According to a late August article in Irish news website Extra.ie, “The students’ union at Trinity College want the Berkeley Library on campus renamed due to the slavery links to alumnus George Berkeley. […] Until [Sept. 30], the 55-year-old building will be referred to as ‘the X Library’ in a ‘de-naming’ by the students’ union that will come into immediate effect in all of its communications.”
The Berkeley Library is a somewhat awful brutalist structure, all concrete, opened in 1967. It was in this library that, during my four years studying philosophy at Trinity College, I first read Berkeley’s challenging and radical arguments. He is the founder of philosophical idealism: the doctrine that all that actually exists is perceptions or ideas, no actual physical matter, which he regarded as illusory, much as you regard the matter you think you encounter in a dream as illusory after you wake up. I will not bore you with his reasons for this — I will only say that it was a dramatic and important moment in the history of human thought, one which I think led to many negative developments, particularly in the way it spawned all kinds of later German idealists to come to regard truth as something unknowable and all reality as subjective. (Berkeley himself did not think there was no objective truth, for what it’s worth.)
Berkeley did his most important philosophical work at an astonishingly young age, mostly in his early 20s. He attended Trinity College before a strange career that saw him off to the American colonies, where among other things he became a devotee of the medical benefits of something called tar water, which he spent years trying to sell. To me, it sounds even less appealing than snake oil — but then, I use activated charcoal toothpaste, so who am I to judge? He later became the bishop of Cloyne in Cork, in the south of Ireland. Extra.ie says, “Berkeley is Ireland’s most celebrated philosopher,” though I think both Edmund Burke and Oscar Wilde have serious arguments in their favor.
Some points about the words here: First, you are likely pronouncing the name wrong. Though the school in California is named for the bishop, he and all Irish people say it like “bark-lee.” The Students for a Democratic Society protests in the Bay Area in 1968 (remember when left-wing protests were done in favor of free speech?) earned the area around the school the nickname “Berzerkely,” but really, it should have been “Bizzarkeley.” Second, what is the point of the word “denaming”? If you dename a library, what is different about that from renaming it? Third, why is it always “X”? Are there no other provisional letters or names? Be creative.
Obviously, this is close to home for me. I don’t want to discourage college students from trying to right wrongs, of course, and Berkeley did apparently own at least five slaves in Rhode Island starting in 1730, justifying it as some sort of project to Christianize them. I’m as morally opposed to that as the members of the student union I used to pay dues to are. It just seems that they have missed a big part of the point of trying to fight evil, which is that the evil has to, you know, still exist. In a sense, they really are not going far enough, given how grievous a crime slavery is. My suggestion, in lieu of rebuking Berkeley by taking the name off a library it was put on to celebrate his intellectual greatness, is this:
The Trinity College Student Union should put out a letter, which will be enthusiastically cosigned by this author, stating that Bishop George Berkeley should not be allowed to draw one more breath until slavery in Rhode Island is made illegal.
