We shouldn’t be slavish about rewriting history
On a recent visit to Maidstone, Kent, I found myself in a conversation about slavery. It had started with ancestry. (I was there to see an old family portrait.) My companion had discovered that among her ancestors was an illustrious Royal Academy portrait painter. Sadly, she had also found out that he made his name painting many notable slave traders of the day. She was, she said, ashamed of the man, but reading about him had been an education.
Take a walk around any notable town in Britain and it won’t be hard to find links to the slave trade. Churches, monuments, artefacts, mahogany furniture, street names, old banks and warehouses, even the family silver and putting sugar in your tea: try hard enough and you could trace back all sorts of things to the abominable crime of trading human chattel.
Sometimes, though, the link is quite direct. Edward Colston was a prominent 18th-century slave trader from Bristol whose business transported thousands of Africans to the Americas. He was also, in later life, a philanthropist who funded schools, hospitals and almshouses and is celebrated all over his home city, including in a stained-glass window in Bristol Cathedral.
Now, facing a campaign to expunge signs of the man from every corner of Bristol, the cathedral dean said he is willing to consider removing the Colston Window. It might have survived the Bristol air raids, unlike many neighbouring windows, but the zeal of revisionist campaigners is a mightier threat.
There’s no doubt that Colston made his money from an evil trade. Indirectly, so did many others, like painters, bankers or dock workers. Colston’s life teaches us that both good and evil can exist in a human – and a nation – simultaneously.
What purpose would it serve, then, to uproot old statues and windows, or to ban schoolchildren from handing out chrysanthemums and iced buns in memory of the man? With such righteous motives we could perhaps create a Britain stripped entirely of its “bad” history, commemorating only the “good”.
Civilisations don’t advance by purging their past. If campaigners were to focus on educating Bristolians, adding plaques to Colston monuments explaining the ultimate source of his charitable donations, it would certainly be hard to argue against them. But changing street names, toppling statues and defacing churches isn’t educational. Instead, like the Reformation’s iconoclasts, it leaves nothing behind but whitewash. American students specialise in self-promotion. One common practice at my alma mater for those who didn’t obtain the extra-curricular post they desired, like editorship of a campus magazine, was to found their own publication. Missed out on being president of the Harvard Law Review? Just found the Harvard Review of Law. It was with some amusement, therefore, that I heard about the launch of a new magazine by two Harvard alumni. The pitch for American Affairs is that it will provide the highbrow discourse so sorely needed to provide Trumpism with an intellectual foundation. This niche was created by the refusal of National Review, the established magazine of the American Right, to play along with Trump’s whackiest ideas.
Happily, on campus, the new magazine’s founders, Gladden Pappin and Julius Krein, did find suitable roles for themselves at The Salient, a conservative student magazine that delighted in making people angry. Pappin became notorious for praising Harvard’s historic practice of disciplining gay students and, when called upon to defend himself, writing a letter declaring homosexuality to be “perverted and unnatural”.
Interviewed recently, Krein suggested generously that Trump offers “a new critique” of US politics, but was gracious enough to acknowledge that there is “still a lot of work to do in outlining the specific agenda”. Unfortunately for Krein and Pappin, the Twitter-addicted Trump has his preferred medium for working out policy ideas. Their rag will undoubtedly find a following, however, perhaps among the aspiring students who once flocked to see the Trump supporter and self-styled “dangerous faggot” Milo Yiannopoulos speaking on college campuses. Milo’s fans might find Pappin’s view on gays a little different, but like all provocateurs, these young fogies in Harry Potter glasses will measure their success by just one metric: attention. Forget Margaret Thatcher’s shoulder pads or Theresa May’s svelte dresses. Our Foreign Secretary offers a salutary lesson in powerdressing: act like you really, really do not care. On this score, Boris Johnson’s creative powers know no bounds. Artfully clad for jogging this week in a clinging polo shirt, squashed beany hat and baggy red boxer shorts straight out of a Carry On film, the Foreign Secretary has achieved a je ne sais quoi that fashion experts can spend years pursuing. Move over, Sam Cam.
Civilisations don’t advance by purging their past – toppling statues isn’t educational