The belief that history and culture can be shaped by the manipulation of statues and other symbols is just one more superstition.
The belief that history and culture can be shaped by the manipulation of statues and other symbols is just one more superstition.
T here is a difference between Thomas Jefferson and a statue of Thomas Jefferson. That much should be obvious, but, to our addled cancel-culture warriors, it isn’t.
Cancel culture understands people, living or dead, in the flesh or in statuary, as moral placeholders. Its mental model of the moral universe is zero-sum, a fixed hierarchy of status and prestige carefully arranged by degree — it is a kind of moral Tetris game in which some blocks must be eliminated in order for the others to advance.
If you listen, the would-be cancelers will sometimes tell you exactly what they are thinking. Those who set their sights on — to take one common target — Bret Stephens of the New York Times very often frame their argument in zero-sum terms: Stephens, in their view, takes up cultural real estate that would be better occupied by some more deserving party. Given that the Stephens-haters are themselves mostly aspiring columnists, it is not difficult to guess who it is they have in mind. (No one has done them the good service of leveling with them about what their prospects actually are.) That isn’t how it works at the commanding heights of culture, of course. If the New York Times or Harvard or Netflix wants to hire someone or do a deal, the deal gets done. It’s more angels dancing on the head of a pin than it is a game of musical chairs.
They make this mistake, over and over, because their frame of reference isn’t the commanding heights of culture — they come from the cultural peasantry, where the zero-sum rules apply more often. For example, a high-school literature curriculum can include only so many books and so many authors, for practical purposes. So, at the margin, school authorities may find themselves making a choice between Coriolanus and Beloved. (That’s what happens in the terrific high school that exists in my imagination, anyway. The real-world choices often are less weighty.) Of course, neither the works of William Shakespeare nor those of Toni Morrison cease to exist if they do not make the cut on the sophomore-English reading list at Westfield High School. The serious reader will want to explore both œuvres.
But it is not the serious reader, or the serious thinker, who is the main actor here.
For the simpleminded, a statue of Thomas Jefferson is simply taking up space — literal and cultural — that should be occupied by some more worthy party. Knock Jefferson off his pedestal, this line of thinking goes, and you create room for Frederick Douglass or some other preferred figure to advance. But Thomas Jefferson does not cease being Thomas Jefferson just because some cretins in New York City throw a tantrum about a statue of him. History doesn’t stop being history, however hard the Big Brothers of our time may seek to distort it or memory-hole it. Thomas Jefferson is dead and gone, and his work is done. The farce in New York City is only a status game focused on the here and now, a genuinely pathetic form of group therapy for people whose troubles are only tangentially related to the controversies in which they immerse themselves.
It is true that some historical and cultural figures do not get the reputation they deserve. In my view, Invisible Man should probably be regarded as more central to the American literature of the 20th century than is To Kill a Mockingbird or The Great Gatsby, while The Grapes of Wrath should be understood as the second-rate propaganda tract it is. But the problem for Invisible Man isn’t that F. Scott Fitzgerald or John Steinbeck takes up more cultural space than Ralph Ellison does — it is that most Americans receive a poor education in literature and are not intellectually prepared to appreciate the book. Most high-school teachers are not equipped to teach it.
We put up statues of Thomas Jefferson because he was a great man — he wasn’t a great man because we put up statues of him. Getting that backward is one more example of the way in which our politics has decayed into idolatry, mired in the primitive superstition that the statue is invested with magical powers that connect it in some ineffable way with the man who is represented. The belief that history and culture can be shaped by the manipulation of statues and other representations is only a sterilized modern version of taking recourse to the voodoo doll.
I am reminded of the episode in which the corpse of Pope Formosus was exhumed and put on trial. Thomas Jefferson has been in the ground too long for that, but we should not pretend that we are not engaged in essentially the same thing for essentially the same reasons. Barbarians, including high-tech barbarians like us, have a hard time thinking beyond what is right in front of them, seeing into the spirit of things and their relationships. If the rooster crows and the sun comes up, that settles the question. If we build statues of great men, and we come to despise those great men, then we can reduce those great men by attacking their statues. That is perfectly obvious, provided your mind is primitive enough.
But the work of knocking down is not the same as the work of building up. That is another truth to which the vandals are impervious.