Why the West Must Fight for Its History

There was no formal declaration of war. No gunshots rang out. It didn’t even make the local news. But, sure enough, at some point at the turn of the twenty-first century, a war against the past was launched.

Who were the culprits? They are hard to pin down. The partisans supporting the assault on the legacy of European civilisation are not members of a party. They have not issued any war aims and have never formulated an explicit strategic vision. They are also a heterogenous bunch, a coalition of disparate interests and movements.

In an earlier era—the 1990s—when the first wave of mobilisation was taking shape, the English historian J.C.D. Clark warned against representing the promotion of this conflict as the “outcome of a grand conspiracy”. He wrote that it is “the result of a thousand separate, distantly related acts, the promptings of widely absorbed assumptions”. Nevertheless, argued Clark, despite its diverse and uncoordinated prompting, it amounted to a “distinct enterprise of historical disinheritance”.

Hostility towards the past evolved slowly, and then all at once, its intensification occurring haphazardly without any serious long-term thought. The use of the term “war” to account for the systematic pursuit of historical disinheritance is not simply metaphorical. In effect, this war leads to the diminishing of the authority of the past, to the discrediting of its legacy and to the killing of the soul of communities whose way of life remains underpinned by European culture.

This book’s principal argument is that the main driver of the culture war is an undeclared War Against the Past.

At times, supporters of the culture war against Western civilisation behave as if this perilous territory continues to represent a menace to the contemporary world. Their constant targeting of the legacy of the past—its physical symbols, values and achievements—resembles a frenetic moral crusade seeking to make people feel ashamed about their origins and who they are. Culture warriors have, in effect, opened up a second front to gain mastery over how the past is viewed.

The goal of cancelling the legacy of Western civilisation is pursued through reorganising society’s historical memory and disputing and delegitimating its ideals and achievement. They seek to erase the temporal distinction between the present and the past to achieve this objective. There has never been a time in living memory when so much energy has been devoted to readjusting the past and questioning and criticising historical figures and institutions. At times, it seems as if the boundary between the present and the past has disappeared as activists casually cross over it and seek to fix contemporary problems through readjusting the past.

The crusade against the past has proven remarkably successful in alienating society from its history. Public and private institutions ceaselessly paint their communities’ past in the darkest colours. There is no longer any need to prompt institutions of education and culture to apologise for just about everything that occurred in the past. Even the spectacular achievements of human civilisation, from Greek philosophy to the intellectual revolution of the Enlightenment to the scientific inventions of modernity, are now regularly indicted for their supposed association with exploitation and oppression. The representation of the past through a narrative that highlights its malevolent, oppressive, exploitative, and abusive dimension is not confined to a small number of headline-seeking historians. The frequency with which history is told as a tale of human degradation indicates that in popular culture, the past now possesses the status of the “Bad Old Days”.

Anyone visiting a gallery or a museum will soon be confronted with troubling reminders regarding the malevolent influence of the past. There is a veritable army of grievance archaeologists whose role is to indict the objects on display with some kind of offence. Any painting or object created in the eighteenth or nineteenth century has a good chance of being directly or indirectly linked to colonialism or the slave trade. Glasgow’s Burrell Collection features the most bizarre reminders of the misdeeds of history. A note attached to a bronze bust of a young Roman man, 100 BC–100 AD, states:

Roman artists copied Greek sculptors, who used mathematical formulas to work out what they thought were people’s perfect proportions. This has been wrongly used to promote racist ideas about the ideal proportions of faces.

The absurd attribution of racist motives about the sculpting of facial proportions in ancient times speaks to a veritable cultural addiction to shaming the achievements of the past. In its own terms, a condescending comment about a bronze bust of a young Roman man does not signify very much. But when similar reminders of historical injustices are attached to numerous other objects on display in a museum, viewers are left with a very clear and negative story of the past.

Even some of the most inspiring contributions to human history have been targeted by mean-spirited activists determined to empty the past of any redeeming features. Practitioners of accusatory history are committed to poisoning the reputation of the Enlightenment by claiming that it was “from the outset a racist endeavour”.

The targeting of the past has proved to be remarkably successful. Historical dramas and films invariably represent the legacy of Western civilisation, particularly its Anglo-American component, in an unfavourable light. The past is anachronistically rewritten in accordance with the playbook of contemporary identity politics. Public and private institutions have uncritically embraced the cause of decolonisation and revel in discovering their own “shameful” past.

The embrace of decolonisation now works as a performance of virtue. Decolonising has become an obligatory ritual for any institution that wishes to demonstrate that it is of the time. As a statement, “Supporting Decolonisation in Museums”, issued by the Museums Association illustrates, all that the crusade against the past lacks is the addition of the word holy. It notes that “at a time” when “history is under more scrutiny than ever, it is vital that museums engage” in “discussions and reappraise their own historical role in empire”. It adds that “we will continue to work with museums to support them on this journey”.

One of the aims of this book is to explain why “history is under more scrutiny than ever”.

There is no doubt that, at least outwardly, “history is under more scrutiny than ever”. However, on closer inspection, it becomes evident that scrutiny is the wrong term to describe the current project of rewriting the past. The Oxford English Dictionary defines scrutiny as investigation and critical inquiry. There is little genuine investigation and certainly nothing critical about the obsessive attempt to seek revenge on the past. The English social historian E.P. Thompson’s phrase, the “immense condescension of posterity”, describes the current project of de-legitimating the past far better than the word scrutiny. In this book I refer to the current obsession with scrutinising the past as the practice of grievance archaeology.

Outwardly grievance archaeology is committed to uncovering historical injustices and misdeeds that require the atonement of institutions and actors in the here and now. Culture warriors justify their project on the ground that the past injustices they unearth are consequential for the lives of numerous identity groups today. Grievance archaeology is not simply about excavating hitherto unknown facts or events. It is principally about repackaging the past in accordance with the values and objectives of present-day identity politics. Through reading history backwards, individuals and groups who inhabited the world hundreds and even thousands of years ago are cast in the role of offenders of present-day sensibilities. In this way, key historical figures are cancelled from the canon of the greats.

Consider the case of Immanuel Kant, one of the most influential philosophers of the modern era. If the grievance archaeologists associated with the decolonisation movement are to be believed, Kant is just another common-or-garden racist. Moreover, almost every major philosopher of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Enlightenment has been cast into this role: Locke, Hume, Hegel and Kant are all deemed guilty. No doubt, these individuals shared many of the prejudices of eighteenth-century society. But they also developed the universalistic outlook that led them to give meaning to the ideal of human equality. Kant, for one, was unequivocally opposed to colonialism and the behaviour of the conquering European powers, warning that they “oppress the natives, excite widespread wars among the various states, spread famine, rebellion, perfidy, and the whole litany of evils which afflict mankind”. But for grievance archaeologists, it does not matter that Kantian ethics offers a precious resource for upholding the moral dignity and worth of all humans. What matters is that his language, attitude, and behaviour violate the recently cobbled-together norms codified in the virtue-seeking language guides of twenty-first-century Anglo-American institutions.

The War Against the Past is not simply a conflict involving words. It also involves the physical act of removing symbols of the past.

The Guardian refers to this development as “The Statue Wars”, yet it is not only statues that are pulled down, disfigured or removed. Troublesome books are hidden from the public and, in some cases, destroyed. Precious and historically significant objects are rendered “troublesome” and presented to the public with a note of disparagement. The world-famous British Museum is so worried about the impact of its troublesome collection that it has decided to give “emotional support” to its staff and help them add trigger warnings to its archive.

Children and young people are the main target audience for the representation of the past as a story of shame. From a very young age, they are exposed to a form of education that aims to morally distance them from their cultural legacy and deprive them of a sense of pride in their past. In the UK, primary school children as young as five are offered US-style lessons about “white privilege”. Teachers are instructed to avoid teaching “white saviour narratives” during lessons on slavery by de-emphasising the role of white abolitionists such as William Wilberforce.

Such successes are not due to the crusade’s supporters’ intellectual coherence and effective organisation. Of course, movements such as Black Lives Matter have contributed to this feverish ahistoricism. But their success has been, to a considerable extent, underwritten by a pre-existing cultural climate favourable to their objective. One of the most striking and fascinating features of the War Against the Past is the relative lack of resistance to it. In the UK, during thirteen years of conservative government, successive regimes refused to respond to the assault on Britain’s heritage. This reluctance to fight for our history constitutes a veritable act of cultural betrayal.

An important reason why the War Against the Past has successfully influenced the current zeitgeist is the defensive stance assumed by those charged with upholding and transmitting the legacy of Western civilisation. In retrospect, it is evident that sections of the cultural and political establishment have, for some time, become estranged from their society’s tradition and historical legacy.

Society’s relation to its past and how it views and understands it has profound implications for every­day life. Should the negative and destructive narrative of the past consolidate its growing authority, it will succeed in undermining people’s confidence in themselves, their communities and their capacity to confront the challenges posed in the future. Once the past is cast in an entirely negative light, there is little possibility of cultivating a sense of hope for the future. In such circumstances, the past ceases to provide any guidance. The continuous serving up of the horrors of the past has the effect of lowering human ambition.

A pathologised history calls into question the capacity of humanity to change for the better and improve its circumstances.

A preoccupation with reinterpreting the past as a story of human abuse, atrocity, genocide, ethnic cleansing, slavery and holocausts coexists with the tendency of society to regard itself as the object rather than the subject of historical change. A morose fascination with human evil threatens to overwhelm our capacity to imagine an individual’s potential for altruism, heroism, or simply doing good.

In its place, mankind is condemned to a world whose history is endlessly recycled as a cautionary tale against the aspiration to exercise human subjectivity. In its most extreme form, humanity’s historical role becomes a self-loathing story of ecocide, with man as the destroyer of all things good. This teleology of evil transmits the message that there is very little that people can do to influence their future: we have created a Hell that cannot be escaped.

Yet, if we are to avoid the genuine mistakes of the past and correct its injustices, society needs to believe in its ability to do good to cultivate a politics of hope. This is the paradox of the War Against the Past: those who are waging it are, inadvertently, denying themselves the capacity to win. For if your past is evil, if your centuries-old story is defined by bitterness and bad faith, how can you possibly hope to redeem yourself?

Dr Frank Furedi is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent. This was an edited extract from his introduction to his new book, The War Against the Past, to be published by Polity this month.