Iconoclasm of the Vanities: Why We Are Destroying Statues - American Affairs Journal

Iconoclasm of the Vanities: Why We Are Destroying Statues - American Affairs Journal Iconoclasm of the Vanities: Why We Are Destroying Statues americanaffairsjournal.org/2022/05/iconoclasm-of-the-vanities-why-we-are-destroying-statues May 20, 2022 Summer 2022 / Volume VI, Number 2 By Samuel Biagetti In March 1774, the ships Resolution and Adventure, sailing through the remote southern Pacific under the command of Captain James Cook, landed on the shores of Easter Island. The crews obtained some much-needed supplies by trading with the Rapa Nui, the island’s few thousand Polynesian inhabitants who subsisted mainly off of gardening and fishing. They were only the third European expedition ever to make contact with the isolated landmass, but reports from a Dutch encounter half a century earlier had given Cook’s crew some idea of what to expect: a rugged landscape, with only a few freshwater springs and scattered stands of palms. Neither were the mariners surprised by the island’s most striking feature—namely, the hundreds of moai, or monu­mental stone statues, that studded the shores and hillsides. As a detach­ment of Cook’s crew, guided by several locals, set off on an inland trek, however, they sighted something that previous foreign visitors had not: near a small freshwater well, the Scottish naturalist Johann Forster noted “several large statues, which had been overturned.” On their return trek to the British ships, the party encountered “another huge statue,” apparently the largest on the island at over twenty-seven feet, “which lay overturned.”1 Although Cook’s men were the first to record instances of toppled moai on Easter Island, they were far from the last. Through the later 1700s and early 1800s, foreign traders recorded more and more statues—especially those that had stood upon stone ceremonial platforms called ahu—lying on the ground, often broken in pieces. By 1868, the only moai still standing were those whose bases were deeply embedded in the earth; not a single statue remained upright on an ahu anywhere on the island. No one knows for certain why hundreds of moai fell between the early 1700s and 1868. Oral traditions of the indigenous Rapa Nui people attest to some instances of tribesmen toppling the statues of rival fac­tions in the course of intra-island feuding, while anthropologists have tentatively attributed some of the destruction to the natural forces of erosion and earthquakes. It is significant that nearly every single moai fell forward, however, landing face down; many of them were found with their heads broken off. At first blush, it may seem bizarre to a modern audience to imagine bands of Rapa Nui prowling Easter Island with ropes, pulling down and defacing the moai. On the other hand, such a scene may strike us as eerily familiar, as images of mobs, gather­ing swiftly not only to topple statues, but often to deface, drag, hack, and kick them before tossing them into rivers, have recently proliferated across social and mass media in the English-speaking world; as one British journalist wrote exultantly, “social media is alive with dazzling poems, images and videos of iconoclastic actions so dramatic they have a performative charge.”2 While the recent destruction of statues in the contemporary West ostensibly relates to a racial reckoning, it nonetheless stands in a long lineage of iconoclasm, and one can understand its meaning only when viewed alongside its predecessors. Indeed, the apparent destruction of the Easter Island moai over the course of a century forms only one of many past instances in which societies have attacked their own once-sacred images. Iconoclasm in some form seems to be nearly as old as recorded history: around 1200 BCE, during the collapse of the Canaanite civilization, rioters attacked urban temples, knocking over the figu­rines of deities before looting and abandoning the cities altogether. Several centuries later, the Hebrew king Josiah destroyed the remaining rural altars and images of the Canaanite gods. In the late Roman era, Christian gangs roamed through the cities at night, vandalizing or destroying pagan cult figures to prove that they were powerless idols, and during the Reformation, Swiss mobs broke into churches, stripped out the paintings and statues of saints, and burned them in town squares. The Iconoclastic Cycle In order to understand the significance of the recent wave of statue-toppling, one must consider the peculiar social conditions that have led people to attack images throughout history. These conditions vary from one place and time to another, but nonetheless they show common patterns. Outbreaks of iconoclasm are especially common, as the fore­going examples suggest, among adherents of the Abrahamic faiths, all of which carry some version of the ancient Hebrew condemnation of “graven images.” This stricture takes its most thoroughgoing form in Islam, with most Muslim societies totally excluding the depiction of human, animal, or even plant figures from religious art, and discouraging it even in secular contexts. While the taboo against idolatry is more ambiguous and subject to reinterpretation in Christian thought, Islamic zeal against idols sometimes spills over into Christendom. Indeed, the word “iconoclasm”—from the Greek for “breaking of images”—was originally coined in reference to the eighth-century Byzantine campaign to destroy the icons of saints adorning the empire’s churches and ab­beys, spurred on in part by fear that the empire’s loss of its eastern flank to the anti-iconographic Muslims was a punishment from God for their own lapse into idolatry. Nevertheless, although religious anxieties around idol worship have been a continuing factor in attacks on images in the West, they cannot account for the occurrence of the phenomenon in far-flung lands, including in times and places beyond the Abrahamic fold. Pre-Christian iconoclasms were often directed by state authorities, such as the Egyp­tian pharaoh Akhenaten, a devotee of the sun deity Aten, who ordered the destruction of all images of rival gods, or the Roman Senate, which after overthrowing the emperor Nero, issued a damnatio memoriae decree to smash all sculptures of the deposed tyrant. While these state-ordered extirpations were swift and narrowly focused, other waves of iconoclasm were more gradual or sporadic, forming part of a broader epochal shift. For instance, the finest sculptures from the once-flourish­ing Mississippian culture of pre-Columbian North America, such as the Birger Figurine of a farming goddess, were “ritually killed” by intentional decapitation, burning, and burial over the course of the thirteenth century. Regardless of their precise targets, all waves of iconoclasm occur in societies in crisis, when fundamental practices and institutions are cast into doubt. For instance, the aforementioned Birger Figurine, discovered at a pre-Columbian site in Illinois, shows a stooped female figure using a stone hoe to tear into the back of a serpent, and probably represents the “Corn Mother” deity linked to farming, fertility, and the moon. The figurine was evidently produced around 1100 CE, at which time the Mississippian civilization flourished on the basis of rich harvests of maize and other crops. It was broken and buried a century or more later, when a cooling climate caused declining harvests, shrinking cities, and a reversion toward dependence on hunting. The destruction of fertility-goddess statues corresponded with a rise in depictions of an eagle-man deity associated with the hunt. The Mississippian iconoclasm of the thirteenth century illuminates a common pattern, in which subjects turn against images of an authority figure, whether human or divine, to dramatize their own changing loyalties. Moreover, the target of iconoclasm usually embodies not only a ruler or a god invested with certain powers, but also the wider political order that revolves around them; if the material foundations of the social edifice crumble, then the statue at its pinnacle, linking the social order to the cosmos, must fall. In Easter Island before European contact, the moai were not simply decorative sculptures, but embodiments of ances­tors, whose spirits they housed in order to watch over and judge the living. The form of a moai, while not totally invariant, is formulaic, and its consistency reflects the ideal of order and continuity that the statues symbolized. The social order that produced the moai rested, in turn, upon a surplus of food and resources from the island’s palm forests. After about 1600, the palms dwindled under the attacks of invasive Polynesian rats. Under material strain, the islanders fell into tribal war­fare and ceased producing moai. The breakdown of traditional Rapa Nui life accelerated in the 1700s after European contact, which introduced new diseases as well as internecine competition for foreign goods. As the devastated islanders became dependent on seabirds as the remaining food source, the ancient statues fell, and the island’s art shifted over, in a remarkable parallel to the Mississippian case, to depictions of a deified birdman. While the precise timing and circumstances of the toppling of the moai or the destruction of the Birger Figurine are unknown, other better‑recorded episodes reveal the internal forces at work in the icono­clastic mind. Whatever the supposed motives or doctrines of the icono­clasts, their targets have always been images of the human form, which they perceive, whether consciously or unconsciously, to embody a watching, judging presence. The human face carries a latent power; from ancient to modern times, Egyptians broke the noses off of statues in order to “disable” their invisible potency. (Incidentally, the Great Sphinx lost its nose due not to accident or casual vandalism, but to intentional defacement by a fifteenth-century Muslim preacher who sought to stop locals from giving offerings to the pagan statue.) The hidden power of the human form is social as well as metaphysical: recent experiments among modern Americans have found that subjects are less likely to steal or litter if a poster with a human face hangs in the room; the mere appearance of a pair of eyes reinforces unspoken norms.3 To destroy a long-familiar human image—let alone a sacred one—serves not so much to express anger toward the subject that it depicts as to attack the internalized watcher that enforces rules and inhibitions in the iconoclast’s own mind. In some cases, revolutionaries, seeking psychological release, create images of authority figures in order to de­stroy them. American patriot mobs, gathered around courthouses to hear the first readings of the Declaration of Independence, paraded, hanged, and burned effigies of the king, then buried the ashes in the ground. As historian Brendan McConville argues in The King’s Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, most British colonists, even on the eve of the Revolution, were fervently royalist, ordering their world around Protestantism and a personal connection to the British crown. When the king’s government moved to suppress the colonial rebellion on behalf of Parliament, British Americans felt personally betrayed, and unleashed a frenzy of iconoclasm on royal symbols; New England militiamen returning from the Battle of Lexington and Con­cord shot holes in images of the royal arms that still hung over tavern doors. Such acts of iconoclasm result not from an antipathy or indifference to the old order, but from an enduring attachment to it, which the iconoclasts must extirpate from their own psyche. The iconoclastic mindset, in sum, reflects a passionate concern with the social and cosmic order, which images serve to anchor. Iconoclasts’ actions demonstrate that they take those symbols extremely seriously, and aspire to control or redirect their power. Although iconoclasts may be revolutionaries, they are never anarchists; as confidence in the tra­ditional worldview falters, they fear chaos, and through symbolic acts of destruction, seek to lay the groundwork for a new order. Iconoclasm is thus necessarily cyclical and paradoxical: authority supplants authority as powerful images arise from the destruction of other powerful images. The tenth-century Islamic scholar Abu Nasr Al-Farabi observed that while the force of law may effectively proscribe certain acts, it cannot provide the sense of shared purpose that a society needs in order to function. For this, he argued, a civilization must rely upon images, which speak to the intuition and imagination of the populace. Naturally, this fact existed in tension with the Islamic prohibition on idolatry, leading to cycles of image-creation and destruction. Al-Farabi reconciled this apparent contradiction by way of the further insight that acts of iconoclasm create their own images, which not only replace those which they destroy, but sometimes far outstrip them, propagating themselves and the new worldview that they represent among ever wider audiences. As the art historian Aaron Tugendhaft has pointed out, the destruction of sometimes obscure ancient images by ISIS was captured on videos that spread around the world via the internet, reaching far more eyes than the original icons ever had. In some instances, iconoclasts can even be seen as conservative, in the sense that they act to consolidate and centralize power by suppressing more unruly folk or popular power networks. The Byzantine campaign against saintly icons provided grounds for the metropolitan authorities, terrified of the fragmentation of the empire, to dispatch inspectors into the countryside. In rooting out idolatry, these imperial agents would also break the power of the informal provincial elite of monks, village holy men, and gentry patrons who had first introduced the veneration of icons. In addition, although iconoclasm may play a role in revolutionary upheavals, it is usually a stabilizing role, helping to lay the groundwork for a new ideological order. The American Revolution is again illustrative: on July 9, 1776, after the Declaration of Independence was proclaimed on the Bowling Green in New York City, revelers wound ropes around the gilded lead equestrian statue of George III and pulled for hours until it finally fell. The gold was soon stripped off and the lead melted down into bullets to shoot at British soldiers. Ironically, if not for its dramatic downfall, few people today would know that the statue, which stood on its pedestal for only six years, had ever existed in the first place. William Walcutt’s famous 1857 painting of the incident immortalized the revolutionary moment, capturing the striving crowd surrounding the royal figure in mid-topple; this image was reproduced millions of times in the burgeoning media of the new republic, reaching a national audience exponentially larger than the royal sculptor could have imagined. The image became a touchstone of the new American civic culture, appearing in innumerable school textbooks across the expanding republic. In the later nineteenth century, the emergence of new visual media, including photography and film, allowed for the possibility of new iconoclasms that would take advantage of the rapid mass reproduction of iconoclastic imagery. Yet while a few famous instances of image-destruction were captured on film in the twentieth century, such as the Soviet demolition of the swastika atop the Reichstag at the end of the Second World War, no social movement or regime made extensive use of iconoclastic propaganda. (Even the Bolsheviks, after seizing control of the Russian capital in 1917, left statues of the czars standing, deferring to art experts who argued for their aesthetic merit.4) No revolutionary cadre capitalized upon the potential global reach of icono­clastic images until the first Taliban government of Afghanistan destroyed the Bud­dhas of Bamiyan in 2001; no social movement organized itself primarily around iconoclasm until the recent statue-toppling trend that has swept over North America and Britain. The delayed emergence of iconoclastic movements until after the turn of the twenty-first century may be accounted for in part by the fact that the Taliban, ISIS, and the new iconoclasm in the West coalesced in the internet age, driven by those who had grown up amidst the proliferation of short, sensational videos. Indeed, the recent campaign of statue destruction is perhaps more conscious of and shaped by the internet than any previous social move­ment, and it is correspondingly decentralized, spontaneous, and diffuse. The attacks on statues, although sometimes passively tolerated by the authorities, are illegal, and the iconoclastic mobs usually form and dis­perse within minutes, leaving only vague impressions as to their makeup or motivations. Lacking clear leaders, a manifesto, or even consistent goals, the new iconoclasm must necessarily be interpreted in social psychological terms, in the context of the common tendencies of icono­clasts through history. Although the internet-saturated politics of today are novel, the recent wave of attacks on statues reflects similar anxieties of changing loyalties that have underlain iconoclasms in the past. Revolts of an Aspirant Elite The largest share of the modern-day rioters who have pulled down or defaced statues in cities such as Boston, Richmond, and San Francisco have been denizens of the educated middle class. Although they do not share a well-articulated agenda, their views can be gleaned from online statements and sporadic news reports. The movement began from dis­putes over statue removal on college campuses, and participants tend to express the views, albeit in a militant form, of a cohort of students and young graduates who, finding their progression through the social ranks stymied, turn to activism as a mode of self-assertion. Demonstrators who helped to destroy the Edward Colston statue in Bristol, Eng­land, for example, described the experience as “empowering” and “visceral,” serving to exorcise the “generational trauma” that the monument em­bodied. These comments reflect the peculiar blend of anti-racist and therapeutic language that circulates among the contemporary press, nonprofits, and college campuses. Bristolians also noted how much of the mob that destroyed the statue was white.5 The generally respectable—even genteel—social status of the new iconoclasts should not be surprising in light of historical precedent. Iconoclasts usually belong to an aspirant elite, which seeks not to de­stroy the social order but to reconstitute it along new ideological lines. By contrast, the truly oppressed and downtrodden of society, when they do rebel, are more concerned with matters of material survival than with breaking icons. In the early years of the Reformation, it was the burghers of such rising commercial towns as Zurich and La Rochelle, resentful of the sacral power of the clergy, that knocked the heads off of saintly statues; meanwhile, the peasant armies that revolted and marched through much of Germany in the 1520s left statues and frescoes alone, concerning themselves instead with demands for tax relief, fair judicial trials, and an end to serfdom. The same class divide has recurred count­less times: the magnificent stained-glass windows of Canterbury and Worcester cathedrals in England were shattered not by peasant rebels, who most often allied with radical elements within the church, but by middle-class Puritan “Roundheads.” During the Ameri­can Civil War, when the owners of South Carolina rice plantations abandoned their properties, the newly freed slaves appropriated their former masters’ art and furniture for themselves rather than destroying it; it was Union officers that descended upon the opulent plantations with a rain of vandalism and fire. Making Statues Matter Whatever iconoclasts’ pretensions to radicalism, image-breaking is usually a lagging indicator of ideological change, arising only after symbols of the old order have already begun to lose their power to shape behaviors and loyalties. Revolutionaries use image destruction as a strategy to manage the transition to a new regime. In the contemporary Anglo-American instance, the idea that slaveholding and slave trading are abominable sins deserving of the condemnation of history commands the assent of a large and growing segment of the public. (Indeed, the steady growth of this sentiment belies iconoclasts’ own claims that the statues of slaveholders exert an insidious ideological power.) More­over, the argument that public sites should be renamed and Confederate monuments removed or revised to reflect changing values is not new, and it had already made a good deal of progress in the decades following the civil rights movement. For many years, despite the objections of a dwindling but committed opposition, the debate over names and monu­ments proceeded apace in city councils, school boards, and ob­scure legislative committees, attracting little notice outside of the local press. The removals accelerated after the massacre of nine black wor­shippers in Charleston in 2015; New Orleans, once the largest city of the Confederacy and the birthplace of the term “Dixie,” took down the last of its Confederate monuments in May 2017. Ironically, it was not the failure of this gradual democratic process of change that sparked the outbreak of iconoclasm, but its success. In February 2017, the elected city council of Charlottesville, Virginia, voted to remove a public statue of Robert E. Lee and to rename the park in which it stood. Various right-wing elements seized upon this public act as the occasion for a “Unite the Right” rally, to which a coalition of liberals, leftists, and antifascists responded with a large counterdemonstration. As the confrontation descended into violent clashes and one death, some observers interpreted the events in Charlottesville as a vindication not of democratic decision-making, but of its opposite—namely, extralegal action against ideological enemies. When, following the Charlottesville debacle, fascists and “white nationalists” mostly re­treated from public view, their opponents turned their attention toward statues, which, when understood as symbols of racism and white supremacy, constituted legitimate targets of attack. Between 2017 and 2020, many demonstrators transitioned seamlessly from brawling with actual, living opponents to attacking inert lumps of stone and bronze. While a small cadre of young activists grew increasingly militant, the broader political mood shifted more gradually. In the three years following the Charlottesville riots, scores of statues disappeared from public spaces all over the United States by the actions of legally consti­tuted authorities. For example, Baltimore quietly whisked away its Confederate monuments and its statue of Roger B. Taney. Most of these removals elicited fairly little opposition; whereas defenders of Confederate or other controversial icons had previously been able to throw up some bureaucratic obstacles and delays, they now mostly acquiesced in the wave of change. Although Alabama enacted a law impeding local removal of monuments, a similar bill failed in Texas. A poll in June 2020 found 52 percent of U.S. voters supporting the removal of Confederate statues. Nonetheless, the new iconoclasts could not accept victory. The progress of peaceable removal only added to the urgency of mob action: to allow the statues to disappear quietly would rob them of their propa­gandistic potential. During the wave of marches and demonstrations in response to the killing of George Floyd in 2020, small groups hived off, usually at night, to tear down statues—often of obscure figures whom few citizens had even noticed previously. Many observers have re­marked wryly that the destruction of the Edward Colston statue in Bristol massively multiplied the number of people who had even heard of the man. Some other statues have found even fewer defenders than Colston’s for precisely the reason that no one was especially attached to them, if they had even bothered to note whom they depicted. In recent years, the contrast between the broad public indifference toward most statues and the iconoclasts’ fury has been stark. Before 2017, one might have reasonably expected monuments of disfavored historical figures to fade into obscurity and eventual removal, whether due to political disapproval or mere neglect and disrepair. (Perhaps they might have been repurposed for their structural utility, like the headless statues of Roman officials that have been found as pillars holding up the platforms of Byzantine-era buildings.) The iconoclasts, in order to seize the opportunity to exploit the statues as ideological talismans, had to first attribute to them immense, almost magical powers far beyond any­thing that the ordinary public could perceive. This effort was furthered by academics and white-collar media; for example, a Cornell professor argued in a 2020 column in Scientific American that “statues are ideological powerhouses that compress whole systems of authority into bodies of bronze or marble.” The great weakness of the new iconoclasm is its choice of targets: Anglo-American society has never invested statues of mayors or college founders with the kind of metaphysical power with which Easter Islanders imbued the moai. This leaves the task of animating the statues with spiritual power, ironically, to the iconoclasts themselves. No contemporary observer has, to my knowledge, pointed to a single example of a person becoming more racist than they would otherwise be, or changing their beliefs in any significant way, because they walked past a statue of James Madison or Theodore Roosevelt, yet nonetheless, the iconoclasts argue, implicitly and explicitly, that statues’ symbolic role alone gives them dangerous power. The tenuousness and meta­physical contradictions involved in this line of argument, which on the one hand are its greatest weakness, also account for its ideological appeal. To target statues of widely ignored or forgotten figures is precisely to rescue them from obscurity and to redeploy them in the rhetorical battles of the present. In place of present-day elites or institu­tions, the iconoclasts make statues into living agents, not only symbolizing abstract social evils, but actually exercising power in the same way that the moai did in precontact Easter Island. As a Democratic operative recently wrote in the Hill, merely by leaving Confederate monuments standing, contemporary Americans “are taking orders from avowed bigots of the past.” The new iconoclasm asserts an almost mystical interpretation of current events: it casts current crimes such as killings by police as the result not of contemporary policies (e.g., police militarization, or the entanglement of prosecutors with law enforcement), but of deeply entrenched, even immutable “structures” embedded in Anglo-American society. This iconoclasm therefore tends to minimize the culpability of actual living political actors in favor of the diffuse evil influence of society’s inborn “original sin.” In these ways, the iconoclasts divert attention away from substantive reform or accountability—or even imply that such accountability is impossible. This perspective is comforting to those who, despite their radical posture, hope to assume the role of a governing elite themselves. Of course, one might object that the destruction or removal of statues in no way negates the call for substantive policy change; indeed, some advocates of racial justice have argued that a “reckoning” with symbols of the past can go hand in hand with accountability in the present. One must note, however, that in the nearly two years since George Floyd’s death, despite record-breaking street demonstrations and massive press attention, no significant reform of policing or criminal justice has actually happened. In addition, even as scores of statues have fallen across the United States and western Europe, no perpetrator of per­ceived white-supremacist violence, apart from Derek Chauvin himself, has faced justice. Events appear to demonstrate that iconoclasm fails to advance the fight against real or perceived injustice in the present—if it has not actually impeded it. The stark disjuncture between the success of iconoclasm and the failure of policy reform raises the question of why young activists continue to attack statues with such predictable regularity. (Indeed, by 2021, the resort to iconoclasm was so habitual that it surprised no one when, following reports of the discovery of mass graves at Canada’s boarding schools for indigenous children, mobs in Winnipeg tore down statues of Queen Victoria and Elizabeth II.) The answer lies in the underlying metaphysical doctrines that the iconoclasts affirm by means of their actions. Iconoclasts throughout history have sought to spread their distinctive worldviews in order to suppress the crises of the present and to secure their place in an uncertain future. Like the Protestant or French Revolutionary iconoclasms, the present instance serves to pro­mote the newly arisen ideology of the younger, educated middle class and to paper over its internal tensions and contradictions. Today, amid the anxiety and economic strain of the postindustrial West (especially the declining imperial centers of Britain and the United States), the young iconoclasts seek to assert a set of moral and metaphysical doc­trines through which they might maintain their standing in the world. This ideology revolves to a great degree around the control of speech and images; as one British journalist observed in voicing her support for the movement, “if the Black Lives Matter phenomenon tells us anything, it’s that images matter. Symbols matter.”6 Liberal Moralism and Mysticism The common ideology that pervades most of the college-educated middle class is grounded in liberalism, which first commanded a wide consensus in the Victorian age. John Stuart Mill’s “harm principle”—that individuals should be free to do as they please so long as their actions do not harm anyone else—provided a simplified and rationalized public morality for a commercial world. Even in Mill’s own time, how­ever, the limitations and ambiguities of classical liberal theory were apparent. Most importantly, what precisely did or did not constitute “harm”? Did it include purely emotional distress as well as physical? What about damage to honor or reputation? And as Mill himself ques­tioned without a clear answer, could harm to oneself also be considered harm to others by extension, by way of setting a bad example? If so, would this not open the door to subjecting all realms of behavior to moral or legal sanction? The lingering ambiguities of liberal theory allowed Victorian moral­ists to shoehorn various norms and strictures of middle-class morality, such as the taboos against suicide, drug use, and vulgar speech, into the liberal order. Over the course of the twentieth century, liberalism and middle-class mores evolved together in a continuing dance of mutual critique and accommodation, giving rise to new rationales for changing norms of sex, diet, clothing, and art, all couched in terms of the harm-based metaphysic. Most of these rationales in some way furthered middle-class concerns about purity and propriety. For example, in recent years, a strong emphasis on personal autonomy has coexisted with intensifying taboos relating to bodily purity and fear of toxins; among the liberal middle class, smoking becomes an offense, while demand for organic, gluten-free, vegan, and otherwise purified food explodes. This pattern is foreseeable: whereas most premodern moralities count pain or harm as only one measure of good conduct, alongside other considerations such as in-group loyalty and ritual purity, liberal­ism enshrines harm as the sole standard and discards the latter as tribal or superstitious. Nevertheless, impulses toward group cohesion or self-purification do not thereby vanish, but rather they continually resurface in new guises, while liberals are forced to devise increasingly baroque and convoluted justifications for them under the rubric of harm. The recent result of this process is a complex and ever-changing moral regime that one might usefully call “hyperliberalism.” This name evokes both the dynamism of the belief system and its intensification of the moralizing tendencies that have always inhered in the liberal middle class. Hyperliberalism involves the vigilant policing of individual action and speech lest they lead, however indirectly or invisibly, to harm, as well as the diagnosis of purportedly malign social influences (e.g., “age­ism” or “fat phobia”) that lead to harmful words or acts. Those specially attuned to these subtle malign influences (in the current lingo, the “woke”) have turned the cultural anthropology of imperial management inward, imbuing perverse social influences with greater agency than the individuals through whom they act, albeit without diminishing individ­ual culpability. For example, a high incidence of rape on a university campus is no longer attributable to motive, opportunity, or impunity, but rather to “rape culture,” an amorphous entity, ostensibly involving all of society, which, like a demonic force or a contagious pathogen, possesses and acts through the rapist, yet in no way diminishes the latter’s guilt. Rather paradoxically, the same inward-looking imperial science condemns cross-contamination of reified cultural groupings under the heading of “cultural appropriation.” As for actual imperial power, hyperliberal rhetoric reserves condemnation only for “settler colonialism,” which stands out as noxious to the woke conscience be­cause it involves the transgression of proper boundaries between colony and metropole. It is important to note that hyperliberalism is not synonymous with socialism or communism. Although some socialists may subscribe to its ideas, hyperliberalism is no more “leftist” or egalitarian than classical liberalism, and it conflicts with materialist leftist philosophies, including in its explanation of social prejudices such as racism. Whereas Marxists have customarily cast racism as a mere historical outgrowth and reflec­tion of economic power, invented as a way of dividing the laboring class, hyperliberalism casts racism as transhistorical, unchanging, and inborn; the ideology is an incurable disease, “built,” in the words of television’s Annalise Keating, “into the DNA of America.” Some forms of racial hyperliberalism, such as that of Ta-Nehisi Coates, are fatalistic with regard to the possibility of overcoming the disease to effect social change, and thus offer comfort and reassurance to middle-class liberals who fear a challenge from below. The duty of the liberal, in this view, is not to reform society, which is impossible, but only to confess and expiate their own personal guilt. Hyperliberalism was not invented by any particular theorist, but a core element of the hyperliberal outlook derives from the jaded and ironic mood of the last quarter of the twentieth century. This mindset is captured in the writings of Richard Rorty, an American philosopher and a guiding spirit of the turn toward relativism and pragmatism in the anglophone world. Rorty called himself a “liberal ironist,” in the sense that he eschewed any fixed doctrines, but still believed that “cruelty is the worst thing we do.” In this, he took inspiration from Judith Shklar, a Latvian-born theorist who had fled from both the Nazis and the Soviets; Shklar insisted that liberals should drop speculation about “the common good” or “the ultimate good,” in favor of focusing on preventing the “ultimate bad”—namely, cruelty. (One contemporary commentator has dubbed this approach “a liberalism of fear.”7) Rorty and Shklar’s em­brace of openness and ambiguity reflects a weariness of endless de­bates over metaphysical or utopian theories, including Marxism, and so ap­pealed to tenured intellectuals at the end of the Cold War. Nonetheless, the central place that they give to “cruelty,” an ambigu­ous and fungible category, allows for the old debates to carry on in a new form. The concept of “cruelty” may connote actions that are damnable purely because of their harmful effects (even if unintentional), or because of their ill intent (even if ineffectual), or some combination of both. This ambiguity paved the way for moral and metaphysical debates to take on a renewed intensity, with participants free to shift opportunistically between observation of social harms and psychological analysis of others’ internal motives. Liberal moralists, evidently freed from Marx, turned to a vulgarized and moralized Freud, using therapeutic concepts to diagnose ever-changing forms of harm and cruelty. Since post–Cold War liberals, following Rorty, had already disavowed absolute moral doctrines, their plunge into pop psychology opened the floodgates of speculation and judgment as to both the motives and the harms of any conceivable action. In no ethical realm is the contemporary liberal tendency to seek out hidden cruelties more evident than in that of speech taboos. Before the liberal age, utterances that caused insult or offense to another could be considered immoral on the grounds that each person was entitled to be addressed or spoken of in a manner befitting their social station. The respect that a person rightly secured through the good performance of their duties in society was called their “honor,” and an affront to honor was damnable whether or not it caused any actual harm to the person concerned (in fact, dishonor to the dead could be even more odious than an affront to the living). Modern liberalism, therefore, negated the con­cept of honor, jettisoning it as an outmoded superstition along with animal spirits and astral influences. Yet the vacuum left behind would eventually be filled. The “linguistic turn” in philosophy after the 1970s encouraged a reexamination of speech and discourse as expressions of social power. At least two generations of college graduates have been trained to understand political struggle as synonymous with the scrutiny of language and images, resulting in interminable debates over offensive speech. Contemporary social critics, having no recourse to older con­cepts such as honor, must of necessity argue that insulting utterances have the power to cause literal harm to their targets (rather in the manner of a magical incantation); hence the predictable assertion, com­monly heard among modern academics, that words constitute “vio­lence.” Likewise, complaints of “trauma” or of being “triggered,” meant to describe psychic harm, are increasingly appropriated from psychotherapy and deployed in moral debate. Colleges have begun to publish catalogues of potentially “triggering” language; ironically, Brandeis in­cluded in its list the phrase “trigger warning,” since the word “trigger” is associated with guns.8 Pop-psychological language has saturated liberal morality, allowing denizens of the modern middle class to diagnose themselves and others with an expanding array of moral and social diseases. Many of their pseudo-therapeutic terms, such as “toxic masculinity,” express a fear of contamination and impurity. By this means, the power deriving from the authority to guarantee others’ biological survival, which Foucault termed “biopower,” has transmuted into a more diffuse “psychopower,” or the authority to defend society against invisible mental harm. The hyperliberal class lays claim to this authority by deputizing themselves as defenders of the fragile psyches of their client populations. The new campaign against “microaggressions”—which a British liberal political committee defines as “subtle harmful comments . . . that are painful because they have to do with a person’s membership in a group discrim­inated against”9—illustrates how the politics of antidiscrimination have been subsumed into the hyperliberal metaphysic of harm. The vectors of psychic poison against which the hyperliberal class must defend society are mostly verbal, but they can also include visual imagery. As the same British liberal group’s “Guide to Racial Micro­aggressions” explains, the sources of harm include “everyday verbal, nonverbal, and environmental slights, snubs, or insults, whether inten­tional or unintentional.” The last qualifier is important, since it implies that the detection and interpretation of visual microaggressions requires a level of semiotic expertise beyond even that of the supposed aggressor. What is more, malign images do not merely convey hidden meanings, but have the power, like words, to cause actual harm. Lay critics often apply their special insight to the analysis of television and films, which they condemn not because their content is immoral, or even harmful in itself, but because it has the insidious power to “normalize” bad behaviors. A good example of the semiotic complications involved in combating visual threats can be seen in an incident that occurred in April 2021, sparked by a hand gesture that a contestant made when appearing on the TV game show Jeopardy!. The person in question, ostensibly in order to mark his third victory on the show, placed his hand upon his chest and “held his thumb and forefinger together with his other three fingers extended and palm facing inward.” Shortly after, a self-formed group of former contestants wrote an indignant open letter to the show’s produc­ers, arguing that the hand motion “whether intentional or not, resembled very closely a gesture that has been coopted by white power groups, alt right groups, and an anti-government group that calls itself the Three Percenters.” The gesturer denied any racist intent to his hand motion, but nonetheless the letter-writers insisted that the latter was a “wink and a nod by white men about their superiority,” and that it sent a message of “hate” toward minority viewers who are already bombarded by “microaggressions nearly every day of their lives.” The letter involves certain apparent contradictions. If, as the authors acknowledge to be possible, the resemblance to a white-power sign was unintentional, then how could it be a conscious “wink and a nod”? Moreover, even if the resemblance was intentional, what effect could the gesture have possibly had upon its putative victims in the viewing audi­ence, if its meaning was so obscure that the letter-writers had to explain it? (Indeed, the wording of the letter assumes that the public will have never even heard of the gesture or the fringe group that uses it.) The letter gets around the latter complication by speculating that the hidden gesture, when broadcast, will have the malign effect of emboldening other white supremacists to appear on Jeopardy! and pull the same stunt—yet this argument falls into circular reasoning. The Jeopardy! fracas illustrates how the policing of the verbal and visual environment necessarily elevates the status of those who engage in it. Threats, it seems, can arise from seemingly benign sources, and must be interpreted and combated by a self-appointed cadre of semiotic experts, to protect the ignorant and vulnerable public. The rarefied status of these self-credentialed guardians is driven home by the letter’s reference to the hand gesture as a “dog whistle”—a hidden sound that can only be heard, much less understood, by specially attuned ears. No matter that the very hiddenness of the signals would seem to contradict their supposed malicious power; the letter-writers insist on the urgency of the search for coded meanings by eliding the distinctions among symbolic, psychic, and physical harm, asking the producers of Jeopardy! whether they are prepared “for the backlash and ramifications should one of those moments ever become tied to real-world violence?” For the past decade or so, the same hyperliberal mode of thinking seen in the Jeopardy! letter has increasingly dominated debates around statues. If words and gestures can constitute harm or even violence, then all the more so towering images of the human form. The notion that statues constitute an active threat of harm to bystanders took root in the 2010s among self-radicalizing college students and activists. The substi­tution of the concept of violence for what previously might have been called “insult” or “indignity” is neatly encapsulated in the comments that a student organizer at Oxford University made to Sky News in 2015 with regard to the statue of the British imperial mining magnate Cecil Rhodes on the campus of Oriel College: “There’s a violence to having to walk past the statue every day on the way to your lectures, there’s a violence to having to sit with paintings of former slave holders whilst writing your exams.”10 The idea that the mere presence of images of the human form constitutes violence implicitly justifies violent and extralegal action against those images. This line of iconoclastic thinking was already evident among British and American campus militants before 2016, but it gained wider attention, especially in the United States, following the election of Donald Trump. Condemnations of racist statues and mem­orials had the effect, as mentioned earlier, of diverting attention away from the current political conditions that allowed for Trump’s election and toward unchanging “structures” embedded in the social order. This made the issue of statue-removal appealing to liberal politicians and media pundits who wished to cast the election of Trump as the result not of current failures in trade policy, health care policy, or the Clinton campaign, but instead as the inevitable result of a subterranean stream of “hate” underlying American life. Hence the statue question freed present-day elites from examining their own possible role in the rise of Trump. For example, in 2016, American media studiously avoided dis­cussing the terms of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade deal that was highly unpopular in the crucial swing states of the upper Midwest. After Trump gained the White House partly by exploiting the issue, the press continued to ignore its substance, with the Washington Post instead printing the petulant headline, “Trump Kills TPP, Giving China Its First Big Win.” A few months later, the Charlottesville debacle gave the mass media an opportunity to explain the Trump presidency as a creature of America’s racial demons, to the exclusion of policy issues. Still, it would be a mistake to see the new iconoclasm as a partisan affair triggered only by Trump’s election. As we have seen, the process of statue removal was already well underway before 2016, and forcible destruction of statues did not really begin in earnest until 2020. Today’s iconoclasts are entangled in a broader social transformation: they are animated by many of the same postindustrial anxieties rooted in institu­tional breakdown and civilizational decline that made Trump appealing to some constituencies, but they respond to them in a radically different way. Their approach casts the college-educated class in the savior’s role: rather than calling for a rebuilding of industry or a halt on immigration, the iconoclasts present themselves as the vanguard of a moral renewal. They place social strain and conflict into a longue durée narrative in which present-day problems are the natural punishment for society’s failure to cleanse its “original sin”—much as Puritan jeremiads interpreted storms or epidemics as divine punishments for their society’s failure to extirpate the vestiges of popery. It is probably no coincidence, moreover, that the modern-day iconoclasts, like Puritan divines, see the ongoing corruption of society as exemplified by its idolatrous attachment to images. Guided by the prophetic second sight of cultural analy­sis that one learns through college education and white-collar media, the iconoclast predicates national renewal on a moral cleansing and atone­ment for past sins. As the same Democratic operative cited previously wrote in the Hill, “slavery was our country’s original sin. Displaying monuments to those who killed and died to perpetuate slavery is a contemporary sin.”11 Convenient Scapegoats The diagnosis of current problems as stemming from inborn sins has several advantages that make it appealing to denizens of the educated middle class: it elevates the importance of their own semiotic training, and it de-democratizes the debate about society’s direction, removing political judgments from the hands of the citizenry at large and placing them into those of a specially trained elite. A drawback of this rhetorical strategy is that deep-seated ills such as “structural racism” or “white supremacy” are by definition invisible and disembodied, and so cannot be attacked directly. Statues offer a convenient solution to this problem, providing material embodiments of the sins that the hyperliberal class appoints itself to expiate. In the same way that ancient Israelite villages chose one goat each year and loaded it with the sins of the community before casting it off a cliff, modern iconoclasts externalize inner impuri­ties and project the invisible, spiritual sins of society onto the statues that they then destroy. Hence, just as the specific identity of the ancient Israelites’ “scape­goat” was arbitrary and unimportant to its function, so the choice of statues to destroy is ultimately incidental. The targets of the new icono­clasm have shifted and expanded without a definite pattern, much less an explicit set of demands. Although most of the statues that fell in the wave of iconoclasm in May 2020 related to the Confederacy, the campaign soon extended to depictions of other slaveholders, and of participants in other atrocities such as Indian removal. On May 30, protesters in Nashville toppled a statue of Senator Edward Carmack because he had opposed Ida B. Wells’s campaign against lynching; several other statues of segregationists or overt racists were preemptively removed. On June 4, protesters in Dallas tore down a public sculpture titled “One Riot, One Ranger” because the model who posed for the artist (not the sculpture’s subject) was found to have opposed school integration. On June 12, vandals tagged a statue of the medieval king Robert the Bruce in Bannockburn, Scotland, with the messages “bring down the statue” and, for unclear reasons, “racist king.” The following day, a group at the University of Oregon pulled down sculptures repre­senting an archetypal “Pioneer” and “Pioneer Mother.” Soon, the cam­paign that had begun by targeting images of Confederates began to turn against those of Union officers and opponents of slavery as well. On June 19, a small group tore down a bust of Ulysses S. Grant in Golden Gate Park, in San Francisco. Four days later, a group of demonstrators in Madison, Wisconsin, toppled a statue of a lady, titled “Forward,” which the state had received as a gift from women’s suffragists; they then used a towing vehicle to pull down a statue of the Union officer and abolitionist Hans Christian Heg, which they decapitated and threw into Lake Monona. On July 23, what arguably began as tragedy crossed over into farce when protesters in Portland, Oregon, lit fires that struc­turally damaged the pedestal supporting a statue of an elk. One might object that these perplexing incidents were outliers, out of step with the broader spirit of the movement. But without a manifesto or formal spokespersons, it is impossible to distinguish between sup­posedly authentic and inauthentic acts of protest. Over the course of 2020, the randomness and strangeness of the iconoclasts’ targets neces­sitated increasingly convoluted rationales, until it became clear that many demonstrators saw a value in toppling or damaging statues regard­less of the subjects they depicted. The attacks, especially on the Ameri­can West Coast, became enmeshed in a broader, generalized campaign against symbols of the past, untethered from any specific historical grievance. In October 2020, demonstrators in Portland, Oregon, broke into and vandalized the museum of the Portland Historical Society; the following spring, the museum was attacked again but saved by its newly installed shatterproof windows. In January 2021, the San Francisco school board approved a plan to rechristen forty-four schools that had been named after persons accused of various misdeeds, such as involvement in slavery or the expression of racist views. The list of condemned names was compiled by a special committee in a shared spreadsheet, with no outside scrutiny or verification. Robert Louis Stevenson was singled out for writing, in the spreadsheet’s words, “a cringeworthy poem.” Some schools appeared on the list through convoluted chains of guilt by association. For example, Clarendon Elementary School had been named for Clarendon Avenue, on which it is situated, named in turn after a county in South Carolina, which in turn received its name from Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, the Lord Chancellor to Charles II who, as the committee spreadsheet pointed out, was impeached in 1667 for violations of habeas corpus.12 It is difficult to imagine how the indirect, three-step transferal of a proper name from a seventeenth-century earl to a San Francisco elemen­tary school could possibly harm anybody, unless names whose origin nobody knows carry the hidden power, through some mysterious alchemy, to influence children in the direction of violating tenets of English constitutional law. Nonetheless, this is what one must suppose that the San Francisco school board believes—unless the renaming in fact has nothing to do with Lord Clarendon, and is instead a mere demonstration of the board’s authority to cleanse symbols of the past. Indeed, when questioned, the renaming committee made it all but ex­plicit that their judgments have nothing to do with the events of history. One of the more controversial renamings related to Paul Revere, whom the committee condemned for his involvement (which one of the mem­bers gleaned from a History Channel top-ten list) in the “Penobscot Expedition,” and hence in the ethnic cleansing of Indians. In fact, the said expedition was a naval mission against a British garrison on Penob­scot Bay and did not involve the Indian tribe. When, in the face of such factual errors, journalists questioned whether the committee had con­sulted with historians, the committee chairperson, Jeremiah Jeffries, responded dismissively, “What would be the point? History is written and documented pretty well across the board. And so, we don’t need to belabor history in that regard. . . . Either it happened or it didn’t, as historians have referenced in their own histories.” Not only does Jeffries present history as a collection of settled, unambiguous facts, but likewise the moral judgments that his committee applies to it are so incontrovertible that additional views or nuances only threaten to muddy the waters: “based on our criteria, it’s a very straightforward conversation. And so, no need to bring historians forward to say—they either pontificate and list a bunch of reasons why, or [say] they had great qualities. Neither are necessary in this discussion.”13 Mr. Jeffries’s evident annoyance with the idea of consulting historians, along with the committee’s failure to do basic fact-checking, illus­trate that the renaming does not constitute part of a “reckoning” with history, but rather a general repudiation thereof, reinterpreting the past as a presumptive source of evil. This repudiation serves to elevate those with the power to cleanse present-day society of the contamination of past sins, and the more summary the judgments, the more awe­some the authority of the judge. Renaming and statue destruction serve the parallel ends of combating the danger of exposure to past sins through verbal and visual channels, respectively—but whereas renaming must necessarily pass through an official process, statues can be toppled by extralegal force, thus delivering the greater propagandistic punch. Securing Patronage in a Declining Power In sum, statues fall as exercises in a civilizational psychotherapy, in which a struggling elite seeks to secure its own authority by diagnosing and attacking social ills. These ills take on the dimensions of both Freud­ian complexes and Christian sins writ large. Thus the metaphysics of the new iconoclasm, though still tethered in some way to the hyperliberal lan­guage of “violence,” is muddled and confused. The iconoclasts do not merely apply the harm-based metaphysic of post–Cold War liberalism but intensify it: they invest words, signs, and gestures with the power to evoke the evil influences of their referents. Thus, inert statues are made into historical agents. The implied metaphysic resembles the Neoplatonic doctrine of sympathies, according to which objects and cosmic forces affect one another through visual resemblances or symbolic links. In late antiquity, a learned class of “adepts” claimed to perform magic by manipulating these hidden sympathies, such as by channeling the erotic power of Venus through a pearl resembling the planet, or by healing a wound by applying a salve to the weapon that had inflicted it. Similarly, although they use metaphysically flattened terms, the young militant activists of today combat white supremacy and other spiritual toxins polluting society’s essence by expurgating their visible symbols. These malign forces, at once both omnipresent and elusive, can never be finally defeated, and so the psychic battle continues without end. Still, like the Neoplatonic adepts of the past, the radical activists of today must attend to immediate, practical social needs. Regardless of their metaphysical doctrines, they must concern themselves with secur­ing patronage and managing their social standing. This is the final and most immediate sense in which statues provide a useful target for young militants. The literate upper-middle classes of Britain and North Amer­ica, from their rise to power, through the Whig-Hanoverian alliance in the 1700s, through the end of the Cold War, have usually sought to join the genteel upper classes rooted in land, wealth, and breeding. They have secured their place by bringing to the alliance their skills in business and statecraft. The constellations of public statues found in the North Atlantic world overwhelmingly depict the members of this amalgamated elite of statesmen, generals, and commercial magnates, who claimed to manage their societies’ rise to global power. Now that those same socie­ties have fallen into postindustrial and postimperial self-doubt, the statues evoke the resentment of their successors who expect to take up the mantle of rule. Among those who stand to inherit a civilization in crisis, an anxiety to maintain elite authority combines with envy toward those who presided over a seemingly easy rise to power. Among these embittered aspirants are the new iconoclasts, who dramatize their supposed break with the past. These militants’ fixation on the images of the older elite reflects a repressed guilt stemming from their desire to take the latter’s place. Paradoxically, the students at elite institutions must subvert the revered status of their predecessors in order to inherit it. Hence it should not be surprising that a leader of the movement to remove the statue of Cecil Rhodes from the University of Cape Town in 2015 accepted a Rhodes Scholarship, originally endowed by the imperial magnate himself. Although the scholarship was created in order to foster unity among the “Anglo-Saxon” race, the South African student argued that he would use the money and two years at Oxford to fight racial injustice.14 Meanwhile, Rhodes College could boast of an anti-racist activist among its graduates. In a mutually beneficial exchange, the old tools of upper-class solidarity are repurposed to consolidate a rebranded elite; the images of the past are sacrificed to preserve the liberal order for the future. The mature, established managerial elites surely understand, at some level, the paradoxical nature of the new iconoclasm, and so have chosen to tolerate it. Once radical students leave the campus, the campaign against statues helps to channel and redirect rage that might otherwise turn against living actors who have deprived the aspirant elites of their supposed due; hence the authorities’ general indulgence of the destruction (and its active encouragement by some white-collar intellectuals). The young protesters’ attacks on symbols of long-dead forebears surely serve to sublimate their anger toward administrators, landlords, and lenders who relentlessly suppress wages and fleece economically squeezed young graduates. Through the escape valve of an iconoclastic frenzy, many surely hope, the forces of envy and resentment may dissipate, leaving institutional fortunes and prestige intact. It remains to be seen whether these established elites have miscalculated. The young militants, as products of their education, are likely to keep their attacks confined to the realm of empty symbolic gestures. Once unleashed, however, radical forces are difficult to predict. Whereas Richard Rorty could propound the new doctrines of post–Cold War liberalism with a humane and tolerant spirit, his successors do not have the same luxury. As hyperliberalism stretches the concepts of harm and violence into ever more convoluted forms, its advocates grow increasingly militant: emotional vehemence must compensate for tenuous lines of argument. In sum, statues are the fortunately lifeless victims of a struggle over the ideological tenor of the twenty-first century. The iconoclasm consti­tutes a battle not so much against the past itself as against the relationship with the past that statues imply: filial piety and reverence, now anathema, must give way to a consciousness of inherited evil. Hence the lack of any proposals as to new figures to erect in the fallen statues’ place. In this way, it resembles the destruction of the moai on Easter Island and of saintly figures in the Byzantine Empire and the Protestant cities: the actual individuals depicted are incidental to the effort to break what was once a bond of veneration. Performance Art versus Performance Legitimacy On April 7, 2003, after an Iraqi weightlifter wielding a sledgehammer struck the platform of a statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad’s Firdos Square, American Marines wound a chain around the figure’s neck and attached the other end to an armored vehicle. Foreign media, previously ensconced in the Palestine Hotel, had been forewarned about the coming spectacle, and so images of the falling statue, alongside a crowd of cheering Iraqi men, were immediately broadcast and reproduced countless times in the United States and Britain. Over the next eighteen years, journalists gradually reconstructed the ways in which the incident had been orchestrated by the U.S. military; Anglo-American media, these analysts pointed out, had aired tightly cropped video which con­cealed the small number of Iraqis gathered in the mostly empty plaza, and one British paper printed a doctored photo to exaggerate the crowd. The creators of the Baghdad spectacle clearly hoped to stage-manage the new generation’s equivalent to the fall of the Berlin Wall, but as the U.S. mission in Iraq faltered, the triumphant scene grew increasingly absurd in retrospect. One local participant in the event told the Guardian in 2016 that he did not understand his own actions, remarking ruefully, “I ask myself: why did I topple that statue? Saddam has gone, but in his place we now have one thousand Saddams.” Despite the gradual disillusionment with the Anglo-American inva­sion of Iraq, the scenes of a falling statue had already been presented to millions of young viewers as the archetypal image of liberation. It is likely that this formative moment of spectacle still influences the new generation of iconoclasts, who stage similarly overwrought dramas before fleets of cellphone cameras. It is doubtful whether any significant number of them will come to recognize their own performances as equally artificial, claiming to break the bonds of oppression by attacking hollow shells of bronze. The current iconoclasm may soon peter out for lack of impact, or it may continue for a generation, papering over com­plex crises in favor of magical thinking. Either way, the rest of us should not be so naive as to think that which statues stand or fall will have any significant effect upon our future. Such questions, insofar as they matter symbolically, can be adjudicated through the democratic process, pro­vided that it is administered fairly and impartially. Rather, the consequential question is whether the rising generation of the educated class will continue to affect a puritanical zeal over symbolic images, or if it will take up the hard work of substantive institutional change for the public good. Such a change would require strengths of character now in short supply, including a recognition of the difference between vehemence and sound judgment, and the equanimity to accept that these activists’ power and status will always fall short of their youthful expectations. These are precisely the sort of qualities of charac­ter that the children of the upper-middle class have been raised to reject, but one has no choice but to cling to hope. Iconoclasm will not save or destroy our civilization any more than it did the long-vanished Missis­sippian cities. Only a true moral elite that engages its fellow citizens with humility and respect can guide the ship of state through the coming storms. The century to come will likely be a tempestuous voyage on which all of us, unlike Captain Cook and his crew who ventured into the vast Pacific, have no choice but to embark together. Cook, in his two mo­mentous voyages through the Pacific, took such great care to insure cleanliness, sanitation, and a healthy diet among his crew that, miraculously, not one sailor died of scurvy. Those of us who are entrusted with our collective fate over the next century must show an equal attention to the wellbeing of all—and they must regard the clashes over hollow symbols with the same detachment with which Cook’s officers observed the toppled moai littering the hills of Easter Island. This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume VI, Number 2 (Summer 2022): 183–207. Notes 1 Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo, The Statues That Walked (New York: Free Press, 2011), 161–62. 2 Rachel Spence, “If a Statue Offends My Sister, It Also Offends Me,” Fair Observer, July 2, 2020. 3 Sander van der Linden, “How the Illusion of Being Observed Can Make You a Better Person,” Scientific American, May 3, 2011. 4 Aaron J. Cohen, “The Limits of Iconoclasm,” City 24, no. 3–4 (2020): 616–26. 5 Osob Elmi, “Edward Colston: ‘Why the Statue Had to Fall,’” BBC News, June 8, 2020. 6 Spence, “If a Statue Offends My Sister, It Also Offends Me.” 7 Samantha Ashenden and Andreas Hess, “The Theorist of Belonging,” Aeon, March 16, 2020. 8 Daniel Villarreal, “Brandeis Lists ‘Trigger Warning’ among Violent Words Due to ‘Connection to Guns,’” Newsweek, June 24, 2021. 9 BLAC Liberal Democrats, “Black Lives Action Committee Lib Dems Guide to Being a Strong White Ally,” Lib Dems Black Lives Action Committee, December 7, 2020. 10 Hind Hassan, “Oxford Students Want ‘Racist’ Statue Removed,” Sky News, July 12, 2015. Incidentally, the same student later resigned from her leadership positions in an activist group and a student magazine after she was accused of engaging in a sexual act with another student without consent. While the accused apologized for her misdeed, the Oxford organization Women’s Campaign still condemned her for failing to recognize that her actions constituted “sexual violence.” This serves merely to illustrate how much of young political activists’ lives are consumed in debate over the expanding boundaries of the category of “violence.” 11 B. J. Rudell, “Old South vs. the New America: What Confederate Monuments Say about Us,” Hill, September 12, 2021. 12 Nathan Heller, “The San Francisco School-Renaming Debate Is Not about History,” New Yorker, February 4, 2021. 13 Joe Eskenazi, “The San Francisco School District’s Renaming Debacle Has Been a Historic Travesty,” Mission Local, January 28, 2021. 14 “Joshua Nott: Rhodes Must Fall Activist Wins Rhodes Scholarship,” BBC News, January 24, 2017. About the Author Samuel Biagetti received his PhD in early American history from Columbia University and produces the Historiansplaining podcast.