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.