a rigid and fairly self-deceiving kind of righteousness.

It is a pleasant fiction to think one would have gone against the mores of a particular society or group or historical context (the Aztecs and other ancient civilizations sacrificed children, the Elizabethans put bears in pits with dogs and watched them rip each other apart for fun, Romans watched gladiators murder one another for sport, Lt. Calley and his men executed women and children at My Lai, Germans joined up and fought for Hitler and his Nazis to return glory to the Fatherland, some Palestinian mothers strap bombs to their children) but it’s a rare person who will turn away from the casual cruelty of what is normal or even laudable at a particular time in a particular context. For instance, a day may come when mankind looks back with horror at the abortion rate , and yet a huge segment of the population will today defend the right for a woman to choose abortion; how will history judge them despite their considered opinions, their pragmatic arguments and their liberty-based intentions? It would be unfair, I think the reader will agree, to decide that the novels of Toni Morrison are worthy of erasure because she came down on the “wrong side” of a continuing discussion on issues (like abortion) that will one day have moved a century beyond her and may, like racism, come to center stage in the culture at that later time. Outlooks and ideas change; opinions once reasonable and mainstream become unfashionable or even repugnant. Culture alters itself with each successive generation, but to regard past generations as a pack of fools because they didn’t think the way “we” do is chronocentrism, and throws away very real wisdom in both positive and negative examples for the short and shallow victory of virtue-signalling to others one’s own righteous and correct opinions. It’s a quick win to showcase moral superiority over the ancients, and it requires little understanding of oneself or the world as it was. This is a shallow and superficial position, in my opinion, but alarmingly popular of late.

It’s not out of place to consider some of the voices (primarily on the Left, primarily concerned with “Social Justice”) calling for statues and authors and poets and works of art to be pulled down or erased or recontextualized into a strictly and narrowly pejorative paradigm as somewhat Victorian. For example, Oscar Wilde is widely recognized today as one of the most superlative geniuses in the history of Letters in the English Language. His open homosexuality (and decision to force the issue at a time when such a thing was a crime in England) left him a pariah and a pauper in his own time who died in exile; all this almost entirely because of social stigma. The Victorian public could not or would not recognize his work as worthwhile any longer primarily because they felt his personal sexual/moral schema might be catching. It is the same now, and it is absurd.

Bad, unpopular, and ugly ideas aren’t inherently and directly contagious simply by dint of being expressed, and current mores aren’t universal. You are not going to become a rabid colonialist by reading “If.” You are not going to catch gayness from The Picture of Dorian Gray. You are not going to start a murderous race war after reading Helter Skelter and you’re not going to start killing Jews after you read Mien Kampf. Rather, you will encounter ideas, figures, and history from which you can be trusted to make informed decisions about the nature of good and evil by your own lights. That is, we can make determinations about what is laudable and execrable without acting by fiat or mob rule to impose that viewpoint on others. Rather, sound arguments rooted in deep historical knowledge and one’s own contribution to “The Great Conversation” will do more than censorship and virtue-signalling to move Western civilization toward an ever more humane system of interaction.

I recognize, of course, that the “social justice” argument for erasing “If” and putting up Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise” in a public space is that historically white males have subverted the voices of marginalized groups (women, people of color, etc.) and this is a corrective to that historical injustice. That may be true in some sense, but the corrective is, to my mind, wrong-headed. We should be taking the best techniques and ideas of Western Civilization gratefully from those who spawned them (classic liberalism, governments that exist to protect the rights of people instead of people who exist to prop up the government and/ or upper classes, the scientific method, free speech,  the right to a trial wherein one is innocent until proven guilty, individual rights generally, academic freedom, a free press, etc.).  We can recognize the uneven, imperfect application of the highest ideals of justice, liberty, and equal treatment under law in our culture, and we might seek to improve upon those in ourselves, in our own lives, and in our communities. I can’t agree with or condone, however,  this “social justice” policy of pulling down monuments, erasing poems from college walls, and revising the Canon for reasons of whiteness or maleness. These are acts of rejection toward some of the good or notable or important aspects of our history because of some fatuous notion that perfect (and currently sanctioned) moral purity is possible in our forebears (or ourselves) and that impurity is appropriately met with wholesale rejection.

That attitude is uncharitable, it’s ungenerous, it’s unreasonable, it’s impossible to live up to, and ultimately I deem it fearful: Fearful that specific, transgressive forms of intolerance and cruelty currently regarded as the highest sins in our culture can be or may be transmitted (or condoned, or even conceived of) by and through contact with figures of the past who did not weigh our values on the same scales we do at this historic moment. That fear means many are frightened when a handful of vocal Nazi sympathizers and white supremacists march in our streets, as if that extremely marginal slice of the fringe will embolden and encourage bald racism across America and the world. Those tiki-torch-bearing extremists don’t frighten me and I don’t see racists under every rock, or in every American living room. The people in my community and my country, more often than not, are basically decent to each other. When disasters happen, white cops boat out black flood survivors and black firemen carry white casualties from of burning buildings and men help women and gay people help straight people and, when things get bad, we all pretty much do what we can to help each other. That’s the real America, as far as I can see. That’s the default in the collective human spirit. That’s human nature, just as sure as tribalism and bias are.

Censorship is always about fear. I refuse to be afraid, and I think more people should take the same stand. Let all people, the good and the bad, say what they like; let’s read widely and deeply from imperfect, messy, inconsistent, troubled, broken, wounded, and sometimes outright bad people; in other words, people like ourselves. Let there be monuments to our greatness and to our folly, to our high triumphs and deep shames, and let us look over them all often and with different eyes, and let us discuss them frequently and broadly and with open ears and open hearts. Let us, in short, sanitize nothing and examine everything for what it will profit us.