Putting grievance on a pedestal is wrong
Some years ago a friend of mine was standing outside the British Museum. A tourist approached him and asked “Where is the British museum?” My friend signalled to the large, pillared building behind him. “No, sorry – where is the British museum?” the tourist repeated. The friend, fearing he had encountered a simpleton, reiterated that it was the rather large, unmissable building behind them both.
At which point the tourist revealed that he was far from simple. “No, sorry. This is a museum of Babylonian monuments, Egyptian artifacts, Greek archaeology. But where is the British museum?” It was a great and revealing question. Most national collections involve a showcase of the best things produced in that country. But the British Museum is different. It is a museum of world civilisation.
Intermittently, this fact comes back to bite it. Such has been the case this week. For a growing chunk of our society now regards the past principally as a fertile ground for grievance hunting. Off across the millennia they roam, searching through the savannahs of injustice precisely because they are so sure to find it.
In recent weeks, this movement has flashed an eye at the British Museum. For in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests, an increasing number of people are talking about reparations and the repatriation of treasures like the Benin Bronzes to their places of origin. Certainly this isn’t a new debate, but it is now happening at a time of heightened rhetoric. People and institutions finding themselves in the way of BLM are right to want to get out of the way pretty sharpish.
So it is with the British Museum. Earlier this week the bust of Sir Hans Sloane was removed from its pedestal. While the museum was keen to hold onto the collection that he bequeathed, they were less keen to be seen to revere someone whose fortune was partly acquired through slavery. But clearly the museum’s director – Hartwig Fischer – knows where all of this could lead. It is a “simplification” he said this week, to think that a collection of 13 million objects should be regarded as stolen goods that should all be returned to their rightful owners.
Maybe. But until people like Fischer explain what is good about their institutions – how they have preserved the world’s culture, rather than “raiding” it – their collections will remain in the sights of the vengeful, and may yet be stripped bare.