The statue was just the start. On an errand to Bristol’s Colston Street on Sunday I could still see the marks left by the now removed signage for Colston Tower, a 1970s tower block that deserved an ugly name. Colston Yard was for the moment simply “Yard” while the Colston Arms pub had put an A-board outside its closed doors saying “We are listening. Black Lives matter”.
It feels like dominoes are falling. But another metaphorical image is leaving many worried: the slippery slope. If failure to conform to our contemporary moral standards is grounds for the toppling of a statue, how many will we have left? Even Gandhi, the great proponent of ahimsa, or non-violent protest, is being targeted in Leicester because of his well-documented slurs against black Africans, such as “About the mixing of the Kaffirs with the Indians, I must confess I feel most strongly”.On hearing one BBC radio interviewee say that no one who had racist views should have a statue of them left standing, my thoughts turned to David Hume’s effigy on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile. In the anglophone world, Hume is the dead philosopher most admired by living ones. Yet for all his genius he still wrote in a notorious footnote that “I am apt to suspect the negroes and in general all other species of men (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites”. If that’s enough to have him removed, who is so pure to be allowed to stay?
Asking where this is all going to end is a very effective means of whipping up panic. But slippery slope arguments are themselves slippery and need to be treated with caution. They force us to take one of two extreme, polarized positions and do not allow anything more nuanced. When the slope is slippery, the only place to be is safely at the top or right down at the bottom. There is no in-between. In the case of statues it would mean leaving everything as it is or tearing down more than most people would think reasonable.
But that does not exhaust the options. The slope is not slippery, merely craggy. With care, statues can be placed at any number of places between the exalted heights and the ignominious bottom. To do this requires going beyond neat lines, with the pure on one side and the tainted on the other. Instead, we have to make judgements on a case-by-case basis, by asking ourselves some key questions.
Start with when the offence was committed. We have to accept that everyone is the product of their time. By our current standards, most Britons in history have been misogynist, racist and homophobic. Miss World was prime-time family viewing as recently as the 1970s, the Sexual Offences Act only began to legalize homosexuality in 1967, and when I was at school in the 1980s Jim Davidson’s racially caricatured character Chalky had millions of households in guilt-free hysterics. To insist that we are only allowed to have historical heroes who were able to fully rise above the prejudices that shaped them is to ask too much.
That does not mean, however, that we let pass all that is past. We also need to ask what it is about the dead that we are celebrating. When that has nothing at all to do with anything morally dubious, we’re not glorifying bigotry even if, as a matter of fact, the person in question was a bigot. For example, in my home town of Folkestone we have a statue of William Harvey and I went to a school named after him. Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood in the seventeenth century benefited all humankind. That would still be true if it came to light that he was racist, which he very possibly was, simply given the nature of Britain at the time. A person is many things: a parent, a member of a club or congregation, an athlete, a musician. We can admire them for one of these things while remaining silent on the others.
But when the very thing that we are remembering a person for is itself morally objectionable, changing times should lead us to change our heroes. Colston is a good/bad example of this. His racism was not incidental to his “achievements”. It is no use protesting that we can honour him as a philanthropist and turn a blind eye to how he earned his fortune. He would not have had a statue erected to him had he not been a slave trader. Unlike Harvey, nothing in what made his reputation is admirable today, or something that we should feel thankful for.
The distinction between Harvey and Colston seems clear enough but there are intermediate cases. This is especially tricky with military memorials. Many of our wars have been imperialistic or dynastic struggles, lacking just cause. But we don’t have to simply accept that all were doing their patriotic duty as it was then understood. Some have more serious stains against them.
The crowdsourced map of dubious monuments at toppletheracists.org implicitly acknowledges this distinction. Nelson, for instance, is not singled out for his military adventures but for using his status to resist Wilberforce and the abolitionist movement. He was not simply caught up in a slave-trading society; he actively worked to perpetuate it. The map also targets a memorial to Marshal Arthur Bomber Harris, but not the memorial to Bomber Command, which remembers the airmen and women who died following his orders in the belief that they were defending their nation.
Making these distinctions requires that we look at the degree of wrongdoing, relative to its time. Nelson was not just a racist in a racist world, but a defender of racism against contemporaries who were challenging it. Bomber Harris was not just a Marshal following the rules of military engagement but one who targeted civilians, even after being advised that it wouldn’t even achieve its aim of destroying morale.
I’ve suggested three questions that we need to ask of the people standing on our public plinths. Is the achievement for which they are being celebrated intimately or causally tied to their sins? Were they significantly worse than others of their time? How recent was the offence? These questions do not add up to a complete and rigorous set of tests. Issues are too complicated to be settled by any moral algorithm. It could be, for example, that there is a statue to someone who is being remembered for the good things they did, not the bad, who erred not more than anyone of their age did, and all in the distant past, yet which should still come down. Perhaps the legacy of the wrongdoing they are implicated in is such that the monument is a living offence. This is what makes slavery such a powerful vector in this debate. Nelson’s crimes may be more than two hundred years in the past but the consequences of the slave trade he fought to preserve are still being played out.
By any reasonable test, David Hume should be safe. (He’s not yet listed on toppletheracists.org.) Hume’s racism was no more than was sadly normal at the time and it had nothing to do with what made his philosophy great. Colston, however, should go. There are countless other cases where it is not so clear cut and there is a need for considered judgements. There is a kind of slope, in that there are gradations of guilt in the heroes of the past, and very few are entirely blameless. But it is not a slippery one unless we make it so by insisting there is nothing between the moral high ground and the abyss of iniquity.
Julian Baggini‘s most recent book is How the World Thinks, 2018
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