That would leave approximately no one from more than a century ago and almost no one from the last century, especially if you're going to exclude anyone who might be considered a bigot by modern progressive standards.

Yes, I’m cool with that.

We can remember these people existed and the things they did without celebrating them.

Removing statues is an example of that.

Are you really cool with that though? It implies no mathematician, scientist, artist, writer, athlete, politician, soldier, or activist should be celebrated or admired unless they exactly conform to the ideological purity standards of modern progressives? If you are cool with that, you and those who think like you are precisely why people get so agitated when statues are pulled down and windows hidden in basements.

You’ve jumped from “bigoted” to “ideological purity”, which I didn’t say.

But just in the interest of going whole hog: let’s assume I become King Of Earth and my new rule is “nobody is allowed to be celebrated”. Does the world stop spinning? It’s a crazy rule, but celebration of dead people isn’t exactly the glue holding society together.

Meanwhile, racism is a pretty ongoing issue that is tearing it apart.

Celebrating people and history is a core pillar of identity. The “founding fathers” are central to the story of America’s founding.

Jesus is certainly a glue of Christianity, Mohammad of Islam, etc.

Does that mean we have to accept all of who those people are? Of course not. We can choose to celebrate the Federalist papers and denounce the slaveholding.

People have a natural desire to follow leaders, to idolize people. In doing so they are tied more closely to others who value/worship/memorialize the same.

That’s (one!) tribal glue.

> People have a natural desire to follow leaders, to idolize people. In doing so they are tied more closely to others who value/worship/memorialize the same.

Yea, this is pretty much the same reason that people want racists’ statues taken down.

People celebrating bigots are people who value bigots, and that’s a tribe I’m pretty happy letting go extinct.

> that’s a tribe I’m pretty happy letting go extinct.

Funny, saying that sort of thing is what got Fisher condemned.

> People celebrating bigots are people who value bigots

But, with some exceptions, these people aren’t celebrated for their bigotry. They’re celebrated for their positive achievements. People are complex mixtures of good, bad, and indifferent values. No one is pure of character or thought.

FWIW I happen to think ideas should be celebrated, maybe accomplishments per se, not people. I've grown skeptical about celebrating people. There's too many problems in the background, all the time, too many unknown stories, too much about the idolizers rather than the idolized, too much weight of privilege, too much.

there's no causal link between Fisher supporting eugenics and continued institutional racism though? The idea of "cancelling" all of history's greatest people is one of the worst suggestions I can imagine, optically, for progressive movements. I would think that educating people about the shades of grey in our cultural icons' history, beliefs and personality is a much better cause.

For example I didn't know that Churchill had some pretty horrendous things to say about Indian people until the last couple of years because British cultural attitudes towards him are pretty unflinchingly patriotic. It doesn't diminish that he played a key role in saving us and the rest of the world from the Nazis, but it does balance his image as a man with positive and negative qualities, which is a more realistic image. To tear his statues down says to other people "fuck your heroes, racism is the only dimension I judge people on" - which is much more likely to garner a reactionary response than to initiate dialogue and understanding on the racism of our history, which IMO is the valuable thing you can get out of these conflicts.

Tearing down statues (of people famous for things unrelated to racism) just makes progressives seem incredibly unreasonable, which is already a popular perception, because of exactly things like this.

> The idea of "cancelling" all of history's greatest people is one of the worst suggestions I can imagine, optically, for progressive movements. I would think that educating people about the shades of grey in our cultural icons' history, beliefs and personality is a much better cause.

This is a strawman.

I’m specifically saying we shouldn’t celebrate bigots. We should continue to educate people about the “shades of grey” as it were. We can do that without statues. Monuments are never going to have context.

If you think me unreasonable, I guess I’ll just have to be okay with that.

I don't care about your personal levels of reasonableness; I care about the normalisation of progressive policies, and puritans keep people from learning about and exploring progressivism; I know because it kept me away for a long time, thinking progressives are all unreasonable.

"we shouldn't celebrate bigots" is reductionist because it narrows important people down to a single dimension. That's puritanism - if somebody invents a cure for cancer and saves billions of lives, they should be celebrated for that achievement even if they have bad racial views, because from a consequential perspective people want to be celebrated and are inspired by the idea of being considered a hero for breakthroughs in their field. You can simultaneously celebrate and condemn a single person, it's called nuance - and the conversation around an individual is not solely shaped by the placard on their statue.

We can praise an accomplishment without forgetting context. But monuments cannot.

Unless there’s a proposal for building an “un-monument”, when we put up a statue for a bigot who did a good thing, we’re elevating the good thing without the context of the bad.

We should celebrate that FDR’s policies got us out of the Great Depression, and also never forget that he signed off on internment camps.

I think this is the point we're actually in disagreement on: you believe that a statue is a celebration of a person in their entirety, where I believe a statue is a celebration of a person's accomplishment - their personhood becomes a symbol for that accomplishment. In my mind a statue of Churchill is a symbol of war victory over the Nazis and British stiff upper lip, a statue of Robert E Lee is a symbol of upholding slavery, etc etc. The statues we build are symbolic of the moments in history that we want to uphold culturally, not an endorsement of a famous person's total being.

I don’t necessarily think that a statue is intended by its builder to celebrate a person in their entirety. As two example: I’d agree that it’s unlike the folks who put Fisher’s likeness on that window didn’t mean to celebrate his racism. It’s also interesting that Robert E Lee denounced monuments to the Confederacy before he died; the people erecting statues of him aren’t intending to celebrate his entirety either.

But in practice, raising a statue of somebody raises that person. They’re put forth as the face of the accomplishment, and they’re more than just the accomplishment. Else we’d just raise a tower with the inscription “In recognition of the British spirit, and of the lives lost protecting us from Naziism”

My broader contention is that you don’t need a statue to celebrate the accomplishment, we have plenty of other ways to do that. So when somebody says “hey, lets take down this statue because the person in it did some pretty bigoted things”, the only thing fighting for keeping the statue is inertia. Nobody in the UK is going to forget defeating the Nazis, every other building is inscribed with details about what stood there before the Blitz.

Few people paid attention to racism until people started tearing down statues and burning Targets. What's the incentive to be nice and polite when being nice and polite gets you ignored?

This is just another call for respectability politics. You're asking people to do something that doesn't work.

I don't care if you're canvassing in a suit and tie or spray painting Marxist slogans on banks - respectability doesn't matter. Results do - and consequentially speaking, destroying things that people consider symbols of pride is not going to win you many friends among moderates. If you want to argue that trying to clandestinely pull down a statue prompts a national conversation about the motives of the vandals, then sure, I can agree with that reasoning. But actually making the argument "no accomplished people should be celebrated at all if they weren't morally squeaky-clean"? That's purity politics, and a continued association between progressivism and puritanism is not going to win any friends or allies.

The people who consider Confederate statues “symbols of pride” are not moderates, just in case there was confusion there.

there wasn't - to be absolutely clear, I don't think the generals of a breakaway slave-state should be celebrated. Hot take, I know.

There's a significant difference between a statue to Robert E Lee and a statue to Churchill (or, say, a stained-glass celebration of this Fisher guy).

Fisher has published works confirming his belief that different races have different “innate capacity for intellectual and emotional development”. Is that not racist enough to be considered racist?

yes, that's obviously racist. But you do realise that publishing about how much he hates racial minorities isn't the thing he's being celebrated for? Robert E Lee's primary contribution to the world was trying to defend the right to own slaves. If Fisher was being celebrated as a race scientist or whatever then I'd be against that too. It's not like celebrating Fisher's accomplishment is an endorsement of his racial beliefs - a statue celebrates a person's achievement, not the entirety of their being.

This entire idea is backwards as hell.

There aren't singular people behind progress. If Newton had never been born we would still have Calculus, and in fact we don't teach Newton's calculus in schools. Einstein was part of a team, and his team was only slightly ahead of another team.

Statues and shit paint a picture of a lie: That great people drive the world.

Human progress happens because other areas progress, the new ideas are inevitable, the person who does them has no real bearing on whether they happen or not. History is not driven by "great men" but by society working together.

The entire "great man of history" thing is actually a giant pile of racist garbage, used to promote unjust systems and reinforce tribalisms, which is the very thing you're talking about it being good for.

Also, Churchill (who I believe you brought up earlier) was a piece of dog shit who starved millions of people in India out of spite. Very few people have done as much actual evil as Churchill did, and his statues and images should be shit on.

The fact that you aren't aware of those things is entirely down to "great man of history" nonsense being the place where you get your ideas. It's bad, it's backwards, and it's really not defensible.

I get that you're arguing a systemic position and it's one that I mostly agree with but I do think you take it too far - great man don't drive history alone, but they do contribute incrementally to it. The Wright brothers weren't the only ones trying to invent the plane, many had come before and were attempting simultaneously, and it was all based on existing work from those who came before, but they were successful where others were not. That counts for something.

Where did I say that either the great men of history model, or national pride, were good things? My whole point that I explicitly laid out was that attacking symbols that people think are good is not good praxis. That doesn't mean that perpetuating myths is good, but if you want to win people over to your side, taking a shit on thinga they think are good is not the way to do it. It just makes you feel good in your righteous indignation, which is basically the image a lot of moderates have of progressivism in general.

Teams are important, but sometimes "great men" have a huge impact on history. What do you think the world would look like today if Arthur Wellesley hasn't been present at the Battle of Waterloo and Napoleon Bonaparte rolled over the Allied lines?

> What do you think the world would look like today if Arthur Wellesley hasn't been present at the Battle of Waterloo and Napoleon Bonaparte rolled over the Allied lines?

Most likely, another general would have defeated Napoleon.

Wellington wasn’t some unique tactical genius. He had 1.5 times the men Napoleon did. I’m sure he was a perfectly competent general, but if he wasn’t there, the next guy in line would be.

Doubt it. Napoleon came close to winning as it was. Having more men doesn't count for much if they're in the wrong position.

And vice versa, Napoleon is a prime example of an individual who changed the course of history.

Not tearing statues down and not scouring flawed people from history also didn't help. Cancelling people who do it is also purity politics. They got exhausted trying to be polite and nonviolent while nothing changed or things got worse, tore down a racist statue erected by racists for racist reasons, and now you claim that's why you don't listen to anything they say even though you weren't listening before.

are you under the impression I'm defending Confederate statues? To be clear, I'm not; I'm defending the celebration of people like Fisher, the subject of this actual article. Fuck the confederates.

The Union celebrated General Lee. Maybe we should tear it down, too.

You think racism today is tearing society apart? Racism has never been lower. I haven't ever seen race riots breakout. In a few American cities anti-police protests have happened.

Liberal guilt is tearing itself apart. As things get better day after day because of the work so many put in, a group of people exists who ignores this and thinks the world is frozen in some media generated history.

This is certainly not true! Many, many people from more than a century ago opposed racism and bigotry. It's just that many powerful people in recent years supported it and want you to believe that racism and bigotry was (and still is) a normal and defensible thing.

Most obviously - there were a lot of people from non-dominant races (in various times and places) in history! We have writings from Olaudah Equiano, for instance, that confirm that he did not believe in the common racism and bigotry of his time, and there were many thousands like him that didn't write anything down either.

But even among the races benefiting from racism, we have writings of people opposing it, too.

Here, for instance, are excerpts from journal entries of Bp. Thomas Coke, one of the founders of Methodism in the US, written in 1785:

> At night I lodged at the house of Captain Dillard, a most hospitable man, and as kind to his negroes as if they were white servants. It was quite pleasing to see them so decently and comfortably clothed. And yet I could not beat into the head of that poor man the evil of keeping them in slavery, although he has read Mr. Wesley's thoughts on slavery, (I think he said) three times over, : but his good wife is strongly on our side.)

> I preached the late Colonel Bedford's funeral sermon. But I said nothing good of him, for he was a violent friend of slavery, and his interest being great among the Methodists in these parts, he would have been a dreadful thorn in our sides, if the Lord had not in mercy taken him away.

And here is Gouverneur Morris, one of the Founding Father, debating in 1787 at the Constitutional Convention the merits of the Three-Fifths Compromise, as recorded in James Madison's notes:

> Upon what principle is it that the slaves shall be computed in the representation? Are they men? Then make them Citizens and let them vote. Are they property? Why then is no other property included? [...] The admission of slaves into the Representation when fairly explained comes to this: that the inhabitant of Georgia and S. C. who goes to the Coast of Africa, and in defiance of the most sacred laws of humanity tears away his fellow creatures from their dearest connections & damns them to the most cruel bondages, shall have more votes in a Govt. instituted for protection of the rights of mankind, than the Citizen of Pa. or N. Jersey who views with a laudable horror, so nefarious a practice.

What you see in these writings is a belief that there is no moral distinction to be made between white and black, that slavery is in fact an outrage, and no defense of it can be made based on race. What you see, simply, is opposition to racism.

This is what some successful and powerful and praiseworthy people - bishops and founding fathers - believed in the 1700s.

You don't know this, of course, because the people who make statues and stained glass windows aren't excited about sharing that history.

What do the people you have quoted think about gender equality, gay rights, and trans issues? I was careful to say very few people were not bigots by modern standards, not that no one opposed racism and slavery.

> You don't know this, of course, because the people who make statues and stained glass windows aren't excited about sharing that history.

I mostly don’t know about these people because I’m not American and have very little interest in American history.

I don't know what their views are on those matters - I don't think there's a lot of documentary evidence. (I also picked those two people because I'm American and I grew up Methodist and I happened to have read about both of them recently; my point is very much that it wasn't only these two people who were the only non-bigots of the 1700s, and I'm sure we can find similar stories from whatever segment of history you're interested in, too.)

I also think the question here isn't really about bigots by modern standards. Bp. Coke makes it clear that Col. Bedford was a terrible man by the standards of the time, so much so that he didn't say a single positive thing about him at his funeral and he was quite glad that God had killed him off. Morris thinks the slavers of his era were working "in defiance of the most sacred laws of humanity" and the slaveholders of the south were putting people in "the most cruel bondages".

Ronald Fisher died in 1962. He was a contemporary of such people as MLK and Rosa Parks, just as much as he was a contemporary of Josef Mengele. He was one of many participated in the drafting of the 1950 UNESCO statement on "The Race Question," and out of those, he was one of very few who insisted on the reasonableness of dividing up the human population by race, both in terms of biological nature and in terms of moral worth. The article is not asking about modern standards of bigotry; his colleagues in 1950 would have called him a bigot.

Nobody is trying to cancel Herod for not being a fan of neopronouns. There were enough reasons for Herod's own contemporaries to call him evil.

That said, since you mention trans issues - you might be interested in the story of the Public Universal Friend (1752-1819), who among other things insisted on being referred to in a gender-neutral manner and generally had that wish honored. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Universal_Friend

I think people were much less concerned about this sort of thing in the past when they were not told to be concerned about it. See also the 1952 New York Daily News headline, "Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty," subtitled "Bronx Youth Is a Happy Woman After 2 Years, 6 Operations." https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/bronx-army-vet-ground-b... (see the original headline at https://www.newspapers.com/clip/25375703/ex-gi-becomes-blond...) The article straightforwardly refers to her as "she" and a "new woman" and says the conversion was "successfully completed," noting also that her military and immigration records were changed. To be abundantly clear, I am sure that Christine Jorgensen would have been much happier to have been alive today and going through transition today instead of seventy years ago - but I also think the anti-trans bigotry that we see today from certain corners is not the remnant of a universal worldview of seventy years ago. Some fraction of people were bigots in the past, as they are today; many people weren't and aren't.

(Of course, also, part of this is that scientific studies of gay rights and trans issues at the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft were burned by the same folks that Fisher decided to defend in 1950.)

Thank you for quoting these. I don't really like a quest for ideological purity, but this shows that both times and people have ideological nuance.

if you and ten thousand others, can accurately and repeatedly find and describe the same people with these labels .. then MAYBE?. Your view of that suspect person now, today, will change..

These obviously negative terms become a mud fight, where each accuser "sticks" others with as much mud as possible, since every single person on earth is imperfect..

one way forward from this depressing situation is to instead, celebrate virtue, and the contest is to find and identify virtue.. meaning "someone did or said something positive" with positive evidence.. that takes away the mud fight and gets everyone looking for virtue. I suggest, do not throw insults as a substitute for seeking and honoring virtue, and find the virtue in others, as a way to move the conversation.

Real -- Humans are dangerous pack hunters, and the reasoning of the mob is notoriously fickle.. If the activity of the day is to "out bigots" and "get them" .. I guarantee you it will descend further

I’m not looking to solve every problem today. But also I’m not interested in engaging with people trying to “find and identify virtue” in bigots. If we can’t agree that celebrating bigots is bad, I’m at a loss as to how to resolve the disconnect.

I’m not looking to “get them”; Robert E Lee and Sir Ronald Fisher aren’t around to be annoyed that we aren’t throwing parades for them.

celebrating womanizing men is bad too. so, tear out all the pictures of MLK and tear down the statues.

does this example help you to understand the danger in your particular brand of ignorance?

Let’s get the crane out. All the statues come down. We can learn about historical figures in our schools, and in our museums, surrounded in both cases by appropriate context.

I don't feel a particularly strong inclination to agree or to disagree with your ideals as you lay them out in this statement.

but when the standard of how to judge your comment is based on practicality and not ideals, what is your _actual_ position? because you know it will take another hundred years to clear just the confederate statues.

We’ve switched to practicality :)

I think my position is: let’s start knocking down monuments for people who are bigots. There’s a lot of them, so it’ll take a while, but we have plenty of viable ways to remember people in context besides monuments. Eventually either somebody smarter than me finds a way to build a monument that includes context, or we just eventually run out of them.

The problem is that you’re going to piss off an awful lot of people, the vast majority of people. That is impractical if you want your broader political project to succeed. Churchill is a great example of this. Tearing down statues of Churchill will set the majority of the UK population against you, even if they broadly agree with your other political goals. It’s incredibly polarising and does nothing to help the people who are actually hurt by bigotry today. That’s the problem with political purity; sometimes you have to hold your nose and accept things you don’t like; otherwise you’ll achieve nothing.

there may be a huge disconnect here. I haven't switched. I've grounded my original example in practicality. All people are awful. Give it 50 years, and you will discover things about people you hold in high esteem that you wish were not true.

my example with MLK was to demonstrate that it cannot be a binary decision whether or not to celebrate the accomplishments of racists.

and if you say I am wrong, I'll ask again what you intend to do with the amazing, inspiring,,.. but womanizing MLK.