Niall Gooch argues that protestors were right to topple the statue of Edward Colston, but that angry mobs are often an enemy of justice.
So Edward Colston is gone.
The statue of the man who made a great deal of money from the cruel trading of human beings was toppled from its plinth and hurled into Bristol Docks in South-West England by an angry crowd on Sunday afternoon.
Statues have become an important point of contention during the last few years, both in the UK and in the US, as progressive radicalism has intensified. Some years ago, in 2015, we had the #RhodesMustFall movement, demanding that a statue of statesman and politician Cecil Rhodes was removed from the front of a building at Oriel College, Oxford. several prominent statues of Confederate leaders from the Civil War era have been taken down in recent years. For example, large memorials to Generals Robert E Lee and Nathan Bedford Forrest were removed from New Orleans and Memphis respectively.
The case against certain statues is quite simple and persuasive when it is stripped of the tiresome jargon and posturing. It is this: we should think carefully about what kind of people are publicly commemorated in our society, and so in the case of people whose character or life’s work are of dubious worth, or immoral, we should consider removing public monuments dedicated to them. This seems to me not only a reasonable position but an eminently Christian one. As St Paul says, we should keep before our eyes “whatever is honourable, whatever is just… whatever is commendable”.
As St Paul says, we should keep before our eyes “whatever is honourable, whatever is just… whatever is commendable”. – Niall Gooch
If this argument doesn’t seem to you at least worthy of some thought, ask yourself whether you would have opposed the removal of statues of Stalin or Lenin from public squares in Russia or Eastern Europe after 1989? Or closer to home, what would be the correct course of action if, say, television presenter Jimmy Savile had been honoured with a statue or some kind of public memorial? Given what we now know about his horrific history of child sex abuse, I think most people would agree that it was not only permissible but obligatory to take it down.
So the question is not really “should we ever take down statues for moral reasons?”, because more or less everyone agrees that sometimes yes, we should. A more pertinent rendering of the question is “under what particular circumstances, and for what kind of reasons, should we take down statues?”
The context, and hence the meaning, of a statue matters. For example, I might have been more sympathetic to the Rhodes Must Fall movement if the statue of Rhodes had been, say, a large and/ or militarised statue in the middle of Oxford. That would have given it a more political meaning, plus the statue would have been more of an imposition on public space. But actually it is positioned rather discreetly on the second floor of a private building, a good thirty feet about street level. It is also less than life-size. If you didn’t know it was there, you would probably miss it. It’s a modest and unassertive monument to a generous benefactor.
But even this doesn’t quite settle the matter. If Rhodes, for example, had personally committed murders, or had been a convicted child abuser, then even this small and unobtrusive statue would probably be extremely inappropriate.
Rhodes is a target not because he was personally very wicked but because he was a relatively typical Englishman of his time, in his racial beliefs and enthusiastic imperialism. – Niall Gooch
In the case of Colston, as well as being a slave trader, he was one of the great philanthropists in Bristolian history. These kind of judgements are difficult and complicated, and inescapably political. Rhodes is a target not because he was personally very wicked but because he was a relatively typical Englishman of his time, in his racial beliefs and enthusiastic imperialism. Attitudes to the management of race relations, and to the Empire, remain important battlegrounds in the culture war.
The fundamental point, however, is surely this: we must have a process of careful and organised deliberation on the appropriateness of statues and other public memorials. Justice must be part of this consideration, but Christians sometimes talk of justice in a rather glib or abstract way, as a slogan or as part of an ideology. This is quite wrong. Justice is about particulars, about specifics, about detail, about individual situations.
Seething mobs are not a tool of justice, but an impediment to it, and indeed its enemy.
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