But just in the interest of going whole hog: let’s assume I become King Of Earth and my new rule is “nobody is allowed to be celebrated”. Does the world stop spinning? It’s a crazy rule, but celebration of dead people isn’t exactly the glue holding society together.
Meanwhile, racism is a pretty ongoing issue that is tearing it apart.
Jesus is certainly a glue of Christianity, Mohammad of Islam, etc.
Does that mean we have to accept all of who those people are? Of course not. We can choose to celebrate the Federalist papers and denounce the slaveholding.
People have a natural desire to follow leaders, to idolize people. In doing so they are tied more closely to others who value/worship/memorialize the same.
That’s (one!) tribal glue.
Yea, this is pretty much the same reason that people want racists’ statues taken down.
People celebrating bigots are people who value bigots, and that’s a tribe I’m pretty happy letting go extinct.
Funny, saying that sort of thing is what got Fisher condemned.
But, with some exceptions, these people aren’t celebrated for their bigotry. They’re celebrated for their positive achievements. People are complex mixtures of good, bad, and indifferent values. No one is pure of character or thought.
For example I didn't know that Churchill had some pretty horrendous things to say about Indian people until the last couple of years because British cultural attitudes towards him are pretty unflinchingly patriotic. It doesn't diminish that he played a key role in saving us and the rest of the world from the Nazis, but it does balance his image as a man with positive and negative qualities, which is a more realistic image. To tear his statues down says to other people "fuck your heroes, racism is the only dimension I judge people on" - which is much more likely to garner a reactionary response than to initiate dialogue and understanding on the racism of our history, which IMO is the valuable thing you can get out of these conflicts.
Tearing down statues (of people famous for things unrelated to racism) just makes progressives seem incredibly unreasonable, which is already a popular perception, because of exactly things like this.
This is just another call for respectability politics. You're asking people to do something that doesn't work.
There's a significant difference between a statue to Robert E Lee and a statue to Churchill (or, say, a stained-glass celebration of this Fisher guy).
There aren't singular people behind progress. If Newton had never been born we would still have Calculus, and in fact we don't teach Newton's calculus in schools. Einstein was part of a team, and his team was only slightly ahead of another team.
Statues and shit paint a picture of a lie: That great people drive the world.
Human progress happens because other areas progress, the new ideas are inevitable, the person who does them has no real bearing on whether they happen or not. History is not driven by "great men" but by society working together.
The entire "great man of history" thing is actually a giant pile of racist garbage, used to promote unjust systems and reinforce tribalisms, which is the very thing you're talking about it being good for.
Also, Churchill (who I believe you brought up earlier) was a piece of dog shit who starved millions of people in India out of spite. Very few people have done as much actual evil as Churchill did, and his statues and images should be shit on.
The fact that you aren't aware of those things is entirely down to "great man of history" nonsense being the place where you get your ideas. It's bad, it's backwards, and it's really not defensible.
Most likely, another general would have defeated Napoleon.
Wellington wasn’t some unique tactical genius. He had 1.5 times the men Napoleon did. I’m sure he was a perfectly competent general, but if he wasn’t there, the next guy in line would be.
Where did I say that either the great men of history model, or national pride, were good things? My whole point that I explicitly laid out was that attacking symbols that people think are good is not good praxis. That doesn't mean that perpetuating myths is good, but if you want to win people over to your side, taking a shit on thinga they think are good is not the way to do it. It just makes you feel good in your righteous indignation, which is basically the image a lot of moderates have of progressivism in general.
This is a strawman.
I’m specifically saying we shouldn’t celebrate bigots. We should continue to educate people about the “shades of grey” as it were. We can do that without statues. Monuments are never going to have context.
If you think me unreasonable, I guess I’ll just have to be okay with that.
"we shouldn't celebrate bigots" is reductionist because it narrows important people down to a single dimension. That's puritanism - if somebody invents a cure for cancer and saves billions of lives, they should be celebrated for that achievement even if they have bad racial views, because from a consequential perspective people want to be celebrated and are inspired by the idea of being considered a hero for breakthroughs in their field. You can simultaneously celebrate and condemn a single person, it's called nuance - and the conversation around an individual is not solely shaped by the placard on their statue.
Unless there’s a proposal for building an “un-monument”, when we put up a statue for a bigot who did a good thing, we’re elevating the good thing without the context of the bad.
We should celebrate that FDR’s policies got us out of the Great Depression, and also never forget that he signed off on internment camps.
But in practice, raising a statue of somebody raises that person. They’re put forth as the face of the accomplishment, and they’re more than just the accomplishment. Else we’d just raise a tower with the inscription “In recognition of the British spirit, and of the lives lost protecting us from Naziism”
My broader contention is that you don’t need a statue to celebrate the accomplishment, we have plenty of other ways to do that. So when somebody says “hey, lets take down this statue because the person in it did some pretty bigoted things”, the only thing fighting for keeping the statue is inertia. Nobody in the UK is going to forget defeating the Nazis, every other building is inscribed with details about what stood there before the Blitz.
Liberal guilt is tearing itself apart. As things get better day after day because of the work so many put in, a group of people exists who ignores this and thinks the world is frozen in some media generated history.