Iconoclasm

[smokingboot]

Blimey. Big long FB discussion on the Colston statue being thrown into the river Avon. Big time philanthropist, horrible slaver. There had been attempts to get the wording on his statue changed to reflect where and how he got his money, all of which had been stymied to the greater extent by the Merchant Venturers. Did themselves no good at that point, now the statue's down in the dock. There's a poetry to it; Colston was known to throw sick slaves overboard on their way to the colonies. Now he joins them, best of all it is close to a bridge named after a slave called Pero.

I like how this feels.

But I don't like how it thinks.

And I heard all the reasons for doing it, for just eradicating all traces of history except in museums and libraries. Iconoclasm makes me uneasy.

Book burning, statue defiling, art destruction, everyone who does it thinks they are right to do it. Not just right but absolutely right; theirs are standards and principles that will echo down through time, and everyone will always know that they were right. Oh so right all the time.

Doesn't sit right with me.

Comments

[chess]

If it didn't look like every other Random Statue Of A White Dude and/or it wasn't likely to be fished out mostly intact and stuffed in a museum anyway I would be less happy about it.

But it's insufficiently ancient and/or unusual to be worth fussing about its preservation over the symbolic value of taking it down to me - unlike the ancient monuments that various groups I don't agree with tore down.

[smokingboot]

I am very wary of the precedent of removing bits of history we don't like. My preference is to explain them. I understand these other conditionals that you mention - age or unusual qualities - but approaches to these are so subjective I mistrust them.

[chess]

I feel like 'removing a statue from a place of honour' and 'removing history' are very different things.

Like pretty much everything else in the entire world, this is a balance of harms argument. (Unfortunately some of it is always going to be subjective - there isn't a firm rule that can tell the good thing from the bad thing, because both options have both good and bad outcomes.)

Having 'bad history' on prominent display harms the people who would rather not be reminded that e.g. they were previously considered to be not people and some people are still not only okay but celebratory about the people who did that to them.

Removing 'bad history' from prominent display (ideally taking it into a museum where it can be contextualised, if possible) removes that harm, but can do harm by e.g. damaging artefacts that still have more to tell us about that historical period, reducing awareness of that historical period in those that need to learn from it, reducing the aesthetic quality of the area etc.

In the case of a beautiful ancient building that has not been fully studied, is at least an uncommon feature, and that you can't move without damaging it, the balance of harms is very different to a statue that is very similar to a lot of statues all over the place, at least some of which can be easily preserved in museums and with photography of their previous context.

[smokingboot]

The problem with the 'balance of harms' argument is, that offence, personal insult even, is not harm. There is a difference between hurt and harm. Hurt to some extent can be subjective, harm less so.

A hurtful reminder does not necessarily harm, excepting special situations eg PTSD. Lack of, say, a hospital because we decide to knock down anything built by/in honour of a slave trader, now that's harm waiting for someone. If we removed everything with offensive connections and connotations there will be little left, a bland landscape of righteousness that succeeds in being neither interesting nor accurate.

I agree with your fourth paragraph, and to some extent the fifth.

For sure the Colston statue can be removed to a museum, though I quite like the idea of leaving it under Pero Bridge with a kind of telescopic (am not sure if that is the word I am looking for) arrangement so that people can come and look down on it, empty plinth and explanatory plaque nearby.

[chess]

I think more recent awareness of what 'microaggressions' do to people's mental health and general life prospects shows that 'hurt' often does build up to 'harm' when it is continual throughout society...