Terrible Arguments - 1
Whatabout Karl Marx?
The memorial to Karl Marx in Highgate Cemetery was erected shortly after he died, by his friends and supporters. There is no analogy between removing the grave marker of an historical figure, and removing a statue put up a hundred and sixty years after the event to make a political point. There is no suggestion that Edward Colston’s grave should be disturbed. So far as I know no-one in the United States objects to graves which date from the Civil War.
Different people have different opinions about Karl Marx and Marxism. He literally is like marmite: some people properly love him and some people really do hate him. Yes, I know that some of my fan base are currently typing a long and boring letter about the extremely horrible things done in Marx’s name in Russia, China and Cambodia, and yes, as as matter of fact I was already aware of those things. I am also aware of a large number of very knowledgable people who think that Kapital anticipated and explained many of the economic problems in the modern world. Lots of people I respect and admire think of or thought of themselves as Marxists. (Woody Guthrie. Robb Johnson. Tony Benn. That guy who writes the interesting stuff about Doctor Who.)
People who say “Destroying Karl Marx’s grave would be just as valid destroying Colston’s statue”, or indeed “If you destroy Colston’s statue it logically follows that you must destroy Marx’s next” are drawing a deliberate and tactical false equivalence. They are saying “Disapproving of Colston is a personal political opinion; all personal political opinions are equally valid; slavery, like Marxism, is something about which sensible people can have a difference of opinion.” My belief that Communism is an evil and your belief that slavery is an evil are the same kind of beliefs. You have to respect both or respect neither. The personhood of black people is legitimately a matter for political debate.
It is the same kind of tactic as the one used everyday by Twitter extremists: “You claim to get triggered by graphic images of rape because you have experienced rape yourself; well, maybe I get triggered by graphic images of strawberry trifle because I once ate a strawberry trifle I didn’t like very much.”
TERRIBLE ARGUMENTS 2
Whatabout the Pyramids?
I think that there should be a very strong presumption against the defacing or removal of historical monuments.
I do not think that any time anyone builds anything it has to stay there forever; but the more historical and the more monumental something is, the stronger the argument is against demolishing it. You will not find many statues of Hitler in Germany today. The concert hall in Bayreuth, on the other hand, is still standing, still stages Wagner’s operas, but has gone to great lengths to repudiate the ideological use that Hitler put it to. “Denazification” is the usual expression.
“If we remove the statue of Colston we would have to remove the Pyramids as well” is a mirror image of the “whaddabout Marx” position. It attempts to imbue a bit of kitsch Victorian street furniture with the same significance as a major cultural and archaeological site and one of the seven wonders of the world. The idea that British history and identity is bound up with the effigy of a very minor seventeenth century businessman to the same extent that Egyptian culture and history is symbolised by the Pyramids is obvious nonsense. It is very like the person who says “If Johnny Muslim is allowed to say that he is very offended by disrespectful pictures of the prophet Mohammed, then I am equally allowed to say that I am very offended by disrespectful pictures of Ena Sharples.” My soap opera is as important as your religion; religion is no more important than a TV show.
Arguments which say “We mustn’t to small thing unless we do a big thing as well”; “We mustn’t do one good thing unless we do all the other good things as well” and “We mustn’t to a sensible thing unless we do a stupid thing as well” are incredibly tedious and not worth making. Even if you think that marriage is irreducibly heterosexual, it does not follow that you can only allow men to marry other men if you also allow giraffes to marry lampshades. Even if you think that some criminals are so wicked that they ought to be killed, it does not follow that you can only oppose capital punishment if you also think that speeding tickets and library fines should be abolished.
“If we remove the statue of Colston we would have to remove the Pyramids as well” is a mirror image of the “whaddabout Marx” position. It attempts to imbue a bit of kitsch Victorian street furniture with the same significance as a major cultural and archaeological site and one of the seven wonders of the world. The idea that British history and identity is bound up with the effigy of a very minor seventeenth century businessman to the same extent that Egyptian culture and history is symbolised by the Pyramids is obvious nonsense. It is very like the person who says “If Johnny Muslim is allowed to say that he is very offended by disrespectful pictures of the prophet Mohammed, then I am equally allowed to say that I am very offended by disrespectful pictures of Ena Sharples.” My soap opera is as important as your religion; religion is no more important than a TV show.
Arguments which say “We mustn’t to small thing unless we do a big thing as well”; “We mustn’t do one good thing unless we do all the other good things as well” and “We mustn’t to a sensible thing unless we do a stupid thing as well” are incredibly tedious and not worth making. Even if you think that marriage is irreducibly heterosexual, it does not follow that you can only allow men to marry other men if you also allow giraffes to marry lampshades. Even if you think that some criminals are so wicked that they ought to be killed, it does not follow that you can only oppose capital punishment if you also think that speeding tickets and library fines should be abolished.
The Pyramids were not in fact constructed by slaves, but by paid workers.
TERRIBLE ARGUMENTS 3
Whatabout Winston Churchill
Again: the presumption should always be against defacing or removing monuments. The question is not “If Colston, why not Churchill?”; the question is “What compelling reason is there for thinking that Churchill, like Colston, was a special case?”
Churchill was a late Victorian upper class Englishman: he had many of the values typical of late Victorian upper class Englishmen. He was an imperialist and a colonialist; he had an incredibly patronising attitude to “natives”; he believed in the white man’s burden. He was also a highly successful Prime Minister who was instrumental in the defeat of Hitler. He is clearly not being memorialised for his colonialist views; but for his wartime leadership.
I do not think that a memorial amount to a declaration of sainthood. Kings and Queens get statues made of them because they a Kings and Queens: whether they were good Kings or bad Kings is beside the point. Poets get memorialised for their poetry. It is entirely possible to honour Thomas Jefferson for writing the declaration of independence and also deplore him for owning slaves. I do not think that it is necessary to scrawl “Cheated on his wife” on the statue of John Lennon or “failed to campaign to abolish flogging in the Royal Navy” on Nelson’s column. I laid a wreath on Wagner’s tomb because he composed Siegrfried’s funeral march, not because he had some fucking terrible opinions about Jewish people.
There might be a compelling reason to remove a particular statue of Winston Churchill from a particular place. A statue of Oliver Cromwell outside the houses of parliament has a rather different meaning from one in, say, Ireland. It might be that his support for the British Empire blotts out his status as the person who led the war against Hitler. It might not be. But “he said awful things about foreigners” does not terminate the discussion.
TERRIBLE ARGUMENTS 4
Whatabout Pol Pot?
There have been one or two cases of homicidal lunatics trying to literally abolish their country’s history; of saying “nothing that happened before such-and-such a date can be acknowledged or even talked about.” This is a Bad Thing.
But the suggestion that ceasing to celebrate certain periods in our history, or certain historical individuals is the equivalent of prohibiting knowledge of them is ludicrous. While I think that some of the “Who’s statue are you going to demolish next?” arguments may be made in good faith, I think that the people who say “You can’t change history” are being deliberately mischievous.
The contention is that the removal of the Colston memorial will result in Bristol’s involvement in the slave trade being forgotten. It is further contended that the Black Lives Matter movement and the Bristol Radical History Society actively wish this to happen: they want, it is suggested, to “airbrush Colston” out of history, to “erase” the slave trade, or to “sweep Bristol’s involvement in it under the carpet”. They claim, over and over and over and over again that radicals want us to “forget” our history and therefore we will be “condemned to repeat it.”
They cannot possibly believe this. History is certainly selective: countries choose what stories they tell about themselves. You can tell children how David Livingstone risked his life to bring medical treatment to people in Africa and how many African’s revered him for doing so; you can tell them how evil missionaries rode roughshod over ancient cultures and religious practices. You can tell them both or tell them neither. Increasingly, even quite young children are encourage to see history as a collection of different experiences and different points of view: rather than a single authoritative story about a hundred and three good things and five bad kings. You ask what the battle of Trafalgar might have looked like to a powder monkey, a French sailor, and a lady in the provinces reading the next morning's Times. It is on the whole the conservatives and traditionalists who have "erased" the slave trade and the empire from English history: in the sense that when we tell our Island story we tend to conveniently forget the experiences of the human individuals who were living in the parts of the map which we painted pink. It is on the whole the radicals and the lefties who want to put them back in.
The use of the term “airbrushed” is rather interesting. It refers specifically to a practice which genuinely went on in the Soviet Union, of editing photographs so that it appeared that politicians who had subsequently fallen out of favour appeared not to have been present at certain historical events. The photograph is the history; it is the record of what “really happened”. The airbrush falsifies history: it changes the evidence so it appears that Comrade Vladimir was never a member of the party. To talk about “airbrushing” Colston out of history is to say that there is a neutral view from nowhere in which Colston was, as a matter of fact, a hero; and that there is a new, biassed, history in which there was nothing heroic about him.
My version of history is the simple unvarnished truth; your version is a sinister falsification.
The suggestion that ceasing to laud a particular businessman as the best and wisest man ever born in Bristol would cause us to forget that England in general and Bristol in particular made much of its money from the slave trade; and the fact that black rights activists and white liberals want this information suppressed is contradictory and meaningless. I do not know what is being claimed. I suppose “you can’t erase history” has to be looked at as one of those meaningless shout-phrases, with no more logical content than “yay! our side!”
Whatabout Pol Pot?
But the suggestion that ceasing to celebrate certain periods in our history, or certain historical individuals is the equivalent of prohibiting knowledge of them is ludicrous. While I think that some of the “Who’s statue are you going to demolish next?” arguments may be made in good faith, I think that the people who say “You can’t change history” are being deliberately mischievous.
The contention is that the removal of the Colston memorial will result in Bristol’s involvement in the slave trade being forgotten. It is further contended that the Black Lives Matter movement and the Bristol Radical History Society actively wish this to happen: they want, it is suggested, to “airbrush Colston” out of history, to “erase” the slave trade, or to “sweep Bristol’s involvement in it under the carpet”. They claim, over and over and over and over again that radicals want us to “forget” our history and therefore we will be “condemned to repeat it.”
They cannot possibly believe this. History is certainly selective: countries choose what stories they tell about themselves. You can tell children how David Livingstone risked his life to bring medical treatment to people in Africa and how many African’s revered him for doing so; you can tell them how evil missionaries rode roughshod over ancient cultures and religious practices. You can tell them both or tell them neither. Increasingly, even quite young children are encourage to see history as a collection of different experiences and different points of view: rather than a single authoritative story about a hundred and three good things and five bad kings. You ask what the battle of Trafalgar might have looked like to a powder monkey, a French sailor, and a lady in the provinces reading the next morning's Times. It is on the whole the conservatives and traditionalists who have "erased" the slave trade and the empire from English history: in the sense that when we tell our Island story we tend to conveniently forget the experiences of the human individuals who were living in the parts of the map which we painted pink. It is on the whole the radicals and the lefties who want to put them back in.
The use of the term “airbrushed” is rather interesting. It refers specifically to a practice which genuinely went on in the Soviet Union, of editing photographs so that it appeared that politicians who had subsequently fallen out of favour appeared not to have been present at certain historical events. The photograph is the history; it is the record of what “really happened”. The airbrush falsifies history: it changes the evidence so it appears that Comrade Vladimir was never a member of the party. To talk about “airbrushing” Colston out of history is to say that there is a neutral view from nowhere in which Colston was, as a matter of fact, a hero; and that there is a new, biassed, history in which there was nothing heroic about him.
My version of history is the simple unvarnished truth; your version is a sinister falsification.
The suggestion that ceasing to laud a particular businessman as the best and wisest man ever born in Bristol would cause us to forget that England in general and Bristol in particular made much of its money from the slave trade; and the fact that black rights activists and white liberals want this information suppressed is contradictory and meaningless. I do not know what is being claimed. I suppose “you can’t erase history” has to be looked at as one of those meaningless shout-phrases, with no more logical content than “yay! our side!”
10 comments:
Andrew, it is possible I have misunderstood some of your argument 1 and if so I apologize, but couldn't the equivalence be the other way? You might believe that Marxism is in the same category as Slavery in that it *isn't* the kind of belief that reasonable people can differ about i.e. the way that many people feel about Fascism now. The only thing that was keeping you from not dynamiting the statue of Marx before was the social understanding that removing statues was not the kind of thing that anyone would do, but now you know the police will let you get away with it, you are going to do it.
I think that Communism is an ideology with pros and cons, adherents and opponents, strong points and weak points. I think that Slavery is an irreducible evil. It is indeed possible that there are people who believe that Communism is wrong in the same way that Slavery is wrong; in the same way that there are people who think that Islam is irreducibly wrong or acknowledging that people can transition from one gender to another is irreducibly wrong. Some of them have prominent twitter accounts.
I think that we need a very high degree of certainty that things are bad, and a very high degree of badness, before we can justify removing or defacing monuments. I don't think that it is possible for communism to be wrong in that way. Some things done by particular Communists may be.
I see the point that if one claims moral certainty about one thing (slavery) then other people may claim moral certainty about other things (Islam, transgenderism, communism); and I suppose that could be an argument against claiming that level of moral certainty about anything. ("If I say that pedophilia is an irreducible evil, as opposed merely to something that we very, very strongly disapprove of right now, then that empowers some bigot to say that homosexuality is an irreducible evil; so it is always better to pitch our language lower.") And the destruction of the Colston statue had a very particular symbolism which no longer had much to do with the actual person or the actual statue. The grounds for retaining the statue of Karl Marx is that you think Kapital is a good book or that you think that good people have thought it was a good book. The grounds for retaining the statue of Edward Colston is that you think that enslaving people was okay, or that it didn't happen, or that you want to make the point that Bristol is a white city.
"You might believe..."
Belief seems a pretty insubstantial basis. The people pulling 5G towers down might genuinely believe they're stopping Covid-19. But a casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith is proof of nothing. (Nietzsche said that. Not sure if there's any statues to him.)
Worth pointing out that Marx's tombstone has been vandalised, the last time was last year.
It's surely obvious to everyone by now that we all know far more about Slavey McSlaveface than when he was just a statue for pigeons to park on. And that those who are cross about this are cross precisely because of that. Even if they don't like admitting it.
Apologies, I am not following your point. More is known about Marx, Marxist thought and actual Marxist regimes than about Edward Colston. So belief that slavery is wrong and Marxism is wrong could be held , even if I agree in the first case and not in the second. Belief in unmitigated wrongness would be the motivation for the destroyer either way.
Well without actually making an argument you're really just saying "someone could make an argument that goes like this...". I suppose they could but you need to know what the argument is to assess whether it's credible or not. And "Belief" is often the last card in the hand of the man who ran out of arguments.
People seem to know almost nothing about Marx's writings in my experience. It's like slaves building the pyramids, it's so intuitively obvious why would you bother with anything so tiresome as actually looking it up? But that's perhaps a separate point...
Yes, I am just saying 'someone could make an argument', responding to Andrew's "Four Terrible Arguments" piece: I agree with him on arguments 2,3 and 4, but I don't think the argument in 1 is quite as terrible as he made out, so I am discussing it. Similarly, when Andrew writes:
I think that we need a very high degree of certainty that things are bad, and a very high degree of badness, before we can justify removing or defacing monuments. , then I worry that what happened in Bristol removes the "we (the people)" and becomes "you and four mates". Hopefully it won't happen in practice and everyone will happily and peacefully agree to remove the statues of actual slavers from prominent public display.
I think the question is 'who decides and by what mechanism that the degree of certainty is high enough?'
Previously the mechanism was presumably something like, 'you have to form a party and convince other people to join you and stand for election and then convince enough people to vote for you and if you can do that then you have established you have a high enough degree of certainty for your belief and we will let you implement it and remove the statue'.
And everybody accepted that if you couldn't convince enough people to vote for you then you didn't get to do whatever it was you wanted.
So the people who wanted to throw a statue in the river didn't get to do it if they couldn't convince enough other people and similarly the people who wanted to dynamite a gravestone didn't get to do it unless they could do likewise.
And what kept this system in place was the tacit agreement on all sides that this was how things were done.
Now the problem is that if that agreement breaks down, then the mechanism for determining whether your degree of certainty is high enough becomes, 'can you get together enough mates who agree with you that you can beat up the people who disagree with you?'
If you can, you get to do whatever you want, because you can overpower whoever is trying to stop you, and you are no longer held back by the convention that you don't get to do it unless you can persuade enough people to vote for you.
That's basically the point of argument 1: that actions like this risk establishing the precedent that the test for 'is your degree of certainty high enough?' is 'can you, physically, overpower the people who disagree?'
And at that point we're basically engaged in a big exercise to prove Hobbes right*.
As an aside it always amuses me that the people on the Tweetbook who seem most ready to call for violent revolution to overthrow capitalism, or even just for the punching of those on the other side, are the ones who look like they would be least likely to last twelve second in an actual fistfight, especially against the kind of people who are found on the other side. You'd think therefore they would think twice about encouraging people to resolve their differences using physical means. But I guess if they get their wish they'll find that out.
* by which I mean obviously that tuna sandwiches are yummy
I can't put it more clearly than to say that "slavery is wrong" and "marxism is wrong" refer to two different kinds and levels of wrongness. If someone came on this forum and said that the workers should control the factories we would have an interesting political discussion with them. We might have a passionate political discussion; we might end up saying "Well I still don't see how a sensible person could believe any of that." But if someone came on this forum and say that black people don't experience pain in the way that we do or that if they do it doesn't matter, then we would block them from the forum and very possibly notify the police. I think that the presumption should be against destroying memorials; I think that the burden of proof is on the destroyer to say that this particular memorial was a special case; I think "it is a symbol of the slave trade" is a compelling exception to the general rule but "it is a symbol of the idea that the workers should control the means of production" is not.
I can't put it more clearly than to say that "slavery is wrong" and "marxism is wrong" refer to two different kinds and levels of wrongness.
Yes, we know that you think that. But there are people who disagree, who think that 'marxism is wrong' is just as obvious as 'slavery is wrong' and that people who claim to be marxists should be treated the same as people who claim to be nazis (given that in the twentieth century communism killed many many more people than Nazism, though admittedly party because it was around for longer).
What stops the people who disagree from just going out and tearing down monuments to communists? Well, only the social convention that that is not the sort of thing we do in this country. It's not the police: as has been established this week, the fact that in this country we have an (almost entirely) unarmed police force, which operates with the consent of the community, means that if enough people get together and ant to do something the police simply cannot stop them.
(This is not the case in countries which have a paramilitary police force in addition to the normal police, like, say, France. A few Gendarmes would have made short work of the crowd in Bristol.)
The problem with pulling down statues without due process is that it weakens this social convention. If one lot of people who would like to pull down a statue but don't because That Isn't How We Do Things Here sees that another lot got to pull down a statue and get away without any consequences (it will be interesting to se if any of those responsible for the damage are prosecuted and, if prosecuted, convicted) then, well, suddenly maybe That Is How We Do Things Here. At least it is if there are enough of us. Especially if more statues get pulled down by crowds over the coming week with a similr lack of consequences.
You talk about things like 'the burden of proof is on the destroyer to say that this particular memorial was a special case'; but that presumes some judge to whom the destroyer makes the case, some official who has the power to decree that this statue is so egregious that it may be destroyed by the mob but that one hasn't reached that level of sheer effrontery.
In reality there is no such official. Every citizen must make up their own mind whether they think that a given action was or was not justified. What has kept the peace in this country for centuries has been an agreement that even if you disagree with the state of things, you don't take matters into your own hands and try to change it by force: you work within the available channels.
If you say that going outside those channels and taking matters into your own hands is okay for this group but not that one then fine, that's up to you, but you can hardly expect members of that group to agree with you. And as there is no official, no judge, who can rule on the case but each individual citizen' conscience, and their consciences tell them their case is as just, their level of outrage, as great as yours, then they will draw the only possible conclusion that what was okay for you is okay for them.
You may be able to argue logically that there is a difference between your side and their side and your side is allowed to take matters into your own hands because you are so obviously in the right but that they should respect the rules because they have no reached the required standard of proof. But in practical terms, seeing as you don't have the power to enforce that distinction, it doesn't really matter how logical your argument is.
Because it's not logical arguments that stop people taking the law into their own hands. It's social conventions. Those conventions are the real Leviathan, more than any government, and you weaken Leviathan at your peril. Bellum omnium contra omnes awaits.
JWH, I think we are reading Andrew's point rather differently.
On the precedent-set business, the whole point of Slavey McSalevface coming down was that there'd been a popular movement campaigning for it for years which had ben officially ignored in the hope they'd go away. A classic case of you can ignore all the people but only some of the time. The far right have committed terrorist acts including murdering an MP. I don't think we need to worry much about antagonising them at this point. They are already looking pretty antagonised to me.
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