Rhodes to Palmyra

There are many things that look to be superficially alike, but that careful examination shows to be very different.  Sharks and dolphins are both grey-ish aquatic predators with a prominent dorsal fin.  It is not wholly unreasonable for someone unfamiliar with them to suppose that they are closely related: a child, or - less plausibly - a marine biologist visiting from another planet might make that mistake.  But closer inspection would reveal significant differences; and one would hope that the child or alien biologist would move away from thinking them the same sort of thing.  One would hope that a tolerably well-informed adult would have stopped making that kind of mistake a long time before, and would not get a newspaper column asserting that dolphins and sharks are very similar indeed.

This serves as a sort of preamble to a rumination on a story that broke a couple of weeks ago: that Oriel, Oxford, was considering removing a statue of Cecil Rhodes after coming under pressure from student protestors.  These protests echo similar protests in South Africa.

The rationale for getting shot of the guy is straightforward enough: that he was racist, imperialist, and not the sort of person whom modern academia should be honouring if it's ever going to stand a chance of becoming the post-racist, post-imperial community to which it aspires.  I've a certain amount of sympathy for this view - particularly in respect of the South African protests; after all, the colonial and post-colonial history of that country has been particularly bitter for the majority of the population.  Having a monument to him at Oriel strikes me as being slightly morally different, though I can't put my finger on why - so maybe it isn't that different after all.

On the other hand, there are counterarguments.  Rhodes was a man of his time; it is naive to pretend that we can, or should, whitewash history; if we want to understand where we are and to control where we're going, it pays to remember whence we came; and, anyway, Rhodes' personal legacy has enabled students from all around the world, of all races, to study at Oxford.  His reputation may be tarnished, but it is not without burnished bits as well.

The point is that the arguments about whether Rhodes must fall are complex, and worth hearing from both sides.

Not everyone seems to think this.
Tony Abbot, for example, has described the demands to remove Rhodes as "moral vanity".  That's not correct.  The people making the demands may have made a mistake, but it's not moral vanity.  Yet even Abbot is not as ridiculous as Frank Furedi.  Writing in The Sun, he compares the protests to the Khmer Rouge and ISIS' destruction of monuments.

ONCE, students marched to change the world and improve humankind.
These days protesters are more concerned with immunising themselves from anything that might upset them.
Ridding campuses of anything students find offensive has turned into a crusade.
Statues of historical figures are now the target — setting a dangerous precedent.
In Seventies Cambodia, the brutal Khmer Rouge declared war on the past and sought to purge all reminders of its history.  It used the term “Year Zero” to express its attempt to rid society of its historical memory.
In Afghanistan, the Taliban had its Year Zero moment in 2001, destroying two sixth century statues of Buddha.
And IS has turned the destruction of ancient monuments in Syria and Iraq into an art form.  They don’t feel comfortable walking past statues that celebrate values different to [sic] their own.

Superficially, one can see how the analogy might work: in both cases, we have examples of "undesirable" history being removed.  BUT... well, this is where the dolphin-and-shark picture is useful.  We'd expect people to dig a bit deeper.  It's on this point that Furedi comes rather unstuck.

Let's take the obvious one first.  If it's true that the main motivation for the Rhodes protest is a sense of being upset or offended, then that's wildly different from ISIS destroying Palmyra: there's simply no upset here.  And, anyway, I don't think that upset is a big part of the students' case anyway.  If it's there at all, it's by far the weakest aspect.  Much more important is the concern about what values one is supposed to find in modern academia.

There's a range of only-slightly-less-obvious lines that we can draw, too.  Notably, there is a case to be made that the Khmer Rouge and IS and the Taliban really are and were intent on erasing a whole culture.  That's not what's going on in Oxford and South Africa.  The most that we could say there is that there's an attempt at erasure of a part of a culture - but even that is likely to be overplaying things wildly.  I don't think that anyone is interested in erasing the past - that'd be daft; but they are interested in not venerating it, and in drawing some of its sting.  Again, I'm not sure whether that's a particularly coherent strategy or intention, but that doesn't really matter here.  What matters is that it is not like what went on in Democratic Kampuchea, Afghanistan, or Iraq and Syria.  It just ain't.

In this sense, removing depictions of Rhodes is much more like taking down the Confederate flag previously flying outside a courthouse or legislature.  In taking down that flag, one is not attempting to erase history, or make it nicer; it's just a matter of reevaluating it, in the context of a move from one kind of society towards another.

Note, too, that the students' motivation strikes me as being fundamentally honourable.  They're pursuing a claim about social justice, and in doing so trying to get rid of something that they see as exclusionary.  Even if you think that they're fundamentally misguided in the way they're going about realising that honourable aim, that doesn't detract from the fact that it is honourable.

One might expect that someone with the putative academic chops of Furedi would have noticed that.  Or, if they did notice it, not deliberately to ignore it.

(Incidentally, in his Sun article, Furedi seems to be parroting Brendan O'Neill in Newsweek and Spiked - it's amazing how the Institute of Ideas crowd all seem to think exactly the same specious things in exactly the same specious ways.  But the less I say about O'Neill the better, for the sake of my blood pressure.)

I don't know whether I think the statue of Rhodes should go from Oriel.  I can see why people might think that it should; I can see why people might think that it can stay.  In the grand scheme of things, I'm not sure that it makes all that much of a difference either way.  I'm open to persuasion, but I don't really have a dog in this fight.

What I do care about much more directly is intellectual honesty in the debate.  On the assumption that Furedi really isn't too thick to see the difference (some of the Institute of Ideas crowd, judging by their twitter feeds, are - but I don't think that Furedi is), he is being utterly duplicitous in presenting the argument in this manner.  That does neither side in this particular argument any favours.