Heroes and Statues

Many people have expressed disappointment with author J.K Rowling for her views on transgenderism. My first reaction to this is that anyone disappointed in an author does not know authors. What I mean by this is that the authorial voice is a mask that hides as well as reveals the empirical individual. Sometimes it is a highly antithetical mask. The empirical individual behind it is not at all the person we expected: they may be a raging alcoholic or an abusive partner. They might be a boring conversationalist or cranky and opinionated. This individual can be very, VERY ordinary compared the exciting persona of the creator. Indeed, like Salieri in Amadeus, we might well wonder why great artistic talent is not conferred on people more deserving of it (like ourselves!).

History also confers prominence on less than stellar people. These people become ‘heroes’ and here again I must say that anyone disappointed in a hero does not know heroes. The heroic mask is like the artistic persona a façade and behind that façade can be a misanthrope or a scoundrel, a cheat or an addict. This is because not very admirable people can transcend their ordinary selves in a historical moment just as they can in a moment of artistic inspiration. This problem usually comes out when it seeps into public consciousness that the legacy of the hero is mixed. Great persons do great things and they also err greatly. Their errors have much greater consequences for others than those of ordinary people and the baser traits in their character are magnified not diminished. The subtle historians know this. Indeed the world’s first written history (as opposed to mere chronicle) may well be the two books of Samuel in the Hebrew Bible. These books tell the story of King David as a great but catastrophically flawed man whose errors are the ultimate undoing of his kingdom. Indeed, one wonders if as raw a historical portrait has been written since. It tells the truth about history and character exactly as Homer tells the truth about war. The greatness of any historical actor is also his besetting sin and hidden flaw.

The problem, as we are keenly aware, is that heroes are memorialized publically and what is memorialized is the mask and not the man or woman behind it. When profound social changes reveal just how mixed and ambivalent the legacy of the hero is the question arises as to what to do about these memorials. On one level they are all, of course, inherently false as no one is the imposing figure they cut in marble or bronze. In strict principle they should all come down if truth is what we are devoted to. At the same time there may be a truth captured by the mask so that a statue of Martin Luther King that occludes his philandering and other human flaws is not exactly a falsehood either. It is probably wrong to think that when we have found the ‘dirt’ on Smith or Jones we have found the ‘real’ Smith or the ‘real’ Jones. IF, though, we are to have commemorative statues of historical individuals it might be worthwhile to enquire on what principles we should have them and make some basic determinations about what sort of commemorative objects we should keep and which we should discard.[1]

We have to remember, before we begin, that statues fall when societies change. When statues of Saddam Hussein were toppled in Baghdad I heard no one complain. In part this was because no one considered them worthy objects of appreciation but also because no one had even a smidgen of sympathy for their subject. Statues are NOT sacrosanct. This is clear with respect to tyrants and should be clear with respect to out and out villains like Cecil Rhodes or King Leopold. People may keep such statues if they wish, but, if pluralities of people find them offensive and want them taken down a society is not obligated to keep them. One other option I suppose would be to replace existing images with negative depictions (grotesque gargoyle-like caricatures?) of such people but, frankly, cartoonish depictions of villainy are aesthetically boring no matter how deserved they might be.  

A bit more complex is the problem not of monsters but of ordinary villains who may have something redeeming about them that causes an irrational attachment to their persona on the part of a significant number of persons. Such is the case with a figure like Robert E. Lee who, in the minds of certain persons, represents gallantry in a lost cause with which they still secretly or no so secretly identify. I will be up front that I think all statues of Lee should come down not for the reason that he is a villain or a monster but precisely because he is not. Lee was a compromised individual which is a bit different than a villain. In a time which required heroes and visionaries he was neither. Though opposed to certain ‘excesses’ of slavery, like many of his class, he had neither the insight nor the courage to question its foundations. Furthemore, like many a 'gentle' slave owner he was perfectly capable of savagery when the mood struck. In other words, he was a man whose opinions did not deviate from those of his society in any meaningful way beyond a bit of handwringing and slave owner’s guilt. I think that as such Lee FAILED to be a historical agent or a man adequate to his times and though his cowardice and conventionality are certainly ours in most of our moods he does not merit any special commemoration. His virtues, the virtues of many a hand-wringing liberal today, are the virtues of mediocrity. A statue of Lee should be about as exciting as a statue of Eichmann.

More complex though are the cases of figures like De Gaulle or Churchill. This is because these figures WERE significant historical agents. In 1940-41 they offered the only effective resistance to Nazi horror that could realistically be offered at the time: military resistance by the other major powers. I say this knowing full well that the major allied powers were in many respects just the lesser bullies and that, for the sake of the future, we need to organize our world around different modes of action and resistance beyond our wasteful and dangerous military establishments.[2] At THAT time it is hard to conceive what else could have been done (and 20/20 hindsight cannot help us here) and in that sense we owe a debt not only to Churchill and De Gaulle but to Roosevelt, King and, God love him for someone must, even Stalin. Such figures did something that at the time needed doing in the only way the ‘nation state’ framework under which they operated could conceive of doing it. I say this also recognizing that in many ways their conduct of the war was reprehensible (I think there should be no statues of Bomber Harris or Curtis LeMay or indeed of Marshall Zhukov). Still there is a broad public sentiment (at least) that their actions saved the European continent from something far, far worse and that is why in the U.K especially there is considerable backlash against removing statues of Churchill. Though he failed in many things (not the least of them running the Royal Navy!) he did succeed in the one thing people regard as essential in a leader and that is in energizing the society he lead in the face of an existential catastrophe (and he did this in effect- I do not wish to bring up the thorny question of historical intention).[3] A better person might, in theory, have done a better job but, as a point of stubborn fact, that better person did not materialize.

    However, I also think we need to fundamentally re-imagine how we think of public statuary. Part of the problem here is the false aesthetic that poses such figures in a heroic ‘classical’ manner. Such poses almost invite us to peer behind the glossy image and see the grubby reality. What is more they create the impression that the function of statuary is uninhibited celebration when, to be frank, I think they should embody the very different function of aesthetic truth. All celebration has a moment of pretense at its core as is realized by the feeling of humility that often overcomes the person celebrated. A historian or novelist writing a novel about De Gaulle would be expected by the rules of her craft to produce a complex and nuanced portrait and neither extenuate his vices and whitewash his failures or neglect his virtues and successes. The historian or novelist would be bound by historical or novelistic truth. There seems to me no reason why public statuary cannot be similarly complex and challenging. We might take John A. MacDonald as a pertinent example. For good or ill Canada (the political entity) exists and for good or ill he is the first prime minister of it. This is a recalcitrant fact that we cannot evade though we MAY alter or improve our reactions to it. For that reason some public commemoration of him may be unavoidable. Conversely, there is no stubborn, recalcitrant fact lying behind Confederate statues for they failed to ‘found’ anything and they exist only as part of a toxic nostalgia cult. That said we do not need any of the current statues of MacDonald. Any sculptor or artist wanting to depict the founder of the political entity called Canada in a way that embodies a more sophisticated conception of the deep moral ambivalence of all founders and the violence inherent in all foundings might face an interesting aesthetic challenge. He would have to acknowledge the darkness in the man without making the aesthetic error of sculpting a cartoonish villain.  Cartoonish villains may exist but they are not aesthetically interesting: as I said above, if someone were a simple ghoul one would not depict him for such a depiction could not be interesting. The banality of evil is an aesthetic principle too at least where humans are concerned and as we know from Milton even a devil needs a certain repulsive glamor. Of course it may be that no such balance may be struck with a particular individual but that is for artists to determine.         

                    

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[1] I say if because the alternative to having better public statues is having none at all. We could decide that they are simply too divisive and that the hero to some villain to others split is simply too deep and pervasive. If we can’t agree on what music to play we can all wear headphones. Still, public statuary has a long history and is part of our repertoire of story- telling so we might, along with the option of stopping altogether, consider the option of doing it better. At any rate putting up and taking down statues is a choice and there seems to me no right answer to who, exactly, should have one. On a continuum for 1 to 100 there are people near both extremes but most of the people at issue, like Teddy Roosevelt or Churchill are probably hovering somewhere between 48 and 52.
  

[2] Non-violent philosophies, like philosophy of mind, have their ‘hard problem’ which is what to do when evil passes a certain threshold of resolution and defiance. Ultimate defiance seems to call for ultimate sanction. Though such examples are abused constantly and used to justify ordinary and avoidable violence they DO, though very rarely, occur. I do not have an easy answer to this beyond working for a world in which such events become increasingly less thinkable and there any number of ways of doing this such as developing techniques and perhaps even technologies of non-violent resistance and working for multi-lateral disarmament.  

[3] A ‘Hero’ may do all he does for personal vanity or financial gain from a God’s eye point of view but as we generally lack this we tend to judge their actions in consequentialist terms. When we move from ‘personal intention’ to ‘historical intentionality’ the question is even more vexed.