Why did the horrible death of George Floyd in Minneapolis lead to people attacking statues as far afield as London and Brussels? What is the connection?
If you are steeped in anticolonialism and identity politics, you might think the answer obvious: The unlawful killing of a black man by a white man is part of a global pattern of racial injustice.
But stand back for a moment, and consider the implication. We are being invited to define people primarily by their physiognomy. Not by their individual virtues and vices or even by their familial relationship with someone else but simply by their physical likeness. Isn’t that the definition of racism?
Such thinking represents a retreat from reason. We are in the world of what the 19th-century anthropologist James Frazer called “sympathetic magic,” the belief that a resemblance between two things implies some metaphysical bond between them so that, for example, a plant with yellow sap might be thought to alleviate jaundice — or a rhino horn impotence.
Yet when we strip away all the pseudoacademic cant about “intersectionalism,” “critical theory,” and “white privilege,” that belief is what we are left with. You look a bit like Person A, who did something bad to Person B, who looks a bit like Person C, so now, you owe Person C something.
The demonstrators, of course, would argue that this isn’t just about similar physiognomy. It is, they would say, about inherited deprivation. An act of exploitation or theft, even far in the past, might still leave people disadvantaged from the moment they are born.
It is certainly true that not everyone begins with equal chances. Some people are born to rich parents. Some are born in rich countries. These disparities may indeed have their origins in some ancient act of conquest. But even if they don’t, even if your father simply did well in business, you could still start with an advantage over others.
We might regard this as unfair. But we also recognize, if we have any historical sense, that it is inescapable. All parents want to pass things on to their children. The states that have sought to deny that instinct, notably communist states, have ended up with inherited hierarchies of their own and have created monstrous tyrannies and squalor along the way.
What we are talking about here, though, is not inheritance. I have never much cared for the idea that people are answerable for what their ancestors did, but I can at least understand the argument. Lots of things get passed down the generations. If you go back far enough, both slave status and slave ownership were heritable.
Yet the protesters, as far as I can make out, are not interested in family trees. Their argument, broadly, is that people who look white have a duty of restitution to people who look black. Never mind that some white people are descendants of cotton magnates and others of serfs. Or that some black people are descendants of slaves and others from slave traders.
The protesters disregard such nuances not because they see us all as free and responsible individuals but, on the contrary, because they want the bluntest possible categorizations. Bad guys and good guys, oppressors and oppressed, agents and patients. But the obvious truth that almost all human beings are both, that we have mixed virtues just as we have mixed ancestry, is not suited to a cult.
For that, in truth, is what we are dealing with. When you see a mob tearing down a statue, you know that you are confronting something that owes more to millenarianism than to logic. Early Christians pulverized statues of pagan gods so as to cleanse the world of demons. Puritans took a similar view of icons, as did the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Islamic State in Palmyra.
The fervor of an iconoclastic mob is intimidating, and few want to step into its path. Unchecked, the mob becomes more and more extreme. Attacks on Confederate statues turn into vandalism of the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial in Boston, a monument to the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, a black Civil War regiment.
Public anger, being demonstrative, becomes competitive. The unlikelier the target, the better. A professor at UCLA is being investigated for reading out a letter by Martin Luther King Jr. (It contained the n-word.) The makers of Paw Patrol, the Canadian cartoon for preschoolers, are criticized for portraying the police too sympathetically.
I thought the epidemic would make our culture wars seem unbearably small. I even expressed the hope that people might forget their differences in the face of a common menace. Fat chance.
