Look out, Sloanes — the Wokesters are coming for YOU!
ONe of my least favourite questions to be asked — usually at dull political fundraisers where the conversation is as dry as the beef — is: if I could go back in time and eliminate one person from history, who would it be?
It’s a pointless question, not least because everyone always chooses Hitler or Genghis Khan, but also because it is an idiotic simplification. There is no one person whose death could eliminate all the evil in the world, just as there is no one person whose presence can cure it.
Luckily the whole exercise is just a stupid parlour game. Or it was. Because lately some people — rather a lot in fact — are playing it for real.
The latest bete noire is 17th century Irish physician, naturalist and collector Sir Hans Sloane. Born in 1660, he lived through an age of great scientific, intellectual and artistic expansion.
He has been denounced, Cultural Revolution style, by the British Museum (which he founded), and his bewigged effigy removed from its plinth. His crime? Like virtually every other nobleman of his age, he owned slaves. Henceforth he is to be housed along with other commonor-garden artefacts in a display that explains his legacy in the ‘exploitative context of the British empire’.
Without Sloane we would not have the British Museum, nor the British Library, the Natural History Museum, Chelsea Physic Garden, hot chocolate — or even one of the more entertaining features of the 20th century, the Sloane Ranger.
Indeed, if we’re really going to cancel everything Sloane then presumably Alice bands, red trousers, Barbour jackets and point to points must henceforth all be consigned to the Orwellian black hole, together with pearl earrings and, of course, blue mascara. T He director of the Museum, Hartwig Fischer, explained that the move is part of wider measures to ensure its treasures are seen in the context of colonialism.
The aim, he asserts, is to ‘rewrite our shared, complicated and, at times, very painful history’.
No one is denying the history of the British empire is inextricably linked to the slave trade. It is an unpleasant and indelible stain on our nation, and it is one that we must all reflect upon. But it is nevertheless just a stain. It is not the whole tapestry.
It is this broader picture, as people have been toppling the statues of similar historical figures in towns and universities across Britain over recent months, that we seem to be ignoring. And people like Mr Fischer — who seem more interested in furthering their personal goals than making the case for the rich and nuanced history of the institutions they represent — are guilty of the worst kind of intellectual cowardice.
The cancel culture sweeping the nation is not about materially improving the lives of the oppressed.
It’s about an intellectual fearfulness now sadly embedded across almost all our institutions — from the Civil Service to the Scouts — that has neither the courage nor the sophistication to resist the zombified armies of the woke whose righteous indignation and evangelical fervour makes them blind to the ambiguities of humanity and human history. S O to depose Sloane — or for that matter George Washington or any slaveowning figures of the past — serves no purpose, no real, practical purpose, other than to play to the gallery.
When you attempt to simplify the past, to paint it in convenient, monochromatic shades of black and white, you achieve nothing. Slavery is not what defines Britain, just as it is not what defined Hans Sloane.
Yes, it is part of our past — but it is only one aspect of that past.
There are countless others — not least the fact that our Parliament abolished the slave trade long before many other nations — that, at least to my mind, tips the balance in our favour.