The past is not the present. Let’s stop pretending that it is - Paul Regan
In Britain, in recent months, we have witnessed emotional street protests and speeches calling for a drastic reappraisal of our history. The unambiguous message has been that most of us are still living under the influence of an unreconstructed racist past, and the only remedy is to cancel it. Can this be right?
The past is a huge canvas, replete with egregious examples of vice and folly, endlessly repeated, but also lit up by moral and social progress, and acts of great courage and heroism.
How tempting it is though to cherry-pick from history in order to create a false narrative about the present.
We can all apply our own perspective to any aspect of the past. This is what makes history simultaneously fascinating and dangerous. But to trade on an assumed ignorance of the past in order to indoctrinate one group into resenting another group is propaganda, and should be called out.
The weaponisation of history is not a recent phenomenon. Wars are easier to wage when populations are enthralled to notions of ideological, ethnic, national or religious difference. Witness the conflict in former Yugoslavia (1992-1995) where a relentless political and media campaign to use historical events, some of them deep in the past, to create artificial division and suspicion, created the conditions for war crimes. The result was catastrophic, leaving 100,000 dead, and many more displaced.
In Britain, our past, if studied superficially, does not look pretty. We did colonise, export slaves, uphold ideas of racial and genetic superiority, and used our military and economic might to oppress technologically less advanced peoples. We also ruthlessly exploited child labour to power the early industrial revolution, discriminated against women, punished homosexuals, and anathematised ideas of racial equality. Further back, we executed imagined witches, hunted down Catholics, publicly quartered traitors, and terrorised our own people through civil conflicts, partial justice, and the feudal system. The past is truly another country!
On the other hand, eventually we did abolish slavery in our territories and instructed our navy to pursue and capture slaving ships; we instituted massive social and health reforms; and quite swiftly we evolved from a militaristic and colonising superpower into to a society, based, at least in theory, upon the Lockean ideal of government through the consent of the governed, and upon respect for basic human rights.
In this modern multi-ethnic Britain, we should not be surprised if we are somewhat confused and divided by our history. But we do have a choice about how we deal with that. Unlike Germany, we have not had one terrible recent event (the rise of Nazism) to bring us together in shared condemnation and demand for retribution. We should and do condemn all injustice but we cannot change what has happened, nor can we ignore the context in which abuses took place. Furthermore, it is a fallacy, even a form of snobbery, to assume that our current generation is uniquely virtuous. Our ancestors may have had a different moral compass, but so too will our descendants.
We could choose to regard our history as a Nietzschean riot of domination from one group over another, continuing to the present day. But we could opt to take our inspiration from the Chartists, the abolitionists, the suffragettes, the hunger marchers and the early trade unionists. We could learn more about those who fought tenaciously to ensure that eugenics and other dangerous ideologies would never become public policy (as they did in Germany, Sweden and parts of the United States). Or, we can simply decide to neither venerate nor to demonise the past, but to accept it as a fait accompli and to move forward, determined not to repeat the same mistakes.
If we don’t start to kick back now, our civil society may become irrevocably Balkanised and fractious. The great majority of us do not want such an outcome so how might we avoid that?
Firstly, we should forensically lay bare the wickedness and folly of some of our history whilst not falling for the myth that the same evils thereby persist legally in the present day. Secondly, we ought to challenge both ill-informed zealotry and institutional cowardice. Thirdly, we can educate our children to be critical thinkers who have the ability to treat unproven knowledge claims with skepticism. Fourthly, we can refuse to accept a warped and slanderous portrayal of modern Britain as institutionally racist and imperial. And finally, we can paint a more nuanced picture of a country that is far from perfect, but open to peaceful improvement.
Paul Regan