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

[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...