Frank Furedi claims there is an ideological ‘war against the past’, but it’s not that simple
- Written by Russell Blackford, Conjoint Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Newcastle
In The War Against the Past: Why the West Must Fight for Its History, British sociologist Frank Furedi criticises approaches to history and its cultural legacy that have become all too recognisable.
He blames institutions such as universities, school systems and museums, as well as educators, curators, journalists and others with responsibility for guiding students or informing the general public. As he sees it, many of these institutions and individuals operate in a mode of political activism, rather than legitimate scholarship and teaching.
Review: The War Against the Past: Why the West Must Fight for Its History – Frank Furedi (Polity)
Furedi identifies two tendencies that look contradictory on the surface, but complement each other as vehicles for contemporary identity ideology. On one hand, there is a mood of radical estrangement from the past, and hence an imperative to discredit anything impressive or attractive about it. At the same time, there is an imperative to reinterpret and magnify cherry-picked snippets of history that support political messaging.
Taken together and pursued relentlessly, these tendencies amount to a “war against the past”. As Furedi elaborates, campaigners in this war discover racism, sexism and bigotry of every sort – and remarkably little else – wherever they look in the record of human (especially European) history. They denigrate the achievements of past philosophers, statesmen, composers, playwrights, artists, architects and many others.
Indeed, they toss out the achievements of entire civilisations. From their perspective, according to Furedi, ancient Greco-Roman civilisation was thoroughly tainted by various moral evils and its record is only fit to be debunked and “decolonised”.
Why does it matter?
Even if this war against the past is real, does that matter if it is for good political causes, such as countering racism and bigotry?
I think it does matter. We can contrast it with liberal-minded efforts to teach school students to think for themselves and debate big ideas. By all means, let’s guide young people to reflect on their society’s past – on the darker, as well as the more impressive and attractive, sides of its history, and on possible flaws in its ideals.
This much is essential to education in a liberal democratic society. But, as Furedi argues, the war against the past goes much further.
First, it teaches ideological claims as fact, rather than as topics for debate. Second, it teaches a distorted version of the past as if it were the true and only one. Third, it is not just about students reflecting as individuals on history and culture.
In itself, this need not detract from human achievements in the past as sources of awe, inspiration and joy. Instead, as Furedi explains, the war against the past means teaching history in ways that deny young people the chance to take some pleasure and pride in their own origins and the treasury of art, literature and thought they have inherited. They are taught to view their own origins and heritage with shame.
We shouldn’t revert to old-fashioned styles of teaching as a process of indoctrination into patriotic values, but if we go to an opposite extreme we are indulging in a reckless pedagogical experiment.
Many of us try to understand the past in the hope that it can illuminate aspects of the present. Just how far studying history can realise this hope is very much up for debate, and some might think the effort is futile.
That’s possible, and yet the unfiltered study of history at least encourages intellectual humility when it introduces us to sophisticated societies with concepts and values very different from our own.
More optimistically, studying history might help us learn something about human nature and what aspects of it are, after all, universal. We might recognise some genuine patterns in the ways human beings have acted, or have at least been tempted to act, when faced with similar circumstances in different eras.
To offer any insight along those lines, our knowledge of what actually happened in the past will need to be as accurate as humanly possible, not a contrivance to support a predetermined agenda.
Good examples, and not so good
Furedi has no problem finding examples to support his thesis. Among numerous other excesses and absurdities, he cites a curator’s note in a Glasgow art museum, attached to an ancient bronze bust. It reads:
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.
Here, it seems, we need to be warned about the corrupting power of the past and its dangerous ideas.
The same museum houses a Qing dynasty figure of the Chinese goddess Guanyin, who embodies mercy and compassion. Again Furedi cites a curator’s note: “Trans people have always existed and are rooted in history.”
Guanyin is, admittedly, a deity with a complex cultural background. She originated in India as the (male) boddhisatva Avalokiteśvara, before evolving a distinct identity within Chinese Buddhism and Chinese religion more generally. In some times and places, Guanyin was depicted as male or androgynous, but never as a transgender individual within today’s understanding.
A wood carving of Kuan-yan (Guanyin). Northern Song dynasty, China. Honolulu Museum of Arts.
Haa900, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
In cases such as this, aspects of the past are falsified and repurposed as propaganda. Overall, I found such examples convincing. Furedi brings an abundance of them, they are often unequivocal, and he earns his reaction of outrage.
That said, he sometimes overreaches and oversimplifies. To take just one of his not-so-good examples, consider the failed Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe. Its wording was settled in Rome in October 2004, but was eventually abandoned after failed referendums in some countries. Following much dissension during the drafting process, the treaty’s preamble ended up with no specific references to Christianity, as some drafters had wanted. Hence it did not endorse Christianity as a European value.
But should it have? Furedi describes this outcome as an erasure of Christianity from European memory, but that is hyperbole at best. We might wonder: why should a legal instrument, such as an international organisation’s written constitution, endorse the truth (or at least the social value) of any particular religion or metaphysical worldview?
To entertain such doubts, we needn’t invoke any 21st-century identity ideology. More traditional concerns apply here, based on concepts of secular government, separation of religious authority from state power, and the like.
In any event, the final draft of the ill-fated preamble did not entirely gloss over history or religion. On the contrary, it stated that the parties to the treaty drew inspiration “from the cultural, religious and humanist inheritance of Europe, from which have developed the universal values of the inviolable and inalienable rights of the human person, freedom, democracy, equality and the rule of law”.
If anything, this is a generous acknowledgment of the historical role played by religious beliefs in Europe – which obviously include Christianity – in shaping modern political norms.
All things considered, then, Furedi makes a good case, but as I read The War Against the Past, I sometimes felt he was throwing out secular liberal babies with the murky bathwater.
Crouching Venus, Roman statue, second century AD, The British Museum in London in 2020.
Kirsty Wigglesworth/AAP
Moral values and moral authority
Furedi laments what he calls a loss of the moral authority of the past. He views the past as a repository of values to be used in socialising children, and regrets what he perceives as diminishing efforts to pass on traditional values to successive new generations.
That is an understandable worry, but let’s be careful here. It is fine and admirable to introduce children to the achievements and experiences of the past, conveyed as truthfully as possible. It is a further step to try to inculcate values actually held by inhabitants of past societies.
Even if we wanted to indoctrinate children (and others) with values that we find in the past, which values should we choose, and on what basis? There are numerous historical periods to consider, each with its own mores, dominant political entities, commonly spoken languages and artistic conventions.
Which of them ought to be authoritative? Should we teach our kids the values displayed by Homeric heroes? Medieval nuns? Enlightenment philosophes and their patrons? Whiskered Victorian patriarchs? 1960s student radicals? Or whichever sets of values were taught, a few decades ago, to the parents of each respective child?
The past offers infinite possibilities. More fundamentally, many values that prevailed in the past are now widely condemned for good reason. Over the past century or so, our understandings of war and its justifications have undergone profound changes: not that long ago, most of the world accepted glory, military adventure and territorial conquest as legitimate motives for warfare. Today, that way of thinking is largely (though not universally) rejected – not only in the West, but far beyond – and this seems altogether salutary.
Again, Western attitudes to sexuality have transformed greatly even in recent decades, with a far wider range of sexual conduct and expression now being socially accepted. Some commentators criticise the 1960s sexual revolution, and it may well have had its excesses, but most everyday people who are not political ideologues have no wish to return to the sexual mores of the 1950s.
This does not mean we always have it right when we reject our parents’ or grandparents’ values as “outdated” (to use a word that Furedi despises): moral regress is always possible. We can, however, recognise this without assuming the past has moral authority over the present.
Impressive achievements, yes. A record of human experiences worthy of life-long reflection, most certainly. Moral authority, perhaps not so much.
Frank Furedi in 2023.
Elekes Andor, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA
This prompts the question of whether it is even possible to teach today’s children a uniform set of moral and political norms. Some thinkers have argued that each human society is held together by a fabric of what it regards as right and wrong, and that the total fabric will unravel if one part no longer has the population’s trust. This view is especially associated with the English jurist Lord Patrick Devlin, who argued along such lines in the middle decades of last century, during debates over homosexuality and prostitution. But is it tenable in modern pluralist societies?
In our modern societies in the West, we can’t expect moral agreement on all points. Instead, we tolerate moral divergence, even while sustaining a core of relatively uncontroversial norms.
We disagree about many hot-button issues such as abortion, same-sex marriage and animal rights, but we mostly agree in condemning efforts to obtain advantage through violence, lies, deception, fraud and economic misappropriation. We largely agree on a framework of liberal political ideas such as democracy, toleration, freedom of public discussion and the rule of law.
Our agreed moral and political norms survive by general, if imperfect, consensus while leaving extensive scope for individuals to develop their own understandings of the world and live by their personal values.
Furedi acknowledges some of these complications. He observes – most crucially – that liberal political norms often arose from bitter experiences with their opposites. This is one aspect of history that he clearly wants children (and the general public) to appreciate.
Here, I agree. But apart from this point I am uncertain exactly what he wants to teach about the past and its legacy, about contemporary norms, and about how these themes connect or interact. Perhaps that is a topic for different book, but it’s fair to raise it here, since Furedi insists so emphatically that the past is a moral resource.
The War Against the Past is most successful as a warning about how not to teach history and its cultural legacy. History and culture should not be used to propagandise students and the broader public with fashionable, though inherently contentious, ideologies.
On this point, the book is convincing and its urgent tone seems justified. But it prompts larger questions about history, culture, education and morality. When it comes to those, I hope to read more from Furedi.
Authors: Russell Blackford, Conjoint Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Newcastle
Hashtag.net.au
