The Woke Returns (?)

I have never believed that woke is dead, but if it did die, it is coming back from the dead in an appropriate fashion, sometimes anyway.

Via the Daily Telegraph:

A Scottish museum has removed its Egyptian mummy exhibition because it does not have “consent from the deceased individual”.

Visitors to the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow found signs explaining that managers had “removed human remains from this display as a mark of respect”.

The items removed include a coffin with the remains of Nekht, a priest, a mummified right hand recovered from the Valley of the Kings in Luxor, Egypt, and a mummified male head and right foot.

There is enough, uh, material in that last sentence to form the basis of a decent horror movie.

The driving force behind this move was a charity called Glasgow Life, a suitably unaccountable Arm’s Length External Organization primarily funded by Glasgow’s taxpayers. It explains that it is acting in compliance with the International Council of Museums’ revised code of ethics.

ICOM is a longstanding NGO, with links to the U.N. It claims “to represent the global museum community,” (so long as the museums are nonprofits). Judging by ICOM’s code of “ethics,” this community has work to do.

Thus:

We are confronting the global challenge of the climate crisis, striving to achieve carbon neutrality, while communicating to the public our evolving understanding of the interdependence of humans and ecosystems.

We must address the role that museums have played during the colonizing process but have yet to comprehend its implications for all museums and their collections, related policies, practices and programmes, as well as for museum discourse.

Gramsci smiles.

The code is said to be binding on ICOM members. It ought to embarrass them, but it won’t. It is joyless, didactic, and profoundly self-important, a manual for the promotion of orthodoxy and the muzzling of free inquiry, a showcase for its authors’ self-righteousness and hypocrisy. They call upon museums to reject “political influence,” and yet the code is itself highly politicized, a reflection of the priorities of a quasi-clerical class incapable of serious reflection and of ever knowing when to stop preaching.

To take one or two examples, museums “have a duty to respect all traditions and cultures equally.” All? Really? I’d rather put my “respect” for totalitarian cultures, whether modern or premodern, on hold. And do the same when it comes to human sacrifice, again, whether modern or premodern. Museums “should show respect for the sciences, traditional knowledge and the belief systems of Indigenous Peoples.” That depends. Pretending that something — science that is not science, say, is what it is not — is extraordinarily patronizing.

“Social justice” makes its inevitable appearance.

The provision that led to putting the mummies (the one with the reference to “the inherent dignity of human remains)” under, so to speak, wraps, includes the following:

Museums should care for human remains as well as artefacts and creative expressions that include human remains with respect. Decisions about these items and collections should be made in collaboration with descendants or communities from which they originate, if known.

Mummies are still displayed at the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization and at the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities in Cairo, suggesting a certain absence of opposition to their display, at least in principle. It looks a lot as if Glasgow Life’s “sensitivity” is purely performative. What a surprise.

It will come at a cost. The mummy exhibition had been at the Kelvingrove museum for over a century and had long proved a draw, a vivid link to people living thousands of years ago. Now that link is to be severed by our culture’s enforcers, intent on policing how we view the past, how much we see of it, and reducing it to the script of a sermon that can only discourage those who want to know more.

And that is the opposite of what a museum is meant to do.