Ignorant armies

As early as 1969, The Death of the Past was the title of a book by Sir John Plumb – Robert Walpole’s biographer, a Cambridge character sprung from C. P. Snow’s The Masters and one of the first “telly dons”. It has been a long time a-dying. However, Frank Furedi, emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Kent, is now willing to pronounce it not just dead, but murdered. “The entire historical legacy of Western civilization has been turned into a battlefield”, he writes. There is “an undeclared War Against the Past … a frenetic moral crusade seeking to make people ashamed of their origins and who they are.” He approvingly quotes the historian J. C. D. Clark, who has condemned what he calls an “enterprise of historical disinheritance”.

Most of The War Against the Past is a chronicle of this enterprise. We begin with the iconoclastic toppling of Abraham Lincoln’s statue on an “Indigenous Day of Rage” in Portland, Oregon in October 2020 – an event, Furedi suggests, not fundamentally different from the vandalizing of the ninth-century BC palace of the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II by Islamic State in Nimrud, Iraq, in 2015. There is burning of books with “outdated content” in Ontario, the precedent for which hardly needs spelling out. There is violent language, too. Nikole Hannah-Jones led the New York Times’s 1619 Project, a tendentious attempt to redefine the US as founded on slavery, as opposed to a uniquely successful constitution. “The white race,” Furedi quotes her as saying, “is the biggest murderer, rapist, pillager and thief of the modern world.”

When we turn to the UK there is slightly less fire and fury, and slightly more Pooter and Python. The war against the past in Britain often seems to manifest itself as prissy museum notes warning of the implicit racism of almost every eighteenth- or nineteenth-century artefact on display. Furedi encounters these at the Burrell Collection in Glasgow, the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, Kew Gardens and practically every National Trust property. Here is the National Trust’s potted biography of Winston Churchill in its report on its properties’ links to colonialism and historic slavery:

Sir Winston Churchill (1874–1965), whose family home is Chartwell, served as Secretary of State for the Colonies from 1921 to 1922. He was Prime Minister during the devastating Bengal Famine of 1943, the British response to which has been heavily criticised. Churchill opposed the Government of India Act in 1935, which granted India a degree of self-governance. On 1 July 1947, he wrote to Prime Minister Clement Attlee (1883–1967), arguing that India should not gain independence.

It takes a perverse kind of zeal to summarize Churchill’s life without mentioning Britain’s victory in the Second World War.

There is a lot of this kind of thing in British museums and art galleries these days. Furedi is right to condemn the curators and trustees who waste time and resources on “grievance archaeology”, prospecting for evidence of past institutional Wrongthink. But the reader cannot help noticing the slight absurdity of much British wokeism. In America the hipster iconoclasts get those statues of Robert E. Lee torn down. While a British day of rage in Bristol did result in the toppling of the former slave trader and philanthropist Edward Colston, in Oxford the most striking thing about the “Rhodes Must Fall” campaign was its utter failure to dislodge Cecil from his perch in Oriel College. There Rhodes still stands, stonily traumatizing every descendant of victims of colonialism who walks past him.

Then there’s the fake history that purports to reveal the deep roots of “trans identities” or “Blackness” in Britain. I feel a certain amount of pity for anyone so lacking in meaningful purpose that they could waste their energy insisting that the Emperor Elagabalus “most definitely preferred the ‘she’ pronoun”, claiming that Stonehenge was somehow built by “people of colour” or punctiliously adopting the Johns Hopkins definition of a lesbian as a “non-man attracted to non-men”. Nevertheless, as the Red Guard interns like to say, I stand with Furedi. Though more silly and less shrill than its American counterpart, British wokeism is also odious. The implicit racial discrimination that lies behind complaints that institutions are “too white” – too “pale, male and stale” – is deplorable.

Why do we tolerate all this? Furedi’s answer is that Alan Wolfe was right about the 1980s: “The right won the economic war, the left won the cultural war”. While conservative and classical liberal professors were otherwise engaged – eg with scholarship – a new generation of ideologues marched through the institutions and imposed their own version of “Year Zero”, intent on effacing all legacies of the wicked, racist, sexist past in a spirit similar to that of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

The effect, Furedi argues, is to “kill … the soul of communities whose way of life remains underpinned by European culture” by brainwashing children to regard their country’s past as tainted. According to a Policy Exchange poll, “nearly half of young people between the ages of 18 and 24 agreed that schools should ‘teach students that Britain was founded on racism and remain structurally racist today’”.

The left’s tedious “presentism”, as the historian Lynn Hunt has argued, “encourages a kind of moral complacency and self-congratulation. Interpreting the past in terms of present concerns usually leads us to find ourselves morally superior … even David Hume was a racist”. But that’s not the worst of it. The enterprise of historical disinheritance leads not only to a decay of educational standards, but also to a fundamental disconnection of the young from their heritage.

What is the antidote? In recent years I have led an effort to change the way we teach history in universities so we spend less time passing anachronistic judgments on our ancestors and more time trying to learn from them, which is possible only if one tries to understand rather than condemn them. “Applied history” is unlikely to end the war against the past, which is a political project, but if successfully institutionalized it will allow a new generation of teachers and students to become non-combatants in that war and thereby to resume the work of scholarship.

The obvious danger is that the Khmer Rouge will infiltrate applied history. After all, our colleagues in biology, mathematics and physics also have to reckon with campaigns to “decolonize” their disciplines. The war is not only being waged against history. To illustrate how not to do applied history, the Australian political scientist Roman Krznaric has written History for Tomorrow. He opens promisingly with a quotation from Thomas Hobbes’s preface to his translation in 1628 of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War: “The principal and proper work of history [is] to instruct, and enable men, by the knowledge of actions past, to bear themselves prudently in the present and providently in the future”.

Alas, it soon becomes apparent that Krznaric is no student of Hobbes, much less of Thucydides. “Faced with the collective challenges of the twenty-first century,” he writes, “from the threat of ecological breakdown and growing wealth inequality to the risks of artificial intelligence and genetic engineering, we are failing to draw on the immense store of wisdom bequeathed by generation upon generation of our forebears.” And:

The global system is already starting to flicker – megadroughts, melting glaciers, far-right extremism, crumbling welfare states, energy shortages, rampant viruses, cyberattacks. We seem to be heading towards an era of permacrisis. History is a compass that can help us steer a way through the turmoil.

But that is not how the author uses history, because he already knows where true north is. The job of this “compass” is simply to point towards a familiar left-wing utopia.

Krznaric’s opening chapter exemplifies his methodology. He begins with a bad analogy, likening the current global campaign to slow or halt global warming with the campaign in nineteenth-century Britain to abolish the slave trade and slavery:

Although the harm caused by fossil fuel production differs in fundamental ways from the indefensible crime of enslaving human beings, it is striking how both cases illustrate the power of economic elites to stand in the face of change. Like the struggle to abolish slavery, the struggle to abolish carbon emissions has suffered from the intransigence and snail-paced gradualism of vested business interests and of the governments beholden to them.

Quoting Kehinde Andrews’s argument for reparations to the present-day descendants of slaves, Krznaric overlooks that, in the 1830s, the British government paid West Indian slave owners compensation when parliament invalidated their property rights. If there were an analogy with today’s climate-change debate, it would be to pay compensation to the owners of coalmines and oilfields. But that is not the analogy Krznaric has in mind. He argues that the Jamaican slave revolt of 1831 and the rural English “Captain Swing” protests of 1830 were “tipping-point events, an unlikely conjunction revealing how popular uprisings and radical resistance can be accelerators of fundamental political change”. (His rather tenuous argument is that the Captain Swing protests “fortified” the Whigs’ resolve to pass the Reform Act of 1832, which reduced the “West India Interest” represented by members for “rotten boroughs” in the House of Commons, clearing the way for the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833.)

Any undergraduate who has studied early-nineteenth-century Britain could explain to Krznaric that these cases of “grassroots disruption and disobedience” contributed essentially nothing to abolitionism, a mainly middle-class movement with its roots in the evangelical religious awakening, the preferred method of which was the collection of signatures on petitions. But the author is uninterested in historical reality. His goal from the outset is to provide historical validation for what he calls “radical flank” groups such as Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil.

Henry Kissinger once warned against treating history as a kind of recipe book from which you choose your preferred dish. History for Tomorrow is just such a cookbook. Worried about racial and religious tensions, which certainly boiled over in parts of England last summer? Never fear – Krznaric has found the answer in “the ancient kingdom of al- Andalus”, where he discerns “glimmers of radical hope for the creation of a more tolerant future”. This will not reassure those who fear that precisely the objective of today’s Islamists is to reduce Christians and Jews in western Europe to “dhimmitude”, ie second-class status under sharia law. To translate that concept into multicultural “conviviality” would be funny if it were not so sinister in its implications.

Seeking a precedent for “rationing as a viable – even necessary – response to the global ecological emergency”? That’s not hard, as almost any preindustrial society restricted consumption. Krznaric chooses pre-Meiji Japan, which he finds pioneered recycling and “regenerative design” instead of consumerism. But “de-growth” was a universal feature of the preindustrial era, as was “net zero”. So, of course, were grinding poverty, malnutrition, physical stunting and short average lifespans.

Worried that big tech companies have too much power? Krznaric finds precedents for breaking up Alphabet, Meta and the others in the history of English coffee houses, and precedents for public ownership in the water management system of Valencia, as studied by the late Elinor Ostrom. The reductio ad absurdum of Kzarnic’s method is his suggestion that we should regulate artificial intelligence the way the farmers of Emilia-Romagna run their agricultural co-operatives.

Krznaric reminds me of the anarcho-syndicalists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, leftists who could never reconcile themselves to the democratic centralism of the Bolsheviks. They pined for a simpler life of decentralized communities where they could be left in peace to tend their allotments, hand-stitch their own garments and conduct politics at the equivalent of parish councils. The author feels profoundly attracted to such experiments in decentralized governance as the ancient Malian realm of Djenné-Djeno and the Rhaetian Free State in early modern Switzerland. “Let’s be honest”, he writes:

representative democracy, in its current state, is no longer fit for purpose. If we really wanted to deal with a civilisational threat such as the ecological emergency, is this the political system we would freely choose and feel confident in, with all its party politicking, corporate lobbying and chronic short-termism? Now is the moment to open up our historical imaginations to alternatives such as communal democracy, with its three dimensions of decentralisation, deliberation and direct decision making, grounded in examples from ancient Athens and the Rhaetian Free State to Igbo governance practices in Nigeria.

By contrast, my own historical studies have led me to view with suspicion utopians who propose getting rid of representative democracy.

Jack Plumb was one of those liberals who dominated postwar higher education in England. Though Plumb had good taste in protégés, his generation as a whole had a weakness for appointing ideologues as their successors in history departments and faculties. That was partly because they felt ambivalent about the death of the past – and perhaps also a little excited by the radicals who wished to kill history.

I suspect history will survive the excesses enumerated by Frank Furedi. The wider public has the good sense to hate them. How far it can survive the methods of Roman Krznaric, if these are more widely adopted, is less certain. I do not find it surprising that Brian Eno and George Monbiot endorsed History for Tomorrow. But Peter Frankopan and Michael Wood have some explaining to do.

Niall Ferguson is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University

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