Roger Angell/baseball

Not all slopes are slippery

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…